I love the turn of the year, darkness and all—it's a season for warmth, for joining together with family and friends, for marking both the passage of time and its continuity. The rituals reinforce it. Christmases seem adjacent to other Christmases, solstices to solstices past, and future. That's one of the reasons I love Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising: that sense of time thinning as significance grows.

Parenting, of course, has made this a more white-knuckled period than it was in the old days—but that's as it should be. We have to make our own magic now, to borrow a phrase from Delenn. And the work of making magic, of making Christmas (as the residents of Halloweentown might put it), brings us closer to the magic, like working on an engine or or fixing a house helps you understand something you’ve always just sort of used. Its inner workings become available to your understanding: the work that went into the magic we met the first time.

That's one reason I write. I've received gifts, abundant gifts, from folks I've never met and from folks who I’ve met since, but who didn’t know me when they did the work that would touch my life. I wanted to work in the same way, to the same end. To give gifts to folks I've never met.

A letter is, of course, also a kind of gift. This one’s a bit scattered at the moment—so many half-formed thoughts and so little time to think them all the way through to the end—but it’s what I have.

I’m a relatively easygoing guy in person, but I’ve always loved a great piece of invective. (Paul Lockheart’s “A Mathematician’s Lament,” StillDrinking’s “Programming Sucks, you get the idea.) I recently read Ed Zitron’s long essay “Never Forgive Them” and while I can’t see myself declaiming it at the top of my lungs to friends the way I have, at times, regaled unsuspecting partygoers with selections from Lockheart or “Programming Sucks” (I’m fun at parties, I promise), it did bring a number of troubling minerals out of solution for me, rendering them visible, tangible.

Like many folks who have spent a long time around technology, I’ve become used to the adversarial relationship between the modern internet and its users. I’m good, now, at unseeing and skipping and blocking ads, at unsubscribing, at modifying my cookie settings, at shrugging off spam and phishing messages, at ignoring recommended content that ranges from the irrelevant to the inhumane; I know that the chum box at the bottom of a page is the realm of horrors, I know that random text messages are the spearhead of the scam. I load an article on my phone and the page turns out to be 85% ads and pop-ups by area? No problem. Like a witch I can dance through spon-con without getting wet.

But I shouldn’t have to.

None of us should. That’s what rankles. None of us should have to do any of this. And if it’s this bad for people who know what an ad-blocker is, who have spent far too much of their one and precious life studying the blade—how bad is it for everyone else?

I am in many ways insulated from the rot, because I like old stuff. For example: books. Books, well, you buy them and then you have them. Emperor Claudius bought books. And if you try to buy a book online, most of the time you get the book you wanted. There’s no NAW PUBLISHING CO out there advertising “THE BOORS OF STONE.”

I tried to buy a case for a keyboard a couple days ago. I scrolled through four pages of alphabet soup drop-shipper product listings before I found one that looked like it might be a connected with a “real” company. A keyboard case! And I’m pretty sure that, even after so much scrolling, I still chose poorly. Same story with the light-up slap bracelets that are all the rage at our after-school playground during this deep dark winter. Do I trust the fine folks at ZSNCF, Inc to strap a rechargeable battery to my child’s wrist? Is that a question any of us should have to ask?

There’s a lot of awfulness at work in the world, of course; these are small frustrations in a dark time. But I think about the demon Crowley from Good Omens, snarling traffic on the M5 to cast a spiritual pall over millions—little depredations and annoyances adding up to an anti-prayerwheel, a smog of the soul.

It doesn’t have to be this way. True of many things, of course. It’s a sad statement, but there’s power in it, too. It can be made otherwise. We can make it otherwise.

Here are a few Patreons worth your attention:

Rosemary Kirstein, author of the phenomenal Steerswoman books, has started a poetry patreon for continued support as she drafts Steerswoman 5 and 6. An instant-subscribe for me.

I've mentioned the philosopher and critic FT in these pages before; he's currently fundraising to pay for legal fees connected with getting his green card. This is a pretty time-sensitive process, given forces at play in American politics at the moment. I'm sure he'd appreciate support, either through Patreon or as part of the fundraiser.

I wish I'd gotten my act together to write a gift guide this year. In an age of junk I find so much joy in a well-made thing that does something worth doing. I always feel so off-cycle; maybe I'll write one in January, just to throw people off the scent. (Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction.)

