effex | Reading

TTRPG campaign idea.

PCs are field agents in charge of finding and dealing with arcane occupational safety violations. That six-sided summoning pentagram? Flagged. That storeroom where the universal solvent is next to the lemonade? Flagged.

That deadly-trap-filled dungeon abandoned by its creator when the maintenance fees got too high? Red tagged.

This isn't the same as my recent FabUlt campaign. That was about discouraging the worst excesses in a world run by oligarch mages and there weren't really regulations. This would be set in a regulatory state, and would be more an exploration of normalization of deviance.

cimorene

‘Sir,’ intoned Dr. Fell, drawing the napkin from his collar and sitting up in dignity, ‘let me assure you I have been listening with far closer attention than my admittedly cross-eyed and half-witted appearance would seem to indicate.'

—John Dickson Carr, The Dead Man's Knock (1958)

(I rate this book 2/5, however.)

james_davis_nicoll

Against the gleefully hypocritical, exploitative Shine, the very gods themselves contend in vain.

Slow Gods by Claire North

torachan

1. Despite a mixup at the airport, I arrived safely in NoCal for my first ever business trip. After I got through security this morning, an airport staff person asked me what airline I was flying on and when I said Southwest, she told me I had to go downstairs and take a shuttle to my gate. This seemed odd to me since I entered at the place at that said Southwest but there’s a lot of construction going on, so I figured maybe it had something to do with that. But when I arrived at the other terminal, it was clear I was in the wrong place, so I had to take the shuttle back. Thankfully I was at the airport with plenty of time to spare so there was still like an hour before boarding and I was able to get breakfast and get to my actual gate in plenty of time. The flight itself is short, only like an hour in the air, though we did have to circle around the airport once before landing because it was so windy they had to come in from the other direction. Amusingly there was a guy from work on my same flight, though we hadn’t realized until boarding that we were traveling together.

2. I have mostly avoided the rain today. It was raining a little traveling from the airport to the store, but I wasn’t the one driving, and it had stopped by the time I arrived. Dry throughout the day, I was able to take a walk after lunch. And my hotel is just across the street. But tonight I had to go out to buy toothpaste and toothbrush because the hotel doesn’t provide them (cheapskates) and I didn’t take my umbrella because it wasn’t supposed to rain for hours, but when I was leaving the store it was pouring, so I had to go back in and buy an umbrella. I actually have one in my suitcase! D: But now I have another one. I did get pretty soaked even with it, but I think I can manage to dry my shoes out with the hairdryer the hotel provided. Tomorrow is supposed to be no rain all day so fingers crossed.

3. There are loads of nice restaurants around and tonight I walked to a sort of food court area where I ended up getting some very tasty yuzu ramen.

Sorry, no cat pics today or tomorrow as posting is fiddle enough from my iPad. I did post on bluesky, though. I’m torachan on bluesky if you want to see cats. Otherwise I will be back to cat posting on Friday.

james_davis_nicoll

Evil Milhouse enraged.

musesfool

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For - u2

Some things make a post, right?

1. I had the dentist today, so I took the day off, because I am always so exhausted when I come back from the dentist. It's rarely bad, but trying to breathe through the cleaning is always an adventure I do not enjoy and it makes me tired. But I told them that the crown I got in December is mostly fine except if I try to eat almonds or other hard things, so the dentist did something to it "fix the bite." He also said it didn't look like anything was wrong either in the examination or on the x-ray, and to let him know if it didn't get better (or even got worse), so I guess we'll see.

1a. I arrived about 30 minutes early for my appointment - it usually takes much longer to get there so I allowed an hour - but they took me in right away since I was only scheduled to be there for a cleaning, and I was home before noon.

B. I was excited to see ZIBANEJAD score the tying goal for Sweden, but then Quinn Hughes won it for the US in overtime. I have to admit, I don't like 3-on-3 overtime (or shootouts!) for the Olympics. Just play another sudden death period.

iii. This past weekend, Baby Miss L went to her first princess tea party event at the Riverhead aquarium (or near there?) and the pictures of her holding court among the princesses are amazing, but my favorite picture is the one of her making a very excited "oh wow!" face at the plate of desserts in front of her. She was ready to dig in!

d. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band are coming to MSG in May!!! Tickets go on sale this weekend! I will probably not try to get them, even though MSG is pretty much the 2nd most convenient venue he could play. (Forest Hills Stadium would be the most convenient for me, but would never happen.)

