I have updated my profile pic for October. I think @pummell.bsky.social took this one at WGT. The t-shirt is supposed to read 'Too Fast to live ...'

Sometimes my brain unironically has thoughts like "Maybe I should write a TRPG, but live on Twitch." The thing is I don't need any more self-destructive hubris in my life right now. So instead I will do a podcast about it.

Yesterday I took a train down to the South coast in order to eat Thai food by the sea. Reading Russo's 'The Celluloid Closet' because this larp design requires research into the 'cinematic history of sissies.' Most of the examples are from the 30s and 60s but I suspect B Movies of the 50s hold more.

I deleted my academia edu account yesterday because of their new terms of use. I hope that whoever came up with their product strategy starts Monday morning like a teenager who has not done their homework walking to school in the rain with a heavy backback of guilt.

It has only been 12 weeks since we last went on this ride ...

More truth from Jonaya.

I am spending my Sunday going through the pitches for the 2026 KP Book. There are a lot of brilliant proposals in here. Some of them won't get written, it is always the way, people drop out or realise that the pitch and the research don't join up. I had one a few years ago that involved

(I'm engaging with geopolitics elsewhere) here, instead: larp theory rejects the fixed script: instead, it gives players a framework for improvisation, a set of tools for creating danger , calibration exercises, and trust structures. larp is not a composition performed, but a performance composed.

The is one week left to send in your idea for the KP Book 2026. This is an annual publication of thoughts and opinions, theory and practice, about larp, which started in 2001! nordiclarp.org/wiki/Knutepu... The KP Book 2026 and its theme "Season of Larp" is waiting for you!

One of my favourite larps from the past few years is being rerun! The Future is Straight is coming back next summer. This is a pitch black comedy about gay and trans conversion camps, the first queer community for many of the people sent there. straightfuturelarp.com

I have just coined the phrase 'An AI handful' as a unit of measurement, It is approximately the same as a handful, but also larger because it has extra fingers.

Well that's the article I have been writing with @happeningfish.bsky.social submitted. I'm rather pleased with it, but I guess we still have to face Reviewer #2 before it sees the light of day. The process of researching and writing has been a joyful one, and I think our ideas

There is only one week left to sign-up for the B Movie larp. Come and make movie magic with us next summer. www.bmovie.org

The KP Book 2026 needs you! We’re seeking contributions for the book that will accompany this year’s Knutpunkt conference, and we need your help! (KP is the annual Nordic larp gathering, this year it will be hosted in Sweden)

I'm rather pround of the design for this one, which means someone will find a typo in the next ten minutes ...

I am back from Immersion festival in the beautiful city of Turku, the spiritual home of hardcore immersionist role-play. I have been a wannabe rapper, a failed performance artist, and an entirely malevolent Faerie. Mainly I have been with my people, eating salmiakki ice cream in the sun.

“Gate info at 9:05” the metaliminality of airports summed up right there. I have found a place to chill and charge my phone - the train commute and the demands of The Owl mean I got through more battery than I would expect by 8:41.

Larper bookshelves, a study in storage and taxonomy

Who do I know who is going to be at Immersion next week?

Science Fiction Double Feature We are delighted to share the news that we have got sufficient interest in B Movie to open sign ups for a second run. This second showing will be June 7th - 12th 2026 (Tuesday-Friday)

This is always the fun bit, where the vision and structure are laid out for potential players to read and enjoy. It is usually followed by a series of really good questions to which the honest answer is 'good point, we had not thought of that!'

So this isn't Spotify or YouTube, but, here is a character playlist anyway www.mixcloud.com/simon-brind/...

Actually ya know what, I’d love to do a birthday giveaway 🤭🫶🏼 To enter: follow me, repost this, and comment below a Spotify or YouTube playlist for your character + a one line description for them Based mostly on the playlist, I’ll make a character design based off the vibes 🙂‍↕️

So I kind of posted this without context; this is something we started researching back during lockdown! Digging deep into the history of the period, and the films, and the people, (I know a lot about HUAC now.)

