Release The SRDs!

With everything going on in open gaming in tabletop RPGs right now, I have decided that I am going to release SRDs (system reference documents) for a couple of systems based on the Fudge role-playing game, to which I have the rights. I will be calling these the Crasher and Quest SRDs/systems. They will be derived from two game systems to which I own the rights. More details will be forthcoming, but the plan is to release each of these SRDs first under a Creative Commons license, and then probably eventually under the new ORC gaming license that is being developed. More to come!

Action-Heroes Is Coming!

After years of development and writing, along with more than a couple of pandemic-related delays, my Action-Heroes role-playing game is finally coming to Kickstarter next week. You can click here to sign up to receive a notification when the project launches next Tuesday.

I am really happy to have the game so close to the finish line, because I have put a lot of work into this system over the years, and I am really proud of the end result. Please sign up for your notification, and also please support the game's Kickstarter project. There are only supposed to be a couple of stretch goals, but they are going to provide some nice upgrades to the game if we hit all of them. 

Thank you all in advance.

Reading Grant Morrison's The Invisibles In 2023

Please note: This series is currently on hold. Over on the Facebook page for the blog I wrote this: "I know that one of the things I promised for the blog in the new year was an ongoing series talking about Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. I started a re-read with that intent, and as I read I realized that there have really been a lot of people who have covered this ground, and I am not overly sure that I have enough that is new or interesting to contribute to make the work worth the effort."

This upcoming Fall will be the 20th anniversary of my blog. I've tried to get more active in posting here over the last couple of years, but it has been difficult. The stress from online harassment really curtailed my desire to comment on things, but I really need to not let the harassers wins. So, I think the answer to getting more serious about writing here at the blog is to get more regimented about my posting.

One of my "projects" for the new year is going to be a re-read of Grant Morrison's comic The Invisibles, originally published through the Vertigo imprint at DC Comics. I don't know if the book is still in print physically or not (I have digital copies of the collections that I picked up on Comixology along with the original floppies) or what arm of DC Comics is handling it currently.

This post is going to set the tone for what I hope to do with this series of articles.

Kind of like with Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, I was not a big fan of The Invisibles at first, but for entirely different reasons. With The Sandman, I didn't really get into the book until it found its vibe around the time of the "Sound of Her Wings" story. I think that moving away from a direct involvement with the general DC Universe was a good idea for The Sandman. With The Invisibles the book just didn't grab me like other works of Morrison's had. The first arc of The Invisibles, dealing with the initiation of Dane McGowan into the group, had a "been there, done that" feel to me. I dove back into the book with the controversy over the second story arc, and found that the story clicked with me, and I ran with it until the end.

Probably one of the most difficult things to do in a new comic, with a new universe, is to create the feeling of an established universe right out of the box. This is something that comics have struggled with since there were comics. In regards to what a lot of comics readers consider to be an "established universe," it is really a build up of plot points that have more or less accidentally accrued around comic characters. A comic universe is like a build up of barnacles, or a growth of coral, where little bits build upon other little bits until a structure comes out of it.

I think that is why neither of these books clicked with me. For The Sandman that introduction leaned heavily into the DC Universe to provide the structure that Gaiman probably thought that his new universe needed, when really all that he needed was to push through far enough to get the growth of coral that eventually brought the Sandman Universe into existence. With The Invisibles, Morrison wasn't using an existing universe as a support structure, in the way that Gaiman did, but instead they leaned into the time honored "world outside your windows" approach that Marvel popularized in the 1960s, but they made their universe, the universe of The Invisibles as a group, much, much weirder than even much of the Marvel Universe was. 

The problem for me was that this weirdness really wasn't enough. Things like magic, "magick," conspiracies and UFOs have been an interest of mine for a long time. I blame 1970s TV as a kid for putting all of that weirdness into my head. This might upset some more diehard fans of Morrison's work, but like I said above it made me feel like that first arc was something I had seen before. Now, I am intrigued to be looking at the book from the perspective of a world where a lot of weirdness and conspiracies have become weaponized in our worlds (both online and off).

