It’s the beginning of the month, which means new stuff is on Criterion Channel. It’s also when The Collection Chamber uploads new abandonware games that has been configured to work on modern versions of Windows and man there’s some real weird ones this time. I hope you find some new sites to add to your RSS feed reader this week. If you have a website, consider adding a RSS button to your site so people can easily add it to their reader.

TTRPGs

Over at Mindstorm they write about creating settlement-oriented sandboxes that players will find engaging.

Photography

I liked these photos taken of a snowstorm on the 3DS at The Works of Egan and I wish we got one final snowstorm for the year here too.

Politics

Sarah Gailey writes about the horrible H.R. 7661 bill and how folks in the US can fight it from passing.

Video Games

I subscribed to Jank and Mothership this week, which means I’ll probably be posting a lot about them for a long time. Did you know Jank had a nice writeup about the very good Treachery In Beatdown City?

I also loved Video games need to do better than treating skin like skins by Wallace Truesdale on Mothership this week.

Anyway, with games outlets and journalism just going through…..a lot, it’s fun subscribing to some writers to support them and also get a lot of nice benefits at the same time.

No Escape writes about that Marathon game that’s coming out very soon and its weird history. Even though PVP fps games aren’t for me at all, I’m still hoping it shapes up to be something interesting. Also come hang out on the No Escape forums and post about indie games. I would like to see more folks there.

I’m a big fan of Read Only Memo, a newsletter about emulation that comes out twice a month. The most recent one is about the Triforce arcade hardware platform that Nintendo made with Namco and Sega.

Jordan Minor at PC Mag writes about 24 Indie Video Games From Developers of Color. Fun to see some games I love being highlighted and plenty of games I never knew about. Adventure game fans, listen to this list and go play the free game Dot’s Home.

Andrew Plotkin has been Infocom releases into context and talks about what was going on with the company in 1989.

Over at The Imaginary Engine Review (and yes, I copied their text from their bluesky post) ‘Librarian and researcher Talita Valle delves into “the rolling stacks of digital archives” and offers a nuanced analysis of B.J. Best’s LAKE Adventure. They remind us of the importance of paratexts and Barthes’ concept of the indexicality of a cultural object of expression, such as the IF.’

Ok, the bit I won’t steal from their post is that TIER has been doing a lot of good interactive fiction crit and people should go check it out. It feels so rare IMO for any games outlet to talk about interactive fiction so I really appreciate when we see it.

RoJo Aventuras covers a lot of the adventure game demos in Steam Next Fest.

Chuck Jordan, who has worked on games such as The Curse of Monkey Island, Sim City 4, and Sasquatchers, has a big blog post on his blog about the Sim City series and how much single changes can impact the whole game.

Writing

I also like the newsletter by Charlie Jane Anders and in her most recent one, she talks about how book criticism has been dying. Not the most fun topic but an important one.

Robert Tinney recently passed away so 70s Sci-Fi Art collected a lot of his covers he created by BYTE Magazine.

That’s all for today! Maybe you’ll find a new website to get excited about and tell your friends.

A smaller one this week. A few days ago in the indie roundup I mentioned that it had been getting warmer but we’ll probably get another snowstorm or two before winter ends. Well, it’s snowing right now. Hopefully you discover a nice new site to add to your RSS feed reader. Discord continues to make bad decisions so I’ve been posting more on forums and enjoying that. I mostly hang out on DOS Game Club (DOS games), Paper Cult Club (ttrpgs), and No Escape (games crit/indie games). I know that Adventure Game Hotspot and IntFiction (interactive fiction) also have active forums that I should check more too. It’s just nice when communities own the platforms they run on.

Anyway, here’s some websites.

Video Games

New video game sites Jank and Mothership both have indie game roundups this week. Good stuff! Mothership has one of games you can finish in one sitting and Jank does a weekly one of new games.

I never played Doshin the Giant so it was nice reading about it here.

I really enjoyed the new game Aerial_Knight’s DropShot and hope to write about it soon, but this review is better than anything I’ll write about it anyway.

Lotus praises the indie game MOONROT on her new site.

The designer of Angeline Era has 6 Tips For Making Angeline Era-style Exploration

Music

If you live in the Ann Arbor area, consider adding Pulp to your RSS feed reader. It’s run the the Ann Arbor District Library and covers new music by local musicians all the time.

