Someone recently wrote, I can’t remember where, that the internet itself is the “town square” everybody’s been going on about, not any one social media network. And that people usually want to go and sit in bars and restaurants or go shopping, not hang around in the “town square” the entire day. Well, you had the shopping malls and the stores and the libraries and a few bars already; now, suddenly, a lot more bars have opened and you need to decide where to go! You can hang out at Mastodon or the Fediverse in general and have a good time. Or you can go to t2, which is more like a coffeehouse; everything’s nice, you need to behave, and swear words are strongly frowned upon. (I’ve an invite left if you’re interested.) Or you can go to Threads where a raucous party’s in progress whose pounding bass you can already hear from the other side of the block. (If you’re from Europe, the bouncers won’t let you through at the main gate, but friends of mine told me there are side entrances and back doors you can try.) Or you can go to Bluesky, where you can’t figure out if you came too late to the party or too early, and now you’re trying to find the refrigerator to check the temperature of the beer bottles and find out. Finally, there’s this clamor outside where groups of people decorated with blue birds and swastikas stumbled out of the Twitter Roadhouse to throw empty beer bottles at the other bars’ facades.
In other news, it’s very nice outside, and I’ve been running a lot. Also, I was busy migrating to a new Mac, which included cleaning and redecorating my desk space at home, and I’m not done. (Next Sunday, hopefully, I’ll have a picture.) Thus, I wrote just one blog post last week about my book Ludotronics coming out in August. However, there’s a new album on Flickr with 13 shots I took during an evening stroll through Roppongi, Tōkyō (careful, there’s a giant spider statue involved); my daily vintage-style travel-squaries at Pixelfed; and, as usual, new pretty pictures and pulp & RPG artifacts at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse, respectively.
No game recommendation this week because of dispiriting news. The day before yesterday, the Thief of Smiles team communicated on their Discord server that they couldn’t secure funding and had to cancel Thief of Smiles, which I recommended three weeks ago. That’s a bummer. It was such an imaginative and enjoyable and mechanically clever and darkly delightful game that really should have seen the light of day.
J.
In other news, it’s very nice outside, and I’ve been running a lot. Also, I was busy migrating to a new Mac, which included cleaning and redecorating my desk space at home, and I’m not done. (Next Sunday, hopefully, I’ll have a picture.) Thus, I wrote just one blog post last week about my book Ludotronics coming out in August. However, there’s a new album on Flickr with 13 shots I took during an evening stroll through Roppongi, Tōkyō (careful, there’s a giant spider statue involved); my daily vintage-style travel-squaries at Pixelfed; and, as usual, new pretty pictures and pulp & RPG artifacts at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse, respectively.
No game recommendation this week because of dispiriting news. The day before yesterday, the Thief of Smiles team communicated on their Discord server that they couldn’t secure funding and had to cancel Thief of Smiles, which I recommended three weeks ago. That’s a bummer. It was such an imaginative and enjoyable and mechanically clever and darkly delightful game that really should have seen the light of day.
J.