Letters from Afar | 11-03-24
I'm fresh off what I thought was a very good podcast recording, and I'm looking forward to a very busy week which I hope will also be very productive. Fingers crossed. Whatever else I can say about my time here in Florida, it is that I have found a certain rhythm, or am finding it. There is no shortage of things for me to do.
follypersist via Urbane, to Comfort Them: we must needs love the highest when we see it
One of my favorite things in the human use of language is our constructions, the compound phrases at odds with common speech. From "we needs must love the highest when we see it", I could never learn its ethics, for in my heart a love reserved for only the highest is a love diminished by its own discrimination. But I could learn the construction "needs must", or "we needs must" as a third person iteration of plural first person pronouncement. It's neither that we need, nor that we must, but both.
as ever, juliet's literary analysis is a joy to read.
bruno via Azhdarchid - Magic Changes Forever; Nobody Notices
Planeswalkers, however, represent the biggest change to the game of Magic itself since the sixth edition rules changes. Planeswalkers are now a card type unto themselves. They will, in time, come to be extremely important, and they will change the dynamic of how the game is played. But for a few months in 2007, they were just a suggestion, a glimmer.
Bruno's Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame is essential reading, and it's finally hit the stretch where I played regularly. I have recently picked up the game again, but...
rhystic studies - Your Foundation is Rotten
If the goal is to invite more people into Magic, then what do you do once they’re here? How do you separate your own signals from your own noise? What happens when that Lord of the Rings fan is ambushed by Captain America and Wolverine in the next fiscal year? What do you say to the Warhammer 40,000 players who were lured in by the sci-fi trappings of Abaddon the Despoiler, only to be winked at by the single eye of a homunculus wearing a Stetson? How do you address, in earnest, the good ole fashioned Liliana fans who have never heard of any of these characters? How many more times must you qualify Magic to the people who built and funded the empire you’ve put up for sale?
MtG's intention to make their ceaseless crossovers part of the Standard format were announced this past week, and I felt like this article did a good job capturing what the news felt like.
moose via The Ignorant Dungeonmaster - 1d8 Bird Memories
A supercomputer made to monitor and manage birds in an asteroid base greenhouse is stuck in a state of malfunction that the humans on board don’t recognize, and can only communicate by broadcasting recordings of bird experiences it has recorded. Do not explain this to your players: they should have to contend with their own understandings of being shown a world of “wrong” scales and desires.
Love a bird. Love a table of random results even more.
msd via quailblog - Little Big Frenchgame: The Returnening
My first experience with LBA was a demo that came with Electronic Entertainment (E2) Magazine's demo disc. It featured the first area of the game; and god damn did this blow my mind. The soundtrack, the isometric view and almost toylike or claylike quality to the world (I can't see Tunic or the Link's Awakening / Echoes of Wisdom era Zelda games and not be reminded of LBA) - it looked stunning - but the gameplay was the shine.
mike talks through an unexpected remake of a childhood classic. as someone who thinks a lot about the impact weird little games had on my own sense of taste in games, it's a treat to discover a game like this that I'd never even heard of before.
Elizabeth Ballou via Kotaku - How Dziobak Larp Lost its Magic
“It became clear to us that this company could not run forever,” said Agata Swistak, who had survived the layoffs. “At some point, it will fall.” One by one, six of the 10 remaining staff members, including Schwartz and Swistak, messaged Raasted to say the same thing: They would stick around for the rest of the season’s events, but. once the season wrapped in December, they were quitting.Raasted would lose most of his Polish team, including the most experienced members.
An article from 2020 that it turns out features a good friend of mine being screwed over by a terrible boss. Lots of this going around, these days.