On one of them is the inscription: “Here lies Tobyn, Who believed in the good of all, Died at the hands of Zombies while asking for directions”. The tombstones refer to different people who worked on that game and this one refers to Tobyn Manthorpe. It’s fitting maybe that the tombstone for one of Tobyn’s first game is about the Zombies that might be wanting to kill him considering his latest project. This episode is an interview with Tobyn Manthorpe, who I spent many years working with at BioWare on his new, independent game Dogs Playing Dead.

When we recorded this episode, we did not know that the week this would air, our former studio, BioWare, would finally close its doors: shut down by its current owner Electronic Arts. See below for a small tribute or listen to the episode!

» Game on Steam

BioWare is alive and strong: A small tribute.

This week, BioWare finally closed its doors. After thirty some years, I will be living in a world where there is no building anywhere with that logo and that history. You can scour Reddit and other sites to see debates on whether the end of BioWare could have been prevented. Why, they ask, did BioWare ever even get sold to Electronic Arts. They question whether it was the studio’s fault or Electronic Arts or EA’s new owners.

The truth is, every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every company, like anything in this world, will eventually go away. To understand the journey you have been on, you must always get to the end of the story and when it is in such a tragic way, there can be sadness, there can be melancholy, and there is always grief. My heart goes out to the individuals who were trying to continue the legacy with the new Mass Effect game. My heart goes out to those who lost their job supporting the studio. These are friends of mine.

But I will leave you also with hope.

BioWare was never just a logo on a wall of a building. BioWare was the sum of all the people who graced its halls. If you ever sit through the credits on a BioWare game, like any modern game, you will see a cast of hundreds. BioWare is the sum of all the people who have been touched by any of the games I or others helped to ship. BioWare is reflected in the people who we influenced to get married, who were helped through dark times, who were left inspired. The BioWare DNA is part of many upcoming games including Casey Hudson’s new game Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic by Arcanaut Studios, and Exodus by Owl Cat Studios. It was even reflected in the ultimate sequel to what BioWare started in Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3.

In this way, BioWare will never die. BioWare will be alive. Always.

For me, I occasionally say or do something and I stop in my tracks. I realize that I just said something or did something that Ray or Greg might have done or said. When I’ve given a rousing speech I sometimes emulate Trent. And I can go on and on, the list of people who have made me who I am and who have changed my life that originated in BioWare would be like one of our game credits: Too long, and scroll far farther than you have time to listen.

I am incredibly lucky that my time at BioWare coincided with its hey day: the days of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. I am very lucky to have spent time learning from, being mentored by, drinking with, and absorbing the values of some of the most remarkable people I will ever have the pleasure of working with. The BioWare values that we worked so hard on and for, are with us always.

This series of podcasts though will continue to bring stories and interviews with those who I worked with.

BioWare is a story worth telling and it is a story best heard from those who lived it.

Thank you BioWare. I miss you all.

A fan petition to get Mass Effect 5 released is also available!

Other Episodes with BioWarians:

We feature the following music with permission:

• Psycho Flower by Festered Corpse

• Whipping Post by Afterforever

• Supa Hero by Sheavy

• White Face by Wizards of Kaos

• Tale of a Broken Heart by Hardliner

Please also check out the art of Dan Moore

As a foreigner working in Finland and as a native english speaker working with many nationalities, I question how my tone, choice of words, and choice of expressions map and translate into my colleagues’ mental models. At work though, the language I am concerned about is what I would call functional English. What about the much more complicated world of fiction translated into Finnish? In Unknown Soldiers, I had read Finnish fiction translated into English. However, the world of English media vastly outnumbers that of Finnish and in most book stores there is a large variety of English to Finnish translations. With that in mind, I invited Anna-Maija Ihander, a translator of fiction and entertainment, to talk about her experiences.

If words create the worlds we live in, how do these words create worlds in different languages?

Let’s find out.

