The Holiday Sales Season

 Instead of some cutesy pithy play on "Black Friday" I bundled up all the products that we have printed on cards with a hefty 69% (nice) off calling it the "Holiday Cards" bundle. Most of these products are only available through Drivethru. It's not like I have fat stacks of cards taking up space because they are all POD but still, I did put a fair bit of effort into setting them up months ago.

Holiday Cards

But if you want other publications of ours that are on sale for this week, you can check Spear Witch. It does help me out more when people buy publications through the smaller shops like Spear Witch and Exalted Funeral.

 

Updates

 Well

I have 3.5 projects in drafts.

One is a book for Aetherjack (so technically Troika).

One is a book for Troika, but it's teetering on the edge for being dumpstered totally.

One point Five is a collaboration and a build-on of a prior project of mine.

Annd I have one book for Aetherjack that's laid-out for printing but even if I decide to print it will be next year. Shrug might even do Zinequest next year like a horrible bandwagoneer.

SPH0RB! has been available in print for a few months, along with a few other things. Not all of which were written by me.

Spear Witch

Exalted Funeral

Floating Chair

I found a copy of Aetherjack 1-6 for sale on Noble Knight for $15 which gave me a chuckle.

I used markdown to make a better .epub and .mobi formatted ebook for What's So Cool About Magical Girls?. Feeling medium proud about that since it's relatively short and was already in plain text.

I've been sitting on an essay or something on why Palladium Robotech being so What It Is is actually a good thing, or at least fine, for portraying the deep drama and such in Robotech, and Macross.

Somewhere I have an essay on how the dressing of a game's rules matter more than the rules matter as far as the perceived themes those rules are the best at.

Gideon the Ninth, and Harrow the Ninth, for some reason are really popular and I guess? They are, especially Harrow, just kind of ok. There were literal memes and pop culture references in Harrow. Like what are we? Reading Ready Player Lesbian Necromancers?

I'm thinking that John Scalzi is kind of over rated. I finished his Interdependancy series, and at the same time I was reading a bunch of Murderbot fanfic, and honestly a lot of the fics I read were written better than Scalzi. Which don't get me wrong, I found that series compelling reading the last two books at about 4 hours each.

And speaking of Murderbot, I'm on my 10th or something re-read of the series constantly thinking about how Mothership it feels. Always makes me want to crack it open and run it or try to play it. Maybe even write a SecUnit class for it. The Corporate Rim is very dystopic in a similar feeling as the US.

I used to make the comparison that the Magical Girl genre and the Mecha genre were just the same with different paint. Haha. No. I've been reading and watching a lot of different magical shows and manga and nope.

Upon Sir Gawain And The Green Knight

 Last night I watched the A24 movie, The Green Knight. It was moody. Talking with my spouse the closest to other films I seen with a similar feel would be Pan's Labyrinth.

It's slow. Moody. I dunno if arty is a good word but it feels correct. 

In any case I enjoyed. It's on my buy list for later.

No onto how it deviates from the source material the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It does deviate. But to me that is a good thing. Better something different inspired and looking at something old than yet another slavish recreation of the old just with better sfx.

Now I am not a great scholar in general, or even a great one on Arthuriana or even specifically SGGK; however, I've read about a dozen different translations of it and multiple essays examining it. I don't remember how long ago the last time I read it was, probably a few months ago.

This film to me speaks to the same fictional events that the poem is portraying. Both differ from each other just as much as two different dramatic portrayals of the various wars throughout history are. And I believe the film itself speaks to that, directly if subtly.

System does not Matter

Setting matters.

System is part of the setting.

If Gygax and Arneson had been bigger space nerds, Dungeons and Dragons would be like Space Dildos or something, and the system you know as Dungeons and Dragons would be considered a scifi system and not a fantasy system.

If the dudes at Game Designers' Workshop had instead of writing a 2d6 vs 8 with dice modifiers etc etc for space fiction wrote it with an implied setting of humans in a fantasy land with long distance travel & trade and roving bandits, you probably wouldn't even need to change the name of Traveller. And Traveller would be a fantasy system.

Troika List Update

Happy Monday Yall

 I've done some updates to the Troika List.

Adding new things.

Cleaning up links.

A few titles had name and link changes, so I fixed those.

Added a bunch of drivethru only products.

At some point in the future I may split all the sections into separate pages and use the main page as TOC, or maybe get into this carrd thing that all the kids are into.

A Review of Sorts of Brian Yaksha's "The Catlands Jazzband Gazeteer"

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Brian Yaksha's "The Catlands Jazzband Gazeteer" is a setting book, intended specifically for Troika! but hey, its mostly tables about things and people and happenings. So you can use it for basically anything.

So you see the cover and it's got some cute cat pictures, most of the art is cute. This is gonna be cute and light hearted right? HAHA.

No. Catland not someplace you want to be; it's someplace you want to escape while you still have your human facilities. It feels like home, in as much as a soggy place can feel like my home which is all places to be from, and pass through, but not places to live lest you allow the place to truly work on you and change you to fit it, oh yes the desert may seem lovely but.....

Ahem, where was I....Oh yes.

Or not. You could become cattish, which not as good as being a cat. But probably better than not being any kind of cat.

Honestly, I want to go to Catland. I want to go there and see the cattish and the cats. I want to go there and look into the eyes of the cats so sure and smug of their superiority so that they might feel some inkling of how no matter what their station in the Catlands, they are a cat, a kitty cat.

But to visit the Catlands to become susceptible to the wiles and whims of these cats.

But who knows.

Every time I read this book, I see what may be different parts of Catland, or may be entirely different Catlands.

All of this being written, the book tells you want it's for, in as much as anything can be anything, and especially in as much as a cat be meant for anything. And to me it is very clear that Brian has known a great many cats.

Finally, and as much as this may pain our dear author, it is probably the most Ghibli inspired game thing I've ever read.
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You can find it at Spear Witch, Monkey's Paw Games, Exalted Funeral,