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$radiantfracture: The word Weird. superimposed on a blueblack forest scene with odd figure circled (Weird)$

Hey, I posted my game! You can find it here.

Playtests welcome. It is a solo storytelling/journalling/story creation horror game. It uses a simplified version of solitaire to drive the story.

[ETA] From the writeup:

And yet the sun rises.

Weird. is a horror game about a flawed protagonist confronting their worst nightmares.

I, a troubled character, am alone on the longest night of the year.

You, a storyteller, use prompts and the inevitability of card order to tell a story for me, driven by fear and fate.

I am tormented by unfinished business, which, as you know, is a great way to become the target of supernatural forces.

Enjoy bringing about my nearly inevitable and almost certainly miserable end, but also maybe final moment of grace, redemption, or transformation, in Weird.

* * * * * *

Title-wise, I went with Weird, as an archaic synonym for fate, styled with a period: Weird.

I liked the suggestion of Patience quite a bit, but this isn't really a game about being patient. I'd want waiting, duration, something like that, in the mechanics somewhere. Actually, maybe I'll try to make such a game, since I still seem to have Game Fever. Maybe it's to play in waiting rooms.

As predicted, the game jam I made has not posted to the Itch calendar, so I am the only person who knows about it or has submitted anything. But I tried!

( Thoughts on the possibilities of this mechanic )

* * * * * *

Qua writing tool, I find the game a pretty decent method for creating something between a detailed outline and a rough story draft.

§rf§

tinny

The theme of

fandom10in30's current round "Ice Ice Baby" is winter, snow, and ice, so I went with Amidst a Snowstorm of Love, and then when I ran out of properly snowy caps, filled it up with Frozen and North of North. Enjoy!

( 10+4 icons )

I'm happy to receive all kind of comments, including concrit! All icons shareable. Credit for brushes and textures I use can be found here in my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

As we are once again fording the atmospheric river, here's the villanelle (!!) I wrote about the one in 2022:

(Climate Change Villanelle)
After an image by K.

Consider the atmospheric river
as a dragon, slithering through peri-
apocalyptic skies. The end is never

reached of all this rain. Its teeth of silver
gnaw the bones of men who refused boldly
to consider the atmospheric river

as a dragon, not just as the weather,
winning us the wages of false bravery:
apocalyptic skies. The end is never-

ending. Consider the dragon, glitter-
ing, greedy, cruel and wise; now carefully
consider the atmospheric river

as an alternative to the wither-
ing coils of smoke, wildfires' choking, hazy
apocalyptic skies. The end is never

quite what you expect or would prefer.
Drink if you wish, smoke up, get high, daily
consider the atmospheric river,
apocalyptic skies. The end is nigh.

nicki

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

$radiantfracture: a gouache painting of a turkey vulture head on a blue background, painted by me (vulture)$

radiantfracture

What is best?

1. A patch with just the text "Tablet XII is Canon"
2. A patch with this text and the shape of the broken tablet above or below it
3. A patch that's in the shape of the broken tablet with the text written on the tablet?

Font would be vaguely cuneiform-y but legible.

For aesthetics, so far as I can tell with very sketchy research the best Tablet XII fragment is shaped kind of like this:

§rf§

tinny

The rounds at

icons10in20 are rare and always fun! This one is round 41, and it took me much longer than I thought, especially the icons that ended up being Kpop Demon Hunter icons. I'd been planning on making a whole Wu Lei set again, but those steadfastly refused. :D I hope you like the set!

Teasers:

( 10 icons, most from Wu Lei, the rest from Kpop Demon Hunters )

Every single comment is treasured. All icons shareable! Concrit welcome. Check out my resource post for makers of textures and brushes I use.

Previous icon posts:

jesse_the_k

...here's an excellent use-case: feed your strong passphrase text as a prompt to an image generator

from the passphrase string "fabulous tattoo Harvey", Reddit user u/waydomatic and ChatGPT made ( this cheerful example )

The LLM thinks Harvey is a muscular white guy wearing a skimpy purple Speedo; arms, shoulder and upper chest covered in rose tattoos. He flexes his right arm and flashes a big white smile under his handlebar mustache. Of course he's wearing a rose crown.

