August 2022 Wrapup

Tricks month has passed and with it, we will now begin an entirely serious discourse on things. There is no more room for tricky stories or funny jokes or wicked japes on this blog now, it is 100% Super Serious Time.

This month I talked about a bunch of games that were all for their own reasons really hard to make into videos:

  • Stunts, which is great fun but also the recording software cannot handle how low the framerate is and it winds up looking like box kites fighting
  • Superstition, which is a journalling game made for a game jam, and I wasn’t sure I hadn’t messed up playing it
  • Kiitos, a physical card game where my copy is currently sitting in my parents’ house
  • Skatebird, a game which seems really good based on the hour of play I was able to get out of the first level, constantly eating dirt

And the month’s Story Pile articles, which were honestly pretty hard given the number of episodes I had to sink into each one:

As for other articles that I think you should go back and check out, there’s a great magic trick technique for the math-inclined at This Is A Magic Twenty-Seven, two different historical dives on two differently skilled bullshit artists in Velikovsky and Agent Garbo, and two different ‘oh hey, this story is more interesting than I thought’ stories in the narrative of The Sodafunk Swindle and The Man From Taured. Since I’d been looking at it for class, too, I reconnected with the pro-wrestling adoring introduction of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies resulting in The Most Important Book On Semiotics In The 20th Century Starts With Wrestling.

Finally, and probably the biggest labour in the month, I wrote a long form explainer on one of the Legal Systems in Cobrin’Seil, the international standard set up by the Eresh Protectorates.

I also made some simple graphic designs based on Magic The Gathering combos, which you can check out here.

I made some bad decisions managing my time this month. I’m really not happy with it and the results have me behind on tasks I need to do. Some things were outside of my control – I’ve been called up for Jury Duty three times in this one month, and planning around that has been like holding my breath for weeks.

Other stuff’s been rough but it’s not my story to tell; multiple people I care about a great deal have gotten sick and it’s become a challenge for me to try and keep my head on straight about it.

I am sleeping well. I was concerned when the semester started I’d be struggling to get to bed on time, but it seems I’m hitting the pillow on time consistently and waking up on time too.

Winter closes and we move in on to Spring. Here’s hoping things go okay.