A Quiet Saturday

Saturday at last, after a particularly intense week. Work sent me to a trade show in Birmingham that threw most of my week off course, but at least I managed to finish chapter nine of the novella I’m writing, provisionally titled “This Isn’t Another One of Your Fucking YA Novels”. Today is the first genuinely free day I’ve had — or rather, the first free hours, which I’ve used to write up everything I learned at the show (work, and therefore boring), but also to do a few other things.

In the morning I improved Ligeia, my audio management software, which I use for my roleplaying sessions. Over the years I’ve ended up designing my own programs, tools I build as I need them and that usually only I use, as part of a sort of personal movement called “Build Your Own Shit”, which consists of writing your own software instead of using someone else’s when theirs doesn’t convince you. Not just to save money on the millions of micropayments we all have, but also to learn and to tailor the experience.

I also took the chance to watch a movie that had caught my eye, Resurrection (Resurrection (2025) - IMDb), a work halfway between science fiction and Chinese fantasy that I’d been wanting to see. I liked it overall, though I’m afraid I missed some of the subtleties because I don’t have a good grasp of the Chinese sensibility, which is at times different from the Western one.

While walking my dog I listened to a few episodes of Changeling the Podcast, trying to learn a little about that corner of the old World of Darkness. I want to add changelings to my Mage 20 campaign “Berlin in Darkness” and, although I own the Changeling 20th Anniversary book, I’d rather first hear what people who’ve been playing for years have to say, to get a feel for it. I did the same with Mage: The Podcast, and I imagine that in the future I’ll do likewise with Werewolf and, if I can find them, with Vampire, Wraith and whatever else turns up. This campaign has been running since the 2020 lockdown and the truth is I’m quite fond of it — maybe I’ll write a post about it soon.

Speaking of which, one of the things I have lined up for this afternoon is precisely to revise one of the old Mage scenarios, Victoria Station, though that might be going into too much detail and I don’t think it would interest anyone much anyway. I’ll spend a few hours doing the research and building that setting and, maybe, making a digital map once I have it clear in my head, though that will take Time (capital T).

So yes, I think this could count as a blog entry: a few interesting things I’ll be doing today and will carry on with tomorrow morning, before the Pathfinder Second Edition campaign I run, Kingmaker, or as Eslizo christened it, Alzarreyes.

Not much more to add. Let’s see how it goes.