July has ripped on by (and I say that because I have been on holiday, and am writing this quite early in the month, truth be told). I could say any old bollocks and it’d just be seen as me being quirky. Actually, I shouldn’t joke because the current thing is a lockdown that I have seen referred to as potentially extended to Christmas and uh fuck that.

Anyway!

June had four Game Pile articles this month, which is the usual number. We have two text articles, and three, count ’em three video articles:

• I made a video of me playing (and failing to beat) Hurtin’ Hermits, a minigame from the Hermitcraft server.
• I considered the works of Raven Software in light of their 1992 game Shadowcaster.
• I reconsidered the blind eye I’d turned to problems in Shadow Warrior when I looked at Shadow Warrior 2.
• I got to talk about Familiar Alchemy, and complain about ‘semi-cooperative.’
• And then a video about the Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century Game, but really, just a bunch of dumping on how messed up the history of TSR is.

While that happened, what about the Story Pile?

• Sk8 The Infinity. I liked this anime of hot boys that really, really should be making out.
• Mitchells Vs The Machines. Just out of Pride month, a disappointing thing that didn’t belong in Pride Month.
• Widget The World Watcher. A cartoon from my childhood that I wrote about in January and cast to this time in the month.
• Gen:Lock, a web animation anime that kind of has no right to be as amazing as it is.

This month I also started on the project We Are The Night, which I kicked off by making a post that just explained the idea. Part of the point of making in public is making sure that you’re aware of not just the things that are done, but the way things get worked on – and sometimes that just means things stop, and that’s okay. That also led to a followup post later in the month. We’ll see how regular those posts are. This public making continued as I worked on redeveloping The Botch for a print-and-play environment.

I wrote about Feeling Superman, and about my weekendless childhoods due to the Working Bees. I also made a Masterpost of my Netflix Marvel posts, bringing them together in a nicely easily read way, all for convenient reference. In my study posting, though, I took an opportunity to explain the idea of Caillois’ axes of play, through the medium of Transformers toys.

I wrote a sad article, because I don’t like being unduly negative about Magic: The Gathering about how I’m not interested in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, which is a bummer to have written. While I was in a D&D mood, though, I also talked about The Hexblade back in 3.5, a class that’s kind of still misbegotten in 4e, and the Swallowers, a kind of jokey memey heritage of friendly non-evil Beholderkin.

As I write this, we are in extended lockdown. I had a PhD timetable written up in January, that was, based on the information presented by the government in that month, expecting that I’d have my COVID vaccine right now. This lockdown is being treated as if it’s the fault of dirty poors transmitting their viruses around, while rich people go about their days unaffected by the rules that the rest of us live under. It’s possible by the time this article goes up, things change.

But for now it’s going to be a darkly ironic note, since I’m seeing it more likely I get my vaccine in 2022.

If you’re, like me, in the Balance Of The Remainder category, you can pick up stickers or shirts and laugh hollowly.

Fingers crossed things don’t get worse.

May is over, and we are now in the last part of the first half of the year that is 2020 Bonus Round. What’s been happening on the blog?

As the Game Pile has matured, there have been a lot more articles about games that are contemplative or not about just plowing through my Steam archive. I’ve come to abandon the idea that every game in my Game Pile should be talked about – not because they don’t deserve it, but because there’s a lot of stuff where I don’t have anything interesting to say.

I did finally make a video about Hyperintertextuality as expressed by Hyrule Warriors, something I’ve been intending to do for a few years now. The video itself was reasonably easy to make – I wish I’d dedicated a little more time to it, to trim out some sections of the background imagery that aren’t interesting. There’s some menu-ing in the video that I would have cut out, and in the later half I might have made more diagram overlay if I’d thought about it more.

I wrote about Usurper, a game that I can’t in good faith recommend because I can’t give you an opportunity to buy it, and therefore, I had to look at as a game design teacher. I also looked at Pixelmon, a mod for Minecraft just because Fox is playing it. Finally this month, I got to look at Hard Wired Island, a game made by a couple of friends of mine that I was planning on skipping entirely.

See the thing with Hard Wired Island, is, I don’t actually think I want to play the game. It does not interest me. It has never interested me. I backed it in the kickstarter to support my friends, and figured that was it. I was going to let this game that did not interest me let go, and that be that. Except then Discourse started around this game and it was fucking boring. The discourse was ‘hey, is this huge book with lots of work and well paid contributors worth its price tag of about as much as a D&D book?’ and like… even if you don’t think it’s worth it, that conversation is really dull. That conversation wants to reduce the things the book is saying to a kind of word sludge, like alphebitising all the text in it and determining ‘too many es.’

Thus, a conversation about the game that isn’t about its price tag.

Weirdly, it was a sour month for Story Pile stuff. I talked about Moneyball, which seems to be a movie about a pretty cool moment that decides to centre itself on just a total dickhead, on Tenchi Muyo, the Star Wars Merchandising of anime, Toy Story being boomer reconstructionalism and The Detectorists, which sucks. And I also talked about BNA, focusing on the way that media chooses to create villains. My take didn’t land for everyone, though; I still like the series, but it’s definitely possible to read the narrative of a secret shadowy culture of elites pulling all the strings as playing into antisemetic tropes.

Thing is for me if you mention ‘posh elites who pure breed themselves for superpowers’ my natural inclination is to see European Royalty, not Jewish stereotypes.

What about other May articles?

I made an article explaining the way I made my unscripted videos. I used my Heretic video as a template to work as an example. There’s also a month’s worth of Daily Cephalid Card Design, a piece on the wonderful Australian animal now known as a Rakali, and a piece on Mind Control in D&D, specifically as it relates to 4th Edition’s better way of handling it. We looked at Megatron and the bodies he’s had, and ways to manipulate tests when you know you are being tested. I even went out of my lane and made fun of Star Wars a bit! And while I am making fun of the House of Mouse, I looked at the way I reacted to the Simpsons episode about Whacking Day.

This month I made a shirt because I wanted it. It’s about a pair of Pokemon I really like – Gligar and Gliscor.

I hurt my leg late this month, which sucked basically all the energy out of a whole week. That sucks! It does mean that I feel like this month just kind of blipped past me, which I may be a sign of something else going on – like as you get older, you start to notice the time flowing faster?

Oh lords, I hope not.

Thus ends Talen Month, a month which is, surprisingly, tricky to actually fill out. It’s often tricky because it kind of behooves me to make it a month of bangers. There’s no room for the ‘eh, it’s not that good,’ kind of stuff, or ‘unexpectedly meh’ kind of coverage. I’m trying to build the structure for this month over the rest of the year – any time a real favourite idea comes up, I put it in the hopper and plan on hitting it hard in April.

If you thought ‘hey the articles this month were kinda big,’ well, they were. A typical post on the blog ranges between 300 to 1200 words, with only a very few big beefy entries that crest 2000 words. This month, the average was 1200, with a full 15 articles over 1000 words. That’s even setting aside the extra media entries – three videos and a podcast, which don’t fit normal word count stuff.

This April had a lot of stuff in it! And that stuff’s real good, in my opinion!

April is a month with five Game Piles, and it seems that this month the subtheme was ‘oh hey, remember that?’ In addition to  this, I talked about One Must Fall 2097 and how its design was influenced by the keyboard. I talked about Heretic and how it iterated on the Doom engine. Then I talked about Ai: The Somnium Files with Nixie, which was fun. There’s another Game Pile going up tomorrow, and it’ll be about Syndicate Wars. Yeah, Syndicate Wars, no doubt a game you’re all thirsting to hear my opinions about.

I warn you, it will not be erotically charged.

There was also an article about Final Fantasy VI, which  got inexplicably linked to on Critical Distance. I mean, I’m grateful and glad, and I hope it holds to the principle of the site to maintain a list of thoughtful writing about videogames, but also, I guess I’ve now enshrined ‘girl hot’ as a type of proper videogame critique.

It’s been a month to consider my branding, the way my Youtube Channel presents itself. It has been pointed out to me that my Youtube Channel doesn’t really do anything to encourage someone to engage with it, I don’t do calls to action, and I don’t give the channel a clear identity. That’s something to work on.

No central theme to Story Pile this month, though! I talked about Only You Can Save Mankind, a book by Terry Pratchett that ruined me for every ‘metatextually clever’ window pane story, Robotech – a series that kinda doesn’t exist (with a followup of some disjointed stuff from the series that stick with me), the movie The Mighty Ducks, and the book The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, part of the Animorphs series (that I said you shouldn’t read).  The unifying theme here appears to be ‘1992-1999.’

We only got one Magic: the Gathering article this month, but it was an article of custom made Sultai monsters. On the other hand, I did flaunt my ass by showing some of my D&D worldbuilding from years ago, and updated it to now, examining the Gods of War in Cobrin’Seil. We also looked at The Ardent from 4th Edition and the Fochlucan Lyrist from 3.5. Then we learned how to be Rock Howard, and how to do an unarmed character that doesn’t completely suck ass in the context of a game all about hitting people with weapons.

I’ve been basically daring myself to write about Bleach, a series I love deeply despite being as immensely flawed as it is. We got ourselves a Bleach weekend, where we talked about the sword as a storytelling vehicle in Bleach, then some examples of stuff it did with that.

There wasn’t that much in the way of game-making or politics this month, though I did reserve some time to talk about the fundamentally punitive way games are structured in common discourse around D&D.