My approach for these posts will be to break things down by story arc. I haven't decided if the various one shot stories that appeared during the run of The Invisibles that Morrison wrote for various anthology books will be tacked onto a story arc that feels appropriate, or if I will write about them on their own. I don't know yet how in-depth I will go into things on these posts. Some will probably be explored more deeply than others.

What these posts won't be is a series of annotations and explanations about what happened in the various stories. Annotation posts have their place, and I've enjoyed them for a number of properties that also have a number of concepts that could need explaining to readers, but I don't really have the temperament to do those kinds of posts. This series of articles will be mostly my commentary and criticism. What I think works, and what I think doesn't work. There will probably be some explanations of material, but that won't be the focus of the series.

Will I get through the entire series with these articles? I hope so, but I can't make any promises. I don't know how frequently I will be making these posts, because they will depend upon my reading and working out concepts as I go along. Some arcs will probably take longer to write about than others.

Here is looking forward to the new year. It is probably appropriate, or at least a serious synchronicity, that I announce this on a Winter Solstice.

Where To Find Me

With the birdsite circling the drain, I am not posting there, accepting new followers or any active use of the site. If you want to follow me on social media, you can try the following sites.

Mastodon https://mas.to/@dorkland  (I have an account, but I don't use it actively)

Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dorkland.bsky.social 

Tumblr https://tumblr.com/dorkland

Instagram  https://www.instagram.com/chris.helton/

Discord  Christopher Helton#1676

Patreon https://patreon.com/dorkland 

I am not currently as active on all of these sites, mostly because I am trying to figure out how to use them. Mastodon has pretty much replaced my Twitter usage, and I am currently mostly Tumblr for looking at art people are sharing. But these are the places where I will publicly interact with others.

Some Action-Heroes FAQs

 

With the release of the ashcan edition of Action-Heroes by Outland Entertainment over at DriveThruRPG there have been a few questions that have floated around the internet and come to my attention, so I thought I would make a post of some of these questions to point people towards. I don't know how frequent these questions have been, but they have been asked about the game.

The ashcan is no longer available for sale now that the Kickstarter has launched.. The ashcan has everything that you need to play a game of Action-Heroes, but it isn't the complete game that will eventually be available on Kickstarter and retail. The final version of the game will also have a series of appendices that outline an alternate magic system for the game, go over some collaborative setting-building rules for groups that want to create their own worlds from scratch, and a series of examples that take you through the process of building powers and special abilities for your characters in the game.

Action-Heroes is something that I have been working on for a long time, and has its origins in a system that I was asked to build for a licensed tabletop RPG that didn't come to fruition, so the rights to the system stayed with me. It is a simplified and streamlined version of one of my earliest professional game designs, and I think it is a design that represents where I am today as both a designer and game player/GM. It uses a simplified ruleset that is augmented by the ruling of the GM, and the needs of the players, that come up during play.

The Shape Of The DCU To Come

Over at Newsarama, one of their writers talked about how many of the story seeds dropped by Scott Snyder at the end of his run of events at stories over at DC Comics didn't all pan out as expected. All of this is completely speculative on my part, as I have no idea where things are going to land.

This is what happens when 1) publishers rely too much on a treadmill of events to sustain interest, and 2) the architects of the big events don't stick around to sprout the seeds lain by their events. As Scott Snyder lead the DCU through Dark Nights, the No Justice Era and then into Death Metal, successive stories picked up what was being laid down because the writing architect was there threading the needle through the events and story arc. Then with Death Metal, Snyder laid out the after effects of his massive run...and then went off to do creator-owned books.

Chaos World Explainer

 

Cover mockup featuring stockart by Claudio Casini

Chaos World is my Fate-based fantasy role-playing game, currently in development. You can find drafts of Chaos World by backing my Patreon.

I have always said that I am not a big fan of fantasy fiction. That doesn't mean that I don't like it, but that my tastes in it are fairly limited. I am a big fan of the fantasy, and science fantasy, of British author Michael Moorcock, and to a lesser degree the works of Robert E. Howard (particularly Conan). 

Most of my interest in Howard came from the Marvel Comics adaptations of his works and characters when I was a kid. I love a good fantasy comic, and books like DC's Warlord also inspired me.

