This orphaned reply to a long-lost post deserves to be read and remembered.
Not writing nearly as much about RPGs or Agile as I would like to be.
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This orphaned reply to a long-lost post deserves to be read and remembered.
What could explain this crisis of faith???
For those that might care, Matt Fraction is starting his Batman run. I'm hoping it's just as good (or better) than his Hawkeye stuff.
Would you believe this page was the launch pad for a 25 year long career of writing critically acclaimed comics? www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/02/e...
I think character creation shows the potential of thos system so well!
Now with music: m.youtube.com/watch?v=7dTk...
sorry to be a downer but coming off of my worst sales summer in years, now would be a great time to pick up something from my catalogue! spooky season's coming up, so I'd recommend: đ Imp of the Perverse - monster-hunting American horror! đ„ Annalise - GMless Vampire horror! www.ndpdesign.com/store
I am aware that my shitty typing is a good reminder of my humanity, but now I find myself wondering if I really need to maybe lean harder I to profanity, just to be safe.
Fuck yes it does
This is a great read, but also a punch in the face because I apparently write like a goddamned robot when Iâm trying to be polite.
Hard not to love the title. complicationsensue.blogspot.com/2025/08/dans...
The marketing department every time you suggest they use the very expensive project management software the company bought
And then people wonder why âthe left should be concerned with getting men laidâ is an argument that flops like a deep sea fish brought to the surface.
i think my 23 pairs of missing scissors and 67 pairs of missing socks are probably off throwing a party somewhere
I figure this all sounds like gibberish to most folks, but for a certain slice of the population, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.
I lack the musical language to fully unpack it, so I will simply say the original is - while amazing - a little less metal. The version from the fight is on the Bonus OST, under the track name "For Those Who Come After", and I am currently listening to it on repeat.
There is a particular fight scene, the second fight with Renoir, which has this moment where the music goes from "This is amazing" to "HOLY CRAP MY BLOOD IS ON FIRE". The song is titled Une vie Ă T'aimer. It's on the OST, and it's amazing, but it's subtly different than it is in the game.
So, I just discovered that Expedition 33 has a bonus OST available, and I just enthusiastically threw money at it. Partly because it'll be amazing, partly because I am happy to pay Sandfall for their wonderful things, but most critically for one specific track.
Yeah, weâve already started laying groundwork to support that. Iâd actually be all for it, but if he decides heâs EXCITED about a college, I suspect no force on earth could stop him.
Anyway, I need to go get groceries. This morning had one of those rounds of âare we doing the right thing?â, and writing it all down was very helpful in reminding me that yes, yes we are.
So, weâll figure out how to support his math, so long as he wants it. College courses, individual tutoring, something else - whatever it takes. I have no desire to PUSH him down this path, but I want to make sure he never looks back and thinks he could have done something, if only.
Thankfully, I get the benefit of watching this kind, smart, creative, thoughtful, delightfully weird, incredibly compassionate kid find his way in the world, and thatâs solid recompense.
Especially fear for your kid. Bad things happening to me? Cost of living. Bad things happening to my kid? Unacceptable. Bad things happening to my kid that are my fault? Apocalyptic.
What if all that horrible stress really WAS the right path? The future of work and education both look increasingly uncertain. Have we made his long term prospects worse? Should we have just tripled down on the rat race? Intellectually, I know we made the right call, but fear is a bastard.
He sometimes talks to his friends from the old school, though not often because, surprise, they have no time. When they do talk, the spectre of AP tests and college admissions always looms large. Iâd be lying if I said these conversations donât make me worry we made a mistake
So I do what I can for him without making it obvious. One conversation we had with each teacher was to make it clear that we are ready and willing to provide EXCESSIVE support if needed, but that we would do so out of sight of the kid, if only to avoid him refusing on principle.
Kids are weird. I see plenty of the challenges I faced in him, and I want to give him all the solutions I have and all the lessons I learned, but in the grand scheme of things, itâs probably good that heâs more interested in working them out for himself than listening to an old man.
And most importantly, when he found out she was to be his teacher, he did not whoop (because he is a teenager and far too dignified to do something so crass in front of his parents) but he was excited. It was so good to see him excited again.
So he starts his first full school year at the new school on Tuesday. We did parent night last week, and I got to talk to his teachers, who seem to know and appreciate him. We had a long talk with his math teacher and it did my heart good. She speaks his language.
Has he solved all his organizational and executive function problem? Of course not. But heâs more confident and capable in handling them. And âconfidentâ is kind of the magic word. Over the course of the year (and a summer of adventure), he started trusting himself again.
His schedule and work had all relied on a robust infrastructure of support, and that scaffolding all got dropped. We stopped hovering. Let him screw up, try, rinse and repeat. It was rough for a while, no question. But given the space, he stepped up.
All of which is to say that it was super high stress with, most critically, no margin for error. He could not learn from mistakes because he could not afford to make any mistakes. So the decontamination process involved making space for those mistakes.
From a distance, I can see that there must be structural issues when the school load is such that NO ONE in the family has time or energy for anything but work and school. But when youâre in the thick of it? Itâs sacrifices made for your kid, for whom youâd do anything, so itâs hard to step back.