Poetry

Two of the poetry sites I follow released new issues this week. Beestung is a quarterly magazine for non-binary, genderqueer, and two-spirit writers and readers and has arrived with Issue #26. ALOCASIA is a journal of queer plant-based writing and just published Issue #17. Both are free but donations are encouraged.

Food

I like when blogs and personal sites post recipes, so enjoy this recipe for Raspberry Cheesecake Brownies.

That’s it for this week. Hope you continue to have a good weekend.

I wasn’t going to do these on a weekly basis again but there ended up being a bunch of interesting posts and the list got long very quickly. Consider adding the ones you like to your RSS feed reader. I use Inoreader but there’s lots of good ones. Or add links to things you like on your own website.

The Bathysphere is a weekly video game newsletter featuring short essays and links to other games and writing. I keep thinking it’s new but at issue 44 it means it’s almost a year old at this point.

The devs at Nice Gear Games now have a blog if you want to see what they’re up to.

The yearly ttrpg blog awards The Bloggies have nominees, if you want to read a billion good posts about ttrpgs.

I forgot to include this in my indie game roundup, I’ll do it next week, but the creator of Bitsy has now made a tool for writing interactive fiction for Casio calculators using Twine.

Two years ago Cabel Sasser gave a really good talk about preserving a mural at McDonalds before it was going to get destroyed and now he has a blog post expanding on it. It has a link to the talk, which I highly recommend.

Andrew Plotkin wrote about the combat system with the troll in Zork 1.

Syl has a nice roundup of video games, interactive fiction, and ttrpgs played in January.

Robert Yang wrote a blog post about the future of games festivals and non-commercial games culture since the oldest games non-profit in the world, Freeplay in Australia, is running into financial trouble. I also like that it is also wants to preserve some of the discourse happening around it on Bluesky, since games discourse can happen so quickly and then be forgotten.

And finally Lone Archivist has a post on how to make more affordable miniatures for your tabletop skirmish game.

That’s it for this time. Hope you found something cool. With Discord making lots of bad decisions lately I’m also spending more times on blogs now and have been mostly hanging out on DOS Game Club, where it’s ZZT month, No Escape has launched a forum, and Paper Cult Club continues being a great place for ttrpg discussion.

I haven’t done one of these in a long time because I didn’t have time but I could still do these on a monthly basis or something. There’s just so many new websites that keep popping up even though a lot of people think the internet is just five websites these days. Maybe you’ll enjoy some of them and add them to your RSS feed reader of choice, or feel like giving a shoutout to a website you like.

Music

Yaffle reposted a Cohost post about the “Brit-Rock” Period of the DIY Indie Rock Scene in Russia (2007-2009). Maybe you’ll discover a new old band to listen to.

Tabletop RPGs

Prismatic Wasteland has announced a new Blog Bandwagon, where ttrpg folks are encouraged to write about maps.

Wannabe Games just started a newsletter that you can add to your feed reader or subscribe to. The latest is about their newest Zine Month game and playtesting.

Technology

Bandcamp Friday just happened again two days ago, meaning I bought too much music again and posted about self hosting music. Someone has a much nicer and more elaborate blog post about their process. Mine is different and not in the cloud but I think it just shows how many ways it can be done.

Video Games

First I’d like to give a shoutout to Jank and Mothership, two new video game websites that launched in the same week that I think are worth a follow.

Wilco Web has been working on a fan site for the Space Quest series, which involves including fan games and adventure games influenced by it. It turns out that there’s a lot of games inspired by Space Quest, including a ton I never heard of.

Lotus has a new website for indie games called Dialed Indie. Poke around and add it to your RSS feed reader.

Nicole Carpenter wrote an article for Aftermath about a report Dr. Jess Morrissette and Dr. Megan Condis wrote that gathered almost “3,000 print ads from the console wars era to analyze whether the popular narrative that “Sega was for rad teens and Nintendo was for babies” actually holds up.” You can read that for free here.

One day I should play Ys, but this article on localization for Ys 1 is still worth reading even though I haven’t.

Sandy Duncan, founder of YoYo Games and why we have GameMaker Studio, recently passed away. Mike Daily wrote about his friend and posted lots of photos of him working on games stuff.