Related episodes

Over the last 70 episodes I’ve managed to keep up a blistering weekly pace. For a podcast that I wanted to try for maybe 20-25 episodes, it has been one of my most fun creative undertakings. However, doing a weekly podcast alone, is a lot of work.

In the last few months, I’ve recently stepped back into a more full-time role at work and returned as CTO for Supermetrics, while also continuing to support the many founders and my colleages at OpenOcean as a Venture Partner. A weekly podcast eats into the remaining time in such a way that I don’t have as much time to do the writing that I originally planned the podcast around.

This means “something has got to give”. Like a good startup, you need to know when to pivot and the outcome you want with the pivot.

From here on in, Tales under the cat tree, the podcast edition, will be published bi-weekly. The format, for now, will not change. The extra time will give me an opportunity to explore different ideas: I’d like to do some video podcasts, spend some more time marketing, and of course, I’m also busy with my writing, more of which I want to post here.

Thank you for listening, thank you for supporting me, thank you to all my collaborators. Please continue to support me and those I interview by telling your friends, posting episodes to your circles and letting me know how I do/did.

I’ll meet you again for some Tales under the cat tree on Monday, September 28 for a fresh new episode.

Listen to the most recent episode:

I sat down for a conversation with my friend, former professor, and collaborator, Dr. Erwin Warkentin, who is living in Berlin as Berlin goes for an election that might swing to the complete opposite of the AFD if polling is to be believed. His point was that we weren’t quite back to the 1930s, but much more perhaps to the 1920s.

How did we get here and where are we going if we use history as a teacher?

Other relevant episodes:

Canada had something unique. Canada has the oldest student organization in North America and longest running student news service in the world with the Canadian University Press or CUP. The organization was setup in 1938 and continues to today.

When I wrote and edited at Memorial’s newspaper The Muse, we were members of CUP and the Atlantic region version, ARCUP. Student and alternative voices were and I believe, still are critical in society. We were not afraid to question the status quo, whatever that might be. We forced conversations whether you liked them or not, and we were a safe space for otherwise silent voices and ideas.

But being part of CUP meant also learning from so many students across Canada. So it’s my pleasure to welcome Alayne Armstrong, one of the presidents of CUP. She was president during my 1993-94 year otherwise known as CUP 56.

Please see original show notes, including pictures here:

And here are related BioWare episodes

If you have ever tried, you will know how difficult that task actually is. Believe me, I have tried and continue to try!

I’ve known Shannon Patrick Sullivan for any number of decades. We met during university and as you will hear in the interview, he wrote his first published novel, The Dying Days, in a scant 5 weeks. As of publishing this interview, he has completed the first draft of his second novel which comes in at a nice and hefty 250,000 words written in a single summer.

Some links related to the interview

You can find Shannon @ www.shannonsullivan.com.

The Patreon page for the podcast that Shannon co-writes with Toby Hadoke, “Doctor Who: Too Much Information”, is https://www.patreon.com/tobyhadoke.

Sparks fly when Lilah, a thief from a struggling freespacer colony outside the borders of the Federated Solar Republic, meets Bax, an FSR security officer stationed at an official colony within those borders, during a time of heightened tensions for humanity as the silent, staring, seemingly invulnerable aliens dubbed The Aureum begin to meddle in human affairs. A story about choosing the life you want to live in a time of unprecedented, rapid change beyond your control.

Elliot has worked in the creative industry pretty much all of his adult life. He has been the executive producer of the Apple TV animated kids’ series The Sisters Grimm and director of flagship Audible Original series Moriarty. We will talk about some of his past work including the Emmy-winning animated web series Tomb Raider: ReVisioned.

So it’s my great pleasure to have Elliot on the show for a fascinating conversation about the book, its origin story, Elliot’s origin story, and more. We even delve into topics surrounding AI.

You can order Into The Great directly from the publisher Li’l Factory.

If you are in Finland, you can order Into The Great directly from Suomalainen Kirjakauppa!