All of these inspirations flowed into my writing and developing Chaos World. The game itself has gone through a number of incarnations and systems over the years. Some people who have followed my blog or social media throughout the years may remember my early playtests of a game I called Demon Codex back in the G+ days. That was an earlier version of the game that I wanted to make. There have been a lot of inspiration from an old school Swords & Sorcery RPG that I am a fan of threading through the various incarnations of the game as well.

Safety And Tabletop RPGs

 

Photo by Serge van Neck on Unsplash

I have been gaming for a long time. I first started playing D&D back in 1979, when I was still in elementary school. I would have been a couple of years older than the characters in Stranger Things (I grew up in a small town in Indiana, too). When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s things were different. The general idea of dealing with things that were uncomfortable or dangerous was that you "sucked it up" and dealt with it.

Honestly? That's not a very good way to deal with things that can be potentially traumatic. So I think that one of the better advances that has come along in tabletop RPGs has been the development and increasing popularity of using safety tools in gaming. 

I haven't always been a fan of using safety tools while gaming, but I have seen the light. At this point I think that safety tools should be a part of your RPG's text, if you're a game designer. My Action-Heroes game (currently out in an ashcan edition PDF from Outland Entertainment) uses safety tools. My upcoming paranormal romance RPG, called Paranormal Friction, will have safety tools. Both games start at the same basic point with them, and Paranormal Friction puts on another couple of layers of tools.

So, what are safety tools?

Action-Heroes RPG Is Out In The World

 

Ahead of the Kickstarter to fund the printing of the physical book, we have finally released the Action-Heroes RPG into the world as a PDF (Note: Now that the Kickstarter is live, the ashcan is no longer available). This ashcan release is a playable version of the game, with all of the rules needed to play and a preview of the art that will be in the final book. The final book will have a full color wraparound cover as well.

Action-Heroes is the culmination of years of work in developing this system. I was running it at conventions in the Before Times, and I incorporated the feedback that I received into what has become the final text.

When I started up my game development Patreon during the early days of the pandemic, I started reworking the text into a game that I wanted to play (really, not making me all that much different from the many other game designers out there). I have posted some new material that I am developing for future releases for Action-Heroes as well.

In my background as a gamer, I have leaned heavily on "generic" games that can be used to realize a multitude of settings and character types, and this carried through into Action-Heroes. I took the lessons that I learned during years of running games like GURPS, Champions/Hero System, Heroes Unlimited, and the big gold book of Basic Roleplaying and combined them with evolving game design ideas and made them into something that I could run without things breaking down at the table.

Top Cow's Sara Pezzini, The Witchblade

 

Witchblade and Sara Pezzini are copyright
and trademark Top Cow.

Once again I am exploring 90s comics characters, and while she might not have been among the first wave of characters put out by Image Comics or Top Cow during that time Witchblade definitely quickly became one of the iconic characters of that era.

This particular writeup is a bit more modular than the previous Top Cow character that I adapted. You can take away the stunts dealing with sensing the supernatural and use the writeup to represent Sara earlier in her career as the Witchblade.

This is not intended to be considered to be an official adaptation of the Witchblade character, or a challenge to any copyrights or trademarks owned by Top Cow.

Cyberforce's Stryker For Fate

 I have a weak spot for a lot of the early Image comics, to the point that I want to make a role-playing game that's an homage to the comics of that era. I am going to periodically post conversions of characters from the comics on posts here on my blog. The eventual mechanics of the game will be based on the Fate Condensed rules, for which you can find an SRD here.

This conversion is not official, nor is it meant to challenge any copyrights or trademarks owned by Top Cow.

Hello!

Hello! Some of my older posts have been bringing people here to my blog, and I thought that I would point out that I am not very active here currently, unfortunately. I keep threatening to blog again but I don't end up pulling the trigger on it. Next year is the 20th anniversary of the blog, so who knows what might happen leading up to that.

Enjoy your visit, there are a lot of cool posts to discover from when I was a lot more active here. Check out the "popular posts" section down below, on the left, for posts that people have liked, for one reason or another. 

Thank you for dropping by! 