5. I've reached The Butcher's Masquerade in my DCC reread, and I think it might be my favorite of the books? It has a couple of my favorite scenes in it, anyway, including ( spoilers ) I definitely prefer the more open-world type floors than the stuff like the Iron Tangle (and I did find the cards so fucking tedious in book 6; otoh, ( spoilers )).

Though This Inevitable Ruin is also a strong contender, since I fucking love ( spoilers ) There's a lot in it that I enjoyed and that also makes me so curious about what happens next, both in the dungeon and outside of it. I am definitely writing up an epic post based on notes I'm taking on rereading, which will eventually get posted. I hope. *g*

*

james_davis_nicoll

The Wolves Upon the Coast Grand Campaign, a bare-bones old-school tabletop roleplaying game by designer Luke Gearing.

Bundle of Holding: Wolves Upon the Coast

james_davis_nicoll

Classic SF was chock-full of dubious ideas; Martin Gardner supplied the antidote.

One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense

james_davis_nicoll

Only witches hunt demons, all witches are women, and Uroro cannot be defeated by any woman. Uroro feels entirely safe, right until the world's first male witch defeats him.

Ichi the Witch, volume 1 by Osamu NIchi & Shiro Usazaki (Translated by Adrienne Beck)

cimorene

I need to hand wash a bunch of wool things. Three sweaters with soot on the cuffs can be washed in the bathroom sink, but there are two big wool blankets which won't fit in that sink. And we don't have a laundry tub! I remember when I was four or five we were living in an apartment that only had a shower, not a tub, and I was afraid of the shower, so my mom had a laundry tub for me to bathe in and at that age I fit in it comfortably. It was one of those round zinc ones. I've never even seen those for sale as an adult, and I love hardware stores.

I have seen sturdy black plastic tubs that are about that size and larger at hardware stores - they're used in construction, to mix concrete and thinset and mud and stuff in. Not sure that would be a sensible purchase though (it's so big!). My current idea is that I could wash blankets in one of our biggest size of plastic storage bins. The problem is all of them are full of stuff being stored and I'm not sure which one would make the most sense to temporarily borrow.

Another consideration: drying. Drying takes AGES when it's cold. Wool absorbs a lot of water and therefore takes a long time to dry, and sweaters have to dry flat. I suppose we can put the things in front of the stove and light a fire, but we can't keep it going until they're dry. I suppose I have to do this one wool object at a time.

ETA: I should just wait until it's spring and I can dry the blankets outside. The sweaters are more urgent than that, but they are also smaller. I'll just have to try to dry them by the fire.

torachan

1. I got my hair cut this morning. Nice to get that out of the way before my trip.

2. I'm all packed for tomorrow except for a few last things I can't pack until the morning. Hopefully I can get to sleep with no issue and early enough, because I have my alarm set for four tomorrow. D:

3. The rain was much better today. It rained a little here and there, but mostly was dry, and none of the times it was raining interfered with anything I was doing.

4. Gemma's helping pack.

james_davis_nicoll

What hope has 10th century Icelandic culture against an armed and moderately educated 20th century American?

The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson

torachan

1. So much rain today. When I went out for my walk this morning, it was just sprinkling very lightly (at times not at all) so that was fine, but I stopped at the store to get a few things and it was raining harder when I came out, then after I got home, it started really pouring and did not let up for hours. It did pause a few times, and I was able to get out to the garage to use the exercise machine and work on my puzzle, and then later I went on another walk myself and then one with Carla, and both times it started raining right after we got home. There's still supposed to be more rain for the next few days, but it looks like it'll mostly be happening overnight, so hopefully won't be too intrusive.

2. When I stopped at the store this morning, they were just putting out the fresh bakery baguettes we like, so I got one of those and some ham to make jambon buerre sandwiches for dinner. The only problem is I still had about half a mile to walk to get home, and the baguette is long and comes in a paper package. But! I had the smart idea of getting a couple plastic bags from the produce area and putting one on each end of the baguette, so it was protected from the rain.

3. I finished up another puzzle today, another 1000 piece one. This one was fun, but I don't think I'll want to do it again, so I'll probably put it out in the Little Free Library for someone else.

