MP Mini Delta Advance! gordsellar.com/2021/10/09/mp-…
Archives: Tweets
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@Freeirony @taebonga @ajosshi @tweetsbymoi Yup. It doesn’t even take much scratching to get beneath the surface. It’s thinner than a bad paint job. Often on purpose, as @roboseyo suggests, because it’s dogwhistle, but also because often bigots don’t think good. @Freeirony @taebonga @ajosshi @tweetsbymoi @roboseyo Also, if you were to take exactly what Bigot says but swap in “Bigots like you” for “transvestites” (?!?!) and “if they keep on being human colostomy bags filled with hate” they’ll whine about how “rude” you are being.
(Because they don’t think good.)
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@mcjulie All of which is to say, on a macro level, the transformative effects I see seem, if they exist at all, to have brought out the worst in a LOT of people. *shrug* @mcjulie But of course, that’s the ol’ bait and switch. “We’ll make you a better person” = “We’ll make you believe you’re better than those other people over there.”
Same as it ever was.
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@mcjulie *Very* much this. I live in a society where Christianity was a recent foreign import—less than ~250 years on, Protestants here are notorious for being cruel, corrupt, joyless, and bigoted. Notoriously so, to the point many non-Protestants actively dislike/resent them. @mcjulie And, I mean, every attempt at anti-discrimination law here has been thwarted by… Protestants, who argue protecting homosexuals is empowering the “Communists” and “Nazis” of today. Little do they realize that if anyone’s “the Nazis of today”, it’s… (ahem)
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Review(s) of “Sojourn,” and Other Thoughts gordsellar.com/2021/10/08/rev…
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I know I’m not the only one (thanks to @full_julia) but I know there’s not that many of us who, like me, think of The Haunting of Julia (AKA Full Circle) regularly. It used to be really hard to find. I had a VHS copy I’d taped off a late-night screening on Showcase in the 90s, then found it on Youtube years ago. I think if you’re in the US you can get a decent digital copy from Amazon. Fans have been pushing for a DVD release for ages.
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@taebonga Well, and also, by this standard if you watched a LOT of Hollywood movies/TV shows with Korean subtitles and don’t understand English, you didn’t really watch the same show.
(Lots of big films and TV series apparently have rather poor subtitling.) @taebonga (My wife used to regularly mention how bad the subtitling was after films in the cinema back in The Days Before. Also, I’ve lost count of the number of times I laughed out loud in a cinema at a joke amid a sea of puzzled silence.)
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The Adventures of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rogers gordsellar.com/2021/10/03/the…
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And if that appeals to you, there’s a whole bunch of similar journaling games (including another musical instrument one) that were submitted to the jam that inspired this creation of mine:
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So, I made a journaling game where you play from the POV of a musical instrument passing from one musician to another (to another) over some unspecified stretch of time.
It’s free (well, PYWY) here, if you fancy trying it out:
https://t.co/l0H3mRA3EH Ignore the sketchy art and limited layout. I might upgrade it at some point eventually (once I learn how to use Affinity Publisher), but my main focus was trying to get content that generates interesting narratives.
The system isn’t mine, it’s @mouseholepress’s Lost & Found SRD. -
@jeremiahtolbert It’s something in the Marlin firmware I flashed into my Monoprice Mini Delta this weekend. It detects something wrong with the heating pad, IIRC, and then shuts down just in case, so you avoid the risk of burning the house down. @jeremiahtolbert There’s some Gcode I need to run that will reset the tolerances a little more. Still won’t burn down the house, but cheapo hardware won’t cause the error, or that’s what I gather from forums. *shrug* I’ll look into it more on Wednesday, when I don’t have classes… @jeremiahtolbert The Marlin firmware and calibration codes are good and totally worth the upgrade, it’s just, you know, some little issues to work out. The MP Mini Delta’s not a super-great machine, so you need to do a few things to get it running properly.
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The camera got closeups of both me and audience members splashing soup into the air for each of the four beats at the turaround (ie. the last of every 8 measures).
Also, this was somehow professionally shot by a camera crew because I was watching it on Youtube. Didn’t tag anyone because none the rest of the old band are active on Twitter, and I think one isn’t even on Twitter at all. *shrug*
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I rarely dream, but last night, the band I used to play in played a gig at a rural Korean restaurant. In one song, we swapped instruments like Yo La Tengo.
