I'm Biased Because I Worked With Beau On This, But I Also Love The Art Sprinkled Throughout The Book.

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

As a bona fide over-40 who got lucky enough to actually buy a house more than a decade ago: I want housing to be free for everyone. I want other people who are less lucky than I have been to have houses even nicer than mine. I'd even be happy to keep paying my mortgage while others get housing at no cost to them.

If we have to live under some form of capitalism, I want government policies that limit the profits corporations can extract from mere property ownership. I want those limits to be harsher the more units a company or person owns, until additional units actually actually cost money to own. I want steep and growing taxes on all unoccupied units that become so ruinous after a year that it is always more worthwhile to sell than to hoard property.

I want more government-owned housing, and for the government to seize housing units from landlords who repeatedly mistreat their tenants (some kind of 3-strikes law, but for asshole landlords). I want the government to turn over ownership of its housing stock to the residents that live there after a short period (maybe 3-5 years) in which they learn any skills they need to maintain the property in accordance with their needs (with classes or other help offered for free).

I haven't become less radical as I've aged. I've gotten more specific.

as we get older we become more conservative, its a natural sign of maturity, so don't worry you'll grow out of this leftist free housing phase in your 40's. & if you somehow don't? Well then you just never grew up in the first place.

i think maturity as defined by capitalism is a strange metric.

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

Why I never loved the "you can't truly make an anti-war movie" line is that the premise is that the language of cinema will, in some way, glorify the war it is supposedly condemning. The assumption there is that the glory lies in the film; it is inventing something that should not be there.

That is of course incorrect - war simply is glorious. Any cursory review of history & society resounds with it. Its glory is socially constructed, for sure, but so are most human emotions. Review the copious quantities of literature from veterans of military conflicts and so many of them speak to the moments they fucking loved it. From the winners, surely, but you even see it in the losers, a sense of meaning, power and identity that defeat took away from them, but that they still grasped in its peaks. Many, maybe the majority, of people who participate in war at least taste this.

And of course war is also monstrous and horrible, and never worth the price of such glory. In sum most participants hate it, or don't even live to have an opinion. People think those are contradictions but they really aren't - the endurance of horror and its mastery is a load-bearing component to the glory that emerges. Obviously media can do a lot to heighten or distort this, but it doesn't invent it; it comes from the reality the media is depicting. And its gonna be there with or without the media - your movie doesn't matter that much, don't make the mistakes of the 2000's media analysis boom all over again.

Film should never be simply one thing ofc, I can think of many segments of war that are a void for this dynamic. But for the films where this quote is relevant, in my opinion the best "anti-war" films actively engage with its glory. Otherwise its like attacking a strawman.

Ok so my kid had an ear infection, right? As kids often do.

The doctor scraped out a bit of earwax to have a better look inside.

I was sent a bill for $200 PER EAR for this 5 second procedure which I did not give permission for them to do.

That was key- they did not ASK me if they could do this "procedure". And, as I OWN a medical practice (it's me. The medical practice is me, sitting in my house on video calls) I knew to call them when this bill came in to be like "You did not obtain informed consent for this procedure, and it was not en emergency procedure. You had full ability to gain my consent and didn't. I'm not paying."

And the massive hospital who owned the bill said "yuh-huh you do have to pay."

And I said "I own a practice. I know these laws. I do not owe you money for this."

And they conducted an "internal review" and SURPRISE! Decided I totally owed them money and they had never done anything wrong ever.

And so I called my state's Attorney General office, and explained the situation because, as I mentioned, I know the law. The AG got in touch within a couple days to say they were taking the case and would send the massive hospital conglomerate a knock it off, guys letter.

Lo and Behold, today I have a letter where said hospital graciously has agreed to forfeit the payment.

"How not to get screwed over by companies" should be part of civics class.

Know your rights and know who to call when they're infringed on. This whole process cost me $0 and honestly less effort than I would have expected.

May this knowledge find its way to someone else who can use it.

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?