Took a walk around the downtown near my office on Tuesday during my lunch break. Got some really cool photos. #Photography

Been reading the first book of The Witcher and it has me wanting to run a classic "village has monster problem" scenario in a TTRPG.

#TheWitcher #TTRPG

Took my kid to Free RPG Day yesterday and Forever DM Dad grinned when she grabbed "No Place Like Homebrew" and declared that she needs a notebook for building her own world, complete with colored pens for categorizing.

Now just trying to find more kid friendly Game Master materials to help her along.

Been looking through @TTRPGkids for storyteller stuff food for kids?

Anyone got recommendations?

#TTRPG #DND #Parenting

I've never understood the reason people refuse to read unfinished series. I love The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear despite the vapor book status of Doors of Stone.

I love Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon, despite his comics career making a sequel increasingly unlikely.

And I'm currently loving Annihilation Aria by @MichaelRUnderwood though the publisher seems to have disappeared from the internet.

Unfinished stories can still be great!

#bookstodon #reading

So apparently Fred Rogers Productions just started a new YouTube channel where they'll be uploading every episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

https://youtube.com/@misterrogersneighborhood?si=o9FcfHuBHytiwKZt

#Television #Children #Parenting #MisterRogers

Finished Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf tonight. It scratches an itch for me in being a translation that tries to understand what the text tried to be to its original audience and to translate that to the new audience. Here, we have the boasting translated into a frat-boy-esque narration that totally works.

(My favorite translation of Eugene Onegin is the Hofstadter one with little translation puns thrown in here and there.)

#Bookstodon #Translation #Beowulf

Photo looking up Euclid from Public Square

More photos from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument

Was in Cleveland for an event this weekend. Decided to take a walk around Public Square and up Euclid. Got some nice photos.

Because of the new book coming out Tuesday centering my favorite character in the series, I started catching up with the last couple InCryptid books.

10% through Aftermarket Afterlife and really liking Mary as narrator. Also, the end of this drive I'm sure is going to see some stuff hit the fan.

#Reading #InCryptid #SeananMcGuire

Heathcliff is the original man who will do *literally* anything else except go to therapy.

Use children as pawns in a Xanatos gambit to snatch up land just to make the people he sees as slighting him miserable? Yep. Abuse a dog to demonstrate control? Yep.

Why does this get sold as "the greatest love story" again? Like greatest petty revenge story, yes. Love story? Eh. There are love stories here but they're so not the point.

#Bookstodon #Reading #Literature #WutheringHeights #Bronte

Using a pocket notebook to keep track of some inspirational reading for games, grabbing Appendix N together with lists from other games.

The mistake was writing the list in Pilot Precise v10 (read 1.0mm liquid ink) in a Moleskine pocket notebook (all the local Office Max had in the form factor), it's on me, I should have remembered. Not like I've seen my Lamy 2000 bleed through multiple pages...

#TTRPG #Reading #FountainPen #PocketNotebook

My reread of the Hobbit continues. I forgot how much I liked the cadence the book takes with its storytelling, the way Tolkien gleefully tells you about a future event with a teasing "but that's for later."

Fantasy has definitely gone places since Tolkien, but there's still a lot to appreciate in his style.

#Reading #Bookstodon #Tolkien #TheHobbit

Happy Public Domain Day!

Standard Ebooks has 20 of the biggest books of 1930 released for free today! I worked on four of them and am so glad to see them released!

https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026

#Bookstodon #PublicDomainDay

I recently converted my blog back from Hugo to WordPress. I really liked Hugo, but the hosting service I was using was expensive for what I could do on my shared server (for a personal site that I have no intention of monetizing in anyway, given ethical concerns with my job) so all my posts had to make it to the site through the specific computer that housed all the markdown files and had Hugo on it to generate the HTML.

I kinda missed the ability to bounce between devices.

Been reading the 1930 Nancy Drew Mystery Stories ahead of them hitting public domain in January.

So far, I've read the book where Nancy follows up recreational breaking and entering with stealing stolen property then hiding the stolen goods from the cops.

(The Tophams totally deserved it)

#Bookstodon #NancyDrew #SecretOfTheOldClock

So I'm getting a backup made ahead of flashing my once Win 7 then Ubuntu then Win 10 machine over to Pop OS ahead of the Win 10 EOL

Occurred to me to peel off the Win 7 case badge because that one hasn't been true since at least 2016.

But got me missing the old old ThinkGeek, where I got a Tux the Penguin case badge for the Dell parts machine I had running Mint in law school. Because I want a Tux case badge again.

#Linux #Windows10

Just watched the first two episodes of #Murderbot with an Apple TV trial.

Okay, Skarsgard wasn't how I'd envisioned Murderbot in my head, but he kills it.

Anyway, gotta check the perimeter.

Cont'd

My daughter doesn't treat them the same way, she slaps them on everything and everything spreading joy and will force you, even if you try to politely refuse, to share in the joy.

Lessons of Magic and Disaster is a book I'm digesting slowly because stuff about loss and shared joy and shared experience is hitting me in places that are still raw after losing my own mom in 2023. But it's so good. And it makes me think about parents and kids.

I'm reading War for the Oaks based on seeing it on Seanan McGuire's Personal Top 10 #UrbanFantasy list (https://reactormag.com/seanan-mcguires-personal-top-10-urban-fantasy-books-for-adults/)

I am really enjoying this, the way musicianship characterizes Eddi, the absolute unhinged chaos energy of the Phouka, I'm glad I'm giving this a read.

#Bookstodon #WarForTheOaks