I developed a lot of sympathy for apparent helicopter parents in that time. There are still the annoying ones who are pushing their own vision on the kid, but a lot of them are just trying to keep up with all the things you MUST do for the child.
But what we hadnât realized, boiling frog style, was that the race was not so easily escaped. High school had been all high stakes and HUGE homework load, and even for a kid without executive function challenges, it was overwhelming.
At one point, the kid had looked around at his friends rushing on their Ivy League paths and had declared he was uninterested in the rat race, and was looking to do more of a ârat jogâ, and I always thought that was super healthy of him.
We got him to another school and, while I think my wife might disagree with the term, we focused the rest of the year on decontamination. Because while the math mattered, it wasnât JUST the math.
Itâs a tale as old as time, so I wonât dwell on the specifics, except to say that this kid, who had loved math and had a talent for it ended up hating and fearing math and became convinced he was clearly no good at it. It was heartbreaking, and part of why we pulled him out midyear.
We discussed pulling him at the end of that year, but he was unwilling to give up his friend group, and we respected that. Which unfortunately laid the groundwork for a story that SO MANY G&T kids know: the one about the teacher who crushed my love for math.
It was not all bad. The teaching staff hadnât changed much, and the individual teachers were still great. But the level of support they were getting from the administration was obviously thinning, and that shift showed up in other places.
Iâm sure it was a good choice for the school, but because the schools are separate, we had no idea this was going on, and the leadership at the HS still *talked* like nothing had changed. So, Freshman year was a ride.
The thing we didnât realize, because it was just starting, was that the high school was a real pivot from the rest of the school. I understand this was not always so, but apparently they had looked at the bottom line and decided that a shift toward sports was better for enrollment.
The school in question does the full run of Pre-K through 12, with 4 schools, each with their own leadership and vibe. When he got to middle school, a little bit of achievement bullshit started showing up, but nothing untoward. So we rolled him into the high school, full of trust.
This came up most obviously in questions of skipping ahead on a subject. When the topic came up, they defaulted to resistance, not because they didnât believe in the kids, but because they did not trust the parentâs. When it was right for the kid, they were all in.
I cannot overstate how much I valued that last bit. Since it was a private school in a fairly high income county, it was absolutely full of kids whose parents had already charted out their academic path to success, which was not always great for the kid.
Kiddo attended a private school from a young age, and Iâm grateful for it. The school had a good, genuine focus on the whole child, so that meant working with us as we sorted out ADHD stuff, and being prepared to advocate for him AGAINST us if needed.
So, my kid is stupidly good at math. I have grown up with G&T folks and super smart folks of various stripes, and I mean he is good at math over and above that context. So much so that I scramble to find ways to support him. It does not help that he hit a bad patch a little while back.
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says âCan I help you find something?â âIâm looking for the obituaries.â âThe obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.â âNot the one Iâm looking for.â
Alright, my dearies. Here we go. Join us for the ride? www.kickstarter.com/projects/lum...
If you missed the live recording of the Murderbot interview episode at WorldCon, you can watch it here:
So, I'm using zones to handle range in Daggerheart, and I started working on a map for our Friday game, and then I thought I'd write about it, then I realized I should probably explain zones and how I use them, and before I knew it, there was a post. walkingmind.evilhat.com/2025/08/29/m...
Any time anyone tells you how to optimize without saying what youâre optimizing FOR, the answer is âoptimizing for their incomeâ.
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and think âThis is fine.â
This exercise by @jamellebouie.net on "How many Slaveholders were there, really?" (youtu.be/pRs2Xu1FWR4?...) is really impressive and honestly I think should be a mandatory watch for *ancient* historians thinking about the slave societies we study.
If you're at Pax West this weekend, stop by @ipr.bsky.social's booth (4320 in Summit Hall) to pick up our latest release. Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern plus bestsellers like Blades in the Dark, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and more!
I finally read computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaumâs 1976 classic âComputer Power and Human Reason.â This book deserves a massive revival in our current age of grotesque and largely thoughtless AI creep into everything:
Parent night at school for the kiddo. One of the teacherâs had a poster of Matt Fractionâs Defenders run, so that was an excellent omen.
Not as many as I would if we were playing at a more relaxed pace.
I support this 9% backofmind.substack.com/p/reject-pre...
I admit, I also get distracted by the question of how to steal good mechanical ideas from boardgames, and donât always make it past that. And, I suppose, the ever present specter of price has a deadening effect as well.
Like, to meaningfully make a point about Oath or Root online would require unpacking things to such an extent that even I would be daunted, and grod knows I love me some unpacking.
Well, not online at least. And I donât mean that snarkily. I have had a lot of boardgames conversations, about Leder games in particular, but almost exclusively offline, and Iâm genuinely not 100% sure of why that is. Some is just fandom aversion, but some may also be that context is harder.
DC-area folks! Pure Panic Comics and Games is hosting a little mini-con September 28th (almost exactly a month from now). Tables running games in both the morning and afternoon, vending all day, two panels. Be there or be square!
