One of the special perils of insomnia is that it's possible for me to do something unbelievably stupid before 5:30am, which generally means I'll need to fight for the rest of the day to keep my chin up.

Much love to MJF today, for reacting long enough to the chants (though they were probably offered out of love for Brody King) to turn the moment into a meme with fantastic traction.

I find when AI bros pretend they don’t understand or believe in intellectual property, it helps to call to their attention to how obscenely they watermark the junk they generate and how avidly they protect their most effective prompts.

I am pleased to report that the supermassive winter coat I bought for a job interview in Nebraska back in 2005, before I joined the faculty here at CMU, still fits.

Some days you write three paragraphs to cover road races in your #Ttrpg, and some days you commit three pages to rules for bondage.

I thought the Discord LLM boards were all but depleted of their value--but then some guy broached the subject of sharing his "art" with the woman who served as the model for his prompt-vomited dreck.

While the use and abuse of LLMs come with a host of red flags, there are few things more tragicomic than watching a gaggle of AI-addicted perverts trying to trick programs into generating personalized smut with reasoning and language skills too underdeveloped to deceive a toddler.

Spent twelve hours out of doors at a Floridian theme park and managed to avoid getting a sunburn. Still deliciously pasty after 20,000 steps.

I am already in peak holiday form, by which I mean I found three gift cards gifted to me on past holidays and birthdays while looking for a gift card I'd stashed for the missus.

I formerly attended to an AI-focused Discord channel to pick up tips and tricks for identifying academic dishonesty. These days I still skim it to watch image-generator addicts lose their ever-loving minds because permissions on their preferred engine of thievery have changed.

I am pleased to report that “The Rocky Road to Dublin” can be easily adapted into a Midwestern snow shovelin’ work song. The companion river dance, however, is not recommended.

Won't need a wrapped at year's end to know this was my most listened-to song by a longshot: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq6A...

Sometimes in the run-up to exam week I get to assign an A+ to a deserving student paper as a treat.

Tomorrow or Thursday I'll have everything graded but final exams, so my brain is currently 50% devoted to devising the sweetest possible origin for a sword in Chancers and the other half is refining the establishing and midpoint murders in that other thing I'm writing.

The peril of being a wizened academic in a neighborhood composed of many retirees is the guilt I feel for not offering shoveling assistance after a goodly snowfall.

Grateful today that I woke up at the same weight I weighed on Wednesday, and that I won’t have to cross the We Ain’t Buying It boycott lines to pick up two or three needful things.

I am pleased to report I stayed in my empty classroom just long enough today to redistribute the murders in Project W.

Playing mind tricks to convince myself to trudge to campus for the class no students will attend. Get to read Blades in the Dark Deep Cuts, which has me half persuaded.

I would be a subpar huckster if I did not avail myself of mine birthday to spread the gospel of Chancers: www.backerkit.com/call_to_acti... I'm rereading A Psalm for the Wild-Built and doing my best to cook in those vibes. I'd love to get more subscribers on the ol' mailing list this weekend!

Took my cordyceps supplement a little closer to bedtime than usual last night and was visited by scandalous dreams. Many thanks, fungal friends!

If you're a citizen of The Big Pleezy, the Missus is vending her delightful holiday wares at Morey Courts today. Or if you are a far flung creature of taste and good breeding, you can find her wares over at www.etsy.com/shop/luxdesi...

I am very sad to report that the Missus insists that I retire my go-to gaming shirt, a graphic tee that is no longer recognizable as such.

I have virtually no artistic training or experience, but when I need art, I never turn to the LLM grinders. I make art the way Them What Lives Beneath the River intended. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRPX...

Going to a Samhain soiree with a connoisseur who can spot real leather or latex fashion in a sea of pleather and PVC is a seriously underrated rite of pervy passage.

Getting ready to teach The Ballad of Black Tom to my fantasy and science fiction class, with "The Horror at Red Hook" already in the rear-view mirror. A helluva book for the hinge into November.