It is 1954 in Hollywood, a city built on dreams and shadows, a small group of passionate people are working on a project that will change their lives:for better or for worse. Burdened by their own consuming darkness, they will breathe life into a film that could be their redemption - or their ruin.

Merleau-Ponty’s "Ontology of the flesh" is not a zombie movie, but what if it were?

Hey folks, it's larp not LARP. Like scuba. In academic circles we fought pretty hard to use lower case letters on purpose. ✨

Currently working on "Beyond Method - Modes of Enactment and The Immersed Aesthetic" a paper that considers the relationship between larpers and performace / acting / drama. next in the queue is "Spontaneity is a Lie (But a Beautiful One) On Liveness, Agency, and the Myth of Emergence"

#pitchyagame A game about language, land, loss, and myth, Tales from the Mabinogion is a crafted and personal third-person adventure rooted in ancient Welsh legend, voiced entirely in the Welsh language. Wishlist on Steam now: store.steampowered.com/app/3067260/Tales_from_the_Mabinogion/

“The game begins where language fails. What remains is gesture, silence, presence.”

Seven years ago we made The Quota, a larp about refugees. It got covered by the Guardian. It made a lot of people angry. It still raises money for The Refugee Council (although not as much as it used to.) It has been translated into French and run there too.

Sometimes I talk to ghosts; it takes the edge off the loneliness; I am now discussing larp theory with one. “You thought this would fix it,” she would’ve said. “You thought meaning could be manufactured.” “You thought grief had a performance state.” Imagine being outwitted by a memory!

World Goth Day is trending. It was yesterday. This is profoundly distressing. Not checking the date is one of the worst things the internet has ever done, and I remember the Eternal September and Hampster Dance.

[World Goth Day] An excerpt from 'The Tao of Goth' A novice asked the master: "Sometimes I go out and have a good time and get sharked alot and sometimes I come home lonely and miserable. I have followed all the rules and social conventionsand I am totally baffled. What is the reason for this?"

“You need grief in there. Not as flavour — as mechanic.” She flipped her notebook around, showed me a sketch: a house with rooms labelled 'Memory', 'Silence', 'Regret.' "Players move between them, but only if they left something behind, but I never ran it,” she said. “I was scared it would work.”

What I am supposed to be doing: "examining the relationship between player agency and the notion of an 'emergent narrative.' In a larp this should not be understood as something organic unfolding, but rather as an effect of power-knowledge regimes encoded within the structural design of the game."

Here is a reminder that in, role-playing terms, bleed is just bleed. It is neither good nor bad, simply an artefact of intensity and imagination. When we imagine something hard enough our brain can process it as though it is real. For example imagine eating food and it is possible that you will

Sleep deprived notes written for a larp design at 4am: “We are going into the woods, not to escape, but to remember what it feels like to be changed.” I have been working on Greenwood Legends for 25 years. I have either worked out what it is about, or I haven't.

Site visits are exhausting but also energising. I am cooling my hangover in a hotel lobby waiting for half of Avalon to come down. Missing @sagalinn.bsky.social terribly

Wrote some reflections and a summary of yesterdays tabletop session open.substack.com/pub/justhalf...

I played my first ever TRPG last night thanks to @justhalfdan.bsky.social

Happy Star Trek Day!

from 2022, some answers I gave to Alessandro Giovannucci from Chaos League about my thoughts on the distinction between larp design and larp writing (More of a rant than coherent thought) docs.google.com/document/d/1...

@wonderlarp.bsky.social ...

I'm still hopefull for runs of this in the UK and in Finland, but who else is going to be brave enough to step into the shadows?

My talk from the IEN summit seems to be availalable now www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Vc...

Ten years ago today I got onto a coach in Berlin in order to go and play my first international larp. larp.guide/2015/04/coll...

The @avalonlarpstudio.bsky.social crew are heading to Poland next month to meet up with our friends at @wonderlarp.bsky.social to start work on a new project for next year! We've actually been working on it since 2020!

In parallel we are looking for locations in Scandinavia (ideally Sweden) that would work as a 360° representation of a detention centre. Somewhere with a bleak institutional vibe. I'm not sure if we can find anywhere like the Gaol in the UK though