A short story that moves extremely quickly but is a fun romp. You don’t need to know anything about Pathfinder other than what the creature accompanying the protagonist is. I had to look it up because I’m pretty new to the Pathfinder universe.

Since it’s a short story it’s not too complicated. It’s a character being heroic and bringing us along for the ride. If you want a fast-paced sword and sorcery story, this one is pretty good.

As you know, I’ve been running a Cosmere TTRPG playthrough of Stonewalkers, the published Stormlight Archives adventure. I plan on writing a blog post (and maybe making a video) retrospective once we finish the game, but, partially prompted by my players, I wanted to write about some of the ways my players have surprised me over the last 2 sessions.

My favorite thing, both as a game master and as a consumer of actual plays, is when the players throw off the GM with their creativity. I don’t mean in the way that people talk about on Reddit (sometimes positively and sometimes negatively) in which the players go completely off the rails or in a direction that negates the prep work of the GM. My players are on board to tell the story we’re telling together, they just have some really unique ways of solving the problems they are confronted with. (Some amazing examples of the type of player creativity that bolsters the story can be found in the first 6 episodes of Mage Hand High Five’s The Badlands) A couple players have had to drop out, but everyone who remains has chosen a radiant path. As they have tried to make use of their powers we’ve definitely had our share of “yes and” and “no, but” moments. The last two battles have had some of my favorite examples.

For a show that often loudly professed to hate continuity, canon, and backstory Rick and Morty caps off the first season with an episode that both references characters from earlier in the season and sets up a bunch of characters for future multi-season arcs. Jerry and Beth go off to a Titanic re-enactment experience while Rick and Summer decide to enact the classic Wild Teen Party with much of the humor coming from Morty being the straight man trying in vain to keep the house from being trashed. References to earlier in the season include some stair goblins, the flu hating rapper, and some Ricks from the Citadel of Ricks (a parody of John Hickman’s Council of Reeds). Seemingly throwaway characters that become important characters throughout future seasons include Birdman, Tammy, Squanchy, Gearhead, and Slow Mobius.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. It’s based on a TTRPG. Would it be like the novelization of a movie or some of the books from the Star Trek or Star Wars universes? Would it be cheesy or great? Well, it turned out to be way better than I expected. There were a few things that came through a little bit game-y, but they were few and far between. The two examples that stood out to me were a character who created a psychic bond with her companions allowing them to speak to each other a “battle mind”

There isn’t much to say about an old, outdated technical manual. There’s at least one newer edition of this book released. However, whether you’re using vim or neovim, the basics remain the same. If you only have access to this edition of the book, I would focus on the chapters that teach you how to use vi and vim. In that respect, this book is very well written. Ignore the chapter on plugins and scripts as those have evolved quite a bit (especially in neovim with their use of lua).

As I normally do for anthologies, here is a series of mini reviews for each of the short stories:

Lean In: The Lord of Hell is Coming (Ericka Kahler): I don’t want to give anything away about this delightful story. I will say that it does an amazing job of flipping many tropes on their head and, in a funny way, actually made me rethink the premises behind many of those tropes.

I was a kickstarter backer for this book.

Back when Goldeneye first came out, the only first person shooter I’d played was a few short sessions of Wolfenstein 3D that my dad had introduced me to a few years before. I found it hard and boring and didn’t try to play all that much. When we rented Goldeneye, it was the first time I found myself enjoying the genre. A great deal of that came from the great mix of humor and seriousness in the game. We had a ton of fun playing “slappers only”.

I have not been doing this calendar in the way it was meant to be played. I keep forgetting for long stretches at a time. Still, we’re only done with the first quarter of the year. Perhaps after this entry I can do a better job at playing daily even if I don’t post to the blog daily. It will probably help the story resonate better for me.

Story

19 Feb

I continue into the swamp, keeping my eyes open for webs or other creatures that will say I have arrived at Silkrend.

It’s time once again for my annual podcast list. The formatting continues with the changes I added last year: Podcast Republic (the podcatcher I use) no longer provides the podcast’s official description. In lieu of that, I have the “My Thoughts” section which is part description and part opinion. If you click on the podcast’s title - that is the link for the podcast’s feed. If you click on the link for the Podcast website, that should take you to whatever website the podcast lists as their official website. This year I added an “Ended” subheading for podcasts that have ended, but I’m not removing them just yet from the podcatcher in case I want to check out old episodes.

I am extremely late in posting this, but I’ve been incredibly busy in 2026. In 2025 I ended up playing 2 days (48 hours) less than in 2024. It would have been way less if I hadn’t been playing Slay the Spire while exercising. More on that below.

Games Played in 2025

1. Slay the Spire (4 days, 22:42:57): You may remember that, a few years ago, I played a lot of Slay the Spire but eventually decided Monster Train was better. Before going on a flight I saw that this game was on sale in the Google Play store. It joined Gwent as the second game on my phone. Having it available for random moments of play made its play time rise up throughout the year. In fact, on the all-time charts it rose from the 39th position to the #4 position. I’ve been working, without success, on beating the final area of the game (essentially new game +).