I have a job description in a drawer someplace.  I know because I wrote it.  It has the boilerplate stuff: “completes special projects assigned by the Vice President” and “assist production during busy times.”  But there’s also the boilerplate line at the bottom that looks like “performs other duties as assigned.” How you read that line defines your job satisfaction. Most people (and myself earlier in my career, I admit)...

Bolo’s empty eye socket burned.  The harsh pokers and the yells and the insults were echoes in the back of his head, dulled by slivers of agony that throbbed in his skull.  He smelled piss and blood and gore and realized it was his.  He touched his stomach and the deep claw marks he found there made him retch.  Death, he smelled death.  His. “He won’t last long on the Outside with only one,” little Ana had said, right before...

Peter examined his creation with the love and wonder of someone discovering a treasured heirloom in a dusty box in the cluttered expanse of their attic.  He considered this his legacy, something he would leave behind for posterity, for all to marvel.  Its sleek sides gleamed in the morning light, like the burnished steel of a medieval breastplate.  The dew-streaked cover was in his hands, and he could only stand and stare at his...

Everyone gets a couple hundred years.  Two or three generations, and then the tapestry of humanity spins the memory of you out of existence.  Your great-grandchildren usually never meet you, and if they do, it’s in their childhood and they don’t remember you as you pass and they live on.  You become a name on a family tree, a photo in an album, perhaps an anecdotal story of something dumb you did as a teenager that cements your fame...

I don’t have any bad days.  Okay, one.  I had one bad day in the past six months, but it was more like a bad event.  I broke something, and then I fixed it.  But that’s it.  Oh, and I got vertigo in March after traveling for the first time in 12 years, but I got to see some amazing things in a city I’d never been to, so that day was a wash. But as a general rule, I don’t have any bad days. When I realized this, I knew it was...

I just finished my second playthrough of Mass Effect 3, the conclusion to Bioware’s sci-fi epic.  ME:3 is tied with Halo: Reach for 1st place in my Top 5 Games of All Time –followed by Civilization V, Mass Effect 2 and Thief: The Dark Project.  Technically, that means I can stuff another one in there, so I’ll add X-COM: UFO Defense. I’ve played all three Mass Effect games in completionist fashion, following paragon and renegade...

In response to a post I read over at The Minimalists about comments, I’ve declared Cytastic.com a comment-free zone.  I allowed comments at the beginning, but I got a lot of spam.  Then I required people to be logged in to leave a comment.  I got very few.  So few that months would go by before I looked at them, only to discover that someone had left a comment and I had accidentally ignored it.  Or, even worse, I would refrain...