I drummed for a (new!) song with chopstocks on a table full of soup and side dishes. https://t.co/nClf55rd9w Nobody played my saxophone, btw, which makes sense. I would never let anyone. I think the drummer sang, the singer/guitarist played bass, the bassist played guitar.
Apparently this was a familiar schtick: people clapped when we did the switch, and were excited for it.
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This meme is fun, but I wish people included a link to the artist. (My wife’s a fan and I got her some of these prints last year…)
https://t.co/ttAvz8D2sW
Shop’s on hiatus now, but comes and goes, and the prints are lovely. https://t.co/W4uF3BulJi Incidentally, her name is Lily Seika Jones and her website is here:
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Hey, wanna destroy rainforests and then convert your proceeds to legit real estate wealth? Consider Canada, whose courts will say, “Yeah, it looks bad, but our laws say we can’t force corporations allegedly involved to prove they aren’t!” (FFS)
canadaland.com/podcast/real-e… -
Book 41: Sleepaway by Jay Dragon. A “Belonging Outside Belonging”-styled RPG about camp counselors, work, identity, magic, and a horrible supernatural threat. It’s a pretty amazing design, with some actually moving poetics and mechanics. I’m impressed. https://t.co/hNllactNJM The (free) Stretch Goals have more playbooks and also a lovely recipe/game compilation by Jeeyon Shim, which is unusual in having recipes I actually want to try—a first for RPG recipe collections I’ve seen possumcreekgames.itch.io/wanderhome-str….
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Saw in @ContraPoints’ (great) video on J.K. Rowling’s recent ugliness: https://t.co/VoWn94oAi9 Book 40: The Tale of the Incomparable Prince by Tshe Ring Dbang Rgyal, trans. Beth Newman.
Sadly, I was rather surprised how bored I was by this 17th century Tibetan novel that is sort of Ramayana/Buddhist Jataka/Mahabharata fanfic. Bits shone, but mostly I found it a slog. -
Book 39: Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman Thoughtful, challenging, discomfiting, but worthwhile exploration of the mislabeling conflict as abuse and vice versa— —and how both errors obscure truth, stifle our person and collective growth, *and* prevent us from recognizing/addressing real abuse. Not everything here worked for me, but enough did to make me rethink the tension between interpersonal idealism vs. cynicism I feel today.
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Book 36: The Adventures of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rogers. A big fat greasy cheeseburger of a book, shlocky and weird, but I loved it in middle school and it was fun enough this time that I’m planning to read the rest of the series just for fun. The art is half the fun (or more). https://t.co/mFC0tvG0IR Book 37: More Adventures of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rogers Another Samurai Cat book. Actually a little better than the first? Samurai Cat visits warped versions of King Arthur’s Court, Barsoom, and the Star Wars universe.
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Much higher-grade lunacy than the grim-and-evangelical UFOlogy we got a decade later. (Especially Streiber, which I grew up reading.)
Was surprised to see how incredibly racist Keel’s description of the (“Mongoloid,” and “foreign faced” and “dark, not Negroid”) Men in Black was. That MIB stood in for overtly racialized xenophobic anxiety seems to have been forgotten as MIB have become emblematic of Big Government or whatever, which is odd. -
Book 34: Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction by Daniel K. Gardner Very much a bird’s eye view and history: I was looking for something a little more detailed but this still was interesting and useful snapshot of its development. Sympathetic but honest about the darker side. https://t.co/lCs0Qwel6Q Book 35: The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel While I’m baffled that anyone took this stuff seriously, it’s entertainingly pharma-grade nonsense. Tulpas, MIB, UFOs, garudas; this feels a lot like ground zero for 70s conspiracy theory nonsense’s injection into pop culture.
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Book 32: Far North by Marcel Theroux. A dark, meditative Western in a global-warming-ravaged future Russia, about people struggling to survive and/or rule. Bleak, but well-written and thoughtful. Less horrific than The Road, but more onscreen awfulness. Thanks, @TheOtherJustin! https://t.co/yKtBN2ZWIJ Book 33: Year of the Nurse: A 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic Memoir by Cassandra Alexander. Appropriately rage-filled, incandescent memoir of nursing during the pandemic. (And a damage assessment for nurses, hospitals, and America.)
