I do not have many opportunities of playing roleplaying games anymore these days – I live in a place in which RPGs are either too modern (because a lot of old people stick to billiards and games of cards, and consider weird any game with a thick rulebook) or too ancient (because younger people play massive online games and consider dice and hex paper quaint).
But I still like reading games, and last night I received a gift card for DriveThruRPG just in time to take advantage of a 40% discount campaign for DM Day.
So I looked into a few things I had on my list.
And I discovered Fantasy AGE.
Any way the wind blows
I like the work of Seanan McGuire, and tonight after dinner, when I finally decided, what the heck, I was going to read me something, I picked one of her short stories.
It’s called Any Way the Wind Blows and it is a small fun gem, filled with airships and New York and parallel universes…
I particularly like the way in which the author manages to pack so much into such a small, limited space.
You learn to watch for such feats of writing agility, when you make at least part of your living by selling short fiction. Short fiction requires agility.
I have Any Way the Wind Blows on Kindle, but you can read it online on the Tor.com website.
It’s a short story, and it will take just about half an hour.
But it’s great.
In the Red Zone
As of one hour ago, the Asti province – what I usually call Astigianistan – is Red Zone for the COVID-19 virus. Which basically means nothing is coming in or out of this place, we are invited to stay at home and not go around, because the infection is out of control.
All we can do is sit tight and wait – but really, if we have been infected already (I visited Asti twice in the last three weeks), there is little else we can do.
If nothing else, by staying put, if we are carrier of the virus, we will not spread it around.
For the rest, we have food for about ten days, and books to last us forever.
I’ll keep you posted.
Three bucks well spent
As I said, after spending a whole day writing, I have no energy for reading, and so I devote my attention to music or movies or TV to decompress after the long day.
But yesterday I blew 3 of my hard-earned euros for something different: a videogame, that hopefully will keep me amused during the quarantine.
As a Linux user, I spent most of the last fifteen years not playing on my PC – if we except playing Go on various online servers. But recently,m through the never-praised-enough Humble Bundle, I was able to restore my ages-old and never used Steam account, and buy a few games for real cheap.
Case in point, my latest purchase – 3 euro and change of Shadowrun Returns.
World Book Day Book Haul
So, it’s the World Book Day and you have just posted about the fact that you are having a real hard time because the writing you no longer enjoy the two quiet hours every night to read a book.
So, what do you do?
Well, after all, it being Book Day, you go and buy more books.
Which is exactly what I did, taking advantage of a small but much welcome Amazon gift card.
So here’s the list of what’s now on my Kindle, waiting for the day when I’ll be able to finally read it.
Ruritanias of today
As assiduous readers of Karavansara know, I have always liked The Prisoner of Zenda – I first saw the movies (first the Stewart Granger film then the Ronald Colman) as a kid, and only later read the novels, and the whole concept of a pocket-sized state tucked away in some nook of the European map is a classic of belle epoque adventure fiction: operetta-style places, with Old Europe pomp and circumstance, the odd Strauss waltz, dashing men in uniforms and women with daring necklines and corsets…
The whole “there is this small state in the Balkans” thing of course also worked in the early years of the Cold War – Eric Ambler wrote such sorts of novels, off the top of my head. Uniforms took a more Soviet-style, old German scientists lingered in the shadows, and women wore berets and tight skirts. Music became less Strauss and more Bernard Herrman.
Continue readingMaking time
It’s been a pretty frustrating period – while on one hand I keep getting offers and there seems to be no shortage of work to be done, on the other hand a number of things that were supposed to be pretty straightforward suddenly got really complicated.
I am still trying to nail shut a job that’s been draining up my energies for two months now, and with no end in sight, it looks like in the end it will be really hard to get paid. Granted, it is all part of the learning process, but sometimes one would rather not go through the school of hard knocks.
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