Derik Badman's Journal

Two ducks in the creek that I walk by this morning. I never see ducks around here, but ███ had spotted some the other day. I guess these are the same ones hanging around. I don't know what they find to eat in the creek, I don't think it has any fish in it, maybe there are enough bugs.

We did a session zero of The Sprawl yesterday with Eric running. It's a "Powered by the Apocalypse" cyberpunk game. Character creation took quite a long time and has all these collective bits to it where you make up corporations and parts of the city. Eric started on the first adventure, but we didn't get far cuz I was tired of being online. I think once we hit the two hour plus mark it starts getting tiring especially if it's not really exciting the whole time which two hours of character creation is not. But I am curious to see how the adventure goes next time we play. None of us are that familiar with the rules for the style. I played Dungeon World once at a conference years ago, and I'm at least familiar with the rule style. It is a bit different than how we normally play, and in some ways it feels more abstract. The adventures seem really structured, in phases, which I think they took that from Blades in the Dark, a similar game.

Don't totally remember what else I did yesterday which is a bad sign. Some more reading some work on my website so there's finally a page up at top level domain. I converted one of my old comics that hadn't been put online on to JPEGs and posted it. It was originally in a print anthology but in black and white, so I never shared all the color versions. Turns out Gimp doesn't open CMYK color files, so I had to go into Krita to open them. Then Krita doesn't do a good job of making smaller JPEGs so I had to make tiffs and then open them in Gimp to make the JPEGs. What a mess. At least I know I can open those files since I don't have Photoshop anymore.

I also finished up rereading Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest, the final book in that series. It can be a hard read, there are lots of pastiches of things I am not all familiar with, and references to characters I don't know, and the pages in 3d are just godawful to read (and of course they have a lot of text). Like all Moore's work its very dense and formally audacious. O'Neill does a great job at all sorts of stylistic changes, though I do find the base line style for the series to be too angular and ugly. The ending feels kind of like a shrug. A lot happens and the world ends, kind of, and then for some reason two characters dance, even though one of the characters died a few books ago and is seemingly only brought back for that last scene. For a more interesting take on it (and what got me to reread it) see Brian Nicholson's essay at The Comics Journal from last July.