I’m still on the road, and am still learning about how doxycycline makes me more prone to sunburn. I’m also learning the limits of my toddler’s tolerance for road trips. Lots of learning happening here.
Dewdrops, 8/6/26
Moon in the crook of a tree, 7/30/26
The tree is quite large, and my phone doesn’t want to focus on the moon. C’est la vie. It was a gorgeous and wonderful evening.
I’m on the road visiting with family, hence today’s brief post. A note to my future self, though: I want to talk more about the perils of not sharing health stories, and of not embracing health education. That’ll be for another time.
Lyme disease, & humor in Dungeon Crawler Carl
This is a week for arthritic pain, fatigue, and wondering what makes “funny” things funny in Dungeon Crawler Carl (which I wrote about last week).
I’m pretty sure I’ve got Lyme disease. I’m already on doxycycline. I don’t yet have a positive test for Lyme disease, but I’m not waiting for one either.
I have enough circumstantial evidence. I walked through scrub forest and near tall grass in a high risk area—Cape Cod—while on my way to the beach. Two days later Ley noticed I had a weird bruise. About a week after that, stiffness and pain started spreading through my left leg and up my left side. I also got even more sleepy.
Weirdly, some part of me is relieved.
Continue readingClass, classes, LitRPGs: implications of game systems 7/16/26
I’ve gotten so behind in tracking what I’ve read in my reading journal, I’m not sure where to begin.
The problem? LitRPG books.
No wait, the problem is that I don’t have the focus to keep up with my usual book logging commitment. I don’t have that focus because baby. And I don’t make time for logging the books I’ve read because… baby. Baby, and everything else that needs to be done.
Another part of the problem is that I can read ebooks on my phone while I’m doing other things, including while I hum and rock my baby to sleep. That works just fine. It works far better, far more easily, than…
Continue readingFatherhood & masculinity, cont. 7/9/26
I wrote last week about how fatherhood has changed my experience of masculinity. That post focused on what my prior experience had been, and how my own relationship with that experience had changed. To sum up, I’ve got more skin in the game now. I don’t want to retreat from cultural ideas of masculinity, I want to confront and change them. I’m carrying the banner for my son, trying to give him healthier ways to be a boy and a man than I had. I want him to have more room, to not be squashed by our society’s limited ideas about masculinity.
But there’s more to the ways that fatherhood has changed my own experience. Having my baby with me changes how others experience me. He’s like a magical secret handshake that opens the doors of social contact, that makes strangers suddenly say “oh he’s got a baby, he must be alright.” Somehow being with an infant or toddler makes me safe and acceptable in a way that I can never be without one.
I say all this like these ideas leapt fully formed from my brow like Athena’s critique of gender ideology, but that would be a lie. These thoughts took time. Besides, what really drove all of this home for me was walking through public spaces with an empty baby stroller.
Continue readingFatherhood and masculinity, 7/2/26
Becoming a father has changed my experience of my gender.
I think it’s a good change, but it (like most parts of parenthood) also feels like more work.
Continue readingRoom to grow: Lootbound (demo)
The Lootbound demo fascinates me. It scratched a series of my itches, handily eating an hour and a half of my Saturday evening and keeping me up past my bedtime. Days after playing it, I find my mind returning to gnaw at its design choices.
It is not, I think, the game for me. But it might be the game for you.
Continue readingThe Creator (2023)
I finally watched The Creator, a movie directed by Gareth Edwards (the director of Rogue One). I’m a fan of Rogue One. I’ve also long loved stories that use AI and cybernetics to dig into our tender, fleshy explorations of humanity and the soul. I’m clearly the target audience.
If anyone were to love a movie about one person caught up in the conflict between AIs living in syncretic coexistence with humanity, and a fearful and hardhearted imperialist anti-AI America, it would be me. And I do! I do love this movie. But… it’s complicated.
I jotted down this note immediately after finishing The Creator:
Continue readingTeaching storytellers: recipes, ingredients, how to cook
How do you go from “Running a game of D&D sounds fun” to “I have some idea of what to do”?
You could do what I did: play enough RPGs at an early enough age that you don’t remember feeling daunted by or awkward about the transition from playing to running games. I figured running games was just what you were supposed to do. I paid attention to how my siblings ran games, and I tried to replicate that.
That obviously won’t work for most people. They could try the adult version, playing lots of games run by other people until they have some idea of what to do themselves, but what if they don’t have a good play group? What if they want more tools?
What other entry points can we (the RPG community) offer? What resources and pitfalls should we and new storytellers be aware of?
When I think about resources and pitfalls here, I think of ingredients and recipes. Roleplaying game materials are strong on ingredients; RPG books often include lots of “what” and “who” and even “where” to use in your stories. But these materials are often weak on recipes, and they certainly don’t teach you how to cook; they don’t offer much “why” or even “how”.
Without understanding the “why” and “how,” what is a would-be storyteller to do? How can we help new storytellers learn the why’s and how’s of the art of storytelling?
Continue readingWhy you tilt the camera, Spider-Noir, 6/4/26
I’ve been enjoying watching Spider-Noir with Ley.
I was adamant that we should watch in black and white. Ley was willing to follow my lead. After finishing the first episode we spoke again about whether the show would look as good in color, and they said “No, it’s art.”
It’s not hard to find people who agree with this position online. I happen to think it’s the right one. I’d heard that the show was filmed with black and white in mind, and that seems obvious to me on watching it.
I wanted to be sure, though. I went through different scenes, rewatching them in color. I admit, the color version looks good too! Working in black and white obviously has a cost; I kind of like knowing that Robbie is wearing warm and punchy reddish hues in episode one, and I wouldn’t have known that without going back to check the color version.
But the black and white version sings. Yes, the color version looks good, but it’s a different kind of good—and I’d argue that the color version isn’t the right kind of good for this show. The team that made Spider-Noir knew what they were doing when they shot for black and white.
That raises some questions though. Clearly, reality isn’t black and white. The filmmakers aren’t working with purely black and white source material. How then are they getting such incredible results?
Like Ley said, it’s art. It’s art, and a lesson in the importance of knowing one’s craft and intended genre. How can we apply that lesson beyond film?
Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 