good morning to spring time.

murderous, vibrant green
hot brutal evenings
life and pollen and new blood

i like haiku. i grabbed a copy of the haiku handbook by higgingson and harter a while ago and it’s a great book - it talks a lot about the history and formation of haiku and sparked a love interest in me with the form, as well as dispels some common inaccuracies in the format (did you know it’s not 5 / 7 / 5 in english, like we were taught?). as such, i carry scraps of cardstock in my traveler’s notebook in my bag, and when something catches me i whip out a piece and write something down. which brings me to my first topic!

poetry book.

that’s right idiots, i make other things besides games! i’m putting together a small zine of my haiku which will be available on my website alongside my other projects, for free. i want to collect a critical mass of spring poems and if it goes well, release further seasonal offerings (even if in savannah we only have summer. i can at least pretend i know what winter looks like!)

kirigami dominatrix display simulator.

it’s out now! go to my website and partake, you perverts. this edition brings it all down to business cards, which adds a fun element of finding them in the wild to use - all those business cards piling up in your etsy shipments or from that one co-worker who side-gigs in realty will no longer be pure trash. they will be art.

aurabellemakesthings.com

our last summer alive.

this is the mech game! it’s coming next. you may have seen me post about it on bluesky - the game shapes up to focus on uneven power dynamics in relationships and friendships; being used, and having your needs held over you unfairly as incentive. creating art has helped me work through things this past, i don’t know, decade? and this is another one i’m really happy with. custom oracle cards come with the game that you can use to inform your character and your scenes, but the player who holds power over the other gets to decide what is and isn’t open for use, essentially deciding how they get to interpret their days. it’s only after affirming who you are that you get access to your own truth.

and i’ll admit, part of it came from watching evangelion and seeing how shinji just desperately wants some things and how each relationship he’s involved in denies it in some way.

bitter tea.

a game thing about witches. this one’s still in the hopper, and it probably won’t be next! i’m enjoying opening up the notebook and unraveling the idea of what a game object is, and i feel it has a lot to teach me still. god only knows when this will come out!

so then, what will be next? well…

upcoming projects.

artifact(e) has caught my eye a fair bit, i never made it too far into that one. a larp about constructing a weapon powerful enough to take out the evil god king terrorizing the land. i envision it as a room full of blacksmith-philosophers and wizards debating fantasy realm politics for two hours while putting together a sick-ass weapon.

aside from that, look for a few smaller-scale games and maybe another reprint of something old. i wrote a collection called four games about unsafety which were about, you guessed it, breaking common safety concerns in particular ways, to examine then and tinker with their guts. i’d like to give that a re-print. same with our radios are dying, about a failed relationship and the couples’ last few moments of oxygen as they die in space (played on a few podcasts!). and i probably need to re-print you must break up with your werewolf boyfriend, because everyone loved that (you gotta break up with this guy, and this guy is played by your actual dog.)

but after that, i think i’ll be done committing older projects to legacy and can start with new life, new pollen, new blood.

good-bye.

thank you all so much for taking an interest in what i do! hearing your reports of play have meant everything to me. please keep sharing my work and take plenty of pictures of what ephemera my projects bring out of you!

keep making weird things!