I also wrote a bit about some characters I like, mine and other people’s. Dinobot from Beast Wars, Kaede from Last Blade, the Thraddash from Star Control 2 and Carcer from City of Heroes.

This month’s shirt was a reference to Only You Can Save Mankind which also creates an interesting little weirdo totemic item, a sort of memory of what it meant to be one of the people penning these ‘important’ things on ‘important’ technology, that have all passed by and stopped being meaningful useful any more.

Beyond that? It’s been a busy one. Teaching, PhD research, and blogging, and it’s been weirdly hard to get to sleep this month. Daylight saving shifted, which normally means I get more time with my friends on the internet, but weirdly, it just hasn’t worked out that way so far.

Curse this Smarch weather!

But March is over and we’re moving on to April! March lacks a theme, which means that anything I wrote in February and went: Hey hang on, this doesn’t relate, got bumped. And thus, I present to you something you can read that directs you to other stuff you can read, that’s all fun and good.

What did we get in the Game Pile? Two videos, and two text articles. The videos were on Second Sight, and how meritocracy is fake and Games Journalism is fundamentally broken, and on how Minecraft doesn’t have anything like Goblins and how that’s? interesting? I also tackled the digital Root board game and how it isn’t quite the same thing as the physical game, but how that can be a good thing, and finally, I took some time to take down Genewars, a 1996 RTS. Man, 90s RTSes are just a genre for me to poop on huh.

The Second Sight video was something I was pretty proud of, especially because there’s some techniques in that that I was afraid would look dumb and bad and it didn’t.  The process of turning a 1500 word article into a video produces a video of about that length, which I think is good, since it means that there’s no reason to just list a series of things that happen in the game and to instead try to focus on what the game is trying to do.

In my efforts to not just become an anime review blog, I wrote about some deliberately oddball stuff. I talked about Chess, a really good musical that fits almost too well into modern discourse about what gamers think matter. I briefly talked about Until This Shakes Apart, a new album by Five Iron Frenzy I’ve been listening to in parts to repeat for months now. I got a single anime article in with The Ascendance Of A Bookworm, which I love a lot and will still use to tease Nixie. I talked a little bit about the way medium influences content with the book series of the Muddle-Headed Wombat. And finally, just a few days ago, I talked about complicated feelings around the series Black Books, which was made by a dreadful dickhead.

What else do I recommend you check out this month? Well, there are two pieces that were put up as part of a sort of ‘Hi, I like you and I like knowing what you like’ Birthday celebration: my article on being Edelgard in 4e D&D, and my article on the Hindren in 4e D&D. These were both little hat-tips to friends near their birthdays, and it seems they were well received, but they also were just, you know good content for if you’re into 4e D&D. While we’re talking about building in other games’ spaces, I wrote about how I use ‘pushed’ when talking about custom magic cards and how Competeitive Commander is essentially building its own game in another game.

On other topics, there’s an article about The Games Of Orcs, which is worldbuilding for nonhuman cultures in fantasy settings. This was really fun to research and involves a lot of thought about the sheer mechanisms of what goes into folk games. I also wrote about how to handle gods based on my own thinking for the gods of Cobrin’Seil, and there’s a piece about how character creation needs to avoid Owlbear Traps because they don’t work.

Game-making practice, there’s one big one: I broke down the rules of my game Die Rich after finally, finally, finally getting a chance to playtest it with some real humans. Also, Fox and I talk about how we’d design Pokemon to fill some holes in the type lineup. It’s a long conversation, about an hour, but you might like it!

Finally, I did write about three equally important political topics; that a dedication to nonviolence doesn’t mean an abdication of a willingness to use force, that Rush Limbaugh is fucking dead, and that Garfield is probably white and Heathcliff is probably black.

Next up, here’s this month’s T-Shirt. Thanks to 2020 I never got to show students my original Naruto-style did you check the subject outline, but I wore it to class this year and they loved it, so it inspired another, updated version of the same idea. I expect I’ll make more on this theme.

March has featured some illness, which in our current situation kind of slowed things down more than I expected. I have two classes going this semester, and they’re both exciting and interesting and I’m talking to students who seem to be split into ‘let me pass and let me out’ and ‘I am genuinely interested in this,’ which is a good split to have. An important piece of PhD documentation got completed and handed in and now I’ve been working on the research part of that, which is exciting. I’m basically finding I have a little more time than I thought I did – that the kind of administrative work of the research project is less arduous than the work I’m enjoying doing, which kind of stands to reason. I even participated in a twitter event with other educators, about games, and got to get them to read ‘Gamification is Bullshit,’ which is

Fun.

Weirdly, I know I said this last month, but another friend had to bow out of a game I was running. In this case, it wasn’t mental health, it’s that they’re a parent to a two year old, and time in the evenings has become precious. Oh well!