The Sock-Monkey As Alone

  I have not read A song of ice and fire. I own the books, I bought them after watching the first few episodes of the show and being really impressed for whatever reason I Wanted to read the books but never got around to it. Now I want to read the books that a knight of seven kingdoms is based off of… because either is the best thing narratively I have seen in years I think the last time I was hit so hard by a new media was cyberpunk edge-runners. That has been a minute. (Without spoilers) It’s about finding hope in pain. A kind of peace in the struggle of the hardships of life. It’s dark but not like serial killer authored  fan fiction of your favorite sitcom. (Spoilers ahead [proceed at your own risk]). Egg is a prince of a near psychopathic family of royals. But, is a good kid. It uses the darkness for strange tension reversals like if Dunk had been an abusive jerk to his squire he would be dead after the reveal of egg’s status as a royal. Though thick skulled and f...

  I think it was fourteen years ago when I thought God intervened on my behalf. I still do. I think he saved me though I don’t understand why. Or, to what purpose.   The cliff notes of it is I heard voices often my radio addressing me directly sometimes it would as Alice Cooper sometimes as other stranger voices. I woke and saw a red light anathromorphic spirit staring down at me I felt possessed by it and went back to sleep when I woke up I left and lived in a Walmart parking lot for a week until the regional manager told me I had to leave.  Then I spent most of a year or so fasting. Until I had fasted forty days and forty nights. I thought I was the Anti-Christ which I no longer think (and I was never told I was I just assumed I was the worst life that ever lived). But still, though, I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia The narrative cohesiveness of those memories make it hard for me to dismiss as my mental illness. You can tell how much it means to me by h...

  Today has been a slow start. Stayed up until about four or five in the morning and then took a nap till eight cleaned and got Luna’s cage ready for the day then went back to sleep till eleven woke up and let the baby bird ours oh of her cage for an hour and a half and now drinking coffee trying to get woke up enough to get some writing done. I know I been posting on the blog too much but I am still feeling like it is a good practice to journal through out the day and then potentially compile these journals into a couple of blogposts throughout the day. On some other notes of potential blog worthy musing, I have been rereading the John Blanche’s biography the rise of grim dark. And while it’s great at what it is I really wish there was a taschen quality coffee table art collection readily available of his work. Though his position as purely comercial illustrator for a corporate company likely will not allow  that to happen in my lifetime. My take away from john blanche’...

  So I have typed for the last three or four hours. I know I need to go to bed mainly for my baby bird… but I always make sure she has two or three hours out of the cage a day. I think I Will let her out when the sun comes up till about nine and then crash. But why my mind is racing has to do with grim metal bedlam. I am utterly overwhelmed with ideas but don’t want to finish the game tonight because it needs play testing.  and no one has commented on the calls for play testing on prior notes I published. So I am going to ramble just spewing ideas and frustrations with design process. Narrative skirmish game are story first: meaning emergent story telling.  Not like a choose your own path game books. It’s about object rules and mechanisms interacting in unpredictable ways. And those string of interactions add up to the result of a story that did not exist until your brain interpreted a die roll. The hard part of game design is using rules to open doors and not clo...

While I intend on compiling all of this eventually to itch.io file of grim metal bedlam. I gonna try to post on my blog as I write it. To kind of have back ups and share what I am doing. Code name/handle generator Simple: roll a d4 and a d20 the d4 says which chart the d20 was rolled for 1 2 3 or 4 and the d20 says says which of the names is used. And choose whichever order the words sound better. Tried to make the list diverse but ultimately I wanted the metal gear solid meets wu tang clan kind of a vibe. If you don't like a name don’t use it. For the captain of your crew.  Use your first name or, a first name and roll once for the second part of the handle making kind of a punk name generator. If you roll something to much just use the one below it. This is more suggestions and attempt to make an anime science fantasy vibe flavor text for the world building. Also I stole this idea from kill sample process my current favorite skirmish game even though I have just played for a day…...