Black Cats & Funerals

This is a new thing I'm trying, where I publish my monthly newsletter on Itch as well as a few other platforms. This is very much inspired by the way Evey Lockhart publishes her blog on this platform. I don't know yet whether I'll simply update this page each month or release a new post each month. We'll see.

tw: talking about death, and some brief politics

We're technically in the heart of winter right now, but we've moved out of the gloom of December and January and into weather that could trick you into believing it's spring. As I write this it's sunny outside. I can see crisp blue skies, frost on the ground, the puff of breath clouding around the heads of people walking past my window. This is very much my favourite type of weather.

There’s a cat who lives on my road. We see him all the time, and sometimes he sunbathes in our back garden. We’ve actually found Lucky lying next to him, both of them on opposite sides of our patio doors, chilling out together without being able to physically touch each other. It’s adorable. He’s black but has white feet, and so we’ve called him “Socks” for years. This morning I saw my neighbours, who he lives with, and so I went out to ask them what his actual name is. It turns out that Socks is his name. There’s no point to this anecdote other than that it’s fun.

February is set to be a month of funerals. This week we're burying an old friend of my partner's family, a woman who I've never had the chance to meet but who we were planning to invite to our wedding next year. That invitation will, obvuiously, not get posted now. At some point I'll also be attending the funeral of my uncle, who died last week.

I don't really know how to feel about his death, or even if I'm meant to feel anything at all. We certainly weren't close. The last time I saw him was at my dad's funeral last year, but before that we're probably going back 20 years. And yet it's undeniable to say that he had an impact on my life. He was the first person I ever met with tattoos, his arms full of old faded ink from his time in the navy. It's directly because of him that I'm so heavily tattooed myself. As kid I thought they were the coolest things I'd ever seen, and I started getting my own as soon as I was able to. I have very fond memories of being at his house as a kid. Now that he's dead I find myself wishing I'd known him better.

And yet, as always happens when someone dies, life has to go on for the rest of us. We take some time to grieve - or to figure out whether we need to grieve, at any rate - and then we sit down and clock in again. Such is life. There's no time to take a break, especially not in the modern world where life seems to accelerate to greater speeds with every passing day.

We're all aware, at this point, that America is fully in the grip of fascism. Elon Musk's salutes were exactly what they looked like, and Donald Trump is exactly the man those of us paying attention since 2016 said he is. Here in the UK Nigel Farage's Reform party continues to gather popular support. There seems to be no fucking escape from them, their rise feels inevitable, and it seems that every internet service will happily roll over and give them everything they want. I've previously written in this newsletter that I'm tired of being chased around the internet by Nazis and having to find new spaces that don't contain them, and that continues to be true. But I'm also not at all entertained by Substack's "Elon Musk is a defender of free speech" bullshit, and I know that there are increasing numbers of you who simply don't want to read anything published here. And I sympathise, and understand. I'm going to continue to keep posting here, because I can't afford to pay for an actual newsletter service, but I'm also cross-posting these newsletters to Patreon, Loot The Room, and my blog from now on. So if you want to keep reading what I have to say and don't want to have to do that on Substack, please choose one of those alternatives. (Or here on itch, now that I've decided to publish it here, too.)

Thankfully we'll always have art to fall back on, whether that's to help us make sense of the world or simply to entertain and distract us, at least for a little bit. This month I've been reading a lot (a more detailed wrap-up of all of that is over on my reading blog. Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night> is an old favourite that continues to be fantastic, and is increasingly relevant today. It deserves a place in the canon of dystopian fiction alongside 1984 and We. I'm also currently really enjoying Jennifer Croft's The Extinction of Irena Rey, which I'll likely write a review of on the reading blog when it's done.

I finally got Down In Yongardy finished. Yes, it's very late. I don't feel good about that. But I do feel good about managing to finish it. It's been the hardest project I've ever written. I can't wait for the print edition to be ready, though that's now out of my hands.

Yongardy being done does mean I can finally focus on some bigger projects again, though. I just did my taxes for 2023/24 and discovered that I only earned £18k that year, which is less than the current minimum wage in the UK. After all the expenses of running a business my actual profit was only a couple of grand, which goes some way to explaining why I've felt the constant existential threat of poverty again for so long. This is a problem of my own making, of course, but not being able to run a crowdfunder for so long has made life very difficult. Now that I can do that again, I'm hoping that Blood In The Margins will do well on BackerKit in March and make life a little easier for me. I'm partnering with Hatchlings Games, who are going to be crowdfunding the first season of GAST at the same time. If you back both projects you'll get a fun exclusive, which I'll be able to say more about once we're finalised the details of it.

Since it's February and that's as good an excuse as anything, I'm running a sale on the majority of my games, adventures, and soundtracks on itch. Everything is 50% off. I made a fun banner for it. It looks like this.

There are also two A Dungeon Game campaigns running at the moment, which is a weird thing to be able to say but one I'm very happy about. Fistful of Crits have successfully funded CALPINI, a horror module for *A Dungeon Game* that's also compatible with Mörk Borg*. And Nick Spence is going to be launching his hack of A Dungeon Game, A Heist Game on the 5th of February. I'll be doing book covers and layout for this thing, which I'm very excited about.

I also need to point you in the direction of Disposable Bags of Meat by Ex Stasis Games. This is a super rules-light game designed to play out horror movies, and it looks great. I've been a fan of the work that Chant and Lore do for a long time (and have worked with them a few times in the past), and I hope this does really well for them.

This is getting long now, so I'm going to leave you with the music I've been listening to in January. And, as promised, a photo of Lucky, who watched *Interstellar* for the first time this weekend and wasn't impressed.