Let’s say you have a computer today, imagine that that computer runs a program. We know the computer isn’t self-aware, it knows only what the program tells it. You would think that we humans are much better at this. We are after all self-aware. We can certainly, or so we would like to think, distinguish between truth and lies.

And yet, every day, whether at work or in our personal lives, little stories of truths and lies change the way we perceive reality. These little stories, whether it’s a comment made by a co-worker, or a short snippet on the television, can slowly change the world around you. After a few generations as we pass down these stories, a tyrant can transform into an angel, and an innocent can become the murderer. Our own beliefs of our culture and what we believe to be true in the deepest corners of ourselves can be manipulated.

This episode continues are dive into World War II propaganda, and believe me it won’t be the last. Dr. Erwin Warkentin has written three detailed books on the subject and joins me to discuss how propaganda during the second world war aimed at bringing down the regime became part of the fabric of post-war Germany.

Please do take a listen to the first part in this two-part series, episode number 65. We delved into the use of various propaganda tactics of the Political Warfare Executive and the work of Sefton Delmer.

Books by Erwin J. Warkentin that explore the subject

Covers of Dr. Warkentin’s books on the PWE and Propaganda

The History of U.S. Information Control in Post-War Germany: The Past Imperfect
July 2017, Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 978-1443897495

The Political Warfare Executive Syllabus: A Crash Course in Mass Deception. Volume I
June 2019, Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 978-1527533349

The Political Warfare Executive Syllabus: Words at War. Volume II
July 2019m Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 978-1527533363\

Images provided by Dr. Warkentin

In the episode I talk about Moishe Kantorowitz, a Holocaust survivor. Take a listen to Episode 19 for more.

On this episode I have my long-time collaborator, friend and former professor, Dr. Erwin Warkentin to talk about how the Allies employed different propaganda tactics against the Nazi regime of Germany during World War II. Dr. Warkentin has done extensive research on the subject and has written three books on the subject.

While we talk, you might want to visit my show notes. There are some of the original pictures of his research including documents from the time.

This episode is part one of two.

Books by Erwin J. Warkentin that explore the subject

The History of U.S. Information Control in Post-War Germany: The Past Imperfect
July 2017, Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 978-1443897495

The Political Warfare Executive Syllabus: A Crash Course in Mass Deception. Volume I
June 2019, Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 978-1527533349

The Political Warfare Executive Syllabus: Words at War. Volume II
July 2019m Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 978-1527533363

Images provided by Dr. Warkentin

The message that my father had passed away arrived as a text from my brother in Sri Lanka while I was pitching to an investor in a board room somewhere in Toronto, Canada. My brother had called, but the phone was on vibrate and I ignored it. The echoing text arrived a short minute later. I don’t know why I reached into my pocket and glanced while I kept motioning at my slides, but I did. I remember I paused in mid-sentence and with the mind of a deer in headlights, I just continued.

As I was leaving shaking hands with the investor, for whatever reason, he asked, “Is everything okay”. Matter-of-factly, I answered, “My father just passed away, that was my brother on the phone.” I left.

I don’t know what he thought of me. I do know they didn’t invest in my startup. It is possible he thought I was callous, cold, or possibly in shock. I can’t remember if I had explained that I had just left Sri Lanka a mere fortnight past. I had seen my father at 81 after the brain surgery to remove the tumor that killed him anyway. He was in the same well-dressed pants and shirt, silver pen tucked asleep at the breast. My last vision was him waving, crying, holding on to my mother who had fretted over him. This was the last of the dozen good byes since they had moved to Sri Lanka and I to Canada.

The text had merely stated a pre-announced fate.

It was not home that I went when I arrived in Kingston, Ontario that afternoon by train from Toronto. Instead the taxi driver dropped me mid-afternoon on a weekday at the Pilot House pub. The waiter, James, poured me a Guinness. I sat at the corner table, opposite an empty chair, sipped the foam, played Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver, and shared a toast to my father.

