Today 23 years ago, Susannah McCorkle passed. It was a suicide, after years of struggling with depression, like so many (most?) suicides are. You can read about her life a lot of places, but I liked this profile best. I only saw McCorkle perform once: that was almost a decade before she passed, back when the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival was a bigger event, and more big-name acts from around the world stopped by while crossing Canada. McCorkle was charismatic and luminous, her performance fascinating. Her “vocalise” performances of several famous jazz solos set to lyrics of her own devising mesmerized …
Month: May 2024
Something Tookish!
I’ve just realized that I never posted about a game I published on itch.io last year. The game is called Something Tookish! It’s not a wholly original game design, but rather a hack of the popular Brindlewood Bay RPG. The elevator pitch for Brindlewood Bay could be summed up as Golden Girls meets Murder She Wrote with a streak of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Well, as soon as I read through the rules, I immediately started thinking about the cozy halfling game that was going with my Sunday night RPG group.
April Reading (2024)
This is the fourth in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024.
14 April–27 April (Sunday–Saturday, 2 weeks running)
This is my regularly updated practice log, mostly for accountability with my saxophone practice. Below you can see my practice for the week. If you’d like to check it out, here’s my goal list of tunes for the year. This update is a little behind: I’ve been mired in preparing and grading exams and gotten less practice done than I’d like, so there’s been little to report. (I even considered doing three weeks in this summary, though I decided against it.) I’m still working on “Four”—trying to get used to playing at at higher tempos—but I’m now also working on “But …