Thought the same today. Juries are part of the often-frustrating-but-much-better-than-fascism rule of law Trump is destroying.
A mostly excellent list (although The Gray Man wasn't for me), that my own Cold War YA novels The Notorious Pagan Jones, and its sequel, City of Spies, would fit right into. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/b...
HELL YEAH, @darkerhue.bsky.social!
Director of Projects Sean Nittner shares the latest on all the items in our production & development pipeline - including Streets of Jade, Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts, Blades '68 and more. It's the State of the Hat: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqRw...
Some cool, intellectual part of my brain reminds me that everyone in the mob is a whole person. That they are humans, capable of empathy and understanding, not caricatures. I try to remember that, but god damn is it hard when people REVEL in being caricatures.
If it was just that they were too scared or cowed or powerless-feeling, then I would be troubled, but not *afraid*. People, together, can face those things. But when the problem is many people looking upon the worst of things and cheering? I donât know what changes that.
For all the horrors he brings, it is not the Tyrant himself who I fear, nor even the Oligarchs who have crunched the numbers and determined that tyranny is better for the bottom line. What I truly fear is the idea that a great many people look upon this all and think itâs fine.
It can feel entirely hollow to point out the obvious moves towards tyranny and collapse, because the truth of observation will not stop it. But the hope, and itâs a slim hope, is that perhaps others may see it THIS time.
After all the fancy constitutional arguments & faux historical glosses, this is the practical endpoint of the unitary executive theory. Because when presidential power is effectively unchecked, the only thing preventing it from devolving into authoritarianism is the decency of the officeholder.
In my defense anything I said was said under the influence of it being the first day of the kids being back to school.
A beer is poured. A first draft is celebrated. A long list of revisions is contemplated. A beer is downed. harryjconnolly.com/news-about-t...
Even when Iâm not formally doing zones, it tends to be zone like. We tend to treat people as operating in clumps, and only really worry about the distance between clumps, except in rare circumstances where more granularity is in order.
Writing a GM section is hard. So instead I wrote down every role I could imagine that a GM might play and instructed the reader to kind of figure it out themselves as they go
Yes to both? Though when I use index cards as maps, I am more likely to use them as zones, Fate/Marvel Heroic style:
Miro, and we like it a lot for our purposes, but we also have a lot of hours put into making it shine.
Question for Daggerheart GMs - how do you handle rest when a long period of time passes, such as in travel or other "time passes" moments? I've experimented with "Player's choice if it's a long or short rest", as well as "Just recover everything and get 2 hope", but curious about other approaches.
I do, and I've done it, but it adds an extra layer of fiddliness that I wish I didn't need to deal with.
Yeah. Iâve had good success with thermal printers for small ad-hoc stuff, but it doesnât work for anything I want to look nice.
For weapons, the physical damage die could be used as a token, but resistance values is the real snag for something like this.
Also, there is a strong temptation to replace written numbers with something like these, could totally work for stats, but probably not for weapons and armor.
IYKYK
I am mostly sad at how hard it is to find a printer that can handle 3x5 index cards well. Makes the format hard to share. (Yes, there are printable sheets, but they make the whole process expensive, which defeats the purpose of it)
On the GMing side, it helps that the adversary and environment stuff loans itself to using index cards already. In a perfect world, Iâd do GM stuff on 4x6 cards and players on 3x5 (or maybe the reverse) but that complicates storage annoyingly.
I have mostly been running Daggerheart online, and it has me really feeling like if I run it face to face, I want to go all in on a component based approach. Character sheets on index cards, clearly specialized tokens, all in a box. I suspect Iâll be fiddling over the details of this for a while.
:salutes:
It took generations for the food supply to get safe enough that you could eat chicken and pork and beef that hadn't been overcooked, vegetables that were roasted instead of boiled into mush, etc. That era is gone. It was an anomalous window, which is now closed for at least another generation.
The assumption that everyone *else* is a fucking rube is particularly exhausting because after 20 years of writing and reading about cons I can assure you EVERYBODY is a fucking rube.
This is a very weird situation in that it's the first time since FDR the press has a visibly ill, probably dying President -- so the first time in the modern media model -- and they seem completely unequipped to report on it. (also "they like him and want him to rule us like a king" factor, yes)
The first new Criminal book for five years, The Knives, is out this week⊠200 page hardcover from @imagecomics.com
It's taken decades for DOD to get the services to play nice with each other and actually work together on developing capabilities. Hegseth destroying the JCIDS process and getting rid of the JROC will undo any work we've done to align the Joint Force. It'll be a service free-for-all.
Happening tonight! See you there, DC folks.
Bought a book about drawing kawaii/cute things because the instructions were all what you draw, not weird magical illustrations that turn two sketchy circles into an owl. My cute things are lumpy and not terribly cute, but I was at least able to try.
Might fuck around and try to release this today...
Oh, absolutely. And in retrospect I find it interesting that I learned the strat without really understanding it the way I do as an adult. The piece that had been missing when I was very young was that I didnât have the concept of âsolvedâ, at least until presented with it, but gladly embraced it.