At that point if you had asked me what he left behind I would have said my many memories. Maybe the numerous friends, patients, and relatives who toast his health now going well past a decade. I even went to visit the small area of the university dedicated to him after having been instrumental in its construction. His study where he saw patients at the farm on weekends with the tidy red ceramic floor remains, though it now doubles as a small buddhist shrine my mother uses daily. On a rare occasion I can see the shadows of his fingerprints in some of the books still dusty and unmoved.

Some years after, I thought back to my own life and I thought that what my father had left behind was probably reflected in the way I told my stories. I thought maybe my almost-obsessive need to connect with dear friends was something he had left in me. Maybe it was the way I laughed, the way I was always curious about history, or maybe it was in ABBA or BoneyM. “Duleepa-chuti-putha”, he would say while opening a cold Guinness at the apartment in Hong Kong, “play some Fernando, or Brown Girl In The Ring!” And that day when he passed and I had had that Guinness, I thought that simple act was something he had left behind.

Just a few years ago, I came across all the letters my father had written me. In them I thought I had found something he had left behind. They always started the same “My dear Chuti Putha”, my dear young son. In November 1993, he writes “It is raining heavily”, weather was a big theme. Politics, dogs, economics, and somehow getting me married off covers the rest. Always, in every letter, there was my mother, “Amma”, the “busybody”, without whom he would be “lost.”

Last year, my hair greyed and thinned. My cheeks took a slightly older shape. One morning, lathering my face to shave, there, staring out at me was none other than my father.

I also feature a piece of writing titled “The things we leave behind” which is about the day I found out my father passed away.

Thanks to Dr. Warkentin for the conversation which unfortunately cuts short: the dangers of recording in a car in Lapland!

In this conversation with musician Johnny Nolan and I, Geoff relives some of the stories from his past and we discuss some of the lost greats of the Newfoundland music scene: Fred Gamberg and Johnny Fisher.

With permission we also have the following tracks:

• Employee of the Month, Fur Packed Action

• Silver Bullet, Jigger

• Gatekeeper, Darshiva

If you are interested in Geoff’s son Angus, you can check this track out and subscribe to his YouTube and heck check them out all on stage together at the end of the Summer in St. John’s, Newfoundland on August 28.

Thank you to Geoff Younghusband (Jigger and Fur Packed Action) and Natalie Noseworthy (Darshiva) for their respective permissions.

Check out the other episodes on Newfoundland alternative music and more music!

This episode serves as a memory to Fred Gamberg and to Johnny Fisher. The music and memories live on as long as we listen.

A few weeks ago, my former professor and friend Dr. Erwin Warkentin and I found ourselves on some long drives through Finnish Lapland. My conversation with Joe Teo for Canada Day sparked a conversation much of which I recorded. In that episode, Joe said home could be defined as where he was able to make the biggest impact. That led to Erwin and I discussing our specific concepts of what home means.

Today’s podcast features:

• Going Home, an original short story by Duleepa Wijayawardhana

• A conversation between Dr. Erwin Warkentin and Duleepa Wijayawardhana on the subject of “home” and the question “where are you from?”

  Subscribe to Tales under the cat tree! It’s free and you would be supporting my work!

Related Episodes

© 2026 Duleepa Wijayawardhana
All rights reserved. This is an original piece of fiction.

Featured in Episode 62 of Tales under the cat tree
Note: No AI was used in the creation of this story.

When my father was a teenager he would often ride a rusted bike along the dirt laneways through the cleared jungle to the village school. Like every other school boy at the time, he wore his hair slicked back with cream with his white school uniform. His entire journey on muggy days was spent making sure the clay mud stayed away from the legs of his trousers. More than once though, he would set his face, ring his bell, and ride on past the school gates, past the backs of the students filing in, past the grumpy eyes of the balding headmaster. One day he said good bye to his mother, grabbed the jam sandwich in the bag she offered, and cycled off to school, past the school, down to the main road and didn’t stop pedaling until he reached the colonial port city.