Influential Books And Authors

So there's a thing going around about influential writers, and I thought that I would give it a stab. I was going to write this up as a Facebook post, but it turned out longer than I thought and posting to my mostly unused blog also means that I can share it more places than just Facebook.

Few things have influenced me quite as much as the Beat writers: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsburg and Burroughs were my introduction to queer literature, and Burroughs showed me that SF writing can be a tool to get at political and social issues. Kerouac just opened up the world, and like a modern William Blake his visions illuminated the world.

John Dos Passos was a turn of the (previous) century author who turned me on to experimental writing, and his works are hauntingly modern and presaged the works of J.G. Ballard. Track down a copy of The 42nd Parallel. It is worth it.

With poetry my tastes are often Imagist, but the Romantics can make a strong showing as well. William Blake was an amazing poet, who likely suffered from mental illness, but was a better fantasist than many fantasy writers. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and "The Lovesong of J. ALfred Prufrock" have influenced my gaming, my design work and even my world view at times. William Carlos Williams would have loved the shortness and precision of Twitter, I think. He was a Doctor who wrote his poetry on the backs of prescription pads in between visits to patients in their homes. "This Is Just To Say" is so much better than "The Red Wheelbarrow." Of course Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are must read American poets. Other must read American poets include Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima.

Jorge Borges and Gabriel García Marquez should be read by everyone, although it might be too soon for a read of Love In The Time of Cholera. Borges' Ficcones is brilliant, and his work as an editor and anthologist brought to my attention a number of writers that I probably would not have otherwise read.

Borges brings me to Michael Moorcock, because Moorcock was a huge fan of his work as well. Stories by Borges would influence a number of Moorcock's works. He is my favorite fantasy author, and probably one of my favorite authors overall. But as much as I enjoy his fantasy writing, he really came alive for me in his later period when he became more of a Romantic writer (in the classic sense), and you started to see more of an influence of writers like Blake, Percy Shelley and Byron on his writing. There was always a pretty strong Byronic influence on Moorcock's writing, though. I don't think that we would have gotten the sundry Eternal Champion characters without Lord Byron. His fingerprints are all over Moorcock's work at all stages of his life. This is also what makes having a grounding in literature so important. Yes, you can read all of the genre classics, but those genre classics were often inspired by more than just other genre writers.

Moorcock was also my passage into the British New Wave of science fiction and fantasy writing. As much as I enjoy cyberpunk literature, the New Wave writers will always have a bigger place in my heart. Plus, without the British New Wave we wouldn't have had cyberpunk anyway. The science fiction establishment was still recovering from the New Wave when cyberpunk came rumbling over the hill in the late 70s and early 80s. I don't think that there is a science fiction writer as good as J.G. Ballard. The movies of Crash and High Rise, while good, don't hold water for the original novels, and works like The Island and The Atrocity Exhibition are ground breaking and mind blowing. Like Burroughs, Ballard's influences would extend out of the worlds of writing and extend into film and music. If you can find a copy of Judith Merrill's England Swings SF anthology, it is well worth getting. Besides the various New Worlds anthologies, it covers a lot of the bright lights of the British New Wave, and writers like Pamela Zoline, Angela Carter (who was really only passing through the New Wave) and John Brunner. John Brunner is probably one of the most influential SF writers that you've never read. Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions also covered the New Wave, and the American Auxiliary of authors like Philip Jose Farmer as well.

Yeah, cyberpunk. Gibson and Sterling and Rucker and Shirley and Shiner are all awesome, but my favorite is still Pat Cadigan's Synners. That and Lewis Shiner's Deserted Cities of the Heart are the literature of the 1980s for me (along side of Brett Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, as big of a dick as he became).

The trinity of paranormal romance fiction for me are Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series, Devon Monk's Allie Beckstrom books and Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson books. If "trinity" meant four, then I would include Gail Carringer's Parasol Protectorate books as well. One thing that geeks really need to get over is the idea that romance books are only for women. If there's one thing that I've faced the most pushback for from nerds over the years, it would be my loving paranormal romance fiction. The genre has become for me what most standard fantasy fiction is for a lot of other gamers and geeks.

