Hello and welcome back. This is Issue 22 of “a bit of bird words” and I’m jamming out to the cool beats of Racing Lagoon while writing this. This is your reminder to give this game a spin, by the way.

What did I do this month?

Probably the most notable thing that happened this month is that the LANCER campaign I’ve been in since 2024 came to its conclusion this month.

I had so much fun developing and playing my little murderous birdgirl, watching her fall in love, not know what a mango is, kill a lot of dudes, reveal her secrets to the world, and learn that she is, herself, a person and not a vessel. This is the first time I’ve ever been part of a proper campaign ending, and the epilogue we played using Clean Spirit was a beautiful chance for us to live in our characters one last time before they said goodbye to each other and us to them.

I will say, if you ever decide you want to play LANCER, just know that it’s definitely more of a war game than a roleplaying game; the GM was very good at finding places to let us inhabit our characters, but the game itself doesn’t really have strong tooling to support this. (That said, I really love the game aspects of LANCER, and really want to play it again.)

Other than LANCER, I read a couple volumes of Kagurabachi this month and am still chipping away through Sense and Sensibility. On the games front, I finished Pokopia, which I wrote about on my blog, and played Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight kind of on a whim. Perfectly fine game, just nothing about it really stood out to me.

What else?

I wrote a lot more for my blog this month than I expected, and I also launched a new design for my website. I threw out so many designs, so many ideas, before settling on something that feels almost barren and flat. And yet I really love it. I think when I looked at version 2, I always had this little feeling of excitement, but when I look at version 3, I feel peace instead. Inner peace feels a bit like an out of reach luxury to me lately, to be honest.

My recommendation this month? Odds are pretty good that you, dear reader, are in the northern hemisphere, so stay cool and wear your sunscreen.

See you next month.