Well, let’s see there, gamersmen, what was March all about, now it’s over? Did you check the blog daily? I update it every day. That’s a lie, it updates itself every day. I try to limit myself to writing one thing every day now I have a good solid track laid out in front of me, but there’s always something new here every day. I bet you didn’t see all of them. Oh, you did? You liked the days of March? Well name every one.
What did I write about in my Story Pile articles? Welllll,
- Skip & Loafer, a romantic anime about not a romantic relationship!
- Bee & Puppycat‘s comics, which left me with an eerie sense of helplessness
- Buddy Daddies, a 2023 high water mark anime, in that it’s just mid
- the Stephen King movie-of-a-novel Christine, about a powerful woman who is also a car that… fucks?
But hey, you don’t just come here to see me talking about media like some kind of movie blog, despite… my doing that… now… for literally years. Weird. Wild. I sometimes think about how this blog is the longest ongoing project I’ve ever had. Anyway, point is, I talk about games! I talked about games this month! Here are some games I talked about!
- Gensou Narratograph, a TTRPG made for god damned aliens who care about such a completely different world to me that I cannot help but be impressed and also never want to play it or touch it. Fun trivia, this article had an entirely benign edit because someone changed their name!
- Magic: The Gathering Arena and ten things I wish I knew about it before I started playing it.
- Marvel United, a cooperative board game made for people with tons of space and money.
- The Beginner’s Guide, an interesting game, but also how people treat authors, including generative media authors.
- Cockroach poker, an anxiety engine I love and probably will never get to play again!
Fox and I also spent this month, instead of playing a videogame together, talking about anime from 2023 (part 1, part 2, part 3)! And y’know, I’m coming down pretty firmly on the idea that 2023 was just a worse year than 2022. It doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter, but when I say that people want to argue with me, and it makes me even more firm on that opinion. That’s not the only writing that happened, though, no no no!
This month I decided, for some reason, to go in pretty hard on some academic concepts. One of them was an article about how capitalism and play might possibly be completely at odds with one aother, which I wrote in a piece talking about playing for money. But I also decided – in deference to it being the month of GDC, three articles addressing academic concepts from my recent readings. They’re about, in order, the idea of the Cynic’s Cop-Out, which is about how we don’t give up trying to understand one another, the idea of the Author-Function, which is about whether or not work is complete if it’s unread, and the idea of Prototype Theory, which is about what is or is not more or less a fruit. I also decided to bore down into a word choice, specifically, how bored I am with the word ‘Epic’ in my creative space.
Alright, what about some stuff that’s a bit less heavy? Well, I wound up writing articles about the Haka, a war dance my family tend to be racist about, and how all fundamentalism is a liar’s game. Hmm. Wait, that’s not less heavy at all. Let’s talk about games!
Setting aside my strangely feral love for a single Magic The Gathering Alchemy card, a format I actually think is a really bad idea to play at this point, and the Paradox Pokemon (but really I’m just going to talk about the dinosaurs), I did a bunch of digging into stuff in tabletop RPGs. For example, I discussed 4th edition D&D’s relationship to pets and the idea of an ‘action economy,’ and the 3rd edition D&D’s relationship to expendable magical items. While in the D&D space, I dug into the Goblin influences on common language in Cobrin’Seil, and of course, the biggest thing, a big bumper set of articles on the Benign Vampire City-State Hecsenfore, part 1, part 2, and part 3!
This month’s shirt design is a cartoon I drew! It’s of a crab! You can get a sticker of it here!
Alright, the month’s end, the month’s end, what’s happened this month?
My mother had a birthday, like she does every year. So did my father, which he scheduled near hers, very convenient. What’s more, his twin brother had one too, same day, which seems a little unoriginal, but whatever. I called my mother on her birthday, and that’s when I found out that her birthday had been yesterday (because of my embarrassing habit of assuming all my birthday notifications on my calendar are one day out because of all my friends in America). Turns out that day? She fell over, and that’s a big deal because my mother is that kind of age range.
And she just took care of herself.
Semester started, and my first wave of marking for my semester, too. This is always full of a weird tension because on the one hand, students are great and I like when I see them engaging with me. But on the other hand, right now, I’m fresh (like a few hours shy), of doing my first wave of marking for the first assignment and that means today has been full of so much weirdly specific angering. Like pulling apart student writing and looking at it and going ‘why the hell would you say that.’
And that’s not a good place to be, because after I get to that emotional level, I then go out of it, discard that entire mindset, and make sure my marks are all good and my feedback is useful and good and I don’t find myself venting at a student for a behaviour of all students. Right? Like no student is in any way responsible for the fact that they said the same thing that all the other students said that was incorrect. That’s a problem we have in aggregate, that’s something we need to direct them around, that’s a thing we need to route. It’s a sign of something I need to bear in mind for the next crop of students.
But ooooo I’m cross!
It’s also been just absolutely absorbing. Like I’m trying to think about what’s happened in this month that I can talk about that is a meaningful share. Like, a friend of mine got into Blitzball and I’m trying to make sure I show up to their games like I’m a nice good soccer parent. It’s cool! I’m trying to get into a roleplay storyline on Final Fantasy XIV! But if I ask ‘what have I done this month?’ It’s… shopping, teaching, marking, phd writing, shopping, teaching, marking, phd writing, loop loop loop.
Early semester! It’s how it goes.
Oh, and also, at the end of the month, Elli had a sore tummy. This was a whole day’s anxiety for me because he got sick on good friday when all of the vets were closed so we couldn’t readily check if we panicked. Thankfully, his aunt Amber was just the best and helped get us grounded about how to handle things.