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Magical Kitties Save the Day, the all-ages introductory storytelling game from Atlas Games.
Bundle of Holding: Magical Kitties
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As the title indicates, "Threnody for Five Actors" is a ghost poem for its subjects and its inclusion in On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998) is maddening because it is accompanied only by the note, "This poem is from an unpublished manuscript titled Screams and Speeches. The five actors named here were all victims of the Blacklist." First of all, you can't drop the existence of an entire manuscript at the very end of a slim selected works and expect the interested reader not to scream, especially when the only copy the internet feels like telling me about seems to be held in a collection in the Library and Archives of Canada, which feels currently even less accessible than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Secondly, and speaking as a person who has been called out for the density of allusion in their stories and poetry, this poem could have done with some notes. The editor was obviously concerned enough about name recognition to parenthesize Julie Garfield as John and Bud Bohnen as Roman, but then why not list their dates so that the reader can see for themselves that all five actors died between 1949 and 1952, mostly of heart ailments, stressed by the hounding of the FBI and HUAC, at the grandly superannuated ages between 39 and 59? If you don't know that Mady Christians originated the title role of John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), then her verse will make much less sense, but catching that one makes me wonder what other references I may be missing, such as in the stage work of Canada Lee or J. Edward Bromberg. Lastly, since it's the only poem I have ever read by Alexander Knox—instantaneously in October, but it's been a rough fall—if he wrote any others I'd like to be able to read them, even if just for comparison. Slide mentions his wicked limericks in the introduction, but unforgivably includes none.
( We know by now that time does not take sides. )
With this one example to go by, he was a better playwright than poet, but except for the self-deprecation which should definitely have hit the cutting room floor, it's hard to want to edit much out of a poem with so much anger at the injustice of a country that wastes its artists in scapegoating xenophobia, besides which there's at least one good line per actor and sometimes more. He wouldn't even have been living in the United States by the time of its writing, having burned off the last of his contract with Columbia by the end of 1951. He hadn't burned off his anger. No reason he should have. I may be confused by the existence of his Hollywood career, but I'm still pissed about the politics that snapped it short. The twentieth century could stop coming around on the guitar any measure now. On Sunday, I'll be at the HFA.Current Music: Brandi Carlile, "Human"
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Could safety from the global pandemic be found in desperate flight towards a land of banditry and violence?
To The Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-Young (Translated by Soje)
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A depowered witch discovers she is just one zany scheme away from regaining her power... provided her estranged mentor does not intervene. Which of course he will.
A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
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It feels like cheating for the air to taste so much like the sharp tin tacks of snow when the sky is so clear that even through the white noise of the streetlights Cassiopeia comes in like pointillism and Polaris as bright as a planet. I saw none of the phi Cassiopeids, but the Geminids peak at the end of the week, with any luck on a night that cloudlessly doesn't make my teeth feel about to explode in my mouth. On that front, may I commend the attention of people in frozen boat fandom to this early twentieth century hand-painted stained glass window depicting Shackleton's Endurance? I spent my afternoon on the phone making sure of our health insurance in the bankrupt year to come: the customer service representative was a very nice science fiction person who agreed that it was time to reset this worldline on account of stupidity and for whom I apparently made a pleasant change from all the screaming and breaking down in tears, even more so than usual this year that never need have happened. I've been sent photographs of some really neat letters. Two cards arrived in the mail. My digital camera is showing further signs of deterioration, but a few evenings ago I caught one of those scratch-fired sunsets it's hard to wreck. I am aware of the collapses in the world, but I don't know what else to love.
 Current Music: Big Thief, "Incomprehensible"
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The third array of recent standalone tabletop roleplaying games using the Forged in the Dark rules system based on John Harper's Blades in the Dark from One Seven Design Studio.
Bundle of Holding: Forged 3
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Did you miss these books the first time around? Good news!
Five Freshly Reprinted SFF Books and Series
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Six works new to me: four fantasy, one horror, and one SF (also ttrpg). Four are arguably series.
Books Received, November 29 — December 5
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26 Which of these look interesting?
View AnswersNew Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 5 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
3 (11.5%) New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 6 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
3 (11.5%) New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 7 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
2 (7.7%) Black River Ruby by Jean Cottle (January 2026)
7 (26.9%) The Flowers of Algorab by Nils Karlén, Kosta Kostulas, and Martin Grip (January 2026)
8 (30.8%) Headlights by C J Leede (June 2026)
4 (15.4%) Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%) Cats!
21 (80.8%)
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After years of not even being able to pirate it, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) spatch and I have finally just finished the first series of BBC Ghosts (2019–23), during which he pointed out to me the half of the cast that had been on Taskmaster. I recognized a guest-starring Sophie Thompson.
This article on the megaliths of Orkney got Dave Goulder stuck in my head, especially once one of the archaeologists interviewed compared the Ring of Brodgar to sandstone pages. "They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead."
I wish a cult image of fish-tailed Artemis had existed at Phigalia, hunting pack of seals and all.
Any year now some part of my health could just fix itself a little, as a treat.Current Music: MGMT, "Electric Feel"
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Another unconscious person on public transit. This guy just seemed to be terribly tired, but when he slumped over, he knocked his stuff on the floor. Several times. I kept putting his stuff back, and mentioned him to the drive on my way out.
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Who killed the empire? More importantly, what does it take to get men to process their emotions?
