The Sock-Monkey As Alone

“What are your plans for the future?”  “I don’t have a future.” I turn my back and staring at my hands meaning every fucking syllable. I almost thirty eight. The business of being expected to pull a miracle out of my ass and make the rational clinical pain mean something other than being the background noise of my life, is something I gave up on. “The thing about lobotomies is they kept people like you from hurting someone trying to get on with their day.” The manager at my last apartment recertification told me that.  He was thirty minutes late for my recertification and was in a bad mood. He was told he was 80% disabled but was considered functioning when he was on his pain meds by the VA so he would lose some benefits. So what did he fucking do he spent a hour and a half insulting me. And carrying on how people like me were the problem with this country.  I then had a meltdown on mastodon about the frustration of always being told I have more privilege as a cis white m...

  Starting this off with a nerd list with my current top ten novels 1 Stone junction by Jim Dodge 2 Gravity’s rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 3 Ridley walker by Russel hoben 4 Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy  5 even cowgirls get the blues by tom robbins 6 Alice adventures in wonder land by Lewis Carrol. 7 cat’s cradle by Kurt Vonnegut  8 Dune by frank herbert 9 buckaroo banzai by earl Mach rauch 10 Shibumi by Trevanian   Now I will simply start typing… mostly because I don’t know what to type and I feel like it would do me well to discuss my days of late. Gave up YouTube and Tv for the most part (trying to watch two or three hours of tv a week). And after a rocky start I can think clearer and my mood seems to be improving. So that is a win I would say. Last book I read was shibumi. I sat down and read three hundred pages of it yesterday and finished it and loved it… very much in the vein of Suda51 one style scripts or a kind of mash up of James Bond and ki...

 Poetry is the sparks of flint, of the human souls in conflict with eternity It is the effort and reward of ambiguity as a document for the living It is the simple act of investing in your life because other people are worth it

  Cleaned 24 miniatures, assembled, repaired and glued to 28 mm bases yesterday. Today’s ambitions include priming them. And potentially painting a handful. Luna (my part bird) had a limp this morning. It has been worrying me most of the day trying to figure out how I can pay to take her tot he vet to get checked… but she doesn’t seem to be in pain and can still get around. I think what happened was her claw got stuck in one of the hard sponge toys she shreds and she sprained it but honestly I don’t know. I did not share for several days on here because I am going through one of my spells of doubt with my intellect. I know I am not at the top tier of a grasp of the language I speak… or for that matter have a passing average grade on the subject. Though I still feel I have things to offer. Thoughts, ideas and such.  Maybe tomorrow I will share some of the campaign rules for grim metal bedlam. They are no where near complete but the thought of sharing them scares me into w...

  Pirates of the Caribbean has a weird place in my life. It may be THE guilty pleasure of my obsessions. But, it’s hard to argue with the accidental brilliance of the first one or the train wreck of two and three… (though… they still are impressive pieces of production design and have interesting world building). They along the secret of monkey island are among my favorite pieces of media. Though I have only finished the first secret of monkey island… I really want to finish the second one this year. Pirates were in real life murdering rapists… but the royals of the world were likely more like game of thrones. So you got to cut pirates some slack. So far as they rebelled against the corrupt fascists systems of the old world. Though pirates probably only democratized morally bankrupt criminal behavior. So… pirates of Caribbean and secret of monkey island are pure escapism. Like I said I think the first pirates of the Caribbean is pretty solid. It’s a classic swashbuckler starr...

  Spent most of the day reading playing at the world and now watching a supper bunny hop video inspired by that book talking about kriegspiel. Goals for the day?… make pixel art command tokens for grim metal bedlam. That is my first priority I also will post a poll on my mastodon asking if I should share rough rules (more design notes than anything) for grim metal bedlam. While this will serve no other purpose than to shame me into correcting and play testing the game more to refine it into a stable form. I know a lot of my rambling crap is just that but for whatever reason it gets me thinking. and thinking in terms of what interacting even is (is fun for at least me). I think the thought of the day will all this kriegspiel madness. Is that tabletop are for the most part good as psychological framing devices that get our brains to interpret verbally not mathematically. Or abstract like chess: deluding the players into thinking creativity has anything to do with optimal play. ...

  I am trying to make myself work on stuff more but struggle to get started in the morning. I thought I would ramble about emergent narrative and see if anything interesting came out. Emergent narrative is about choice players intemperate simple outcomes in context of each other and a story emerges from the filling in of the gaps of the narrative. What I struggle with is simplicity of a uniform system does not allow the game create narratives beyond the game. Think chess emergent narratives are the interactions of the players at the table.  But the game flow doesn’t change that narrative beyond the immediate results of the apposing wills of the contest. Narratives games however are like secular tarot card reading… provocative symbols that provoke a story by simply being layed out in a sequence.  The rules are the pattern of how you lay out the symbols but the symbols are a series of a loose frame work of associations.  The emergent part is how those things inter...