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January 6, 2019

2018 is over. 2019 has begun. These are facts.

The Brainfart Chronicles


Updates & Random Thoughts

  • I'm probably going to make some largish changes to the core Cinemechanix rules, because I can't leave well enough alone. Dammit.
  • I've submitted my GenCon games (well, to Josh; he'll submit them to GenCon sometime soon). I'm running one QAGS game, James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub Time Machine, and three Cinemechanix games: DinerPunk: Ruckus in Radical City, Hobomancers at War, and The Treasure of the Tower
  • That last one is a City of 10,000 Daggers adventure. I've posted a couple of things about the City of 10,000 Daggers on Patreon, and it basically started out as a place to scratch the fantasy world design itch that I'll never fully be rid of. Suddenly I've got ideas and it's threatening to turn into a project. 
  • The first week of the new year has been very unproductive. Right before Christmas I got the urge to play a video game. Part of the reason I'm not a video gamer is that I have tendency to play games obsessively for a few weeks and then get bored and stop. That being the case, I tend to stick with free-to-play games. In fact, I usually just fire up Neverwinter because I enjoy it and I know what I'll get. So I started playing Neverwinter a couple weeks ago and wasted most of my free time on it, to the point I had to quit playing Friday because my hand was starting to hurt from gripping the controller. Hopefully by the time the cramps or carpal tunnel or whatever it is goes away I'll be over the video game urge and can do something useful. 

2018 Reads

I used to keep a list of books I'd read each year on livejournal, but when livejournal died I stopped. The goal was to read 52 books a year (a book a week, for those of you who are bad at math). I usually ended up somewhere in the 30-40 range. Around this time last year, I decided to start doing it again, in part because I've been reading way fewer books than usual over the last several years. Part of it's because I spend so much time reading articles online (mostly Cracked, Taibbi, and The Intercept), part of it's because I'm old and my eyes and ability to stay awake through the boring parts aren't what they used to be. This year's list came out to 20 books, and even that's kind of overstating it because some of them are really short books. Here's the list: 
 

  1. The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Christopher Moore

  2. The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, William Dear

  3. Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut

  4. Gnomon, Nick Harkaway

  5. Spirits of Place, edited by John Reppion

  6. The Cornbread Mafia, James Higdon

  7. The MarmiCon Conundrum, Leighton Connor

  8. A Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman and Rafael Albuquerque

  9. D&D 5th Edition Player’s Handbook

  10. Chasing Eris, Brenton Clutterbuck

  11. Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman

  12. Autonomous, Annalee Newitz

  13. What The Hell Did I Just Read?, David Wong

  14. Jesus Crawdad Death, Betsy Phillips

  15. High-Rise, J.G. Ballard

  16. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Sarah Vowell

  17. Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers, and Martial Artists, Guy Windsor

  18. Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantero

  19. Uncertainty in Games, Greg Costikyan

  20. Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design, Wolfgang Baur & others
​​

My Top 5 recommends from the list are:

  1. Meddling Kids
  2. The MarmiCon Conundrum
  3. Jesus Crawdad Death
  4. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
  5. Autonomous

Word of the Week

Lyrical Filth:
A prose style in which horrific, disgusting, and offensive subject matter is described in evocative, graphic, and almost loving detail. Noted masters of the form include William S. Burroughs and Warren Ellis.

Brainfart Press will eventually release a dictionary of words nobody particularly needs to know, tentatively titled (with apologies to Ambrose Bierce) "The Dumbass Dictionary." Here's one of those words:
 


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