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Book 31: Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Somewhat disappointing & tedious anti-hagiography. Gives every question about Mao the same answer: “He was a conniving sack of turds. Also, bad hygiene. #%@* that guy!” This one is why I read so few books this year. (Not that I necessarily want “both-sides” “balance” re: Mao—he was awful—but this feels a bit simplistic and doesn’t explain systemic reasons why this sack of turds did so well for himself for so long. DNF. Maybe I just need another multi-year break from it.)
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Loaned from @ahimsakerp, who’s right: these give a somewhat clearer snapshot of Carcosa as adventuring site than I got from the hardback version of the setting book. I liked #5 and #8 best, and can see myself throwing locales from all of them into any weird exploration RPG. Book 30: Crimson Blades Dark Fantasy RPG by Simon Washbourne
OSR retroclone w/interesting classes, neat powers to the Sorcerer (all-purpose spellcaster), and actually-workable cinematic (heroic PC-action-focused) mass combat rules. Can’t see myself running, but pilfering? Yes! -
Book 25: The House of War and Witness by Mike, Linda, and Louise Carey. A slow burn ghost story set in a haunted manor on the border between Prussia and Silesia in 1740. Lt. Klaes bored me, but Drozde made up for it. Took a while to get started but felt worth it in the end. https://t.co/dS17Adyw7Q Book 26-29 (cheating? eh): Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa Modules 5–8: The Yuthlugathap Swamps (5), Barrens of Carcosa (6), Jungles of the K’naanothoa (7), The Mountains of Dream (8).
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Ian Watson’s “Amber Room”; Kathleen Goonan’s “Butterfly Effect”; Lisa Tuttle’s “White Lady’s Grave”; Ian McDonald’s “The Time Garden”; “God’s Bright Little Engine” by Stephen Gallagher; “Land of the Reflected Ones” by Nancy Collins; & Storm Constantine’s “Blue Flame of a Candle.” Book 24: The Searing by Peter Coyne
This 80s horror paperback starts with spontaneous orgasms, “magical autism” (🙄), and—ta-da!—a dead baby. And it gets more ridiculous as it goes on. Not really my thing, but it has to be read to be believed. -
Book 22: Master of Space and Time by Rudy Rucker A rollicking gallop through alternate worlds accessed via a silly gizmo… some bits maybe haven’t aged so gracefully (surprised it wasn’t edited for the republication in 2015), but it’s mostly a kooky tumbling adventure. https://t.co/8mEvRoLB9P Book 23: Tombs ed. Peter Crowther & Edward E. Kramer A White Wolf fiction anthology from 1994. First time reading the whole thing. It’s a mixed bag, but a few stories stood out for me, especially:
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(If D&D’s (via Tolkien’s) orcs are rooted in Renaissance European exaggerations of Mongols’ barbarity, Weatherford’s depiction would be a good inspiration for rehabbing D&D humanoids culturally: foreign, different, tough, maybe baffling, but with lessons to offer their world.) (Not that we *should* model orcs on any one real ethnic group (!) but Weatherford’s text shows one way to unpack a maligned group as a long “misunderstood” and “misrepresented” group in-world, in order to move away from the frankly racist roots of the “evil orcs” fantasy trope.)
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Book 20: On the Origin of Species and Other Stories by Bo-Young Kim Nice to read work by a friend—though disclosure, we have a story in this. It’s now up for an award. We weren’t properly credited, by publisher/editor error, though. :/ Lots of post-human extinction tales here! https://t.co/Lit8lmvtAx Book 21: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford Fun book arguing the Mongols weren’t that bad, but my enjoyment was tainted by a certain distrust of the author’s (seemingly uncritical) use of apocryphal/mythic text as a primary historical source.
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Book 18: Trash Planet Epsilon
Another RPG zine: a sci-fi hack of Electric Bastionland, set on an interstellar landfill—more an idea generator than an adventure, but a fun springboard for a weirdo space junktrawl game w/Electric Bastionland’s ruleset.https://t.co/6ZMUIbxBgZ Book 19: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling
Wild, flamboyant alt-history ride through a real, strange moment disturbingly relevant to the now, especially in how it interrogates what attracted (& attracts) people to fascism and powermongering tech assholes.
