Exhaustion, Beauty & Debriefs

 Hey chat ~ I've been a little less active in pretty much all but my local spaces recently. Insurance bullshit, paired with house hunting, paired with mild local drama, paired with being a queer American in 2025, paired with bitter bitter New England winds have made me a very sleepy girlie. In the evergreen words of Alice Longyu Gao "I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm so fucking tired."

BUT that's not say I have nothing to report to you, my silent majority, who have supported my work and this blog. So let's dig right in!

DIGITAL ANGEL

So I released a game on itch for Valentine's Day: Digital Angel! It's a spiritual successor to the cyberpuke gig-hell trifold game Burnout Reaper, but this one's about near-sci-fi pornographers ~ I tweaked the core rules a bit more and am very happy with the results. Similarly this game was an exercise in making something complete, but scale-able (with my hope being to rerelease Burnout Reaper and maybe make a few other modular zines that can slot in to the Death Spiraling grimdark future of 2026).

It was also an exorcism in ongoing feelings about the pursuit of beauty in the present day and about synthetic / augmented bodies (my own included). I'm sure I'll have something more profound to say on the matter eventually, but until then I'll let the work speak for itself.

VIVA MOLAMBO!

One of the many local savants I've had the pleasure of playing / designing with (who for privacy reasons will be going by Sovran henceforth), has been on a bit of a Braunstein kick for the past... well 2 years at this point. He was my co-conspirator on EXCOMM, and where I was much more interested in the mega-game side of things, he always helmed the more roleplaying side of things. It should come as no surprise then that he was interested in recreating the proto-D&D Braunstein (specifically the Banania scenario from Braunsteins 2-4).

Thus enter Molambo ~ A fictional mid-Atlantic post-colonial 1973 island nation whose fanatical  dictator has recently passed away and now rebels, general and union bosses alike are scrambling to instate a new government while being wary of both US and KGB influence. It was a BLAST, and yet another example of how I feel tabletop is at its best when untethered from traditional ideas of "role playing" and "games."

I played the General, in charge of Molambo's shoe-string military, and through clever use of radio propaganda and cooperating with nearly every other player, I managed to unite (most of) Molambo into a new Democracy and even win the election! I'll harass Sovran to start a blog to talk more about it ~

ON FURTHER ABSENCES

To top all of this off I've been playing a LOT of Goddess of Victory: Nikke (check out my blog post about it), a game that has become a text as fundamental to my tastes in Sci-Fi as StarCraft or Destiny. Monster Hunter Wilds is also on the horizon which I'm very excited about and is sure to devour a lots of my time.

Pair this with the aforementioned health stuff and house hunting and the steady parallel corrosion of both social medias and the country I'm living in (on top of, yknow, working and hanging out with friends), means I've been way less active in online spaces (sorry Discord and Blog Friends, I still love you I promise 3:). I actually plan on doing a post about this soon because I've found turtling up to be quite productive and fruitful in its own ways, but I'll save that for another time!

Until then I have a 80+ blog reading backlog to get through on top of numerous ambitions, so you can expect my spaces to be quiet for a while longer ~ But I hope you're all doing well in these trying times and finding creativity and comfort where you can <3