Much earlier this year, I came across references to a new RPG from the Gauntlet, a group whose podcasts I’ve been listening to for several years now. They’re a group of people who run, review, and publish role playing games. Originally based out of Austen, Texas, they have largely moved online. The RPG in question was a new game from designer Jason Cordova, Public Access, and and I paid the $15 to get the pdf of it as soon as I saw it had gone live.
Read MoreI need to take a brief break from talking about political and theoretical topics, because I’m building my classes for the fall, working a lot at my summer job, and it’s hot as hell in the apartment – so I’m going to do my normal thing when I need to do that and discuss tabletop role-playing games.
Read MoreI’m taking a short break from talking about politics to discuss a video game I completed recently, Paradise Killer by Kaizen Game Works. To an extent, this dovetails with my recent writing on mutant epistemologies. I say this because detective fiction, after its heyday in the earliest twentieth century, does one of two things: it either simply recapitulates the tropes of hard-boiled fiction as an imitation, or it delves deeper into questions of knowledge and how we know what we know.
Read MoreThis began as a review for Cyberpunk 2077 and changed into something else. From the piece:
The real world didn’t copy cyberpunk, but it rhymed it, and then one-upped it. A novel set in the real 2021, that accurately reflects it, sent back to Gibson or one of his contemporaries, would be an incomprehensible trip: a hit of uncut psychedelia that would be both banal and mind-shattering (equal parts Dick and Ballard, shot as a documentary).
Set in a time-screwed 1930s – it’s mostly the dust bowl, but you can meet people who live in your future, as far forward as the 1950s and 1960s – Where the Water Tastes Like Wine casts you in the roll of a minion: you lost a card game with a supernatural entity called the Dire Wolf. He has transformed you into a spirit, and sent you to walk across America, starting in Maine, to collect stories.
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