The following are articles I found interesting or useful for my writing.

Shut up & Sit Down is a great blog for board games on a normal day but their account of one player’s experience in a poker tournament is riveting. I love researching gambling but never actually gamble because it is one giant system designed to deprive you of money. This gives a great outsider’s peek into the casino environment.

Week in Weird had a wonderful article about the demons who possessed every other nun in a convent in 17th century France. Okay, it was probably less a demonic invasion and more of a frame job to convict a heretic but hey, the alleged demonic activities are bizarre. Mostly it seemed to involve planking.

Have a pothole in your city that the government refuses to fix? Try drawing a giant penis around it. Hell, I bet if you did a vagina that they would do it twice as fast.

This week’s music is “We Don’t Die” by Tricky.

The following are links to articles I found interesting or useful to my writing.

This is an older article by Samuel R. Delany and his experience as a black science fiction writer. I find it particularly interesting because lately a group of racists sexist assholes have decided to hijack the Hugo awards because they don’t believe the work of non-white males have any merit. It is interesting/sad to see the same arguments used today mirror so closely the arguments Delany has dealt with all his life.

I feel like one of my odder hobbies is enjoying stories of government waste. My other less odd hobby is rocket science so I was really excited to read this article about a ten billion dollar waste of an attempt to make a radar that is vital to the rather impossible dream of missile defense. It has hubris! Complete lack of fore-planning! Missile physics!

Summer is coming and I have been debating whether to write more stories about Mermaid Island. I always saw those stories as a highly optimized daydream fantasy of my teenage beach experiences. Chillwave is a genre of music kind of like that especially the part where the genre itself never really existed.

Today’s music is Ratatat’s Cream on Chrome. Ratatat is becoming one my favorite bands to write to.

The following are links I found interesting or useful for my writing.

I love conspiracies. Taking real world data and fudging it a little to make a story might be the basis for all fiction but conspiracies often go that extra mile for a little WTF. Read about how the Denver Airport is probably a secret Illuminati bunker.

Know what fantasy roleplaying games need more of? Real world economics applied to fantasy tropes. Multiplexer writes in depth articles about such things and each one is gold. Well, let’s just say a valuable precious commodity because as some of the articles prove, that pile of Dragon’s gold is probably the worse thing to ever happen to an economy. It is hard to pick a favorite but if I had to it would be about the Murder Hobo Investment Bubble.

Finally we have a free game you can play in your browser. The Coop Times is about being a reporter with a really vicious deadline. You are given a story and told to write five lines about it under a time constraint. It is a fun and hectic way to write and I highly recommend that any writer give it a shot. The stories are then collected and published on a site so you can see the collective efforts of your fellow reporters. 

Music this week is Beastmilk’s “Death Reflects Us” because everyone needs Beastmilk in their life.

The following are links to articles I read that I thought were inspiring or useful for my writing.

The Fairy Investigation Society was/is a real thing. It is useful to remember that before people were hunting UFO’s and Bigfoots, a lot of people were haunting the woods looking for little men. Also, Fairy Census sounds like the coolest thing ever.

An Interview with Richard Laymon is a 20 year old article printed in a fanzine but writing advice never ages. Laymon is part of my unholy Trinity of Favorite Horror Writers and one hard working writer.

My Dad, the Pornographer is one son’s account of his father’s pornographic career. Andrew Offutt wrote a lot of porn to support his family which is no easy feat. This article is about Offutt’s son who had the task of going through his father’s belongings after he passed away. It’s a touching article about fathers, porn and writing.

Finally, we have Lindsey Stirling’s Roundtable Rivals, introduced to me by the always excellent, The Other Side Blog. The song is awesome but a steampunk western showdown with music instead of guns? Fuck yeah.