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation recently placed a lot more rules restricting the usage of LLMs in writing games for IFComp (yay) and a judge wrote a lot more about that in a post titled LLM Slop Will Make Us Antisocial.

Save State has A Lore Dump on Two Obscure Magazines, a post about two PC gaming periodicals from the UK that no one seems to know about.

Writing/Books

My local library did a post on how they showcase teen titles.

I Might as Well Explain the Joke is a very nice blog that goes into the history of cliched jokes and tropes. This time it’s about Underwater Basket Weaving.

It snowed a lot here last night, which seems to be exciting for me and literally no other adult. From looking at the week ahead, it seems like it won’t melt soon and we may get some more on top of that. Again, only a thing I enjoy but I will enjoy it quite a bit. As I write this I am listening to the last episode of the Reggae Schoolroom radio show on WFMU. Public radio is great. This week is going to be extremely heavy on video games posts but maybe you’ll find something new to add to your RSS feed reader or feel compelled to share things you’ve enjoyed lately in a post. The internet might feel small because of it revolving around a handful of social media sites but there’s still lots of folks with their own websites.

Video Games

Chuck Jordan, one of the writers of Curse of Monkey Island as well as many other games, praises the new point-and-click adventure Foolish Mortals despite not actually being a big adventure gamer. He also just got around to, and enjoyed, Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn.

Speaking of adventure games, the adventure games convention AdventureX just happened and a few folks have posts about it. Jana from Rat King wrote about showing Mops & Mobs and The Point n’ Clicker has a few posts covering the event. Both have lots of photos.

Remember Valve’s Ricochet? Well, erysdren digs into the release date listed for it.

Interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin has thoughts on Microsoft making the source code for Zork 1-3 open source.

No Small Games has their monthly indie game roundup, in podcast form.

Retro XP reviews Bonk’s Adventure for the Game Boy. As a child I was weirdly really jealous about the Turbografx folks having Bonk, despite owning a Nintendo console? I don’t really get it now that I think about it. Yes, clearly Bonk games did come to Nintendo consoles but I didn’t consider them to be “real” Bonk games.

Misty talks about a bunch of games from IGF 2026.

The History of How We Play figures out the release dates for some very early crpgs.

Eric, designer of the very good Virtue’s Heaven, has thoughts on Evil Game Design.

Gaming Alexandria uploaded scans of the Scatcher manga and other fun bits connected to the game.

Rob has a really nice writeup and fan art for the indie game Snake-A-Roid.

Indiepocalypse has started hosting writing features. This one is about Hana’s Light and Blink and how they relate to the ways we view the world through technology.

Oma writes about the weird death mechanic in the 2004 ps2 game Malice.

Dev Logs

I mentioned Mops & Mobs earlier in this post. Well here’s a dev log for it. You can check out the current version on Itch.

Laura Michet has a post about writing for the upcoming Young Suns, which I think looks fantastic.

Michael Coorlim makes a small game for the Retromancer collection.

Michigan

Ryan has updated his community giving guide if you’re looking to donate to charities in southeast Michigan.

Michigan!/usr/group has their next virtual meeting on December 9. The topic for this month is IPv6.

TTRPGs

I goofed and forgot to collect good TTRPG posts but here’s one I liked, Pocket-Sized Powder Kegs. It’s about micro-scenarios.

Writing

The Golf Shrine, a website dedicated to golf video games, makes up a bunch of golf films.

Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup hosts writing from Amal El-Mohtar on birdwatching and the loss of a friendship.

Food

It’s not a blog post but I liked this article at Eater about writers talking about growing up with parents who owned a Chinese restaurant at Christmas time. One of the writers is Curtis Chin, who wrote the very good memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, which was about growing up in Detroit during the 80s, being gay, and working at his parents’ restaurant.

Technology

Someone just published a simulator of a 1961 relay computer that runs in your browser.

It’s currently snowing for the first time this season and I’m very happy about that. I love snow, as long as it’s not happening in March – October, and never complain about getting more.

Here are some blogs posts I’m recently enjoyed reading. Consider subscribing to them or adding them to your RSS feed reader. If you’ve never used a feed reader before, then I think Inoreader is an easy one to start using and is free until you start adding tons of feeds. I also think you should consider making a blog, newsletter, or website if you don’t have one already.

