August is RPGaDay month. Yep, a month solid of RPG-related posts, answering these questions: Today’s question is this: What is an RPG you would like to see published? Hmmm. You know what I’d dig?
Note: Yeah, this is a day late. I’d written it a few days ago and scheduled it for yesterday at noon, but somehow scheduling’s broken on my WordPress installation. I’ll be publishing today’s post (#2) in a few hours. August is RPGaDay month. Yep, a month solid of RPG-related posts, answering these questions: Today’s question is this: What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now? I’m going to say it’s a toss-up between three: Paranoia (the XP edition) and Michal Oracz’s De Profundis, and James Wallis’ The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Here’s why:
You read my post about Mary Ambree and Dianne Dugaw’s scholarship on women warriors in popular 16th-18th century English culture, and now you want more, you say? You’re in luck: the excellent Stuff you Missed in History Class podcast (which I listen to a lot these days, while driving) has made a few pertinent episodes recently. Here they are: Catalina de Erauso, “the Lieutenant Nun.” Not English, in this case—she was what ended up being called Basque—but a fascinating figure all the same, she was a runaway from a convent (and not actually a nun) as well as a cross-dressing …
So, a more general writing update: Once again: I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-thon thing. I write a lot, and you donate money to a great fiction workshop for genre writers. (I attended in 2006 and it was invaluable to my growth and my starting to take my writing more seriously, especially in terms of sending things out.) If you’d like to sponsor me, please go here. If you’re my top sponsor, you’ll get a cameo in the book… probably being killed in a terrible way (though the book’s been pretty devoid of any killing so far… probably a good thing, …
I know some people must be wondering if I’m writing anything new these days, since all I have announced lately is reprints of my story “Prodigal,” but this reprint is interesting and cool—and, I think, the last one for a while. “Prodigal” has recently been reprinted in The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 9 edited by Allan Kaster, published by AudioText. There’s a range of formats, but the audiobook version was read by Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari and Henrietta Meire. The book contains stories Nina Allan, Karl Bunker, Matthew Claxton, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Samantha Henderson, Paul McAuley, Cat Rambo, Robert Reed, Lavie Tidhar, and me. It’s very …
Apparently I missed it when it happened, but a professor named Choe Tong-Hyon spent five years translating all the various versions of of Korea’s traditional pansori to English. At the time, a post on Seoul Stages mentioned that these translations were immediately posted to the Jeonju Sori Festival website. By some miracle the link (here it is) still seems to be working as of this morning. If you’re interested in pansori, but maybe not enough to go out and hunt for old published copies that might cost you more money than you want to pay, then you should grab ’em …
This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. In this installment, I try to figure out what we can say about Canto LXIII, the second of the …
A couple of passages from books I’ve read recently, and then some thoughts on each. The Lady now finding her self in so strange a place, and amongst such wonderful kind of Creatures, was extreamly strucken with fear, and could entertain no other Thoughts, but that every moment her life was to be a sacrifice to their cruelty; but those Bear-like Creatures, how terrible soever they appear’d to her sight, yet were they so far from exercising any cruelty upon her, that rather they shewed her all civility and kindness imaginable; for she being not able to go upon the …
Yeah, I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-Thon thing. The goal is to raise funds for Clarion West, the excellent SF writing workshop I attended eleven years ago. This year I’m working on the same thing I was working on the last time I signed up for the write-a-thon, though I am working on a new draft of it. A lot of the vague outline is the same, but some of the details differ: https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011840873119744 https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011993172484096 As I noted (in the full conversation with Kate, which for some reason I can’t seem to embed here), the evil plotting Habsburgs are out, …
So, I’m running behind again, but I figured I’d write this up anyway. Free RPG Day 2017 happened a the weekend before last. A few of us made the trip of to Dice Latte in Seoul for the event. I didn’t take any pictures—I’m terrible at taking pictures of anything but the kid, these days—but I can say a good time was had. We arrived late, expecting my friend Justin to run Blades in the Dark rather than joining in on any of the official tables (because none of us had thought to sign up for anything—if I had done, I …