Some of you have likely noticed that the URL interpunctgames.com redirects to this blog — mostly by clicking a link on one of my online bios and discovering yourself here.

I do have plans. I also need to file a DBA with my local county and get a business license from the local city and some other odds and ends (including actually making a separate web site) and I don’t currently have the luxury of gobs and gobs of free time given the 40 hours a week I spend in other gainful employment.

The non-existence of that separate site seemed like something worth noting, though, so I’ve noted it.

Plans (for 2024)¹ including getting on a regular publishing schedule and providing actual downloads (free on itch.io) on my way toward longer-format products and uniting some of the currently unrelated bits-and-thoughts I have floating inside my head into something larger and more coherent.

More information, or at least some hints, about the 2024 schedule and the over-all plan behind it will be coming later this fall². If you can recall some of my sporadic blog posts from earlier this year I’m working on fantasy maps, among other things, and trying to figure out appropriate map scales and templates. That’s part of it, and will probably be the bigger part, but hopefully I can also drag my undiagnosed lump of brain matter away from hyperfocusing on just that and can also move along other, currently slower moving parts of the project too.

Thanks for reading, and for not kicking me out of your RSS feeds.³

In other housekeeping here on the blog: I’m not sure if this means more regular updates here as well as on the new site. I certainly enjoy sharing my progress and process, and I could certainly be a lot more systematic in how (and how often) I share. We shall see. Watch this space, I guess.

¹ I had similar plans for 2023. and 2022. and, um… yeah ok fine it’s been a while.

² Just a reminder that we just started fall/autumn and ‘later this fall’ is technically any time before 21 December.

³ should I not have mention that? no… wait… don’t do it now…

Yesterday — for almost the entire day — my notes read, in total:

##
Thurs 26 Jan.

Long day.

There was an edit, much later in the day, to add:

Not getting better, really.

We’re all going to have days like that. I didn’t expect one so soon after making certain promises (to myself) but that’s how the pendulum swings sometimes. I also have a draft that I will finish up and post, more likely to be tomorrow’s post than something that you’ll see this evening, but again, that’s how it swings sometimes. Creativity isn’t a faucet, and sometimes the boring thing will have to do, and I have to make it work in the machinery even though I know that part will be the first thing to ‘break’ and then I’ll have to scramble and make an emergency fix but that’s one of the ways the process works. Sometimes.

And enthusiasm ebbs and flows. Yesterday, obviously, the tide was out. It’s also a bit of a crunch time at work, as I shared on twitter

"Note to all staff: requests for miracles should be sent to Rome, preferably with 2-3 weeks lead time, and not to the local 'facilities dept', which I'll remind you is just one guy, at 7am on the morning of."

— m · blind (@mdotblind) January 26, 2023

Edit, 4:50pm 27 Jan 2023, to add: Apparently it’s just as well that my half-a-draft yesterday never made it to post because recent news changes a lot of what I was going to say. No real spoilers here but it was going to be D&D related and this new bit is, a lot.

I am in the habit of writing notes to myself, occasionally long ones. Initially, it was just a draft email in Outlook [not a client I like but required for work] and would be short notes along the lines of “buy butter and eggs” or “attack and dethrone god” – things to remember to do on the way home from work. But over time I moved from just bulletpointing notes to talking my way through projects like building a new computer or buying a new condo or remodeling the kitchen in the new condo, and on top of links to articles and pullquotes and tracking prices and all the rest, I would drop back into a conversational tone and write whatever my additional thoughts were.

“We can probably skimp on the processor since we’re planning on putting an absolutely ridiculous amount of RAM in this rig and also the graphics card. Well, by skimp I mean get a 65W tdp part, but still something with at least 8 cores.”

I have unfortunately adopted “We” as a pronoun. In context it makes perfect sense – these are notes to myself and so this is present me talking to future me, or at some point later when I review the notes, it is present me listening to past me, and in either case “we” are perfectly fine with this form of address.¹ My literary executor will probably think I went nuts in 2015 and will burn every metaphorical page in a metaphorical fireplace.²

The habit grew stronger in 2020 and I switched from emails to Google Docs and the notes became much more, ah… present [?] in my life? I was jotting down short story ideas before they ran away from me, alongside notes for the longer project and board game ideas and resurrected the long dormant RPG notes and (when I’m not distracted by twitter) I found myself writing more. A lot more. The archived notes file from 2021 is over 200 pages long. The file from last year is 483.

Now that Twitter is actively trying to make itself un-useful and I’m not getting the same sort of nice-distracting-side-screen vibe from the app on my phone, I find myself needing another distraction to fill out agonizingly long 8 hour shifts exploring new avocational resources to keep my mind alert, sharp and productive for my employer’s benefit.

What I will miss, maybe, is engagement. Comments are closed on this version of the blog, a decision I made several years ago, and I don’t anticipate ever enabling the feature. Diligent folks who just had to make their feelings known about a blog post could scour the page and eventually find my Twitter handle, which seemed like an acceptable compromise to me. I suppose, when I am fully done with Twitter I’ll need to update that link.³

When I am the only intended audience, writing is easy. The conversational tone I usually take makes sense, the long asides (so many asides)⁴ don’t really distract from my points because I always remember what the point was. I don’t have to find the right words to describe a state of mind or an emotional reaction because, well, it’s me. When I go back and re-read the notes, I know where my mind was at⁵ and I remember why I talked around a thing that evaded exact definition in that moment. Transferring this writing habit to the blog means we’ll encounter a few speed bumps and maybe the occasional detour, but I have a new (new-ish) daily writing habit and I might as well flex it.

This blog activity will not be replacing my habit of writing little⁶ notes-to-myself and you won’t be seeing any version of those notes here. That Google Doc is a different thing that lives in a different space, both physically and in my thinking about it. But if I can adapt that voice and tone, the one I’ve found so easy to use when talking Me-to-Me, I can maybe take what has become a mid-morning ritual and get some additional mileage out of it.

For those of you who remember, and added the RSS feed to your readers-of-choice way back in the day, I used to work retail for Barnes & Noble. Back then I would blog about the things that frustrated me at work, and since the industry was in transition [2008-2013] there was a lot to mine for content. So you might have followed the blog back in the day for the bookselling insights, or for my opinions on Comics & Manga, or for the occasional bits of analysis⁷. The current iteration of the blog isn’t like that – you might read through the new front page to get an idea of what I felt was blog-worthy, the past couple of years. Going forward, I’m not sure where this (new) new writing impulse will take me or what topics we’ll cover or discover. But if you’re game, and can put up with my annoying new habit of using “we” when I write, well: let’s find out.

¹ I live alone and have for over 12 years now and I think that may also have something to do with it.

² At least one very presumptive assumption there but we’ll leave it for dramatic effect.

³ I’ve made appropriate alternate accounts at a number of suggested socials but I haven’t found where I’m ‘landing’ quite yet.

⁴ My brain is multi-core and apparently is always running multiple threads. See, for example, the use of footnotes in stupid personal blog posts.

⁵ …Usually.

⁶ noted earlier, 483 pages in 2022.

⁷ That version of the blog is a bit of a mess because of mildly incompatible software and broken links but still ‘lives’ at archive.rocketbomber.com. And I apologize for crashing into your feed this morning via a long-forgotten RSS – but I hope you’ll stick with me for a bit longer anyway. :)

I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

##

¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.

I can tell from the visitor logs that someone is trying to hack, redirect, or otherwise gain control of this blog (why? the other thing I can tell from the visitor logs is how infrequent the traffic is) and while I can ban IPs (and will start doing so) I realize the futility there because any entity with the knowledge to try this kind of hack, however hamfistedly, likely also knows how to redirect so as to come at it from a different IP.

So I’m just going to put this on the front page for a bit: Whoever you are, just stop.

Obviously it’s not working for you, and having any sort of “in” to the back-end of my CMS doesn’t really matter when I have separate control, through the company from which I purchase webhosting, to the SQL databases and actual files. In a worse case scenario, I just delete the blog, reinstall, and restore from backups. Though I shouldn’t have to go that far. (But thanks for the reminder to to do a backup)

You can save a lot of your time by just not trying. As for my time: well, I’ll just keep monitoring the situation.

I still don’t know what I’ll be talking about.

On the last iteration of the blog [now found at archive.rocketbomber.com] I started with the vague idea that I might generally cover sci-fi—hence the name, RocketBomber—but over time I ended up digging into ebook sales, tried to track digital sales more generally, took off on a three year tangent on bookselling, and mopped up the last year or so of blogging there with some linkblogging and music essays.

I don’t feel like taking any of those topics up again.

If I look at the sorts of news sources that I subscribe to, and what I’m currently reading, and the stories that I share on social media, that may give us a better idea of the sort of topics I might fall into later.

Urbanism:

Cities & Living. Neighborhoods, how they live, grow, and die, and the related issues of gentrification, zoning, walkability & transit, affordable housing, and changing demographics including the growing aging populations

The Future of Energy:

As the now-4-year-old Onion headline succinctly puts it: Scientists Politely Remind World That Clean Energy Technology Ready To Go Whenever. Electric cars are part of this, but that’s not my beat. I’d rather look at how materials science is changing solar panel efficiencies and costs, how house-scale battery technology is improving, how off-the-grid and small local grids might develop as alternatives to long-distance transmission, and the other odds and ends of the new energy sector.

Design:

Not gadget design, & not necessarily industrial design, and while I’m fascinated by the design of spaces, I hesitate to call it interior design.

Working Spaces, particularly things like open floor office plans and why they are evil, standing desks and other alternatives to the table-and-chair norm, shop spaces and work benches, organization of all types (because I recognize my own lack), and generally any space where we work – even kitchens, labs, classrooms, and factory floors.

I might get distracted and chase design down a rabbit hole, which would lead to considering Restaurant & Bar spaces; Creative Retail; Halls, stages, auditoria, & performance spaces; Galleries & Museums; Libraries—damn but I do love libraries—
But it’s the working space, from corporate offices down to individual corners, that I might try and write about first.

And also designing for accessibility, which is cool.

Pop Culture?:

Fandom is turning toxic in odd corners and I’m not sure I want to open that can of worms. But I do like comics, comic art & sequential art, and I might succumb to the temptation to write about them, or their adaptations into media other than print.

Also: I still love science fiction. The blog is still called “rocket bomber”. It might come up.

& Storytelling:

The art and craft of writing, and storytelling – on the page, in games, on screens, & the nuts and bolts of practical modern myth-making

##

That’s five pretty big targets. I might find something completely different down the line. And even though this isn’t a Diary Blog, I’ll be starting with some more personal posts until I find my feet (and my voice) and get into the habit of blogging again.

I’m just going to head this off, well before I put the paddles on either side of the cold dead heart of this blog and shout ‘clear’:

Comments are closed.
Comments, for this iteration of the blog, were never enabled.
(Comments are trash, never read the comments.)

If I post something here that you feel you must comment on, I’m not going to make you type in an email for verification or log into Disqus or go to a bespoke forum site or subreddit – just, find me on Twitter. Twitter has a wonderful system for, [*cough*] …conversation, and sadly enough I’m almost always logged in over there, so that’s the best way to comment. To me. Directly.

Sadly, this means your immortal words will not live on my CMS, forever inscribed beneath this or any other blog post, for later readers or for search engines to find. No “this is really more of a statement than a question”. No “I tried to follow this recipe but I subbed pasta for the rice, chicken for the beef tips, and anchovies for the Sichuan peppers and it came out Awful!”. No spam, no links, no SEO, no ‘well, actually’, and no drama. No. Comments.

This is by design, and since I’m the person paying the hosting bills, it’s a policy that will not change.
Thank you. And if this is a deal breaker for you, well, at least I’ll know it’s because you dislike *my* words & voice (& rules) and not because of something toxic in the comments.

Welcome to the online home of Matt Blind; thanks for reading.

RocketBomber is a generic, general-issue, all-purpose kind of blog, of the type that used to proliferate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. You know, back when we called them ‘web logs’ instead of blogs, and you and your friends were all on LiveJournal. (or your parents were.)

While definitely a blog, using both the ‘bones’ of a blog and a blog’s idiolect, this site is neither autobiographical or journalistic. It’s not a ‘topic’ blog, either — this isn’t so much about anything, it is the writing — the messy, disorganized pile-of-notes, snippets-of-story, links, thoughts, and spitballing that goes into other projects, large and small.

It’s meant to be fun — for me at least.

It should also be an awesome way to organize my notes: tagging articles, throwing them into broad categories, and making everything searchable.

Two quick notes before I get into the copyright stuff:

Commenting is disabled across the site. If you still feel you must comment on an item, reach out to me on Twitter @mdotblind or Mastodon/Federated socials @mdotblind@mastodon.social.

Also, this is the second incarnation of the RocketBomber blog — if you surfed in on a link and got a 404 error, try the URL again but replace www.rocketbomber.com with archive.rocketbomber.com. All of the old articles are still there, just moved [entirely] to that subdomain. I no longer update (or fix anything) over there, but a little extra effort should get you to where you thought you were going.

##

If you read something here and want to steal it, for the most part: go right ahead. Some rights reserved:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Alinth Fantasy World Descriptions and Plinth RPG Systems by Matt Blind and other commentary and content on this site are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The CC License applies to all descriptions, characters, story elements, maps, place names, and most but not all items posted to the blog. Images used are typically also CC Licensed, but also are typically not originally mine — please make a note of any citations on photos. Additionally, I might preemptively revoke Creative Commons in advance (for whatever reason) so if a post explicitly cites copyright or otherwise exempts itself, well, that.

Additional rights might be available, specifically rights to commercially reproduce any content found here, but you’ll have to ask (and obtain) permission first.

##

I’m a pencil-paper-and-dice table-top games veteran (primarily D&D and D&D-derivatives) and sometimes I find it easier to think about things in terms of how it would work “in game”. I think many people who currently write fantasy have a similar background and inclination. I might post some material here that is either intended for role-playing gaming, or that is formatted that way just for kicks-and-giggles.

Please Carefully Read the Following Regarding Game Mechanics:

In the event that I post material suitable for gaming or for easy translation to any and all 3rd-party RPG systems, I will be using a modified version of Steffan O’Sullivan’s 1995 FUDGE system [Freeform Universal Do-it-Yourself Gaming Engine]; any specific references to FUDGE mechanics fall under Steffan O’Sullivan’s very generous terms and subsequent licenses.

As of March 2004, FUDGE System™ is owned by Grey Ghost Press, who holds all copyrights. Grey Ghost Press makes the FUDGE system available to developers under the FUDGE System Trademark License and the Open Game License.

see also
http://fudgerpg.com/about/about-fudge/fudge-overview.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge_(role-playing_game_system)

included below is the original Disclaimer mandated by O’Sullivan in his 1995 version:

DISCLAIMER

The following materials based on FUDGE, entitled “Plinth RPG System Mechanics”, are created by Matt Blind and made available by Matt Blind via rocketbomber.com, and are not authorized or endorsed in any way by Steffan O’Sullivan or any publisher of other FUDGE materials. Neither Steffan O’Sullivan or any publisher of other FUDGE material is in any way responsible for the content of these materials.

Original FUDGE materials ©Copyright 1992-1995 Steffan O’Sullivan, All Rights Reserved.

If you wish to distribute copies of all or portions of FUDGE or derivative works based on FUDGE for a fee or charge, other than in a magazine or other periodical, you must first obtain written permission from:

Steffan O’Sullivan
P.O. Box 465
Plymouth, NH 03264

##

Please Note: I do not intend, in any way, to present a complete gaming system — not on the blog, there will be a separate site for that — however, gaming (especially referencing RPG fantasy games) presents a unique vocabulary for describing concepts. I like leaning on that legacy, and you’ll find me using gaming vocabulary often.

O’Sullivan used a seven-level sequence to describe traits: I love the mechanic but use the following eleven-level (zero to 10) sequence

0. fatal
1. terrible
2. awful
3. poor
4. meh.
5. fair
6. good
7. great
8. rare
9. epic
10. legend

The scale defaults to 4, “meh.” as a baseline; “fair” traits are actually ever-so-slightly above average.
If “meh.” doesn’t sound RPG enough, you could use mediocre or meager, but meh.—despite being a more recent coinage—is an excellent monosyllable with clear meaning.
At 8, “rare”, was “superb” in FUDGE and you are welcome to use that term instead. Superb, particularly when you can let it breathe on its own without trying to cram it into several sentences in the same paragraph, is a fantastic word but I keep mentally tripping on it. Once I chose Epic & Legendary as my 9 and 10, defaulting to Rare for 8 was just natural. “Rare” is little clunky too, but is a strong, clear monosyllable and I like it.

Anyone interested should definitely check out the 1995 Fudge PDF, currently available for download from Grey Ghost Press.

this page last edited 23 Aug 2023.