This is probably just the tip of the iceberg, and doesn't even go into my love of comic books. Without the influence of comic book super-heroes (and my mom), I wouldn't fight for the causes that I fight for today. We are, each of us, a big tangle of influences. The things that we read. The movies and television shows that we watch. The music that we listen to. All of these are factors that inspire and influence other aspects of our lives.

My Life With Cyberpunk Gaming

photo by cheng feng

While I had read a few of his short stories in OMNI without knowing really who he was, my introduction to William Gibson came when I picked up a copy of the paperback of the novel Neuromancer when I flew off to my freshman year of college. I picked up the book after I had read a review of it, and an interview with Gibson, in Rolling Stone a month or two before hand. It blew my mind, and was probably the book that I've had copies stolen from me the most.

The Sound Of Breaking Glass

I think that it is time to jump back into the reviewing game, because I have missed doing it. Let's talk about one of the new young adult original graphic novels that are being put out by DC Comics, in this case Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass. This is a poignant story that redefines the character of Harley Quinn in ways that make her interesting again. In this review I will look at the new original graphic novel (OGN) that I picked up the other day.

This is probably not something that I would have picked up, if I hadn't seen some of the previews for the book. I am not a fan of the current interpretation of the character that is rooted in her dysfunctional and harmful "relationship" with the Joker. I don't consider those sorts of relationships to be healthy, or the kinds of relationship goals that anyone should be shooting for. I do like the power of the Harley Quinn character, but I hope that when we get to the next phase of young creators in comics that someone will recast the character in way that doesn't make it an extension of something harmful.

The Patronage Of Paranormal Friction

You may or may not know, but I have launched a Patreon page. The reason for it is to help with funding the development of my paranormal fiction inspired and Fate-based role-playing game called Paranormal Friction.

If you have followed the blog for a while you'll know that this is something that I've worked at for a while now. I recorded a couple of YouTube videos for a couple of the very earliest playtest sessions. Honestly, I always figure that this would be something that I would write mostly for my own personal use and probably print off copies to use at conventions or home games.

The cover at left is a dummy image that I made up a couple of years ago out of some free clip art. I like the colorfulness of it.

It was probably close to twenty years ago now that I first encountered the genre of paranormal romance. I was at a Half Price Books, when I still lived in Cleveland, and as I was wandering and randomly glancing at shelves, I saw a book with the title Bitten, by Kelley Armstrong. You may have heard of Bitten from the Canadian-based television series that aired on SYFY in the United States (at the time of this writing it is available on US Netflix and I recommend it strongly). Since that book I have traveled through the worlds of Armstrong, Patricia Briggs, Gail Carriger, Devon Monk and others.

The books were filled with witches, magicians, werewolves, vampires, Fae and other things that go bump in the night (sometimes with a little grinding as well). What drew me into the fiction was things like the well-defined characters who were more than hard-bitten and grizzled anti-social loners. These were people who loved. People who had friends. People who were members of a community, who cared about the people around them and the places that they lived. I mean, yes, sometimes these characters wanted to be left alone so that they could drink their coffee in peace, but when bad things happened to people close to them, they got a to-go cup.

What I wanted, for a long time, was a role-playing game that would let me play games like the stories that I was enjoying. Some of them were close, on the surface they had supernatural creatures and people with weird powers, but the games fell out of step with fiction quickly. They aren't bad games, but they aren't what I was looking for, either.

I wanted a game that was simple. A game that could allow characters to have connections to each other, and to the world, in ways that were not only fictionally meaningful during play, but also could have some mechanical bite to them as well. I wanted the much-ballyhooed mechanics that "get out of the way" during play.

I have been a fan of the Fate rules since before Spirit of the Century ever came out. Those early free PDFs were so close to the game that I wanted, and unfortunately the variants of Spirit of the Century had an annoying habit of getting more complicated than they needed to be. And then came new versions of the rules: Fate Core and Fate Accelerated. I found the system that I needed to use in Fate Accelerated. The idea of approaches is a brilliant one, while being simple enough that I am surprised that no one hit the idea sooner in RPGs.

