Weather looks great for our outdoor tabletop games fair on Saturday 10/18! ☀️ Swing by from 12-4 to meet local designers and join us for a moderated discussion between three established gamer designers inside People's Book at 4pm!

In Minneapolis this week, visiting game shops, colleagues, and friends, telling them about Gorgon’s Garden! www.mothspire.com/games/gorgon...

Conference organizers: If you want people who work outside of academia (or financially secure company), to give a talk at your conference bc you value their expertise, it's unreasonable to make them pay for registration. Artists/Nonprofit folks do not have the funding to pay you to share expertise.

Five weeks out. I'm launching a new Kickstarter for a really cool COOPERATIVE social deduction game. Please come and follow the project! The art is shaping up magnificently, and I'm so so looking forward to showing this off. www.kickstarter.com/projects/ogr...

The art is so good. I can't wait to show y'all more

Hello again, tabletop RPG designers! The second Bannerless Games Tabletop RPG Grant is now taking applications! I'm looking to award up to 10 grants at $200 apiece. Applications open until the end of the month. Apply here: bannerless.games/grants

TIL: Netflix customer service agents aren't allowed to voice their own complaints about Netflix. I can't imagine anyone likes the new household lockout system.. The agent I just spoke to certainly didn't. I also lodged a complaint about that.

New post up today! Part of a new "Games we Own" series. www.mothspire.com/cursed-court/

If you buy one of everything from #Booth449 at #GenCon2025, it'll be 136 pounds, and we'll give you as many free tote bags as it takes to carry them. $5300 if you get there when the booth opens Thursday! If you buy out the entire booth, yes, that'd be well over a ton of fantastic indie TTRPGs.

I'll give you a choice: take it or leave it. Exploring the concept of Hobson's Choice in tabletop games, how to identify them, and when they are a good (or bad) part of a game's design: www.skeletoncodemachine.com/p/hobsons-ch... #boardgames #ttrpg #gamedesign 🎲✂️

This weekend you can find our game The Old Ways Must Go at Origins booth #1203, courtesy of @ipr.bsky.social For more in the Tarot for Transformation series of 'zines, visit www.mothspire.com/publishing/t...

This is the kind of thing that makes me extremely happy

Want to see me perform in Much Ado About Nothing this weekend? Info here! mailchi.mp/c96983537051...

The Japanese artist Masayo Fukuda hand-cut this incredible life-sized octopus from one sheet of paper. Known as Kirie in Japanese (translated as “cut picture”), the traditional art form involves cutting intricate forms from a single sheet of white paper and contrasting it against a dark background.

Hour 6: “Will the Senator yield for a question?” “I will yield while retaining the floor.” “My question is twofold. First, would you consider ‘Godzilla’ horror or sci-fi? Two, how much credence do you give to the idea that Honda took inspiration from ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ when he was…”

Hey, I need to prep y'all.... Five Fires is coming to Kickstarter in a few months. I will need folks to get on the notifications sign-up when I post it this week. Get ready please!!!

In the 14th century, someone who didn't have a highlighter handy thought to use octopus tentacles to mark the most important parts. I love it so much (Manuscript from the Bankcroft library, UC Berkeley)

We’re at Gameface this weekend in Baltimore! Stop by if you’re in the area? www.gamefacecon.com/2023/09/blog...

Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government - defector.com/billionaire-...

Trans rights are human rights. Also, I care way more about potentially working with Marceline and other great designers, etc. than “offending ‘potential customers’.”

This is one of the best reviews of a board game I've ever seen. youtu.be/xJApU3RRNhs?... It's especially valuable for designers working to understand what kinds of theming goes with their mechanics; and why cheap theming or the dismissal of "oh the publisher will just retheme it" is a cop-out. 🎲✂️

I have recently solidified a negative opinion of a game company I’ve had for a while now. Unsurprising but disappointing. Related, I don’t believe that it’s the onus of the comedian to explain the joke if some people don’t get it. Especially when most of the audience does. #vaguepost

Free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for use in prototypes

I watched Pacino’s “Scarface” tonight; had never seen it and it’s leaving Netflix. The most striking thing for me was how much and how clearly Daft Punk was influenced by Giorgio Moroder, who did the soundtrack. Also: so…much…brownface.