If you enjoy this post, my daughter’s Girl Scout troop is gathering donations for local food banks and any money is appreciated. As you can see if you scroll down, money donations can go a long way for food banks.

Video Games

If you’re new to interactive fiction then you may like this guide explaining the different types that exist.

Speaking of IF, Wraithkal talks about the upcoming competition Spring Thing.

The Imaginary Engine Review discusses Interactive Fiction’s Retrofuturist Roots. They’ve been writing a lot about IF lately and I recommend going through their archives to read more of their writing.

schledorn gives a shoutout to various Game of the Month clubs, including my Adventure Game Club which is doing a salami(?) theme this month.

Aura talks about various indie games entered into the IGF this year.

I’ve mentioned Myst Online billions of times here but I think it’s neat that this MMO that was never commercially successful is still alive and doing tons of community events every month.

I also liked GlitchOut‘s Hot Pig Jump! and How to Run a Successful Games Website Business (or How to Don’t)

Michigan

Yep, here’s some local stuff that might not seem relevant to 99.9% of the people that are going to look at this but I think is still worth a look.

The Ann Arbor District Library has a website reporting on fun local events, music, theatre, etc. and does a nice regular post on recent music releases from local musicians.

I can’t recommend the creating.care newsletter enough. The latest one talks about building housing, social justice issues, and Halloween being extra cool when there’s no copaganda costumes this year.

If you’re a local Linux or Open Source nerd, maybe you’ll like the Michigan!/usr/group virtual meetups. This Tuesday they are having a meetup titled Keeping Your Android Secure and Snappy: Exploring GrapheneOS and LineageOS.

TTRPGs

Prismatic Wasteland has announced a new blogging topic for everyone to participate in. This time it’s everyone writing their own Hex.

Clayton Notestine does far better ttrpg link roundups than I do in The Explorateur: Issue #13.

Music

No Escape has a ton of music recommendations if you like punk and hardcore.

Dev Logs

Eniko, the developer of Kitune Tails and Midboss, explains the block game they’re working on.

Writing

I’m so excited for Grayson’s new blog I Might As Well Explain the Joke, which goes into tons of detail explaining jokes. The first post is about all the Elvis is Alive jokes we saw everywhere in the late 80s and early 90s.

My friend Shea Socrates wrote a poem. Check out Waspmobile.

Tech

The Works of Egan has a very fun mockup of what Neocities would look like on floppy disk.

I haven’t done one of these in a while! I really need to do non-roundup posts but I like pointing people to other websites that I like since it maybe makes the internet feel a tiny bit less small? Anyway, if you see something you like, consider adding the site to your RSS feed reader.

Technology

Speaking of RSS, this explanation of RSS and recommendations of feed readers is really good if you’re up for reading a longer explanation of them.

If you’re interested in starting your own blog, consider My Cool Blog by The Works of Egan. My Cool Blog is a starter template for setting up simple personal websites and blogs with 11ty.

You could also follow this guide to Create your own free & portable website (for non-techies).

If you are a fan of The Computer Chronicles Revisited, the blog covering the classic tech show The Computer Chronicles, you may have missed that it moved to a new address. You can (and should) follow it here.

Leaded Solder walks us through the process of repairing an Apple III that a mouse peed in.

Games

The Space Quest fansite The Virtual Broomcloset (one of the first video game fansites) just got a massive update to celebrate its 30 anniversary and I’m just digging through the entire site and having a great time

No Escape is planning on focusing more on indie games and not covering AAA games at all in 2026, so give them a follow and/or supporting their patreon.

I liked hearing Brain Baking talking about how Warez was really important to them for games discovery. I had a kinda sorta similar experience so I can’t really get mad when I hear about games piracy, although I imagine no one is pirating my games anyway. But if they did, I would just be kinda amused.

Atari Archive continues doing great work going into the history of all Atari 2600 games so I was excited to see Boxing get covered since I played that one quite a bit.

The 1980s Mac game Continuum is now playable in a browser. There’s also a lot of nice fan levels you can play.

The Golfshrine continues to get updates and new games added to the site. If you have any interest in the history of golf video games, there isn’t a better website. You don’t have to be a fan of real golf either, the creator of Golfshrine certainly isn’t, video game golf is just really interesting to me even as a hater of real golf. They were also on the most recent episode of DOS Game Club to talk about DOS golf games.

