A Queer Milieu
Beginning again requires working outside a ready framework or canon. Beginning again requires sinking back into more inchoate feelings and sentiments, looser and less organized concepts, and galvanizing hopes and values. Beginning again, I experimented with some new and playful ways of divining, sometimes using spark tables and sometimes turning books into spark tables for reflection.
I am clearing out deep preconceptions that inhibit this. I am reminded of my experience with ayahuasca fifteen years ago, of the way the plant moved and gathered up all this detritus in my body that I then threw up. What I felt and saw as swirling morass of gears and keys and more, expelled in waves.
The axis of my fantasy shifts from the landscape of seriousness and pulp to a fusion of monumental, memorial black and a flurry of fabric color. The phrase "muppet mausoleum" captured the vibe early in the year, but now perhaps veering more toward "muppet masquerade," swirling through the streets and across stages. The dead in their most joyful and absurd finery.
The Land of Eem catches my eye, bringing the color that I so adored in a couple OSR projects in line with a world weighted with life. The sculptural blacks of Leonardo Drew's work captures this heavy memorial depth surging into our world to embrace and move alongside us. Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, counter to her purpose, intensifies my interest in the alternative forms of togetherness found in the Black studies "poetheory" she criticizes (Dionne Brand, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Kathryn Yusoff...among others).
I circle back through huffa's Between the Skies, still enamored with the clarity and simplicity she brings to role playing. I am tempted by Em Acosta's Crescent 2e for what play possibilities it might open. I return to Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues for its bracing vision of art and its limitations in the midst of atrocity. And still the sweet lesbian romanticism of Elsa Gidlow's Sapphic Songs does not feel out of place, weaving loving bodies into the animal and plant worlds she so loves, if we weave alongside the romanticism a tender grief over the ravaging of those worlds.
I am still poring through the critical apparatus available to me to think about role playing games artistically, and continue to find only flashes of what I need internal to the community. Reviews of specific games as well as design and play practices don't tend to intersect with or help me develop my thoughts on all this. I find hints and flashes of it in some of what Weird Writer is doing over on her blog; in Moyra Turkington's discussion of spotlighting techniques from LARP with Sam Dunnewold over on the March 18, 2025, episode of Dice Exploder; here and there in Thomas Manuel's work both on his own podcast, Yes Indie'd, and his work for Rascal News; Snow's discussion of genre in RPG's.
Robin's Cozy RPG Reviews often provide me with novel games and has led me to look at games I had heard about but might otherwise have passed over. I struggle a bit with Quinns Quest, often finding nuggets of critical insight in his work but applied to works largely out of synch with my sensibilities. No surprise given Quinns's stated goals of breaking folks away from D&D, establishing a high brand profile, and selling books, but still I chafe. I haven't discovered a game through Quinns, nor has it kindled enough interest for me to revisit a game I am a familiar with. Maybe I was secretly hoping it would fill a niche something like Paul Beakley's Indie Game Reading Club did for me back in the day?
That's enough for now. Out this post goes.