By the time I was born, we had all moved to a suburban house, complete with fenced yard and a shiny new car. My father had worked on the docks, run the docks, and soon enough had become a marine engineer. My mother had found a home in his arms and soon I would be the one delivered to that home in the trembling arms of my father from the hospital.

As I grew older, I ran our yard ragged, first laying tracks with my little feet, later stripping the grass riding my training bike as my father sat on the steps with whoops of encouragement. Every day he would kiss my mother, take his packed lunch, grin and wink at me before heading out the door. On weekends he would take me with him to the Automobile Association Club. Seated at a privileged spot at the Club bar he would clink pint glasses, tell bawdy stories, and wink at me as I played to the edge of the bar. In a time when driving home after some pints was not only ignored but encouraged, we would do so together with me keeping an eye out, a daring game somewhere between hide and seek and frogger.

One day he kissed my mother, took his packed lunch, hugged me close and pressed a letter into my hand. His letter was short, written in an old cursive form. He promised he would write, he would make sure that I didn’t want for anything, and he would bring the world home. He promised he would come back home.

While he never stepped through the door again, every month checks arrived dutifully in ragged envelopes endorsed by stamps of strange sights in foreign scripts. Every birthday came a letter, complete with toys, curios, and later on, extra money for me. The letters told of his adventures, his friends, and life lessons for me. I dreamt of my father as if he were a character in a Saturday morning cartoon: battling pirates off the shores of Madagascar and riding manta rays in the South Pacific.

I graduated at the top of my university class and the letters noticed, the cursive more excited, spilling happiness from somewhere out there in the world. I always read the letters only after I had rescued them from under my mother’s spattered wine glasses. She passed away shortly after my graduation on a winter day sooner than anyone of us wanted but probably should have expected. For a brief few months the letters ceased as if observing a moment of silence. A large amount of money arrived with a letter from over the sea the week I married; enough for a downpayment that I didn’t need for a childhood home that still surrounded me. Teddy-bear-shaped letters arrived to herald the birth of my son and subsequent birthdays. And still afterwards the letters came, though now there was a flowing river from the mailbox to the basement where they were stacked, crisp and unopened.

The final letter was not borne by a mailman but the professional knock of a nurse at the door to our home. I read the letter, written in a stumbling cursive, out loud to my wife, halting in several places, as saliva caught in my drying mouth. My father had suffered a stroke while being treated for cancer. He had been shipped back for terminal hospice care. He wished to come home, he said, and be with his grandchild before he passed.

When my father came through the door he was lying on a motorized hospital bed. His smile through the breathing mask the same as when I ran around the yard. His eyes as deep brown as my son’s, a forehead creased and passed from generations. Soon his breathing stabilized in the living room where we had installed the bed. There was a rhythmic quality to the deflation of the airbag and the measured beats of the pacemaker. After the initial excitement, my son went back to his toys, oblivious to the nose, eyes, forehead he shared with my father. My father fell asleep at the centre of my home as I watched the blips of a heart I wished we didn’t share.

You can read the original story:

• English: https://tales.dups.ca/p/the-cottage-on-yli-kitka

• Finnish: https://tales.dups.ca/p/mokki-yli-kitkan-rannalla

The sound of the Kuikka: Kuikka: Kuikka / Black-Throated Loon / Arctic Diver by YleArkisto -- https://freesound.org/s/242110/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Thanks to Suvi Salmilampi (translation) and Kaj Makela (translation and reading)

Please note, the podcast will take a break and return July 13, 2026

Welcome to my Canada Day special episode. Canada Day 2026 is special for me because twenty-five years ago on 1 July 2001, surrounded by many dear friends, I became a proud Canadian. That story comes towards the end of the episode.