Saving the generated image would certainly be more secure than writing down the password.

tinny

Mount TBR 2025 Book(s) #05* Murderbot 1-4

Murderbot novellas by Martha Wells
Murderbot Diaries #1-#4

SecUnit, a human-machine hybrid, is owned by an evil megacorporation, but it has hacked its own system so it can now do what it wants. It's mostly bored by its job and the boring humans it has to protect, so spends most of its time watching tv shows instead. Over time, it grows emotionally, and gets attached to its favorite clients, despite itself.

Murderbot has always been a wonderful first-person narrator. Very unreliable, my favorite, very snarky, also my favorite, and addicted to tv shows, very relatable. :D

I had read the first novella years ago and then never continued because I found them too expensive. But now that there's a tv adaptation, I wanted to reread, and so I borrowed the first four from a friend and read them all in one go.

thoughts - not very spoilery, I think? Y'all have read them all already anyway, right?

* Man how I love murderbot. I already did the first time I read the first novella, and the three other ones have only deepened that impression. Although of course it's not the easiest to live with. Or like Arada (or was it Pin-Lee? I keep confusing those two) says in book 4: "I'd forgotten what an asshole you are." :D

* When I read the first book, I always thought of murderbot as female - for no other reason than that it's a fan of tv shows, like me (and everyone else I know). Androgynous/non-binary would have been better. The tv adaptation now looks very male. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle.

* Mensah is just such a sweet character (maybe a bit too ideal, but oh well). No wonder murderbot imprinted on her so much. <3

* I liked all the progressions from "I hacked the weapons scans" to "now I have experience in hacking surveillance and scans and I can do several of them at once" and "I couldn't have gotten through this security check a while ago".

* I love how a lot of the characters are women, and sometimes not specifically mentioned. The two security guards in book 3 for example, which I'd originally pegged as male, but it's revealed late in the book that they're both female.

* I loved ART. Awesome smart, nerdy, and arrogant character, which I would love to meet again (and so would murderbot, I think, even if it claims otherwise).

* To me, the physical changes that ART makes to murderbot (to make it blend in and not look so much like a secunit) sounded like it changed its hairstyle to something more female-looking. It's never actually stated outright, but I liked the idea.

* Through all the novellas, murderbot's voice stays funny and snarky, but small changes are noticeable and I love how it grows, not only in technical skill but also emotionally. It still needs to be dragged into saving its people sometimes, but somehow it does it of its own accord, and I love both.

5 stars - Wonderful unreliable narration, great worldbuilding, neuro-atypical characters galore

1 - 5 stars - Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Final Architecture #1 [DW link]
2 - 2 stars - Miss Merkel: Mord auf dem Friedhof by David Safier Miss Merkel #2 [DW link]
3 - 4 stars - Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire Toby Daye #10 [DW link]
4 - 1 star - Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin [DW link]
5 - 5 stars - Murderbot Diaries 1-4 by Martha Wells [DW link]

$radiantfracture: A yellow die with a spiral face floats on a red background, emitting glitter (New RPG icon)$

radiantfracture

Hey, I made a little game jam, mostly so that I had a jam whereat to submit my own game:

https://itch.io/jam/winter-solstice-haunting-ttrpg-jam

Make something and I'll try to round folks up to play it!

ysobel

We're on the final boss fight of the campaign. Said boss is hovering over a deep pit -- bad for melee, unless they have some form of flight.

My character rolls the highest initiative.

She is a L20 owlin monk. She has flight. She also has a) 70 feet of movement per turn, and b) magic items (and a feat) that gives extra damage for distance moved in a straight line just before the attack. Oh, and a potion that does bonus

First roll hit a nat 20.

Rolling 20 means damage dice are doubled; if you would normally do 2d6, on a crit you roll 4d6. Between the damage roll (doubled), the extra monk ability I always like to throw in (also doubled, plus poison for a round), and the bonus damage for straight lines (doubled), I did 119 points of damage.

I also have a feat that says if I get a critical hit, all attacks against that creature have advantage until my next turn.