The Shawty is looking for our skeleton platter for a weekend Halloween party, which is a Whole Thing, for we dwell in a Halloween-rich environment.

The ingenuity with which my noggin devises things for me to be worried about is pretty impressive.

In our small town they drew about 2,000, or about 10% of the local population. The aerial photos and street-level photos look to my bleary eyes like tens of thousands at the very least.

My Botanist in Way Over His Head dodged death and gibbering insanity thanks to a series of dice rolls that dovetailed perfectly with unfolding events in @DeltaGreen last evening. And I've arrived at an exquisitely simple answer to a question that had stymied my revision of combat in Chancers.

Watching a movie billed as a "horror comedy," yet there's nothing even mildly funny in it. The prime suspect (wearing the killer's costume and carrying the killer's weapon) just died, and there's 45 minutes to go. So whatever happens next is sure to be either ridiculous/poorly plotted.

Caught up on all the grading I postponed as we sprinted to our wedding and fall break honeymoon. Now I need to turn the corner and work on thorny aspects of the combat mechanics in Chancers, finish off a promotion application, and resist the siren song of Secret Project X, not due till December.

Sometimes love means saving your bride the last piece of wedding cake, even though you're pretty sure she won't want it, given the caffeine and sugar content. And sometimes love means investigating squirrel skin conditions for more than an hour, so she won't worry too much about Lumpy.

My brain is stuck in a spin cycle as I try to envision the staging for the last scene in the spicy project. It's satisfying at a bunch of levels, but I want to make it gruesomely spectacular.

Rolled around the corner coming back from the wife's office and found myself behind a feller with the license plate HAVEL. Jolly cooperation, alas, did not ensue.

Outkicking my coverage, as the youth are wont to say. A+ officiant, A+++ bride, B- groom.

CMU Press is up to its old tricks--launching a few groovy new games into the stratosphere. Give them a look, won't you? www.backerkit.com/c/projects/c...

September 30th/October 1st

Today I should probably bail on the help I was promised two weeks ago by one of the Shawty's aulden friendfolk and settle the last half hour of the wedding playlist on my own.

Moving on up to another threshold of mailing list subscribers over at Chancers, so in the hopes of hurdling that line today, here's a link to the Abbey, where folk can find a prose/format sample and a glimpse of the worldbuilding in this community-minded game: wrackwellabbey.com/2025/09/15/c...

Always a little annoying when it turns out a WIP has a few vague resemblances to an existing property that's sold a couple million copies.

Today's jaunty juxtaposition involves an article on winning over lonely male voters (part of the Male Loneliness Crisis series) and an article on conservative men lying about or hiding their political beliefs in the hope that they might be able to bluff their way into a heterosexual relationship.

Writing wedding vows, and struggling to negotiate the fine line between the whimsical and the weird.

I am pleased to report that I made two Tylenol jokes in two classes today and they both landed as intended.

I was dead certain that the wedding poem I was looking for was to be found in Robert Bly's Selected Poems of Rilke, but lo, 'twas in the J.B. Leishman translation. My life has been a fib! Let this expiate!

The Shawty and I are winding down from a fantastic weekend, but we are two tuckered truckers.

Both of my go-to gaming shirts are in the laundry, which means I must entertain the terrifying possibility of The Third Shirt.

Working on Chancers (see my pinned post) in earnest for months, and I’m delighted to feature Emily’s art therein. A real pleasure to work with!

Pay a visit to the link and you'll find a few downloadable pages of Chancers, which will give you a player-facing feel for the haps in the Drifting Kingdoms! Please feel welcome to share far and wide with folk you think might be vibishly inclined! wrackwellabbey.com/2025/09/15/c...

Pay a visit to the link and you'll find a few downloadable pages of Chancers, which will give you a player-facing feel for the haps in the Drifting Kingdoms! Please feel welcome to share far and wide with folk you think might be vibishly inclined! wrackwellabbey.com/2025/09/15/c...

The new haps over at Central Michigan University Press!