Juan just deleted his Mastodon so add his blog to your rss feed reader if you want updates on the DOS games they’re working on.

Music

They Might Be Giants brought back the HyperCard stack they created for their album John Henry, in website form.

Gaming Alexandria goes into the history of a C64 type-in program featuring music by Johnny Ramone.

TTRPGs

Party of One, one of my favorite ttrpg podcasts, just celebrate 10 years. Both an interview show and excellent showcase of indie ttrpgs, the most recent episode is a discussion of the history of the show.

Tot’s Character Compendium is a great blog that reviews the character creation process of various ttrpgs. This week Tatiana covers the game Gravemire.

That’s it for this post! I’ll make more of an attempt to do these more frequently because a lot got left out but hopefully you found something new to follow!

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these but with Bluesky currently imploding because of its dipshit staff, maybe people will want some other websites to look at and add to their RSS feed reader. I’ve been using Inoreader since it has a solid free tier (although I pay for it now) and syncs everything I’ve already read through all the platforms I use it on, and adding sites to it is easy.

Creating Care is a new favorite newsletter I’ve subscribed to. If you’re like me and always feel compelled to be online looking at the news, maybe you’ll also find the latest post on staying informed without staying inflamed to be helpful.

My friend Steven, developer of games like WaveCrash!!, just started a newsletter where he will be posting his writing.

Video Games

Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia, recently had a post where he talks about all the ports of the first game and which ones are his favorites, which include some he wasn’t involved with.

Interactive fiction designer Andrew Plotkin covers the release of the remaster of the Making of Myst video that Cyan just released

Super Chart Island talks about the history of the classic UK computer game Monty on the Run which IMO has one of the greatest game theme songs in a video game.

A few months old but Syl’s Blog praised the multimedia cd-rom Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia so of course I have to mention that.

Also older but I need to include this post about the video intro at the beginning of some cd-roms that came with General Mills cereal.

Brain Baking has had a million good posts recently about card games but this one was how I found out about a fan remake of the card game in Might & Magic 7.

Sometimes you just like reading a post listing someone’s favorite ZX Spectrum games.

Ephemeral Enigmas is always reviewing retro games I never heard of, like this Gundam game for the Virtual Boy.

Tech

I think this post does a good job covering everything happening with Bluesky right now.

TTRPGs

Hosting your own mini-con is not as hard as you think!

Dev Logs

This guest post by Elissa on Ron Gilbert’s blog goes into the level design of their upcoming game Death By Scrolling.

erysdren is doing dev logs on making a new game for DOS

I’m also really enjoying the updates on Ben’s new point-and-click adventure

Writing

Yozy has been doing pixel art covers of the books they’ve been reading and they’re all very good.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these but Bluesky suspending accounts over the mildest posts reminded me that blogs and personal websites are good and should have more attention, so here’s some posts I liked. Since it’s been a while and I kinda of a backlog on my rss feed reader, there’s some older posts in here and other things not on here just because I haven’t read them yet. Anyway, if you like any of these blogs then consider adding them to your RSS feed reader!

If you’ve been bored with how this site has fallen off with indie game coverage at the moment, I feel like Wraithkal has always done a great job and is always writing about games I never heard of like Woodo.

Does anyone know about this Mystery McDonalds Machine?

Atari Archive can make anything interesting, even the history of a 3D tic tac toe game.

Dinoberry Press wrote a retrospective on their ttrpg Dinocar, which I’m a massive fan of and loved playing with my kids.

Michael Coorlim has been uploading lots of BASIC programs to a Bear Blog. He’s also been doing an epistolary Let’s Play blog of the games Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas on another Bear Blog. Both are great.

Andrew Plotkin analyzed the Hugos and how they do their game award.

Dhippo.net wrote about another Hugo.

Game designer Farfama wrote about playing ICO. Obviously I am a fan of people blogging about games after playing them and making it more of an experience than just “another game to get through in the backlog.” Which is probably another reason I’m grumpy about the site Backloggd.

It just makes me happy to hear that the Myst Online community is still active and doing meetups.

And finally I’ll end today’s post with some nice pictures of a dog. Hope you’re doing well and have had/are having a nice weekend.