Tag: media

• Gullet of the Rust Demon (June 30, 2026)

  At least half of my enjoyment of Gullet of the Rust Demon, a one-page, system-agnostic tabletop RPG adventure by Dan D., comes from the “establishing shot” of the dungeon exterior at the top of the sheet. The tufts of grass and single, stray flower, cartoonish as they are, do so much to suggest where some adventurers might come across this minimalistic dungeon’s entrance, and how quietly, temptingly anomalous it would appear.

• Project Lion (June 27, 2026)

  My friend and fellow New Yorker Francisco González launched a Buttondown-based newsletter last year to announce the release of Rosewater, the latest in his long-and-growing oeuvre of independently produced point-and-click adventure games. Having played and enjoyed that one over the intervening winter holidays, I was delighted to see Francisco start to use the newsletter as a development blog for “Project Lion”, the public code name for his current work-in-progress.

• Incident Report by Andrew Nesbitt (June 27, 2026)

  Andrew Nesbitt is a software engineer and package-management blogger who also writes excellent satire in the form of standardized industry documents, such as change logs and incident reports. I have discovered his fiction by way of Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM, a hilariously brilliant story of countless autonomous AI agents responding to a malefactor in the stupidest way possible, eventually “succeeding” by accident, and all written up an an after-action report.

• 2600 Magazine is charming (February 5, 2026)

  A couple of weeks ago, on an errand to fetch the bread and milk ahead of the winter storm expected to wallop New York, I sidestepped into the neighborhood Barnes & Noble to see if they had the latest issue of 2600, The Hacker Quarterly in print. They didn’t, but they did have the autumn 2025 issue, so I bought that instead. I love it.

• To Hell and Galgenbeck (January 5, 2026)

  This week finds me gearing up to run a session or two of Mörk Borg, a doom-metal role-playing game and tiny cultural phenomenon that I discovered in November. As part of my research and preparation over this past weekend, I came across To Hell and Galgenbeck, the official Mörk Borg webcomic. It’s pretty great.

• Button, Button (December 16, 2025)

  I am eating my way through a wonderful Penguin edition of the best Richard Matheson short stories, and just read “Button, Button”, the basis for my very favorite episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone revival. I didn’t know before yesterday that it was a Matheson original, but I’m not surprised; he also wrote the indelible 1960s Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, which I’ve written about elsewhere recently.

• Hidden messages in shiny covers (November 30, 2025)

  Two physical books I purchased while traveling last month, the RPG rulebook Mörk Borg and the Jeff VanderMeer novel Borne, have something in common on their covers, neither of which I discovered until well into my ownership of either: “secret” images or messages, applied in some kind of clear material that is literally invisible in direct light but shines when viewed obliquely.

• Could I get a hat wobble? (November 29, 2025)

  And a Flarhgunnstow?

• Down in the mörk (November 28, 2025)

  I spent last weekend at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia. It had been a long time since I’d last attended a tabletop gaming conference of any kind with my game-loving partner, and I pushed to have us attend this, both because-of and despite how it slotted perfectly between two other interstate trips that filled out most of November for us. We traded away a chance to catch our breath at home for several days of exhausting overstimulation that reminded me why I love non-digital games at least as much as video games, and caught me up on recent trends and innovations I’d been missing. It was a terrible idea, and I regret nothing.

• Weird guy makes me miss hyperlocal news (August 1, 2025)

  In June, West Side Rag published a story about a weird guy bothering women at a local cineplex. The Rag is an independent online newspaper that has covered street-level goings-on in my neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper West Side since 2011. Its story topics range from profiles of fresh political contenders to galleries of historical UWS photographs to rumors about new bagel shops. But something about the movie-pest story really struck me: it’s a good extremely-local news story, of the kind I remember growing up with in the previous century, reading in the local paper or watching on the local evening news, to name two things that don’t really exist any more in much of the country.

• Hooting Yard on the Air (July 31, 2025)

  A complete archive of Hooting Yard on the Air, hosted by the Internet Archive. Bizarre and beautiful short fictions, presented as half-hour radio shows, written and presented by Frank Key. Sort of a drily deranged Prairie Home Companion, with its locus in the murkiest boroughs of London.

• X SHIP (August 17, 2020)

  Zarf detailed a retroactively obvious but quite forgivable plot hole in Myst which nobody in that game’s fandom can recall ever having discussed before.

• “A Season of Grief and Release” (August 11, 2020)

  My relationship with New York feels like a darkly comic scene in a movie, coming after much buildup about the legendary heroism and greatness of some off-screen personality