Series: Paranoia XP Reviews, Book-by-Book

This entry is part 1 of 21 in the series Reading Paranoia XP

A while back, I became fascinated with the classic RPG Paranoia. I’d seen advertisements for it in Dragon as a kid, and been curious, but of course it’d never been easily available where I lived as a kid. Well, in 2017, I ended up picking up everything in the “XP” line while it was still available—barely—through various online sellers. (The core book had gone way up in price, and a few supplements were so rare it took me a while to track down copies. Indeed, I was only able to get the Little Red Book by trading a module with …

Continue Reading

WIP: Unnamed Verses IV

One more update on my WIP—another accountability post. I’m proud to say I maintained my pace of drafting one poem a day, and have what I think might be a complete draft. I’m not 100% sure it’s complete: there might still be room for a few more little singlet poems in there among the several linked-long-poems.  I have some revising and editing to do, of course, but right now I’m just happy at having finally competed a creative writing project of this scope. In the end, it took 70 individual poems to explore what I wanted to. Some are narrative, …

Continue Reading

WIP: Unnamed Verses III

This is another update on my WIP, mostly intended as an accountability post. I’ve kept up my work on the project, and have hit 58 poems. I thought I would be finished in a couple of weeks, but one of the poems I thought would be shorter ended up being a very formal experiment in internal rhymes, which is very tricky, and also ended up unexpectedly expanding into a long poem with multiple parts: of my 58 pieces, six are sections of this newly-extended poem.  So… if I keep up my current pace, I probably have ten days more of …

Continue Reading

WIP: Unnamed Verses II

Here’s another little accountability post, following up after about a month and a week on this project, and a bit less than a month since my last post about it. I’ve kept at it! Indeed, I’ve picked up the pace. At the moment, I have 49 complete poems, which is because I’ve actually written more than one a day for certain days.  Some of the poems are multi-part pieces, including a couple of “long poems” that included ten or more parts, but I’m counting each section as a poem for the purposes of tracking my progress. I’ve enjoyed exploring some …

Continue Reading

Reading in 2024

This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series 2024-Reads

You can see what I read last year—well, most of it—in the header image. I count a total of approximately 48 books. (I don’t think I missed any, but I’m not counting the Dragon Masters books that I read to my son. I am counting the Judy Blume and Roald Dahl books, though, since I actually had fun reading them. Dragon Masters, I mostly just enjoy vicariously through my son’s reactions.)    For me, the standouts were:  Nonfiction, Biographical: This one’s a toss-up between Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which I found a rather moving and troubling look at …

Continue Reading

November–December Reads

This entry is part 8 of 9 in the series 2024-Reads

  Well, here’s the last installment of my 2024 reads. November was a hectic month, so I read less than I’d like—sick kid, couple of translation deadlines—but I still read a fair number of books. I’ll be posting an overview of my favorites from the year in a post in January 2025, but for now, I’ll just cover what I read in the past couple of months.  I read Roald Dahl‘s Fantastic Mr. Fox to my son. It’s a fun read, even if it does have its nasty moments. The (alcoholic!) rat in the Bean’s Secret Cider Cellar is a …

Continue Reading

Versifying, Reading, Editing, Reviewing, and More

So, I’m not going to say much about this project—I’m trying to keep it under wraps until it’s done—but I for the purposes of accountability I wanted to mention that I’ve kept up with my commitment to draft one new poem every day. “Draft” is the operative word: often, I warm up by editing the work of the day before, tightening up the rhythms and polishing the wording, before drafting a new poem. I’m quite sure the manuscript will need some overall editing once I have drafted the full cycle of poems that will be in this collection, but for …

Continue Reading