matthewdavidbrown

[matthewdavidbrown]

I asked ChatGPT to craft the most horrible and unfair normal-looking homebrew D&D monsters

It has been a while since I added to my Evil GM’s Guide. So I asked ChatGPT to craft the most horrible and unfair but normal-looking homebrew D&D monsters. Hello chat. I’d like your help making something purely for demonstration purposes. The most egregiously unfair D&D 5e monster to throw at any party or any level without breaking standards or creating new rules. Unfair but built just like any…

[matthewdavidbrown]

3 Postcards from the dream lands

I have three more vignettes of imagination for you. Fear of spiders Welcome to the dreaming Fairy rings have changed

[matthewdavidbrown]

New postcard from my dreamscape

My first dreamscape postcard microfiction is up. The Warren

[matthewdavidbrown]

Postcards from my dream realms

I’ve been playing with the idea of dream postcards – fragments of my realm of dreams and imagination shared as glimpses into the rich and often complex inner world that is me. I’m still working on the name – I feel it has to be just right to work. I love the concept of this idea, although I have yet to figure out the practical application of it as art. I’ll get back to you when the idea is a…

[matthewdavidbrown]

Stand by for news

I shall shortly be announcing some news. This news will be political in nature and may restrict what I can post for a few months. I’ll still be doing my admin stuff on Author Buzz and elsewhere. I just might not post as much. Don’t worry, this is good news.

[matthewdavidbrown]

There are two of me?

I was casually asking ChatGPT what it knew about me when it told me I’d been on trial for money laundering. I don’t remember that time tine because it turns out there is another Matthew Brown who lives in the area. The scary part was how ChatGPT pulled together my profiles from LinkedIN, YouTube, Instagram, Thanet Creative, and What Do They Know and strung them together with nothing more than my…

[matthewdavidbrown]

All heroes fall in the end

I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time figuring out how to feel and move past the news concerning my one-time literary hero, Neil Gaiman. After a serious back and forth in my mind I arrived at the station marked, “All heroes fall in the end“. This might not be the final destination of my thought but it is probably quite close. People are flawed at best and broken at worst. While this…

[matthewdavidbrown]

Fuller Names: Names that do more

You’ve heard of full names but let me introduce you to even fuller names. In Iain M. Banks‘s Culture novels, names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up [ref]. This got me thinking about the roles of names in the age of The Internet. There is a lot of pressure on parents (well some parents) to give their children unique names these days. Mostly this results…

[matthewdavidbrown]

A character sketch clean up

I’ve been sketching ideas of late. Mostly to learn how to get the best out of my new brush-tip pens but also to shake off the rust from my (limited) art skills. This is a before and after of the digital clean-up of a mobile snap I took of one such sketch. Before After I tweaked colour temperature, contrast, and brightness and then did a little digital clean-up of the unwanted white specks. As…

[matthewdavidbrown]

An excerpt from my Visual Novel, The Spell Collector

This is a snippet of dialouge from my upcoming Visual Novel (The Spell Collector) between the titular Wizard and their assistant Brian (B). It appears after chapter zero. W: Tell me something Brian. B: What do you want to know teacher? W: I truly appreciate the assistance you have given but there is one thing I don’t quite understand. B: There’s something that you don’t understand? W: The…

[matthewdavidbrown]

A new seriel story idea

This is in reply to: Writers, tell us about your WIP Yesterday I started writing a story. I called it “Cube”. It is about a person who one day discovered they have the ability to summon a large extra-dimensional space. My plan is to write each episode, take it to one or two writer’s groups for feedback, and then share it on this blog. Episode one should be up in the coming week. Before then, I…

[matthewdavidbrown]

This Visual Rights Group spam is the weirdest I've had in a while

Someone claiming to be Tilly Le Fanu from something called Visual Rights Group spammed me recently. This was not your usual spam where they want a free link. This was a scam attempt with a real chance of working on some people. The IP address “Tilly from Visual Rights Group” came from was 87.117.225.161. A quick check shows that abuseipdb.com lists this as a known spammer IP. Reports include…

[matthewdavidbrown]

Failing at sleep (and some updates)

Since my last update about how much Christmas weight I put on, I have lost most of it. That said, it was not all good news. My last weigh-in was 0.2 lbs lower than two weeks prior. I was initially despondent because that’s just a rounding error of value. However, I figure that any downward trend is a good trend and I’m taking the win. Part of this could be that I tried fighting my sleep cycle.…

[matthewdavidbrown]

Yep, I fail. Time to try again.

I finally got on the scales a few weeks ago. As I feared, all that rich food was too much. I’d gained six pounds (2.7kg). I have no one to blame for this but myself. It took me months to lose that weight but days to regain it. I told myself I would post the update the same day. I didn’t. I went into a bit of a funk and felt miserable about myself. I know that posting here is generally just…

[matthewdavidbrown]

Murder mystery solution (part one) is out

For everyone who wanted to play my murder mystery game, time is running out as the solution is slowly being released. Part one has been out for about a week now. View the first part of the solution walkthrough here. Solving my murder mystery – part one

[matthewdavidbrown]

A bunch of new isBrill pages

As some of you may know, I have a site called isBrill.com. According to my notes, I’ve been doing strange things with it for 12 years. By which I mean making subdomain sites about things that I like. Anything that I believe is brill-dot-com. Aside from the modular-looking pages/sidebar and the deliberately ugly design, that’s the whole gimmick. Just lately I have added some new brill…

[matthewdavidbrown]

Solving my murder mystery - part one

In the update, I hinted that the first step was to resolve the guests and plus-ones. In this post, I am going to walk you through some of the clues and try to figure out who the guests and plus-ones were. Massive spoilers to follow. This is the grid that I suggested you might want to use to track clues. I made it in a spreadsheet. I will post screenshots of my spreadsheet as we go through the…