If you haven't played, the idea is a simple one. To streamline mechanics they came up with the idea of "What if, instead of coming up with a list of skills that outline what a character can or can't do, we instead come of with a list of ways in which a character approaches a situation? What happens when they do something forcefully or cleverly instead of having skills for all of the sciences, and the different ways that they can hit something?" It was pretty radical. And, it also opened up ways to achieve success in a situation without necessarily resorting to violence as well.

Don't get me wrong, there can be plenty of fighting and violence in paranormal romance fiction. It is just nice to be able to also have ways in an RPG where players can think outside of the box of combat when deciding their characters' actions. All of this meshed together for me, and I started combining material from the various Fate SRDs into a document and compiling it with the explanations that I have come up with for players who have never played the game previously, as well as codifying some of the things that I do when I run games for people.

I try to run my games as cooperative venture as I can. The story creation rules for Fate Core are nice because they give everyone in the group some level of input into the creation of the game's world.

So, all of this went into a pot, and over time as it cooked Paranormal Friction came out of it. I hope that you check out my Patreon page and, if my blog has given you any interesting content over the years, support me as I work to get the final yards of development done for it. There is also a Discord server for talking about the game linked through the Patreon page, and I hope to develop a community around the game.

Right now, as soon as you support the Patreon you get the current copy of my WIP document for Paranormal Friction in a text format PDF. There are still things that I am working to add to the game, and a few rough spots to smooth out yet. Hopefully you will become a part of the journey to get Paranormal Friction to the end, so we can all have a finalized game of it.

Law v Chaos (2)

Darkseid by J.G. Jones, from Final Crisis published by DC Comics

Over in Gallant Knight Games' first Tiny Zine Compendium there is an essay by me about the forces of Law and Chaos in fantasy role-playing games. It serves as an early promo for my Demon Codex fantasy role-playing game (still in development/writing).

I am going to go back over some of the basics from that essay here, but I'm going to also talk about the inspirations that have helped develop my take on Law and Chaos in my gaming. Click on the link above and get a copy of the Compendium, there's plenty of cool stuff in it to balance out what I wrote. Yes, that is an affiliate link.

The EN World Archives

I've had a couple of people ask about reviews or articles that I wrote at EN World before the job change, so I figured that I would throw up a link to the landing page for my articles. There are a couple of gaps, from when the site had a catastrophic database crash, but this should let people find things.

I am sorry that I haven't been as active with writing here as I would have liked. The day job is keeping me pretty busy as we prepare for some launches. I have a couple of reviews that are almost ready to go, so we'll see when I have the time again.

Update 2: I think that I have a working link to the articles that I did while I was writing for EN World. Hopefully another site update doesn't make this not work. The link above is updated to the new link.

Update: Apparently one of the site updates after I left it broke the author's search, so that link doesn't work. I'll try to update when I've figured out a work around.

The Path To Whimsy

A long time ago, back in the Stone Age before the internet was what it is today, there was a tool for players that was put out by White Wolf called StoryPath and Whimsy cards. Now, Nocturnal Media have relaunched the lines, and added sets of cards that were originally planned but never launched.

Top 10 Influential Books

There's one of those memes going around Facebook where people share the ten books that have been most influential on them throughout their lives. I'm not big on the whole "tag me and I will tag someone to do the same post" thing, so I'm just going to post here to my blog instead. Here are ten books, in no particular order or anything, along with a little blurb for each.

Go Into The Void With Horror Comic The Gentleman

There is a long history of the occult detective in horror fiction, starting back with characters like Carnaki and John Silence and stretching into the present with comic book characters like Doctor Occult and John Constantine. SFC Comics now brings a new character into this tradition in there comic The Gentleman: Darkness of the Void.

Oliver Solomon, the hero of The Gentleman, isn't just a Constantine of color. Like many heroes of horror, Solomon is haunted by his past. This aspect of the character is brought out in the story quickly, but it is handled in an organic manner by writer Greg Anderson Elysee. What could have been a cliched stereotype of a character is engaging and pulls you along deeper into the story, like a good antagonist should do.

Looking Back At Gen Con 2018

Now that Gen Con is a couple of weeks in the rear view mirror, I think that I can put down some of my thoughts about the convention. This is going to be a more or less random set of impressions that I have, in no particular order of importance.