4. I cleaned the stove today. It's an old stove (based on the brown color, I assume it and the oven and the old fridge we no longer have were installed in the 60s by the people who owned the house before my parents) and is hard to just wipe clean after using because it has a setup similar to the top picture in the wikipedia page on gas stoves, but somehow even worse? Anyway, if you miss cleaning it after use just a few times, the grease build-up is impossible to take care of quickly and easily and it becomes a huge project of having to take the stovetop apart and scrub all the pieces. Definitely something to be done on a day when I don't have anything else to do, which is rare, so today was a perfect day. I had it on my to-do list but was tempted to put it off to some unknown time in the future, but since I was stuck inside with the rain, I just went ahead and did it, and while the stove will never look actually nice just due to age, it looks presentable and I feel really good about it.

I would like to get a new stove, but because we have a built-in stovetop and separate oven, it's not as simple as just buying a new one, and would require new countertops, and then if you're doing that, might as well replace the awful 45 year old flooring that's peeling up, and the cupboards are pretty dire, too, and it's a whole kitchen remodel, which is not only going to be expensive, but hard on the cats, so... (Someday, but not right now.)

5. Jasper was exploring the dryer the other day.

james_davis_nicoll

Downcrawl and Skycrawl, twin toolkits from designer Aaron A. Reed that help you create spontaneous tabletop roleplaying adventures in the Deep, Deep Down and the Azure Etern.

Bundle of Holding: Downcrawl-Skycrawl

cimorene

I find it trying when it's 17° indoors (63), but manageable (with sweaters and wool socks etc) for the most part. But right now it's 14° (57) in the warmest room in the house.

It's too cold to knit, or sit writing or using a keyboard for very long, because all those things require my hands being outside the blankets. The only things it's not too cold to do are being inside a cocoon of blankets, or moving around so briskly that it warms me up temporarily. That's tough, though, because I hate the part before you warm up.

torachan

1. We walked down to Pita House today for lunch, the place where I got the amazing shawarma cheese fries a couple weeks ago when Carla was out of town. We got that again to split, and even splitting between two people we were stuffed! They're so good, though.

2. Sales at the new store continue to be great. Mid week sales were lower this week than last, but yesterday's totals were higher than last Saturday, which was higher than grand opening on the previous Saturday.

3. Multiple times today I had the happy realization that even though it's Sunday I don't have work tomorrow!

4. The cutest snoot.

musesfool

Current Mood: intrigued
Current Music: Work That - Mary J Blige

I lost most of yesterday to feeling unwell and spending a good part of the day in bed, but I did make char siu and therefore did make pork buns today and as always, they are so good! And remarkably easy, too, if you follow the recipe. I still have tomorrow for doughnuts, potentially.

I also spent some time yesterday watching more Pluribus and I find myself arguing with myself about it. ( spoilers )

So I still am not sure how much I like it as a show, but I am definitely curious to see where it goes (no spoilers past "HDP" please!).

*

torachan

Recently Finished
Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin
I was thrilled to have a new Enola Holmes book to read. I'm not sure if this is the last one (the ending kind of felt like it could be), and if so, I will miss them. This has been such a fun series.

The Age of Miracles
I found out about this from

rachelmanija's review and was immediately interested. When the MC is eleven, the earth's rotation suddenly slows and the world changes. But even as these big events are going on, she is focused on the big things in her own life: friendships changing, her parents' marriage falling apart, crushes on boys, starting middle school. I really loved the balance between the two.

Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body
Margaret, having defined herself as a tween detective in middle school, now struggles in high school with how to grow up and ends up developing an eating disorder that lands her in a treatment center.

This sounded very relevant to my interests from the blurb but it just didn't work for me. As someone who grew up around the same time (maybe five years earlier or so) and loved mysteries and series like the BSC, and struggled with weight and being queer in a time before the internet and easy access to knowledge of the fact that people like me even existed, I should be the target audience. But I am not that big a fan of the paranormal and magical realism, and while those elements are not mentioned at all in the summary, they feature heavily throughout, and more and more as the story goes on. I wanted something realistic, and this is not that. It's well written and I love the idea of it, but it's just not for me.

Middle of the Night
The MC moves back into his childhood home when his parents move out to a retirement community. Immediately strange things start happening, and he is constantly having nightmares of the night he and his best friend were camping in the yard and his friend went missing and was never found. Now his body has been found nearby, and the MC has to figure out if he's really being haunted or if someone is messing with him, and if they are, are they the murderer? I liked this all right.