So... a pretty good start.

I love this character.

(...I got a crit the next turn too.)

$radiantfracture: A yellow die with a spiral face floats on a red background, emitting glitter (New RPG icon)$

radiantfracture

I am nearing completion (fingers crossed) on a little winter solstice horror game that uses solitaire as its mechanic.

You will not be surprised to learn that this is is pretty much a solo journalling game with prompts. However, the solitaire mechanic does impose (I hope, anyway) a kind of melancholy fatalism.

I have been calling the game Solitary for obvious reasons, but of course there are many many many many games on Itch alone already called Solitairy. Any thoughts on an alternate title?

§rf§

jjhunter

The pearl at my ear is a lacquered grey seed
My lips strong red from wind's chaffing
I do not feel my middle age as any lessening
Here I am, a portrait of myself more vividly

Among old oaks I am still a hot young thing
Mind like a swallow sketching possibility on the wing
They say uncertainty ferments fear
I feel the old familiar thrill of stepping out of known into becoming

___

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

tinny

I was pretty diligent about writing down things in November, apparently:

( 21 things I learned in November )

ysobel

So my plan of quitting Duo at 4K days has gone from "vaguely in the future" to, uh, tomorrow.

It feels weird. And me being me, I'm second guessing myself. But then in a matching exercise it gave me patada (kick, as far as I can tell a noun) on the Spanish side and "to give somebody the push" on the English side, and that is a) a British phrase for firing someone, b) that is a verb, c) an unlikely translation, and d) completely novel to me both in general and on Duo and thus unhelpful for learning.

So, tomorrow is my last session and then I'm done.

umadoshi

An important task, given that I'm switching away from Spotify to Qobuz at this time of year: sifting through someone else's curated Trans-Siberian Orchestra playlist and pulling only about a third of the tracks from that to my own new holiday playlist. (There is a way to import Spotify playlists, but I haven't actually investigated it yet.)

My playlist is awfully random, really. I'm picky about Christmas music, but not in a way that follows much rhyme or reason. I like some boys' choir stuff. I mostly prefer older Christmas songs to more modern ones. But in practice, a lot of what I listen to is single-artist holiday albums, often by artists I don't really listen to otherwise. (The examples in my playlist so far are Annie Lennox and Sting and Idina Menzel, and maybe Mary Fahl counts, since I haven't heard any of her other solo work, just the old October Project albums where she was the lead vocalist.) If you have recs along those lines, feel free to throw them my way!

(Am I still entertained by the fact that Tori Amos put out a seasonal holiday album, uh...[*checks notes*] seventeen years ago? [WHY did I just date-check that?] Yep. Am I listening to it right now because it turned out that I enjoy most of it? Also yep. Still funny.)

(Would-be-funny-if-not-completely-horrifying: Every once in a while I remember Tom McRae saying that in the earliest days, his label thought his song "You Cut Her Hair" could be released as a Christmas track. "You Cut Her Hair" deals with the Holocaust. Very seasonal. Yes. o_o)

I guess it must've been back on the weekend that we made Smitten Kitchen's Mom’s Apple Cake, which was the first apple cake I was looking at a few weeks ago, but at the time we didn't have a tube pan on hand. (You can use a bundt, which we did have, but...I didn't opt for that.) It's very good. It's also LARGE. (Some went into the freezer.)

We cracked out the Burlap & Barrel Royal Cinnamon for it, and the cake is very cinnamony, but that presumably is at least equally due to the part where the cake calls for a tablespoon.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Tori Amos - What Child, Nowell

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Branch and Root

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Weird. (a game)

multifandom flash freeze set for fandom10in30

(Repost) Atmospheric River

Angelitude

Vital question re: Tablet XII is Canon patch

10 multifandom icons for icons10in20

If you're required to deploy AI

Book #05* Murderbot Diaries 1-4 by Martha Wells

Winter Solstice Haunting TTRPG Game Jam

(no subject)

Frivolous question - solo horror game

Poem: "Portrait of the Artist Feeling Liminal"

Things learned in November

(no subject)

Christmas music | Not-Christmas cake

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