Hello Thursday!

It’s June, so that means 🏳️‍🌈Pride Month🏳️‍🌈, so that means corporate promotions for Pride Month. These are usually some degree of cringe, so I just shop wherever I would have stopped anyway, enjoy the savings (if any), enjoy the rainbow merch (if possible), and don’t get too worked up about it either way.

I was rather pleased and surprised to see that Wizards of the Coast did a Pride promotion tied to Magic: The Gathering. I played Magic for about a year back when it was the Hot New Thing in the mid-90s, then I moved on to other things. I looked in on it from time to time, though, and started playing again last November, which has been a lot of fun. So when I read about this year’s Pride promotion, I decided to check it out. It was at a different game shop from the one I usually play it, so that was an adventure in and of itself. I went there on Saturday afternoon, paid 6 bucks to enter the event, and got a Magic booster pack (normally more than $6 by itself), a special event pin, and a card specially made for the event, featuring artwork of Chandra and Nissa, a lesbian couple from MtG lore. (I suppose they’re also interracial, as one of them is an elf and the other is human.)

Apparently there was an attempt to write away Chandra and Nissa’s relationship in one of the MtG tie-in novels, but the fans absolutely Were Not Having It, so that’s been fixed now. This is one of the fun things about playing Magic now that’s really different from when Magic was new: The characters and cultures and places and items and so forth on the cards have stories behind them that you can learn if you want to. It doesn’t affect the gameplay, though I’m sure it does affect what the designers are able to do when they’re making new cards, but it adds an extra level of depth to the game that’s fun to interact with while still being strictly optional.

As for the event I went to, it happened to have been scheduled opposite a release event for a new expansion for the One Piece trading card game, so I ended up being one of two people who showed up for Magic that day. I spent a couple of hours hanging out in the shop, watching a game of Warhammer 40K and waiting to see if anyone else would show up for Magic, then went home with my new toys. Not the best day of gaming ever, but still a good time.

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve started reading

• Inkpot Gods (Seanan McGuire) — This is the fourth book of Seanan’s Alchemical Journeys series (the previous three are Middlegame, Seasonal Fears, and Tidal Creatures), just released on 9 June 2026. So far I’m only a chapter in, but I’m enjoying it. This series, based on the idea that alchemy is real and that alchemical ideas were hidden in 19th-century children’s books, is absolutely amazing, and it blows my mind every time I come back to it. Then again, all of Seanan’s writing blows my mind — I have never read a book or story of hers that I didn’t love, and I think it’s amazing that she got her start writing in X-Men fanfiction (she makes no secret of this, so it’s not like I’m revealing occult knowledge here) and that I got to hang out with her on LiveJournal. (I still miss LiveJournal. And before you say “It’s still there”: No, it’s not. A withered husk wearing the same name is still there. IYKYK.) 

I’ve continued reading

• Looking for Group (Alexis J. Hall) — The first big surprise happened before the characters met outside the game, which surprised me. I’m really enjoying the way Hall is handling the fact that the story consists of both “real world” and “in-computer” interactions, acknowledging that the “in-computer” interactions are real and important, which is something that a lot of people in the “real world” don’t seem capable of grasping.

• Careless People: a Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Sarah Wynn-Williams) — The more I read this book, the less I like anyone who appears in it.

and I’ve finished reading

• Komi Can’t Communicate, vol. 37 (Tomohito Oda) — The series ended well. As much as I wish there was more of it, it had reached a satisfying conclusion at a natural stopping place — it begins as Komi gets ready to start high school, and the final chapter we see her establishing her new life as a college student. I’d love to see Oda come out with a new series, whether it’s related to this one or not.

• Welcome to the Ballroom, vol. 12 (Tomo Takeuchi) — This volume was released in November 2022 in Japanese, but wasn’t released in English translation until March 2026. When I reached the end of it, I went online, hoping the next volume would be sooner, since it left us at kind of a cliffhanger. Unfortunately, since the publication of this volume, Takeuchi, the mangaka (manga artist/writer) behind this series, has been suffering with some kind of chronic illness and has only been able to produce six more chapters, which are only available online as fan-produced scanlations, and the manga is on hiatus. I wish her all the best.

• Art in America, Summer 2025: Excellent issue. A number of concepts went down on my lists for further reading, and so will likely turn up in future Thursdays. 

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason