Part of my unemployment regime is making sure I do something creative for a few hours every day. I’ve got the time, so I should use it wisely. Here’s Zombie Apocalypse (PDF), a Fiasco playset I wrote with Susan last week. We playtested it over the weekend and it went pretty well.

After a bit of searching about, I finally found the Blades in the Dark game I’ve been looking for. I dug up two people on Reddit, of all places, and we had our first session last week. It’s a cool group of PCs, sort of occult-leaning novices to the criminal world. Dock is a kid who was raised in a cult and has no idea how the world works (but lots of occult knowledge); Crucible is an alchemist and sailor from the Dagger Isles who got kicked off her ship for stealing things and now has to figure out how to live well in Doskvol; and Loretta (aka Etty) is the child of a noble family who lost all their money and status, so she’s stuck living on the streets with the ghost of her childhood pet for company. This game sparked my documentation obsession, so we have a wiki (original). For the click-adverse, the record of the first session follows.

These are my pre-play and post-play thoughts on Cthulhu Confidential, a GUMSHOE game from Pelgrane Press. It’s by Robin Laws, Chris Spivey, and Ruth Tillman. Short version: if you want a sourcebook for noir Cthulhu Mythos play, it’s great, and it works way better than I expected for one-on-one roleplaying.

So the other day I quickly tweeted a few things. http://web.archive.org/web/20221225030457/https://twitter.com/BryantD/status/1008728548754898947 (original) The aftermath was wild. The first tweet got just over 1 million impressions. Around 48K people interacted with it. 8K likes. Jake Tapper is now following me, but I’m more fanstruck by Eric Heisserer. The retweeter with the biggest audience was Cory Doctorow, at 437K. He also picked it up for Boing Boing, although he didn’t ask. On the one hand, he didn’t need to ask. On the other hand, Dorkly politely checked with me first. On the third hand, someone at Boing Boing photoshopped Trump’s hair on top of Eric’s head. Meh, screw them. ...

We hit the new location of the Nordic Museum in Ballard today. It’s been open a month or so. The space is great – a two story atrium themed after a fjord cuts down the long center of the building, with the permanent Nordic and Nordic America exhibits on either side connected by bridges. You’re crossing the Atlantic to get from one to another. The signage doesn’t go as deep as I’d like, particularly for the temporary contemporary Nordic art exhibition, but I still enjoyed myself a bunch. ...

My 200 word RPG is up. I’ll move a copy here at some point but right now, let’s go over to the main site to read it, check out a couple more microRPGs, all that stuff. The Widening Gyre is basically a sidestep away from a mechanic I was thinking about for Feng Shui, which I basically lifted from Blades in the Dark. Asymmetric relationship stats for the win. I think it’s basically playable although I did not work out the math.

It’s about time we got a mass market pop culture version of the Jack Parsons story. Ridley Scott produces. Ben Wheatley directed an episode. This will cause me to buy CBS All Access; the trailer is everything. Rupert Friend appears to be playing a fictionalized character, so I’m curious about that. Based on John Baxter, maybe? From a quick glance at IMDB I don’t see a lot of real historical figures, so maybe they’re fuzzing all the real names. Either way I cannot wait to start watching this.

Lots of photos after the cut. Click on one of the galleries to expand and see captions! Or if you’re reading this on Dreamwidth, well, you’ll just get all the pictures at once. See also this post for my notes on the cruise.

Oh hey, remember that time I pointed out that Republican campaign manager Corey Bliss was ignoring healthcare as an issue? The Democrats have not forgotten that healthcare is an issue. Health care will be a defining difference in North Dakota, where incumbent Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp faces GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer, who backed repeal. In Arkansas, Clarke Tucker, a cancer survivor, says health care is the reason he’s running for Congress. And in New Jersey, Democrat Andy Kim is talking health care as he tries to unseat Rep. Tom MacArthur, who played a key role in finally getting a repeal bill through the House, only to see it die in the Senate. ...

I was expecting the whole cruise ship experience to be cheesy as hell and possibly not enjoyable without a heavy dose of irony. However, at the tender age of forty-eight, I am keenly interested in new classes of experience and the idea of using a very large ship as a sort of hermit crab shell was intriguing. Also, Alaska. My short review: that was actually reasonably fun. Alaska is flat out gorgeous and historically fascinating, so you should visit it if possible. There is no way to visit southeast Alaska from the contiguous 48 without a significant investment of time and money; given that, it makes a bunch of sense to unpack your stuff into a big floating hotel rather than unpacking and packing and flying and unpacking and packing and so on. I wouldn’t recommend a cruise for the sake of the food, the entertainment, or the social opportunities – YMMV on the last, I’m a bit of an iconoclast – but all of the above are just fine as side elements to a cruise focused on seeing the sights. Details: we took Holland America’s MS Noordam on a six night cruise departing from Vancouver. We spent a day cruising the Endicott Arm, stayed in Juneau overnight, and stopped for most of a day in Ketchikan. We also had two full days at sea. In a little more detail…