The Suicide Mission

I always wanted to know what the other fire team was doing during the attack on the Collector Base at the end of Mass Effect 2. This is a nine-chapter retelling of the suicide mission, from Garrus’s point of view.

It was written so long ago that I remember almost nothing about the process or the circumstances. I know I wrote it quickly, with minimal fussing, and I was pleasantly surprised by how solid it is when I read it recently. Apart from one other story, which has only ever been posted on the Mass Effect Kink Meme, this is the last of my creations that has not been published here till now.

Read it here and enjoy!

Image: Scars by Shade-of-Stars

The Turian Year

My long-time gaming buddies, ex-Clusum and The Techno Turian, have started this weird, nerdy and awesome project of weekly posting a video of a Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer solo match with turian characters wielding each of the 68 different weapons in the game. That’s one weapon a week, for 68 weeks. I noted that this would make for more than a year of weekly solos; but later I realized that it would make for almost exactly one year on the turian homeworld, Palaven. Palaven’s year lasts 1.2 Earth years, which happens to be around 62 weeks. That’s just too much of a coincidence to ignore! What my friends are actually doing is celebrating The Turian Year. Watch it unfold here!

Image: Palaven, from Mass Effect Codex

Ergo Proxy

I started writing this post about half a year ago, just after seeing the series for the second time. The plan was to use another text about it as a platform for the development of my own thoughts and interpretations. But this turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined (as I’ll explain later) and eventually I abandoned the draft. Obviously, I finished it now, because I want to preserve the memory of the experience, but the details I originally wanted to delve into are largely lost on me now. As a result, the text might still be a bit incongruous, despite the significant effort I put into to smoothing it out. Please bear with me!

Themed Challenges Halls of Fame

This is the fourth in the series of posts about Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame. Previously, I wrote about Platinum Solos Hall of Fame (PHOF) and fan-created Themed Challenges. Now it’s time to talk about the halls of fame for those same themed challenges (TCHOF).

Fanart (!) for TTSS: Sniper Nihlus

My friend Sixtus drew this amazing, badass Nihlus sniping in the jungles of Invictus as an illustration for my Mass Effect novel Thinker Traitor Soldier Spectre. (Please view the picture in full size here!) This is incredibly inspiring and uplifting. I could not be happier and more grateful for all the support this story has lately got from my friends and other readers alike. ♥

My 2019 in Books

I might not have mentioned elsewhere on this blog that, in spite of my writerly ambitions, I’m a tragically slow reader. In 2018 I managed to read some 18 books — that’s 1.5 books a month — and considered it an achievement. In 2019 I planned to read 24 — the whole of 2 books a month! — but in the end managed only 20. Here they are, and how I remember them: