Justin Howe's Blog, page 4

19th Century Eccentric Dandy Simulator

The 19TH CENTURY ECCENTRIC DANDY SIMULATOR is a solo journaling game based on the novel À rebours by JK Huysmans. In this game you play as an eccentric dandy surrounded by all that you cherish. Your walls are stout. Your tastes are impeccable. You will strive to create a world closer to your ideal. 

And you will fail. 

Over two weeks of game time you will be wracked by internal torments that push you towards an act of ultimate desperation. 

CONTENT WARNING

The 19TH CENTURY ECCENT...

Balloon Tomb of the Ancient Aeronaut

Remember all those UFO and “spy” balloon shenanigans from a month or so ago?

They got me imagining a whole upper atmosphere region populated with lost kites, desiccated corpses of early aviation pioneers, and strange creatures like in that old Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Horror of the Heights”:

“A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and wo...

February 2023 Reads

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF LONDON’S LOST ARTIST by Phil Baker
Fun stuff, but 80% of artist biographies are basically “stayed home, drew” so the interesting bits are on the periphery. That periphery here involves occultists, the world wars, the end of one world, the start of a new, and the rise and fall of art movements. Reading about art magazines from the early 1900s is similar to reading about feuds in any zine scene except involving WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. And the...

Some Yesterweird Books

I make it a habit to check new uploads to Project Gutenberg.

Some recent highlights:

Freak Trees of the State of New York by Gurth Adelbert Whipple. Gurth Adelbert Whipple is a great name. Here people send Mr. Whipple pictures of freak trees and Mr. Whipple decides the freakiest! “Treebeard, you so nasty!”

Was It a Ghost? The Murders in Bussey’s Wood : An Extraordinary Narrative by Brent. This is about this awful murder case in Boston that features a criminal named “Scratch Gravel”...

Books January 2023

Here’s the stuff I read and liked in January 2023.

Under Hill, By Water by Josh McCrowell

My gaming group’s current game. It’s silly. It’s fun. It suits what my group wants from games at the moment. And the Shire we’ve made has become something of a playground for revolving GMs. This is good. If your game group likes to have a small game on the back burner in case someone needs to take a break this game is perfect for that.

Inspiration for my solo game One Too Many.

The Perip...

One Too Many

One Too Many is a one-page game about being a hobbit who has had one too many drinks down at the pub and now has to walk home. Usually, the Shire is a peaceful place, but these days you can’t be so sure. Strange folk are on the roads: rangers, black riders, and even hobbit gangs running off with their family’s heirloom jewelry. Most nights, it’s a short walk from the pub to your front door. But tonight? Well, you never know.

Materials: a 6-sided die or two, paper and pencil to document yo...

Orlando Furioso, Canto XLVI – THE END!

This is it. This is the end!

Ariosto starts with a bit of meta about himself being on board a ship and piloting it to shore where all his friends and favorite writers are there waiting eagerly for him. He thanks his patrons and their wives, their holdings, their subjects. Needless to say he goes on. (But I will admit if he you look up most of the people he mentions on wikipedia, such as Julia Gonzaga they’re interesting rabbit holes to get lost in.) At last, we get back to the story.

...

Orlando Furioso, Canto XLV

The penultimate canto… let’s do it!

To start we get some expounding on the nature of fortune and how “Good follows Evil, Evil follows Good, shame ends in glory, glory ends in shame.” Ruggiero has just wrought havoc upon the Greeks. Now he wants to sleep. He arrives at an inn but is recognized. The Greek king has him abducted, and the king’s sister urges him to treat Ruggiero harshly since he killed her son in the battle. In the end Ruggiero gets locked away in some deep dungeon full of sn...

Orlando Furioso, Canto XLIV

We start with everyone in the hermit’s cell congratulating Ruggiero. When Rinaldo learns Ruggiero’s betrothed to his sister he’s delighted by the news. Unfortunately, Ariosto reveals the fact that their parents already pledged Bradamante’s hand to Leon, the Greek prince of Byzantium. Neither Rinaldo nor Bradamante’s knows about this yet, so Rinaldo has no reason not to be delighted. 

I gotta hand it to Ariosto. He’s down to the last three cantos and he’s still going to introduce a love tr...

Orlando Furioso, Canto XLIII

This is a long canto mostly about cuckoldry. There’s been a good bit of that so far, but in this canto they dial the cuck to 11. (My apologies to everyone.) 

If Orlando Furioso was the most popular novel for everyone in Europe for centuries and the basis of countless paintings, operas, and ideas, then much of Western CultureTM is based on the very cishet male question of “What’s my girl up to when I’m not around?”

“A husband who desires to know  

All that his wife has ever done or ...