If you're in the mood for a tabletop RPG, the physical edition of Triangle Agency is a lush and provocative artifact, more than fulfilling the promise of its digital incarnation. It's extraordinarily rad. I can't wait to hit the table.

If you're looking for a great short tactical video game, Tactical Breach Wizards is... well, it turns out I wrote a whole dang review of it a while back, and never posted it? Blame the pneumonia. But, at any rate, ehre it is!

I love this descriptively named small-unit-tactics-magic-sim game. The opening levels promised vibes and modern fantasy and cool puzzle solving, and the full project delivered on those promises plus a surprisingly deep story about resistance, personal growth, and practical politics—through the lens of a spec-ops wizard squad. More things should be delivered through the lens of a spec-ops wizard squad. Maybe that’s just a me thing.

The writing is funny and deep by turns, and they’re the right turns. What makes sharp back-and-forth dialog (often dismissed as “quippy”) work for me is a sense that it’s rooted in character. If this is mishandled, you get the sense that the characters do not take their world or circumstances seriously—that they know none of this is real. Which can be fine if you’re trying to highlight the unreality of the moment—not everyone playing Dungeons and Dragons wants to feel like they’re in a melee, not every war sim is the Jason Pargin “I Want a War Sim”—and clever writers can use this to destabilize the reader to stunning effect (Pratchett level-shifts more than a jiu-jitsu guy on the Tower of Terror)—but if the reader ever gets a sense that the characters don’t care about what’s happening, that’s the ball-game. Rapid quips can develop and reveal character, for example conveying Nick’s sangfroid in The Thin Man, or a (successful, early) Sorkin character’s—Casey and Danny in the pilot episode of Sports Night, say—tendency to intellectualize and deflect to avoid feeling something they don’t want to feel. (Sorkin goes back to this well a lot.) Here the rapid back-and-forth (almost) always serves character, particularly once PCs start having anxiety dreams (that manifest, of course as tactical breach wizard levels).

The gameplay was perfectly tuned, for me. It mirrored my experience of D&D level progression—start off playing short stack and sweating every possible option and opportunity, move to a midgame where you have tons of abilities and are sure a solution exists but big shrug emoji as to how you get there, to a vibrantly creative endgame where the level becomes a canvas, on which you can paint such beautiful pictures.

Also, Tactical Breach Wizards pulled off, again and again, a design finesse I’ve seen fail so often that I wince in anticipation when devs try it. Here’s the basic outline: let’s say the standard loop in your game is “run around and shoot things.” The story places you in a situation where the designer thinks it’s really obvious that what you need to do is use your flamethrower to light a bunch of candles in the hidden temple, to open a secret door. But, you haven’t used the flamethrower in twenty levels because something something Geneva Convention and anyway it’s extremely underpowered compared to your shotgun. But you have to use the flamethrower for this! You can’t use a grenade. Or pick a torch off the wall in the previous room. Or whatever. You’re being asked to use lateral thinking, but only the precise lateral thinking that the designer imagines.

Often games will have you under time pressure at this point. So you die repeatedly, and maybe if you’re lucky the game throws up a “you idiot, don’t you remember that you have a flamethrower?” screen. Or you just throw up your hands and google it, at which point chatGPT recommends you make a sautee of neighborhood deadly mushrooms. I don’t think this is quite design malpractice—it’s just hard to make a game that encourages one set of problem solving tools in one way, then convince the player to choose a different set—or to get creative with those tools.

There are a handful of moments where TBW calls for just this sort of lateral thinking—but each time, after a bit of thought, I gave something a try, and it worked just as I hoped. That is to say: the game set me up to succeed at these challenges. It primed me to review my characters’ abilities regularly, so none would fall through the cracks—and it offers a range of seemingly-unattainable objectives in each level, priming the lateral thinking brain, and encouraging experiment. It made its own logic and world real enough to me that it could set me a challenge and wait for the lightbulb moment—which made the game feel alive and responsive, even in scripted scenes, and made success feel all the sweeter.

And that's what I've got! The snow’s rising, the night’s falling, and soon the Winter Break begins. I have eggnog in the refrigerator and presents to wrap. Happy holidays, all. Take care of yourselves. We’ll pick this up in the new year.