Space Skimmer by David Gerrold
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My therapist suggested I might be burning myself out working too doggedly on a game lately, I was dubious but whenever I feel stuck I've instituted a policy of taking a break not just until I feel up to working again, but until I have felt up to working on a different creative project for a while first. And the positive effects on my mental health and creativity, both generally and even regarding my game, have been significant!
And also it SUCKS. I have this straightforward option for immediate You Did A Thing dopamine right there and have to IGNORE it and find some other more vague, complex source. Excruciating! Especially since all creativity for me has to work around long stretches of Being Too Ill To Do Anything.
So yeah, after much thought about what creative thing I could be doing this time...I am writing this post haha.
Anyway. Life is not too bad! Had a bunch of annoying health stuff, nothing serious just tiring, but despite that I am successfully if intermittently working on a game! It's a remastered version of a game I released 7 years ago, because I'd run out of energy rather than being entirely satisfied with it. So I am happy to see something much closer to my original vision coming together. But making games is so sloooow it is taking forevver, even with the vast majority of it already done.
Also we got a benchtop dishwasher and it's been really good. We have to hand fill it with water because there was no way to get the plumbing to work, and it's too small to handle everything, but it still makes washing the dishes overall way less exhausting.
I'm currently playing the otome (romance) game Nor9 for the switch and it's pretty good, and am still having fun in Jack Jeanne fandom. A friend dragged me into Twisted Wonderland aka "what if there was a magic school full of hot boys inspired by the villains from various Disney properties" which is more fun than it has any right to be, I am not playing the game (gacha + phone game = no) but the plotty videos are on youtube and the ongoing anime is pretty good.
HMMM I feel there was something else but this will do!
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Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.
When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.
Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.Current Music: Annie Bartholomew, "Mountain Dove Song"
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Dec. 6th, 2025 @ 09:18 am
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Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968; aged 21), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967; aged 22), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968; aged 21), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960; aged 29), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964; aged 25), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966; aged 23), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967; aged 22), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961; aged 28), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968; aged 21), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969; aged 20), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958; aged 31), nursing student
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I ate'nt dead and all that...
We upgraded Ubuntu on our webserver, which upgraded PHP, which broke the CMS I was using for random.fangirling.net. The CMS (PicoCMS) is no longer supported or under active development, as is the way of such things, and it makes sense to me because the niche it filled - flat file CMSes - was quickly squeezed out by static site generators.
So I figured I should rebuild it using a static site generator (SSG), and spent some time playing around with Astro and Eleventy before I got too frustrated by how hard it was to build a site with the file structure I wanted. And then I thought, why did I spend all that time writing a static site generator if I wasn't going to use it?
And thus, here we are. random.fangirling.net is now mostly functional again. Please let me know if anything seems amiss!
The biggest thing that's missing is the breadcrumb navigation, which was the only kind of navigation I had on the site but which is difficult to generate with my script. So that's on the TODO list.
I thought I might make the code I use to generate the site public too, as a demo for how to use my makesite.py fork. Something to ponder!
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Realizing last night that I have for decades thought of myself as a full year older than I chronologically can have been for my first real job—I was fifteen—led into a crumble-to-dust reminiscence about the number of bookstores once to be found in Lexington Center, which gave me some serious future shock when we walked into Maxima while waiting to collect our order from Il Casale and it occupied the exact same storefront as my second job, also as a bookseller; it was perhaps the one form of retail to which I was natively suited. My third job was assistant-teaching Latin, but my fourth I accidentally talked my way into by recommending some titles to a fellow browser. spatch's anniversary gift to me was a paperback of Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023). It was teeth-shockingly cold and we all but ran with our spoils back to the car.
( Twenty-four hours every day. )
We had set out in search of resplendent food and found it in polpette that reminded us of the North End, a richly smoky rigatoni with ragù of deep-braised lamb, and a basil-decorated, fanciest eggplant parmesan I have encountered in my life, capped with panna cotta in a tumble of wintrily apt pomegranate seeds. Hestia investigated delicately but dangerously. After we had recovered, Rob showed me Powwow Highway (1989) right before it expired from the unreliable buffer of TCM because he thought and was right that I would love its anger and gentleness and hereness, plus its '64 Buick which has already gone on beyond Bluesmobile by the time it is discovered in a field of clunkers and a vision of ponies. It has no budget and so much of the world. As long as we're in it, we might as well be real.Current Music: David Byrne, "What Is the Reason for It? (feat. Hayley Williams)"
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spatch and I have been married for twelve years. A round dozen of anniversary gifts looks as though it adds up to the woven road of silk. Here we are still, intertwined and traveling.Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Fishing Boat"
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Largely the same as before:
Currently trying to support a friend in a Very Bad Situation and it's desperately anxiety-inducing and my brain is trying to eat itself, which also makes me less useful as support, which is bad.
So if anyone would like to ask or discuss anything about Prophet or Dark Souls or IWTV or climbing or, you know, any of the somewhat cheering topics I sometimes ramble about, PLEASE DO. "More of a comment than a question" questions also very welcome.
I cannot guarantee replies in a timely or consistent manner (because of the Situation and also the bad state of my brain) but it would be deeply appreciated nonetheless.
Except that THANK FUCK my friend is now out of the Very Bad Situation (and please let him remain so, please please please).
My brain is just trying to eat itself because it's prone to doing that and it's been a very very hard year (and I'm having yet another IC flare-up, joy).
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