I lost my job this past month. The less said, the better - I'm trying my best to focus on what's happening here and now and what's next, rather than what happened.

The one thing it's given me back is time: time to rest, to consider the state of things, to adjust the things that I want to make adjustments to, and to see the people I want to see. It won't last forever, but it's good to have while it's here.

• After the longest stretch of development since we first released it, Matthew and I finally got FATHOM v0.3 out the door. It has a lot of really good rule tweaks that make things easier to play and understand, and it's got a wealth of new content in it: Zenith moves to end your characters' stories with a reality-bending bang, two whole Jobs to use as examples or as one-shots, and lots more. The layout needs some work but I'm hammering away at it to make it all look nicer soon. Really pleased to finally have this out there.

• I started work on Mutiny, the second of my "at sea" trilogy (which started with Voyage) but after an intense week or two of work, I've hit a couple problems that I've decided will be best served by setting the project aside for a while. I think the core mechanics of it, as I've built them, simply don't work the way that I want them to, and that I'll need to build it again from the ground up with that lesson in mind. Once again, I have the benefit of time!

• I have a lot of Big Ideas about what the next project is going to be. Fantasy Heartbreaker might need to take a backseat for a little while. At the start of the month I started thinking about "canon" and what that means within the context of a tabletop game, and deliberating what it meant for a game to have a memory of its own, and that's spun up into a whole thing.

• 📺 - I'm watching THE MANDALORIAN season three out of a sense of obligation more than a sense of enjoyment. I have not yet watched THE LAST OF US. Tune in next month to find out if I still haven't watched THE LAST OF US.

• 📽️ - Movies are good, it turns out. I saw JOHNNY MNEMONIC IN BLACK AND WHITE and it remains a deeply visionary but deeply messy film that's nonetheless fun to watch - especially in a theater. I also saw TÁR, a film which sits neatly in my celebrated collection of "prestige movies about horrible people doing horrible things." I also watched SOUTHLAND TALES and fell in love with it immediately: another movie that's deeply messy, and more than a little gross from time to time, but is also deeply skeptical of the world, of political order, and of people in power, and has some really great performances selling a weird black comedy.

• 🎮 - STORYTELLER is out, after being teased ten years ago. It's exactly two hours long and it's charming for nearly every minute of it.

• 🎲 - DUNE IMPERIUM remains an all-timer. We recently got 7 WONDERS back out to the table, and it's such a delight, although I've run up against the issue of: 1) not liking the expansions past a certain point, since they seem to distract from the main game with breadth rather than adding depth, and 2) not at all liking the newer, shinier 2nd Edition cards. This first point might be worth its own essay.

• 📚 - Nearly ten years late, I'm reading THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM by Cixin Liu.

I got to go to a reptile show this past week and while there were a lot of wonderful animals - many of which I would have loved to have taken home with me - none were quite so impressive as this tegu:

Ciao for now.