J. Martin

August 6, 2023

Skipped a Beat, Again (Also: Vacation!)

The week before last, when I was critically preoccupied with wrapping up loose ends before summer vacation, the newsletter completely slipped my mind. It’s been a staycation so far, only without the balcony I redecorated around this time last year because it’s raining all the time. No floodwaters yet or anything, thank goodness. But it’s raining so much day in day out that it feels like living in a Venus settlement as imagined in those quaint SF stories of yore. Anyways, my big announcement last week: The Ludotronics Game Design Methodology is available for preorder! From Routledge directly, of course, and from Amazon US, UK, Germany, Japan, and what have you. (The book’s new companion site’s in the making; it’ll go online later in August.)

Traditionally, I produce a lot less when I’m on vacation (I heard that’s the point), so there’s just two blog posts, the Ludotronics pre-order post at between drafts and a bibliographical post from the week before on H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shunned House at my Voidpunk blog. However, there are three new albums on Flickr: 15 shots from the Soong Ch’ing-ling Residence in Beijing; 30 shots from Shiodome highrises in Tōkyō; and 10 shots from yours truly hanging around a MIM-104 Patriot System at Osan Air Base in South Korea. Plus, my daily vintage-style travel-squaries at Pixelfed and some posts at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.

Today’s recommendation is not a game but a book, because it fits nicely into this newsletter’s “pre-order” and “Lovecraft” themes: the English-language edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror illustrated by François Baranger is available for pre-order at Free League’s webstore! It’s Baranger’s fourth illustrated Mythos book, and the other three—The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness Vol.1 and Vol.2—are just gorgeous.

J.