You May Have Heard

If you follow me on social media, you may have caught my big news today. I have been offered a job with Petersen Games, and I have accepted it. I will be working for them in a sales capacity, at least at first, and I am looking forward to getting things going. This also means that I will be ending my multi-year relationship with EN World. If you haven't kept up with my writing over there, you can got through the backlog by clicking here.

What does that mean going forward? Well, I am going to be busy getting used to Petersen Games, the people who work there and their games, but once I have finished that. However, eventually I will probably return to writing at this blog again. My work at EN World was important to me, and it didn't leave me a lot of time for posting here.

I won't be posting here as often as I was at EN World, I'm just not going to have the time for that. However, I do want to keep up with reviewing games and talking about games and gaming. My goal is to eventually get back to posting here a couple of times each month. When will this start? There's no real time table on that.

My Top 10 Songs For 2017

Based on my listening habits from the last year, I made up a list of the top ten songs that I listened to the most from 2017. I don't know if I can really rank them or not, but these would be among the top of the songs from this year that I have listened to the most.

I totally get that your list is different from mine. That's what makes music awesome.

10) Gorillaz - She's My Collar (featuring Kali Uchis)

There is a lot of good on Humanz the latest album from the Gorillaz, but She's My Collar is the one that stuck in my playlists.

9) Sir Sly - High

This is a catchy pop tune that I picked up from the radio. Like some of the early tracks by Grouplove, this song got stuck in my brain in a good way.

8) Zola Jesus - Siphon

This latest Zola Jesus album is mind-blastingly good, and a bit of a departure for her, soundwise. But still SO GOOD.

7) Lorde - Green Lights

Her first adult album, and it was really good. Melodrama got rid of a lot of the teen angst that were a big part of Heroine and replaced it with some really mature song writing. This woman has a long career ahead of her in music.

6) Bleachers - Don't Take The Money

Bleachers really grew on me. They took a chance with Terrible Thrills, Vol. 2 (spoiler alert: there was no volume one), and let a group of women singers reinterpret the music from their album Strange Desire. The gamble paid off with a record that was both familiar and innovative. Now they've come back with their fusion of rock and pop with Gone Now.

5) Alt-J - House of The Rising Sun

It really doesn't get to be much more of a deeper cut than Alt-J covering the seminal rock song, House of the Rising Sun by The Animals. Barely nosing out the track In Cold Blood, this became my favorite from Relaxer, the latest from Alt-J.

4) Portugal. The Man - Feel It

There is a whole lot of political naivete in this song, but it wraps it up in a nice sugar pill of pop music that you can almost forgive the band.

3) Arcade Fire - Everything Now

Arcade Fire had a hard time recovering from The Suburbs. To be honest, that is probably one of the best albums of the last decade. Reflekor was a hot mess compared to it. I think that the band has finally recovered with Everything Now. I went with the title track as my favorite, but there's a lot of really good cuts off of this album.

2) St. Vincent - Pills

Breakups suck, and breakup albums rarely capture the lightning in a bottle of the feelings of love, and loss that come with a breakup. Masseduction manages to give a peak into Anne Clark's head, and let's you feel some of the emotions that are spilling out of her over her breakup. Again, there's a lot of good on this album. Give New York and Los Ageless good listens too.

1) HAIM - Right Now

I wouldn't have expected HAIM to be at the top of a list like this for me, but here we are. These three sisters from Los Angeles put together some great music influenced by bands like Fleetwood Mac. Something To Tell You is their second album, and it is no sophomore slump.

Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini -- A Review [NSFW]

There are currently few purveyors of the hardboiled noir school of pulp fiction that are as good as the Hard Case Crime imprint from Titan Books. When I want a new crime fiction book to read, I go through the crime section of the book store, looking for the familiar white and orange spine with that Hard Crime logo. I am never disappointed. When Titan Comics announced a few years ago that they would be adding a Hard Case Crime comics line, I was over the moon. There have been some great comics since: Peepland, Normandy Gold and their adaptation of the Millennium Trilogy have been some of the best crime comics of recent time. Now, add to this list the awesomely named Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini.