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@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 27, 2026, 8:48 AM

I've cut some of the games that influenced my books in favour of those that have most stuck with me as gaming experiences - I suspect there will be another list of games in #TheAmbivalenceChronicles later.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 24, 2026, 8:22 PM

I don't have any meddling, but I do have this bit of tampering going on in The Master System.
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The bad news turned out to be that in the chaos and confusion of the Bootlebot battle, Viktor Wendig had somehow gained access to the Cartography Room.

With nothing more than a 'I'm on my way,' Gary was a blur of yellow, making a speed run through the Manor's corridors until he burst into the Cartography Room, katanas flashing with the reflected glow of dozens of PC monitors, and threw a warning star at Wendig, who was hunched in a corner tampering with something, until the shuriken whistled past his ear and sunk into the wall with a ching.

Wendig turned slowly, an unpleasant grin on his already unpleasant face, flexed a hand wearing some sort of electronic glove, and casually pulled something from inside his suit jacket.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 23, 2026, 11:34 AM

Phil lunged, clanking, his no longer dextrous fingers just managing to grip the ZX81 before it took a potentially fatal tumble down a stone spiral staircase.

from The Knight Errors - Bit#5 of The Ambivalence Chronicles

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@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 21, 2026, 9:17 PM

The Ambivalence went on, weaving through the stream of frogs with all the certainty of Werner Heisenberg plugging in a boot sale Amstrad.

from The Dragon Download - Bit#4 of The Ambivalence Chronicles

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@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 20, 2026, 7:54 PM

Today in #WIPSnips, a couple of nice Easter Eggs in The Dragon Download.

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Bryonetta shook her head. 'Feeding the originating device into a hex portal unprotected... That would be bad.'

'Wait a minute,' Phil stepped out of the shadows and announced his return. 'I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?'

'Try to imagine a self-perpetuating Entelechus Hex, feeding on all our random thoughts, making them real and spewing them back into the universe at the speed of light.'

'Weakening the fabric of reality,' Nectarine added, 'in a feedback loop of chaos and destruction.'

'Right,' Phil said. 'That's bad. Okay. Thanks, BB.'

'So how do we stop it?' Charlotte said.

'There's always a way to do that.'

'In theory,' Bryonetta said, 'if we could find the computer that's generating the Hex, shut it down properly...'

'I thought you said they fed it to the portal?'

Nectarine glared accusingly at Grell and Fella.

Bryonetta made the interdimensional hand signal for 'wibbly wobbly'. 'It's back,' she said, indicating the general weirdness around them.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 19, 2026, 7:15 PM

There's actually a character called Tube in The Master System, but I've gone with this short and potentially amusing #WIPSnips from The Knight Errors instead.

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Inside, lights flickered reluctantly into life, like the bored fluorescent tubes in a maths classroom. Phil followed the badly lit - and even more badly cleaned - corridor, to something called ‘Gort’s Giftorium’.
It was not immediately apparent whether Gort was the name of the large hairy dog which blocked the entrance, snoring contentedly, oversized paws resting on what was probably a superfluous iron mace, or that of the dog’s owner.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 17, 2026, 8:07 PM

Today's #WIPSnips is a slightly scruffy snippet from Bit#6: The Master System, which is a bit more 'in progress' than some snips I post.

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'The Ambivalence is over here,' Sam said, leading the way as Dark Towers' began to collapse in on itself as if the universe had just pulled off a spectacular Tetris combo, spitting bricks and chunks of masonry across the clearing.

'Nina!' Gary tossed her one of his katanas.

'Charlotte,' she said, catching it with ease and quickly dissolving a chunk of tower into pixels before it squished her.

'Follow my lead,' they both said, leaping and dodging through the shower of debris, despatching dangerously sized chunks into pixels with apparently minimal effort, clearing a route which Sam and Nectarine followed through to the Ambivalence.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 16, 2026, 8:03 PM

Today on #WIPSnips:
Phil flexes his armour; a cabbage is grumpy; and Sam answers a distress call.

