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Hey all!

I've got some pretty cool news to share. Innkeep has a publisher! They are a new pub set up by industry veterans.

Here's a bit more detail over on steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/925500/view/6807840020993584268

Hi Rob! You sound like a good fit for Exilian! :-)

Hey everyone!

Welp, I'm still working on Innkeep. And I'm happy to say it's finally been covered in Rock Paper Shotgun! :-)

Currently pivoting with some core systems, and I'm looking forward to sharing more soon.

Beautifully written. I feel like I was there too. Thank you for sharing. :-)

I have not been to Italy since I was 20, when I did some olive picking in Abruzzi and visited Rome (fun memory: I was kicked out of the Borghese Gallery for taking photos when I failed to see the no photograph signs).

Speaking of little European states, my sister's husband is from Monaco, and they have been looking at buying their own apartment right on the Italian border. Maybe I'll have my chance to visit again not too long from now. :-)

I gave it a spin last night. Seems like it's coming along nicely. Lovely art. Really nice work on the little icons.

I finished the whole thing the other night, and I quite enjoyed it. At first I thought he was spending rather a lot of time time just talking with Fugal (current owner of Skinwalker Ranch) and his 'team', but in the end I could see his approach worked well for showing what these people are like. The key figures are predominantly fantasists (Bigalow, Fugal), but they also enjoy the grift. They like to think they are doing something extremely special, but on some level know it's all just entertainment. The capacity to hold those two conflicting attitudes in their minds at once is fascinating. One can be both a child and an adult at the same time, in different ways, in different contexts.

The intersection with Mormon theology was fascinating too. Greenstreet's own mormon background certainly turned out to be useful for this insight.

I found a related article on this topic.

I've still only just started watching it (I'll have to split it over a few evenings) but already fascinated to learn that Hal Puthoff was with project STARGATE. A great example for showing that 'the government' is not an all-knowing entity that operates in some purely rational manner. It's huge, messy, and like the general population at large, has its share of cranks. If you know how to say the right things, or get in the right ear, you can (historically at least) get money cleared for staring at goats.

Oh wow. The journalist at the New York Post covering this story (Steven Greenstreet) has released a 3 hour and 50 minute breakdown on youtube.

On that point, one interesting debunking by Mick West was a video of a tic tac UFO taken from a passenger plane window. They were able to catch the details of the fight, figure out the exact time and angle of the shot, and deduce (with flight record software) the precise plane the photo was actually of. However the camera of the phone, when 'zooming', was resolving the plane as a simple tic tac shaped blob, because really the lenses of the phone cannot 'zoom', so there was no extra information to resolve the shape into. (The video in question. )
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That article I shared before on the dark origins of Starseed thinking is quite interesting with this respect as well. I really recommend it. There's a certain religious / spiritual element, where the spirits of super naturally powerful ancient Indians (Aryans) were simply replaced by Aliens. Alien mythology is heavily cribbed from the alternative spirtualist / theosophist movements of the 19th century.

I re-watched this classic skit the other day. Seems relevant.

I quite like this tongue-in-cheek 'last will and testament' by Philip Klass, published in a newsletter in 1983.

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF PHILIP J. KLASS

    To ufologists who publicly criticize me, ... or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath: THE UFO CURSE:

    No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.

40 years later, and here we still are.  Getting excited over what somebody says somebody else told them. I guess it will just keep going on like this, over the generations, for quite some time to come.

One of the rough lessons for people who liked the scholarly early Internet is that a lot of digital things in the smartphone age are not for us.  As the Internet grows bigger, it becomes less like a cross between a university campus and a geeky convention and more like people in general.

Well put. When I got on in the late 90s, I spent most of my time on MUDs and Ultima Dragons usenet. Pretty much everybody was a fellow nerd.

Some more interesting articles.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/disclosure/
The dark historical roots of 'starseeds'

Nice gaming update! I've heard good things about Smallworld!

As for myself, after a bit of a break, our Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion group is back together. We finished a mission over two sessions recently. I think we are now a bit over half way through the campaign. I wasn't really enjoying it too much at the beginning, but it is growing on me. Particularly as my character (the Voidwarden) is starting to get more impressive as I level up.
Tomorrow I'll be playing a game of Feast for Odin with some other friends. It's my favorite game in my little collection I think. Looking forward to it!

Hopefully over the Christmas break I can also wrangle some games with a few of my relatives. Let's see...

Welcome!

Haha. I have made a few recently.