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I’m really deeply thrashed this weekend. Pets with digestive problems, G1 Climax wrestling tournament, and a fun online gaming convention (original). Nevertheless. In my copious spare time I’ve been kicking around an idea for a West Marches style Electric Bastionland game. Short explanation: Electric Bastionland is a deeply weird minimalist urban exploration fantasy game; West Marches is a campaign style in which there’s a large pool of players who self-organize self-directed game sessions, designed to lessen the load on the GM. The driving motivation for Bastionland PCs is paying off crippling debt (oh, so it’s a reflection of 2020!) which works just fine for a player-driven game. Since I’ve been wanting to play Bastionland for a bit, and since West Marches is an intriguing campaign style, I was pleased to realize I had a good match on my hands. Here’s how I put them together and started fleshing the idea out.

Movies reviewed this week: Rebels of the Neon God.

My whole week has been pretty much New Japan Pro Wrestling’s G1 Climax tournament for the last couple of weeks. 19 shows in a month, it’s kind of a crazy pace. This is their big heavyweight tournament of the year every year and for a while it looked like it might not happen but they managed to get a few critical wrestlers back into the country and here we are! ...

iOS 14 allows you to put widgets on the home screen, which is very exciting to those of us who aren’t Android users. For Android users, it’s an opportunity to point out that Apple is late to the party. The new capabilities resulted in a wave of widget apps, which allow you to customize widgets and put your own stamp on your phone. I like tinkering, so I decided I wanted to do something beyond the typical “calendar with a photo of my cats behind it.”

Movies reviewed this week: The Killers and The Hills Have Eyes.

Editing note: added our experience with Gauntlet-style character keepers. A few months ago, some friends of mine who hadn’t done much/any tabletop gaming said they wanted to try D&D. I had plenty of free time and felt like it’s somewhat mean to make non-gamers learn D&D in a virtual setting, so I volunteered to run Monster of the Week for them. It’s gone great – we wind up playing about once per month, and everyone seems to be having fun. ...

Movies reviewed this week: Girl, Action U.S.A., and The Boy Behind The Door.

For all the obvious reasons, I spent some time this year refreshing my knowledge of a rough cluster of subjects centering around the dangers of extremism, particularly on the Internet. I haven’t finished reading all of these, but I’m on course to get them done by the end of the year. It occurred to me that it might be an interesting list for others. My thanks to Shane Burley, whose article " The Best Books on Fascism in 2019" supplied much of this reading. Subscribe to his Patreon. ...

Movies reviewed this week: One Cut of the Dead.

Movies reviewed this week: Contempt.