Do you know that the majority of people who read my blog are in fact, super great and cool? It’s true, I have the analytics. No, you can’t see them. Why would you want to? Don’t you trust me? I’m very trustworthy and can be relied upon to have normal thoughts in my normal brain. I had it certified.
Anyway, it’s the end of a month, and I think it’d be good if you checked through this list of links and suggestions and see if there’s cool content on this blog you’d care about that you missed!
This month’s game piles were a video explaining the Ur-Quan Heresies, which was – effectively – a rebundling of an older article I wrote, and I wanted it to be more available for non-readers. Then, Fox and I talked about Bloc By Bloc, an excellent cooperative game about opposing fascist occupation by a mysterious fantasy faction called ‘the police.’ I talked about Small World too, which I liked a lot, as both a game that’s a lot of fun and a game that connects me to a beloved friend, with its fun experience of being an ideology. Then I talked about Unblock Gridlock, ASMR, and history of puzzle development.
For the Story Pile this month, I dedicated each week to one season of the series Person Of Interest (season 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I liked it! It’s a cool show! I thought it was interesting and it made me ask interesting questions! Also the way that I watched it during the choking, convulsing torment of the Large Language Model discourse happening, that was kinda weird. And one of the guys central to it, Jim CaVEIIEZEL, is a big ole poop head and he just recently put out a movie that sucks about an idea that sucks because he’s a big ole Qanon weirdo! That sucks!
This month’s other articles have included an ongoing diary working on Bloodwork (and I kinda got more to go on that). I talked about some real life changes, like watching more anime and getting a library card and having the language I use being clearly weird and awful. I also put a lot of work into talking about making things, and put some of that into practice even if uh, it was a bit rough to write!
I also talked about Worldbuilding in D&D a lot! I talked about the way that currency is a byproduct of organisation and technology. I talked about the city of Torrent, and its lightning muscle wizard monks! I talked about how people get started playing games, and I talked about how inadequate critical hits are as a mechanic for my preferences!
Also, I really hate Lord of the Rings in Magic: The Gathering. So avowed a hashtag hater am I that I’ve stopped watching Magic content entirely while I wait for the deforming cards from it to go away, which I really, really hope they do! Stupid bowmasters!
It doesn’t really fit anywhere in this, but I also busted open Camp Osum and got to work on fixing a mistake in its prototype. This means between Camp Osum, the Sonic Runner game, and Goncharov I have managed to conceive of about five games this month.
This month I did two shirt designs – this one because I knew I needed it for class teaching (and hopefully it’ll arrive in time for the semester’s end), but also because I saw a post on tumblr joking about it:
You can get this design here.
It has been a complicated month.
Remember that library card? I got it to try and borrow an ebook of Baru Cormorant because a friend likes that book series more than she likes The Locked Tomb. I figured that’d be a great place to go for that kinda thing. Turns out, while yes, okay, yes, the library has probably got those books, they have the physical books, which is… funny, and embarrassing to realise I didn’t consider that I might have to like, go look at them.
We have a bike. We have a bike that sits in our garage and if I can muster the courage I can get onto that bike and ride it a little down the road to the library. Hell, I could walk to the library! And then I’d be able to have those books to read. I wouldn’t be able to attest to finishing those books in time, of course. In time for what? I don’t know. Brain not work good.
New semester starts in a few days! That’s going to be exciting because it’s going to be able to do a lot of things I don’t normally get to do. I’ll have someone I can defer some work to! We even have lesson plans of structured material to engage with, it’s going to be so fun (That’s also what I’ve been doing these past few days, which is trying to digest lesson plans and make my slides)!
I’ve also been struggling really hard with work. I’m trying, trying, trying to do things, but I feel like I have this deep failure happening, like somehow I’m, not good enough and I’m not doing a good enough job. I promise this isn’t a crisis brought on by my age or by reading a book I liked. Nothing I feel should be seen as an attack on anything that prompted the feeling! It’s just a lot of reflection and personal distress about feeling like I’m always working and that work isn’t good enough.
There are all these things in my day to day life that I feel like I’m somehow just messing up with it on the most fundamental level. Like if I make dinner and clean up there’s going to be something afterwards I forgot to do right so that’s what’s going to stand out, that’s the thing I failed at rather than one small detail out of a large list of successful tasks. I’m very… failure sensitive? I guess? And it’s making me a bit lairy, I think. I want to vent about things that are doing a bad job of what they do, but there’s that ongoing feeling that if I’m too mean to a videogame I’m going to make someone cry.
Anyway, I think I can get a handle on it!