First, I want to celebrate a fellow Canadian and a fellow Newfoundlander. I’ve known Joe Teo for more than a decade. A long time ago, my alma mater, Memorial University called me up and asked me whether I could meet with two young entrepreneurs, Joe Teo and Sahand Seifi, who had just started a company in St. John’s called HeyOrca. Over the years I’ve watched Joe navigate life and entrepreneurship and I am incredibly proud to call him a friend. On the day I interviewed Joe, Joe had just received his Canadian citizenship and taken the oath.

This episode also contains the original audio created by my friend and then journalist Craig Welsh for CBC featuring my Canadian citizenship ceremony. Hearing my friends voices from twenty-five years ago is surreal and touching. I hope I have done you all proud.

I would like to thank the many Supermetrics colleagues who contributed to this episode: Dave, Bartosz, Kamal, Darius, Toli, Irina, Pavel, Anssi, Lee and Jaz. I’m sorry for those that I could not include.

The Canadian National Anthem, O Canada, is performed by Julie Nesrallah and Nathalie Paulin, accompanied by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Peter Oundjian.

Instrumental versions of O Canada are public domain recordings.

This is part two of my series on Canada.

Today, we will explore what it means to be Canadian in 2026 by looking back at the last 50 years of Canada through the eyes of two of my best friends. On a beautifully sunny day in a small tea garden in Berlin, Germany, I met up with Sylvia and Erwin Warkentin, fellow Canadians observing our country from afar. Together, we discuss the changes they have witnessed over the last half-century, the evolution of Canada’s cultural landscape, and what we can learn as we look to its future.

Episode Highlights

• The Cultural Mosaic: Sylvia discusses growing up on the prairies and how she appreciates Canada’s shift towards diversity and tolerance over the last 50 years. She highlights the value of maintaining one’s heritage as a hyphenated Canadian, celebrating a cultural mosaic rather than a melting pot.

• Borders and Identity: Erwin shares his unique upbringing in a Mennonite community in Manitoba, with the US border running right past his schoolyard. He notes how the once-fluid border has hardened since 9/11, but believes Canadians are now developing a stronger backbone to reaffirm their own values.

• First Nations and Systemic Struggles: We delve into the difficult history and ongoing challenges faced by First Nations and Métis communities, including the enduring legacy of colonisation. Erwin suggests creating physical memorials, akin to Germany’s Stolpersteine (tripping stones), to ensure those lost through violence are never forgotten.

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This is part 1 of four episodes celebrating Canada.

On July 1 is Canada Day, and this year in 2026, it will be my 25th anniversary as a Canadian citizen. It is the country I choose to call home. Canada has as many problems as any other country. As we speak, Alberta, a province I called home for near a decade, is preparing for a referendum on separating from the country.

Today’s episode is about something that brings any group of people together: Music, and about a specific band that you have never heard of unless you are Canadian, or know a Canadian of the generations between 1980 and 2015. That band is The Tragically Hip.

When it comes to The Hip, as we like to call them, I cannot think of a bigger fan than my friend Edgar (Eddie) Thomas from Newfoundland and Labrador. Over many drinks we have often philosophized and spoken about music and what it means to us.

We talk a lot about the band, so who are/were they? The band members were Rob Baker, Gord Downie, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois, and Gord Sinclair. Gord Downie, the lead singer was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2015.

At the end of the episode I have an essay that I wrote in 2017, shortly after Gord Downie had passed away from his cancer. The essay was written six months into my life here in Helsinki and after a short visit from Eddie.

Episode Highlights

• A Shared Canadian Experience: Eddie and I discuss how The Tragically Hip transcended provincial borders and musical genres to unite a massive, varied country.

• But he won’t travel alone: A multi-part essay covering my discovery of Canada and the Tragically Hip.
  

  Want more tales of Canada? Subscribe my friend (everything is free)!

Eddie’s Top Tragically Hip Tracks

If you are new to the band, here are links to Eddie’s top picks:

• 50 Mission Cap:

• Fireworks:

• Wheat Kings:

• Bobcaygeon: