iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

I'm glad I got to blow a few minds with the Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines. Reminder: Choir of Hatred is out now! There's a whole trilogy! And they're good, especially if you like your narrators mangling existential dread and Buddhism in the dark depths of space. www.amazon.com/dp/B0D6X7N8J...

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

The new Asterix series on Netflix is fantastic. Clever, beautiful, and has that classic Goscinny×Uderzo vibe.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Meet Yudha's Starmap: a little galaxy generator in the browser. My own little slice of No Man's Sky. Something I've been tinkering with on and off for four years now, finally usable! Very happy with this. github.com/yudhanjaya/S...

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

Fascinating. First time I’ve heard of this. So eerie to see so many American headlines in the last decade come straight out of this plot.

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Tac Anderson @tacanderson.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Just got the next two books set in The Salvage Crew universe. @yudhanjaya.bsky.social is a unique voice in the sci-fi space. If you like thought provoking, hard sci-fi, check these out. They're all standalone books set in the same universe.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

If you liked The Salvage Crew (2020) and the sequel I spent four years on - Pilgrim Machines (2024) . . . Then I'm utterly delighted to give you something totally different in vibe (again) with CHOIR OF HATRED. www.amazon.com/Choir-Hatred...

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

Going back to Origami Meteorite . . . The notes just keep piling up

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

Thank you! Glad to see Pilgrim getting some love. PS: love the Bobiverse, and DCC is probably one of the greatest binge-reads I've read in the last ten years. Good taste!

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Nerd card: 📚 Fantasy & sci-fi 🔧 Mad engineering 🌱 Gardens and farm life content 🎧 Classical music and Lo-fi beats to chill/study to 🎮 Video games and dev. Think FFVII, Cassette Beasts, Pokémon, Rimworld 🎼 Linkin Park, Audiomachine, Yosi Horikawa, anything scored by Ramin Djawadi or Clint Mansell

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Helen Macdonald @hjm.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

Got this passage from “The Writing Contest” by the marvellous @yudhanjaya.bsky.social stuck in my head today. Will not leave me alone.

Quote runs: “and then someone got a bot to write a perfect Heinlein novel, and the world was never the same again. I knew that day how painters felt when they realised photography had taken over.”

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

We’re packing up for the move tomorrow, but I couldn’t resist buying @charliejane.bsky.social’s Victories Greater than Death. Found it in the store amidst my search for microfiber cloth and gloves. Beautiful book (I have it on my Kindle) and the hardcover is stunning.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Maybe we’re taking this AI business too far

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

You reckon the machine in Rage Against the Machine was a microwave? Because I’m definitely raging against this machine right now.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Good stuff. If you’re looking for some fantastic reads, go forth!

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

This is an excellent essay with a lot of food for thought. I keep thinking of Kafka’s or Satre’s various protagonists, where the story is as much about things happening to them as much as it is about them happening to things; where the story is about enduring more than inflicting.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

I miss the days when technology was brought to us by excited geeks and the nerds instead of sleazy marketers, MBAs and podcasters

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

I think the inverse statement holds true: if you don’t enjoy the writing, the audience can tell.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

We’ve actually managed to grow something here in Colombo. Our mulberry bush shares its fruits with us daily. Going to take it to Kandy and see if we can get a few plants going. I’ve been told they’re fairly hardy plants!

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Honestly, the Internet is still full of promise. It’s just that the promising stuff is hard to find and requires us to dig beneath the noise and the ubiquitous identical interaction templates built for the lowest common denominator of users. It’s what happens when something goes mainstream.

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Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

these excerpts, from an essay on the modern use of first person perspective are gonna stay with me for a long time, even if a whole lot of this feels way more like a reaction to literary than speculative fiction. But really interesting food for thought here

This generation of writers did not grow up as readers. They grew up as watchers. Their experience of consciousness is fundamentally a mediated one. It exists solely on the surface. A highly mobile face shifting through expressions that convey, symbolically, something to an external viewer. The something is never clear. But the faces are described in exquisite, minute detail that loses all significance.

