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Dan Sheehan

@dansheehan.bsky.social
14K followers 526 following 3.1K posts

Writer of books and games

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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 21h
I have passed judgement
It's no substitute for the book but it defied basically every expectation I had. 

As someone whose hot take is that Cathy Ames is the least interesting part of East of Eden, I think most of Kazan's choices worked here! Pugh puts in maybe the best performance of her career (Same with Hoon Lee's Lee) and by looking at Cathy's textual backstory with a more modern eye, her actions make a lot more sense. Some might say this undermines her role as an allegorical depiction of pure evil but I'd argue that Adam is another allegorical character and that didn't stop Steinbeck from giving him motivations and a coherent backstory!

Speaking of, I thought Abbott did great here. His Adam has a distant, almost pathetic, quality for most of the series which underlines the beauty in the moments where he rises to the occasion of living his life. His last Timshel is said like an exhale, as though the word itself was made to be someone's last. It's a lovely moment immediately undercut by the Netflix-ass move of explaining what the word means one last time just in case the viewer was on their phone, for which I am deducting an entire half star because jesus christ.

The other missing star? Well that would be for my dear friend and favorite literary character Sam Hamilton. One of the best characters in the book is drawn hastily and it makes some crucial developments for both Adam and Lee feel rushed. I know, I know, the book is like 700 pages and kind of impossible to adapt in its entirety. I get how they arrived at the choice but I think minimizing the Hamiltons was a huge unforced error that cost the story a lot of depth.
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 21h
If you walk away from East of Eden with either of these questions you should have to go to baby jail, the jail for babies.
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
One apple isn’t enough, it’s the second that opens the mind
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Horse lunch is back on the menu
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Ah! Alright then!
asking a customer service rep if I'll be able to delete my account or if it would just be there forever and the rep says it would be here forever followed by a notice that they have gone offline because we live in hell
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Look who’s back from the frame store
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Good to see her cutting loose, she works so hard
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Really hamming it up as I eat grape after grape like “now THESE are a game changer!”
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Used to go out or order delivery every Friday but now the baby goes to bed at 7 and daycare costs as much as our mortgage so we do homemade pizza and we really nailed it this week
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
kind of humiliating for the toad
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
my vote for the best 21st century TV shows (in no particular order)
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Missouri
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Powered Cube is so beautiful
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Got my hands on an original Kev Walker painting from the Not A Wolf secret lair courtesy of the absolute dude @vorthosmike.bsky.social
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
They weren’t kidding brother
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
1-2 because I got two brain freezes and a high tide and proceeded to not follow any additional signals for the rest of the draft lol
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Stone soup
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Paid for Sunset+ this month. Very worth it!
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
saying farewell to some drafts on a Friday as one does
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
The goof ass film had its moments though
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Got suuuuch a cool picture of a gorilla doing dominance displays at the crowd and forgot I had some goof ass novelty film in my camera
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Having the same name as a prominent UFO scientist pays off sometimes
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Have not laughed this hard at a shot/chaser in a while, there's a particular loss of sanity happening here so specific to parenting a young child lmao
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I've dubbed this particular phenomenon, where a company restores a product or service to its pre-enshittified state for a markup, Financial Necromancy. Mostly because it felt apt but also because it let me talk about bones.
In that moment, I knew that dark math had been done in some distant office building, math that triangulated the exact overlapping point at which an airport was too humiliating for people with disposable income to endure but just serviceable enough to keep those without that disposable income from straying to car travel.

This is the forbidden magic of the real world, a brand of analysis that seeks to optimize the diminishing of our communal standards. It should offend like necromancy. These profane analysts have realized that The Lounge is only a respite as long as the airport’s an ass. If the latter is ever improved, the former would have to be as well and that costs money.

Unfortunately, this is the principle on which the entire world now runs. Enshittification, the short-term-profit-driven drop in the quality of everything , is no longer a theory. It’s just part of life. Whenever a new industry’s quality starts to dip, these financial necromancers begin drawing circles in blood and looking for new and novel way to reanimate the bones of better times.
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Wrote about "fancy" airport lounges as a microcosm for enshittification and our diminished expectations.
The only thing in the lounge that even attempted to make me feel as though my money had been well spent was a complimentary chilled ceviche bar, the presence of which was so dissonant that it felt like a mockery. It seemed like a sort of fly paper for fools like me, who were not yet familiar with one of life’s great lessons: there’s no such thing as free shrimp at the airport.

The ceviche isn’t for eating, not really. It’s an exhausted show of feigned affection, a bouquet of flowers tossed onto the table by a man who hasn’t loved his wife in a very long time. Here, it seems to say with exasperation, will this make it all worth it?

The product that airport lounges offer turned out to not be a luxurious alternative to the airport, but rather a fulfillment of what reasonable expectations for an airport would be. The experience is defined not by the consumer’s objective standard of a fancy lounge (a club for admirals!) but by the neglected hellscape that surrounds it.
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Thousands of parents saw this poster and subjected their children to one of the most singularly depressing movies ever produced by human hands
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Been spending an inordinate amount of time photographing the critically endangered piping plovers at Montrose Beach in their eternal standoff with beachgoers
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
There is simply no better place for cool buildings than beautiful Chicago, Illinois
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Okay so I’m pissed
Simply too many copies of CASCADE CASCADE
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Hmm I sure hope this isn’t 40 copes of CASCADE CASCADE. I’ll be simply furious if this is 40 copies of CASCADE CASCADE.
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I was on the Creative Text team for Nauctis and it's genuinely the greatest set I've ever worked on. If you love more traditional Magic worlds, this is your moment. Pure high fantasy in a new setting with so much respect to both the real world natural inspirations and the story of the world itself.
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
just imagined a new type of American guy who has somehow aligned himself with the wildfire smoke
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
saw this in real life
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
you guys know there's a whole internet where you can look this stuff up right
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Scariest part of that Atlantic article about postliteracy and that's saying something because it's exclusively made up of scary parts
What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. “If we gave those up,” the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, “we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.”
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Here he is running away
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Sometimes youve gotta think about some stuff
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
A wee plover
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Creature Summer
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
The heat has felled even the strongest among us
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Cat’s being weird
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
It's a goof from the early 00s!
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
The man really didn't miss
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
The boys thank you
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
RIP to Ron Spears, one of the all time great Magic artists. His work, equal parts otherworldly and evocative, was a huge part of what drew me to the game as a kid. He was one of the best artists in fantasy and it's heartbreaking to see him go.
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Got to meet some guys
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
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Dan Sheehan @dansheehan.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
If I ever have an extra 1200 bucks laying around, this will be my cube's Tinker printing
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