The Legend of Auntie Po
Graphic novel about a Chinese American girl in the 1880s who lives in a logging camp with her father, a cook. I liked this a lot.

A Map to the Sun
Graphic novel about a struggling girls' basketball team. I liked it.

A Star Brighter Than the Sun vol. 4

Kindaichi Papa no Jikenbo vol. 3

rydra_wong

https://www.scenemag.co.uk/lancaster-university-launches-national-consultation-to-shape-future-of-adult-gender-healthcare/

https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/transadultspsp/

The focus is identifying priorities for future research, specifically related to "non-surgical, transition-related healthcare for people aged 18 and over", and they're starting with a survey.

Funded by Gendered Intelligence, led by a steering group which is half people with lived experience (in fact more than half, as some of the healthcare professional members also ID as trans), one of the two co-leads is a trans woman, and they're partnered with TransActual and GIRES, so this looks like real genuine co-production.

sanguinity

candyheartsex has revealed, and I have received a delightful gift!

In Which Laurent Rises to the Occasion
The Wounded Name -- D. K. Broster
Laurent/Aymar, Amyar/Avoye
Canon divergence, Pre-Poly

Aymar despairs of clearing his name and leaves France, leaving only a letter behind.

Laurent is so delightfully himself, burning with passion for all the things! For Aymar! To clear Aymar's name! To tenderly care for him! And also to straighten out this mess where Aymar is determined to throw himself on his sword for Avoye's sake, without first consulting with Avoye about whether she even wants that! (If there is one thing that Laurent has learned from his association with Aymar, it is the frustration of having a lover throw himself on his sword for you without asking first! NOT THAT THIS FLEETINGLY CRITICAL THOUGHT MEANS HE LOVES AYMAR ANY THE LESS!!!!!!!)

I have strong suspicions as to who wrote the story (*casts a meaningfgul glance in

luzula's direction*), especially given the central theme that maybe you should ask your girlfriend what she wants before making a grand life-altering gesture in her name. (A genre of story that

luzula excels at!) But I shall refrain from offering official thanks until after reveals. (But please know I enjoyed it very much!)

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Page Summary

james_davis_nicoll - All Regulations Are Written in Blood
cimorene - Or as much dignity as you can with a walrus mustache
james_davis_nicoll - Slow Gods by Claire North
torachan - Daily Happiness
james_davis_nicoll - MP Matt Jeneroux leaves Conservatives to join Liberals, citing 'national unity crisis'
musesfool - i have scaled these city walls
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Wolves Upon the Coast
james_davis_nicoll - One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense
james_davis_nicoll - Ichi the Witch, volume 1 by Osamu NIchi & Shiro Usazaki (Translated by Adrienne Beck)
cimorene - Clearly I should only do Stuff to the fire while wearing leather gloves with long gauntlet cuffs
torachan - Daily Happiness
james_davis_nicoll - The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson
torachan - Daily Happiness
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Downcrawl-Skycrawl
cimorene - Talking about the weather...
torachan - Daily Happiness
musesfool - read the book of my life and see I've overcome it
torachan - Weekly Reading
rydra_wong - For UK trans/nb/gender-diverse people (or anyone who might want to signal-boost)
sanguinity - The Wounded Name fic

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to wake up, to shake up, to wake the sun

Reading

All Regulations Are Written in Blood

Or as much dignity as you can with a walrus mustache

Slow Gods by Claire North

Daily Happiness

MP Matt Jeneroux leaves Conservatives to join Liberals, citing 'national unity crisis'

i have scaled these city walls

Bundle of Holding: Wolves Upon the Coast

One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense

Ichi the Witch, volume 1 by Osamu NIchi & Shiro Usazaki (Translated by Adrienne Beck)

Clearly I should only do Stuff to the fire while wearing leather gloves with long gauntlet cuffs

Daily Happiness

The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson

Daily Happiness

Bundle of Holding: Downcrawl-Skycrawl

Talking about the weather...

Daily Happiness

read the book of my life and see I've overcome it

Weekly Reading

For UK trans/nb/gender-diverse people (or anyone who might want to signal-boost)

The Wounded Name fic

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