I have read pages and pages of scenes narrated from the first person in which an unnamed narrator sits in a room looking at light on a wall or at a cell phone, describing without affect a whole range of physical expressions—gestures, faces they pull—and yet nowhere on those pages does a single thought appear. Not even glancingly

We talk a lot about the effects of televisual media on prose fiction. We call it cinematic when writers transcribe visual phenomena from the reel in their mind. Clunky, dull description. I call it trite physicality. She lifted the glass to her lips. Or she walked across the room and stood at the window. Or, he extended both of his arms and flapped them up and down. I would argue that this issue runs even deeper and turns into a faulty understanding of point-of-view itself. When you find yourself noting the perceptual apparatus rather than just giving the reader the perceived world, then you are in fact participating in the retrograde mediation of cinema into prose. That is, every time you write, She could hear or He could see or They felt, you are describing looking at someone while they undergo perception. You do not need that extra step of noting that someone is noting something. Where did that come from? I believe that extra step was inserted by cinema. You are so accustomed to looking at someone looking at something that you don’t notice you’re doing it anymore. Prose literature lives and dies on the immediacy of its contact with experience. Any barrier to that experience should be eradicated.

I feel that this is especially in true in the case of first-person fiction. It causes me a special pain when I read lines like I frowned or I felt my lips twitch into a grin or I could see or I could hear or I wiped sweat from my brow. As far as I am concerned, these constitute grave breakdowns in the consistency of the POV. If you are writing in first-person POV, then every object noted in the story is perceived. If there are sounds, obviously, the narrator has heard it, otherwise it would not be in the story. If there’s a glass on the table, I don’t need you to say I could see a glass on the table. Sometimes people write first person as though they are describing something happening to another person instead of to the person currently narrating the story.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Playboy actually published Jack Kerouac, Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Nabokov, Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez etc. There was a period where the porn mag was one of the few places willing to publish real transgressive stuff.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Solid stuff. Every year I have a moment of awe for the creativity the SFFH space gives us.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Really happy to see Pilgrim slowly making waves. In 2021, Google Drive sync issues swallowed 20k words of the opening; in 2024, a water tank leaked through the roof, dousing my computer and burning out the drive just as I was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Just got back on Bluesky and wow! This place is thriving!

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Aidan Moher @aidanmoher.com · 03/12/2024

What makes a great RPG story? My latest feature dives into JRPGs and why the genre spawned by DQ and FF offers a unique platform for big, sprawling narratives. To help tell this story, I spoke with writers like @yudhanjaya.bsky.social, @emcandon.bsky.social, and @patmakesrpgs.bsky.social.

astrolabe.aidanmoher.com

What makes a great console RPG story?

Let's explore how Japanese RPGs and their descendants explore narrative through player agency and investment

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

After weeks of trying different devices, I finally have my perfect, low-power writing setup: my old Boox Air (e-ink) paired with this custom keyboard that I built today. Power consumption is so low that battery life is measured in weeks, and I work directly in Google docs.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 18/09/2023

KJ Parker’s story in this is such a strong opener. Could see the ending coming from a distance, but the story is so well researched and the voice is so strong that it doesn’t matter. Also, is anyone else in awe of how Tom Holt maintains a massive career as both Tom Holt and KJ Parker?

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 17/09/2023

Closing my tabs and my searches today have been wild it begins with "The dictionary of obscure sorrows" and ends with "Relativistic kill vehicles".

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 17/09/2023

21,912 words on Salvage Crew 2: Humble Space Pilgrim! As a technical challenge, I'm going to simulate crew actions to a point where there's a kind of natural resonance between them. I did this earlier by writing code; die rolls and Markov chains; this time I want to replicate this paper's approach.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 07/09/2023

Yesterday, in a sudden fit of inspiration, I wrote a complete short story. 8300 words. It isn’t what I was supposed to do… Yet I am tremendously happy about this … Moments like this are rare for me. And on a technical level I feel like I unlocked a new sense of style for myself.

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Vijayalakshmi @wordylocks.bsky.social · 27/08/2023

I've been trying to find some Indian/South Asian SFF in bookstores, and unfortunately haven't had much luck... Until today. Spotted The Inhuman Peace by @yudhanjaya.bsky.social and Stolen Hours and Other Stories by Manjula Padmanabhan at WHSmith at Delhi airport. Here's hoping for more 🤞🏽

A copy of The Inhuman Peace by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

A copy of Stolen Hours and Other Stories by Manjula Padmanabhan

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 06/09/2023

Genuinely enjoying Starting Point, and I've got Turning Point queued up next. Miyazaki is so refreshingly grounded and unashamedly idiosyncratic with the answers to why he creates a thing. It's great reading for these times when I'm shepherding my energy.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne @yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 22/08/2023

I had written off this year as being a strange liminal period, but it isn't so bad; I've clocked - - The Gratiaen award for fiction - two manuscripts delivered to a (local) publisher - another manuscript done and sent to my agent - my short stories have been compiled and translated into Sinhala

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