Vengeful Ghost

It’s January and it’s raining in Baltimore. Isn’t the snow supposed to be coming soon? In any case, here’s what I’ve been up to over this mild week.

WORKING: All the baby doctors and nurses are on their winter break, so I am too–from the day job, at least. That has meant more time to edit Project NYC and get a solid start to the draft for Project Makalu. I’ve also been trying to figure out what the next year of Vengeful Ghost looks like. There are two Kickstarters I’d like to run in the near future and I’m a bit behind in my buffer of weekly content, so there’s a lot to do in pursuit of New Year resolutions.

PLAYING: I’ve fallen back into Skyrim, so help me. A friend published his mod lists a while back and I decided to give it a go. I am literally right now feeling a little stupid, though, because I’ve been playing the original, while the Special Edition snuck unannounced into my Steam library a while back. Oh well, I’ll get that downloading and probably start another playthrough. My new character is a hunter, and has already killed two dragons. All my other playthroughs have petered out when faced with the massive freedom of the Elder Scrolls games, a sort of paralysis by analysis, but I’ve got a good feeling about this one. You’ll probably be hearing about it for a while.

And on the roleplaying front, an acquaintance’s stray mention of Spellbound Kingdoms got me intrigued again. It’s a swashbuckling game of political and cultural revolution that makes a couple assumptions about genre conventions–things like Inspirations, the effectiveness of insults, and True Love–and bakes them into both the rules and the setting. Imagine a dystopia where love was magic. Now imagine that the kings and hierarchs of this world knew love was magic, and therefore set about a massive cultural engineering effort to ensure that only the noble and loyal were capable of love. I want to get this thing to a table, ASAP.

CONSUMING: The big news in my media consumption is that I’ve joined two groups of people dedicated to working through The Artist’s Way. If you’re not familiar with the program, I call it a 12 week process of introspection and indulgence. It gets terribly woo-woo at parts, but the lessons and exercises are incredibly useful for developing trust in one’s creative self. I’ve started it twice before (finished it once), and I’m looking forward to approaching the text with today’s eyes.

Oh! And I watched Spy! What a film! I enjoyed it terribly. Melissa McCarthy is hilarious and also empathetic as a brilliant person out of her depth (which I think I’ve mentioned is one of my favorite genres), and it is a funny spoof of super-spy movies that is, in itself, a completely respectable super-spy movie. Loads of fun.

But what about you? New plans for the new year? Let’s chat!