After successfully getting through what one would call a hell week, I have put together another collection of blog posts I enjoyed reading. Maybe you’ll find something to add to your RSS feed reader. If you don’t have one, use one! It’s just so much easier to have them all scooped up into a feed reader instead of having to constantly check social media. I use Inoreader but there’s plenty of RSS feed readers out there. Apologies if there are lots of typos in this, I wrote it after only a few hours of sleep. But I must talk about blogs!
Books
Transfer Orbit recommends 14 SFF books that are coming out this month.
the Lunar Flaneur always has great reviews of books. I think it’s more of a focus on SFF books but not always. This time it’s a review of the graphic novel Glass Town.
Dev Logs
I follow lots of game devs through their blogs. Here’s what some are up to:
Edenwaith released a remake of the slot machine from Space Quest 1 for the Playdate.
Harris Powell-Smith has released the interactive fiction story Honor Bound.
David Lindsey Pittman gives an update on Eldritch 2.
M.H. Miller talks about writing a Twine game.
It would mean a lot to me if you could give to Rob’s GoFundMe. He’s been so supportive of other folks in the past and his games over the decades have given me a lot of joy.
Tabletop RPGs
The BLOGGIES are open for nominations! It’s a yearly awards event to celebrate blog posts in ttrpgs.
There’s been so much talk about blog posts in the Prismatic Wasteland discord. Highly recommended if you love ttrpgs and blogs. Here’s some of the recent posts that I saw in there:
I love this explanation of how to play ttrpgs by post, including through Discord. I recommend doing this if you really want to play ttrpgs but are just unable to coordinate the regular meetup sessions because of real life.
Playful Void explains what Forsaken Easter Eggs are. The blog has also been doing regular critiques of ttrpgs.
Fool’s Pyrite gives their final impressions of ICON.
Video Games
Indie Tsushin has released its latest issue. The issues are readable in the browser and each one covers indie games from Japan and features interviews with game developers.
The Digital Antiquarian has a nice interview with interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin.
Press Play Gaming has been doing a ridiculous amount of GOTY lists this month, with a focus on indie games in every genre.
Renga in Blue did an incredible comparison between the original version of Colossal Cave Adventure and the Dungeons & Dragons campaign that inspired it.
Here, have an article on reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format for the Sega Genesis.
Brain Baking says you should hang out with the DOS Game Club and I agree.
Are you feeling down because of the winter weather? David at startmenu talks about how playing old rpgs is comforting to him.
Websites
Obviously you know by now that I have lots of opinions on websites and why you should have your own. It turns out that a lot of other people do too!
Nora tell you to make a website, why, and how to get started.
Jared riffs on Aftermath’s article about building your own site to say that you must also visit other websites.
Not a new post but From The Hart explains why you should use a RSS feed reader.
A blog post I saw in the Prismatic Wasteland discord that I mentioned earlier, it turns out you can use Bluesky as the commenting system for your blog posts. While I have my own opinion on this and think you should have your own commenting system on your site to have full control over it, it’s still cool! Not trying to start discourse! It’s neat and I wouldn’t post it here if I thought it was bad. The post itself has the feature enabled so you can see how it looks at the bottom of the post.