July draws to a close and with it, a new semester begins. It’s a non-theme month which means like the other odd months, you can see some truly weird grab-bag of stuff finally getting attention. If you don’t check my blog regularly, you might not have caught these, so I’m going to highlight some stuff that I did this month that I think is particularly cool!
If you’ve been paying a lot of attention to the schedule on the videos this year, you’d notice that I’ve been putting out a video every two weeks. That has meant so far that there’s been two videos very month, but you may also notice that that would mean there’d be twenty six videos in a year, not twenty four, because, of course, there’s going to be some months where an early Friday on the right schedule means the month gets three videos. That’s part of why this month’s videos came out on an odd schedule and every Game Pile was related to a video this month:
- Quake, and living through history.
- Golden Sky Stories and finding strength in comfort
- And the big rundown on the Super Solvers games, which was first presented in two parts as script
And the month’s Story Pile articles:
- Reaper Man, a Discworld novel about death and shopping malls
- Barry, the Hotline Miami live-action series you didn’t know you wanted
- Shoresey, an excellent sports series that makes me feel clever
- Keep Your Hands Off Eizoken, a heartwarming anime about making anime
I’ve been thinking about D&D and fantasy worldbuilding a lot this month. No reason, promise. It’s been part of why I wrote about the Vast Forest Of Corrindale (aka ‘Giving Up On Maps’), about the distinction between a ‘Nation’ and a country in Cobrin’Seil, about how Dragons Got Hands (Sometimes?), and the awful classes presented in the 3.5 D&D Complete books (which I still liked!).
We also finished the Disney Animated Canonball. Under the hood there’s a lot of fuss there about trying to make the feed update properly – I have no idea why, but for some reason, only ten of the most recent episodes show up and I’m trying hard to make it behave properly. It was a really interesting exercise I enjoyed doing but man did I have to watch some tedious crap.
There was also some fun stuff with game design: I wrote about how you need to make choices when you design, and should treat your choices as if they are the best possible choices, about something exciting in the game Biblios I saw, and even a fun brainstorm about tagging areas and scaring off cops. I followed up on the floating island game, now called Cloudguides, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next iteration of it.
Oh and I hurt my leg, like two months ago and finally the writing about it landed.
Meanwhile, here’s a design that at one point, looked like a magical knight clown nose, and I was not here for that kinda honka badonka.
You can get this design (in red, blue, and green) over on Redbubble.
Some real rough stuff has happened around me this month. Not my own losses, but people around me are suffering and I’m doing what I can to support them. This has taken some pretty weird forms, and some of that has been really interesting to share, but also, I don’t know how good a job I’m doing.
It’s a funny thing that my bullet journal for this month has basically just been scribbled notes. No schedules, no plans, just ‘get what needs done done.’ The new semester started this month right at the end, and it’s going to be a scary one for now, for unrelated reasons to anything big and important.
Onward!