Chest Harness From The Back.

Chest harness from the back.

Pentax K1000, Takumar 50mm f1.4, Ilford Ortho Plus 80 developed in Cinestill Df96.

“At the same time, families across the country face excruciating decisions to relocate to a different state to protect their children from dangerous and hateful anti-LGBTQI+ laws, which target transgender children, threaten families, and criminalize doctors and nurses. These bills and laws attack our most basic values and freedoms as Americans: the right to be yourself, the right to make your own medical decisions, and the right to raise your own children. Some things should never be put at risk: your life, your safety, and your dignity.”

That’s an excerpt from President Biden’s Proclamation on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Pride Month, 2024.

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from the White House press secretary laughing uproariously at AIDS patients and making sneering accusations of members of the press corps only asking about AIDS because they were gay to POTUS supporting the rights of trans people, trans kids, in a proclamation of national recognition of Pride.

No, more plainly, we’ve come to this point in the last fifteen years.

The depth, breadth and speed of this progress is astounding, especially as it has coexisted with absolute regression and a constant state of attack of LGBTQIA rights from Republicans.

Do not take this for granted.

I'm biased because I worked with Beau on this, but I also love the art sprinkled throughout the book. It includes lovely illustrations for all of the beasts, little drawings for the human archetypes, town maps, and stunningly evocative poetry.

Pick it up for the thoughtful essays placed in each chapter, or the delightful feel of the cover, or the cute and fun art throughout, or to be transported to a place where -- just maybe -- your friends and your town can put aside fear and learn to love you for your differences.

Right before the pandemic, I did a Kickstarter for my TTRPG Turn, which is about playing shapeshifters in small mostly rural towns. I worked with some great people on it and I think it is still an amazing game and wish I could play it more and expand upon it extensively, but I don't think that it will be in the cards for me.

However, it still exists.

This game, where you struggle between your public and private identities, where the rules are mostly focused on avoiding faux pas in human social interactions in order to keep your beast side hidden, where violence is easy but has hard consequences, and where the biggest struggle is finding people who will still love and care for you when you're exposed to be something most people would see as monstrous or freakish & you're struggling to live, it exists. I made that, six years after I first conceptualized it, & now five years after I made it real, no one knows.

I didn't get to take it to tons of conventions & promote it heavily, in part because I was struggling with my health, in part because the pandemic cut short a lot of my plans, in part because I didn't truly have a community that loved & cared for me when I was exposed & struggling. Instead, I lost my community, & I eventually had to give up my dreams, too.

But Turn exists. It's still beautiful and special to me, and I have had experiences with it building community and finding myself that I don't think I will have in real life. It's how I found my name. It mattered. Today, I'm holding on to that.

Turn is here, with my other works:

https://thoughty.itch.io/turn

+supplement, Towns Like Ours:

https://thoughty.itch.io/towns-like-ours

+Script Change, which I recommend using with it/any RPG:

https://thoughty.itch.io/script-change

Print:

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Turn.html

DriveThruRPG:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/10592/daedalum-analog-productions

KS:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/briecs/turn-a-tabletop-roleplaying-game

What should have been said after the Trump shooting

So what they should say is “This should never happen. We are coming together, and we believe that every single lawmaker who loves this country very much should join us in passing an assault weapons ban in the name of this never happening again, in the name of the safety of every single one of us, including people who are running against us. We're doing this for our opposition. That is how much we care about this, how much we care about them, how much we care about the process.

- Anat Shenker-Osorio

Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?

Sleepy cat chooses the least comfortable surface for a pillow.

Ilford FP4 in Pentax K1000 with SMC-A 50/1.4 lens. Developed in Cinestill Df96 and scanned via DSLR and macro lens.