About me

My name is Flinn (they/them). I'm an Asian-American writer currently living in California with my partner and small dog. I was a late bloomer and didn't start college for real until I was 25. I now hold a bachelor's degree in English literary studies and creative/professional writing from Goucher College, and a master's degree in creative fiction from North Carolina State University. When I'm not writing, I like cooking and baking, loom knitting, playing video games, and talking about fiction. This includes games, game design, books, film, TV, and theater.

Here's what you'll get at FriezerBurnt:

Storytelling in games

I'm a huge fan of games as storytelling vehicles. I love talking about stories, what makes them work, and where I felt they went wrong for me. Especially as I start dipping my toes into the world of making games myself, I'm more interested than ever in dissecting things I love as well as things I hate to break them down into the basic pieces. Every story is made of something, and every world contains the critical components of a story. What are they? How do I find mine? I don't know, and that's a powerful admission to make in the quest to find out.

I'm likely going to focus hard on games here, but I may branch out into books, TV, and film if I find something I want to discuss.

Making a game of my own

I don't do resolutions every year, but as I've gotten older, I've found more value in setting goals. My goal for this year is to do my very best to make a full game myself. I'm not so proud as to refuse all help—my partner is the dictionary definition of a computer guy, and I live in an age where a plethora of knowledge about games, computers, code, and more lives in my pocket. But the making is the fun and important part, so that's what I'm going to do.

No generative AI, ever

I don't have a day job, so I don't have to justify this choice to shareholders or anything, but here's the CliffsNotes breakdown for casual readers: I'm fully committed to human stories and fiction told with purpose. My purpose in storytelling is to have fun and explore concepts, which I am more than capable of doing without AI. I will never use generative AI. You couldn't pay me to use it at all, let alone for my creative projects.

On a technological level: Generative AI can only imitate and reproduce things it already knows, which makes creativity and innovation difficult. It also means that AI is susceptible to a lot of common academic critiques about where the canon comes from and who is represented. If the victors write history, and if AI is built on and learns from data that already exists, there's a huge amount of marginalized experience and culture that AI simply can't see. If you've ever left a movie feeling like you'd seen this same Summer Blockbuster Action Movie With Explosions And Car Chases a dozen times before, you're already familiar with this problem. An overly focus-grouped film or AI-generated image might be flashy to look at it, but is that really all it can be?

On an existential level: The writing process is plagued with pitfalls, but the process is one of the things that makes it fun for me. Further, the act of reading a story or enjoying a piece of art is an act of connection. When you engage with a creative work, you are connecting with something the creator thinks about and wants you to think about too, even if that thing is just a bunch of jokes and fun. I think that's what makes so much of art worthwhile: for a sliver of your life, you get to dive into what someone else thinks is worth making sense of and sharing. Sharing what we love with others is an experience I don't think we should ever outsource. I wouldn't let an AI cook my dinner or spend time with my partner for me, so you can trust that I will never let any AI more advanced than a spellchecker anywhere near my work.

The bottom line: As a creative, I find more meaning and purpose in interrogating my own relationship with canon and culture than in reproducing it without a second thought. While it may not always be commercially successful, it will always be true to me and my vision. An AI I didn't build and that I can't control can never promise that same creative truth, and that is reason enough never to trust it with your art. Get in the pit and fight for your creativity.

Mediocre art

"oH, bUt I'm NoT a GoOd ArTiSt" I don't care! Neither am I! Sucking at something is part of the human experience and I intend to suffer through the exquisite struggle of being kinda mediocre at stuff in service of a creative vision that no one but me can realize!

I spent my childhood writing stories in the margins of all my homework rather than doodling. I don't have as much experience with art beyond doodling fanart during my middle school manga phase. But if I really want to make my own games, I'm going to do my best to make the art myself, too. It's going to take me a long time for a whole bunch of reasons (chronic pain, perfectionist tendencies, trying to understand screen sizes and sprite placement and and and...), but I'm going to do it because this is something I want to do.

I've never studied graphic design or anything else artistic. I took a few days of a sketching class once in community college. Beyond that, I'm flying into the void with nothing but a discount art tablet and a dream.

Thanks for coming by!

Hope you enjoy your stay. We're just getting started here.