Apparently the history of the US Supreme Court is “too sensitive” a topic for Meta/Facebook so they have pulled advertising. How awful to have an educated and informed populace! Fortunately you can still back this game directly on Kickstarter. www.polygon.com/news/492507/...

I don't know who needs to know this, but Pro Publica has an online thing that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial. (which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases) projects.propublica.org/claimfile/

Welp. I won't be pledging to any projects using Gamefound after this recent experience. More specifically, any platform that decides it should charge me some small change for taxes when I don't have any physical rewards being shipped.

This. This is good.

To be clear, I was reading the NYC ballot proposals which are all bullshit except for the first one.

Hey👏 @draknek.bsky.social (+ sponsors) is offering 6 grants of $15,000 each to make thinky games (puzzle, strategy, etc). No strings attached, this is not a publishing deal. The deadline is in a month. You only need a tiny prototype and 5 minutes to fill a form. grants.draknek.org

Big Love for Scrivener. One of the best apps I own.

Olympic Breaking is giving me life.

Today I learned that my cousin’s uncle was the screenwriter for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and that my uncle (that cousin’s father) had been offered a role in a sequel that eventually went to some guy they found in a bar….Matthew McConaughey. 🤯

Have finally started fulfilling Old Ways Must Go. ::whew:: also, why is this so annoying and difficult. (oh, it's because most of these tools actually kinda suck -- looking at you Dropbox Transfer).

For my first @bloomberg.com feature, I tried to answer a question that everyone I know has had for years: Is locking up everyday stuff like toothpaste and deodorant doing more harm than good to retailers like Target and Walgreens? (Gift link!) www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Disappointed that a place that I had really liked buying custom stickers from, sent me pro-Trump propaganda. Anyone got my new fav place to get custom stickers?

@kevinkulp.bsky.social forwarding relevant content: bsky.app/profile/simo...

Oops new project...

"When efficiency comes with upward wealth redistribution, our recommendations frequently become little more than a license for plunder." TL;DR: Economics is broken because it quit paying attention to the tenet of social justice. www.imf.org/en/Publicati...

Awoken to discover Meta has added AI searching to insta; and I actually found a good use-case! I told it not to show me dogs, ever. If your response to this is to want to show me cute dogs, please reconsider doing this. I had a panic attack last night caused by a dog in my building. So, just don’t.

I have caught myself using an awful lot of war/military/firearm-related cliché analogy language recently. I'm not thrilled about this and I've decided I'm going to be purposeful about shifting the words I use. Sports analogies are on the chopping block too, but lower priority.

Such a good article. It absolutely nails one of the biggest problems with defaulting to meaningless good reviews, describing them as "participation trophies" for companies making bad products. Don't buy garbage. The only people who benefit from it are people who are investing in garbage.

These comments really matter. Even if it’s just a sentence saying: do this. Agencies count them up and characterize which types of organizations respond and if they are positive or negative.

highway to the danger zone? please. what this city needs is free and accessible public transit to the danger zone

Be safe out there, firebenders.

An earthquake AND an eclipse!? In this economy?

I'm compiling a Bluesky list of women in the board gaming/tabletop gaming industry. If you know of a woman who should be added, pls let me know: bsky.app/profile/debb... (click ABOUT for info & user list so far) #boardgaming #boardgamedesign

Hunting for Easter Eggs with Werner Herzog

Mental note. As much fun as going out and spending a long evening out with friends is, it is a WHOLE THING to also have a 5am coop shift the next morning. I should be posting this from a nap, tbh.

Kickstarter's bizarre blockchain announcement in December 2021 makes so much more sense now that we know Andreessen Horowitz secretly promised them $100 million to pivot to a blockchain-based product built on the also-a16z-backed Celo blockchain. fortune.com/crypto/2024/...