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'Oh yes, I wear armour now,' he flexed it to demonstrate some of the skills Dexy's training programme had almost taught him. 'Armour's cool.'

'And the handbag sets it off beautifully.'

Phil smiled sarcastically. 'How did you find this place anyway?'

'I got your distress call, of course,' Sam said. 'At least, I assumed it was you, but when I got here there was just a grumpy cabbage in a stable...'

'Distress call?'

'The smoke signal. I'd know the call of an A-Series in pain anywhere.

And this baby was crying out for help.' She lovingly patted the dusty front wing.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 15, 2026, 10:01 PM

I don't think I've used the word itself, so today's #WIPSnips features some exterior vibes from The Chip Whisperer: Bit#1 of The Ambivalence Chronicles.

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'What the hell just happened?' Charlotte was shouting. 'What have you done? Where are we?'

'OK, one question at a time, Phil said, running his hands through his hair. 'In fact, forget that, what do you mean, 'Where are we'?'

'Have you looked outside, Phil?'

'What?' he said, looking outside properly for the first time. 'Oh my god...'

Phil scrambled up to the window - or, to where the widow used to be and looked outside. Or, where outside used to be. 'Where the hell are we?' he said. -

'I believe I asked that first, Charlotte said.

Phil climbed up onto the workbench and jumped down on the other side, where the garage wall should have been.

'There's nothing here,' he said, his voice echoing against walls he couldn't make out. 'It's all just... white. And a little bit fuzzy. Like there's been a really heavy and slightly out of focus snowfall.'

'On the plus side,' Sam said, 'the computer works.'

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 12, 2026, 9:21 PM

Today on #WIPSnips, Magic Knight Sir Phil is gonna need a bigger car.

From The Knight Errors: Bit#5 of The Ambivalence Chronicles.

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With all the grace of, well, a knight in armour trying to get into a small car, Phil managed to wedge himself into the driver's seat, which protested under his iron-clad weight. He opened the choke as far as it would go, taking the wooden clothes peg clipped to the ashtray to hold it open, and turned the key. Somewhat to Phil's surprise, the engine turned over, but didn't quite fire. He gave the accelerator pedal a few clanky pumps (although he was unsure this was anything more than one of Sam's weird Mini owning superstitions, a bit like how he could never be in the room while loading Jet Set Willy from tape) and tried again. 'Come on come on come on,' Phil muttered frantically as the foliage outside the car grew increasingly restless and the spark plugs stubbornly refused to live up to their name.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 11, 2026, 8:53 PM

Today on #WIPSnips:
Tim Burton eats some cheese;
H P Lovecraft trims his bush;
and T Rex gets a floral exhaust.

From The Master System: Bit#6 of The Ambivalence Chronicles.

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'Where are we?' Charlotte tried to blink away the after images of the portal, a great swirling magenta blu8r across her vision, behind which she thought she glimpsed an imposing manor house towering over the trees, a mishmash of Baroque and brutalism creating a monstrosity plucked from the Stilton-fuelled nightmares of a Tim Burton wannabe. 'Where's Sam?' 'I'm over here,' she called. 'I'm ok... I think.' Sure enough the familiar sound and silhouette of a Mini 1275GT emerged from a nearby hedge, which now looked like HP Lovecraft had recently been hired as a topiarist, but wasn't very good at it.

'Are we home?' Sam asked once she had parked the Mini next to the Ambivalence, realised the Ambivalence wasn't so much parked as dropped into a rose garden, and then parked the Mini on a piece of patio far enough away that it wouldn't get blamed for the destruction of the rose garden despite the roses hanging out of the exhaust pipe like the calling card of a slightly confused flower power activist.

@sptroweresq.bsky.social Sep 8, 2026, 8:30 PM

Today on #WIPSnips, a throwback to The Chip Whisperer and our first meeting with the Assembly.

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