Ostensibly, this is the last article of the year that follows the ‘normal’ pattern of the rest of the year. There’s a whole month more after this, but this is kind of the last spot I have to put anything that doesn’t fit in Decemberween… … which is to say this is my last chance to be spiteful, mad, or cruel about something. Not that I spend a lot of time doing that, but it’s definitely the point at which I have to get any last minute spite out the door.
Oh, you don’t need to worry, you don’t need to worry about that at all. I’m not going to burst into vituperous rage over something, mind you. It doesn’t show up this month.
Much.
Here’s a funny coincidence; thanks to how I treat November, as a catchment bin for everything I do randomly throughout the year, this month has four articles that were collaborated between me and Fox. Two of them were in this month’s Game Piles:
- Dinosaur Island Rawr & Write, where Fox and I talked about a kickstarter game of making dinosaurs out of dice.
- The Adventures of Willie Beamish, where Fox and I talked about a 90s point-and-click adventure game about corrupt union officials and walking your dog
- Here to Slay, a game that irritates me for being merely fine when it’s so incredibly good looking
- Root, Mastery Depth & Material Demands, a long form video grappling with how great Root, the game is, and about the idea of Mastery
And then Fox came along to talk about some anime we watched together!
- Deca-Dence, where Fox and I talk about a show we really liked that’s also, just like, extremely strange? It’s a tight, short series that hits a lot of ideas really fast? It’s hard to summarise.
- Wave, Listen To Me!, where Fox and I talk about a much more downbeat comedy anime that still manages to do that thing I love in a show, which is deep nerdy examination of the specific experiences of a niche interest.
- Do It Yourself, which is the same thing and I did watch it with Fox, but this time the thing they were focusing on was Industrial Arts.
- Bocchi The Rock, last year’s all-purpose, everyone-loves-it, everyone-knows-it meme queen phenomenon, which has been waiting to show up a year since it first aired.
Outside of those regular features, I wrote about the prestige classes of 3e D&D, and the complicated relationship they have to player power. I talked about the the 4e monk and suggest moving it to Martial, out of Psionic. I also talked about how the principles of interface design can be wholly considered for principles of game design. In world building, I talked about the Origin of the word Orc and the notion of Corrindale as a place for events to happen in. If you’re more into Magic: The Gathering, I wrote a three part series on the Transformer Commander magic cards, and then about the impossibility of Universes Within adapting the Dr Who and Lord of the Rings cards.
Almost finally, I wrote a buyer’s guide for Invincible Ink products for this Decemberween, and then, most seriously, a reflection on the establishing of new habits.
Man, the shirt designs came thick and fast in the end of the year. This is just one of many, but I wound up making a Locked Tomb fan design. You can get it here, and it’s pretty much the same vibe as everything else I do. Though I am now also wondering if I should get some stickers of it to share at Cancon next year.
Huh.
Maybe I should do that with more of my designs.
November has Desert Bus; November has Marking Season; November has the end of work for the year and the clearing of decks. November, in my own mind is an unofficial theme month of no effort November. Throughout the year, any time I come up with something that’s non-thematic to that month, I will throw it forwards, into November, because that’s forever away.
November is also a month where I figure I’m going to take it easy. A lot of the articles of November are already written, and that means November’s writing time is often spent on building the otherwise relaxing Decemberween posts, which, as of time of writing – halfway through November – I’m halfway through writing up December! That’s pretty cool!
But November is also the month when the queue gets depleted. Marking days are huge amounts of work, and the result of smashing through them meant that my brain was pickled. It’s no secret to me that a lot of what I write about is ‘what inspired me today’ and it turns out when you watch a lot of student material all day, any inspiration from that feels… icky. Like, I don’t want to make articles responding to ideas my students put in my head even if they’re interesting, because that feels like shooting down at someone who can’t shoot back. And like, if my student says something that spurs me to talk at length about something I should talk to them about it because they are paying me to do that and teach them things.
It’s like how if I spend a weekend hanging around with my niblings and playing board games, I largely don’t want to talk about how they behave with those games or what they think of them because that’s making my family, kids who have no control over it, into hash-tag-content. It seems bad!
In practice it means that at one point, right at the tail of October, my pad of posts, which had peaked at 45, had dipped down to 26. That means there were at least 19 days in which I did not write anything.
Right now? I’m writing this because it pushes me over a threshold (31 from 30, meaning tonight, I will have 30 queued, and that feels good). Then I get to dive back into my literature review, fingertips itchy.