With Twitter becoming increasingly unhinged, Mastodon is becoming a better, fuller place each week. There’s now an embed post option available on the platform so I’ll make use of that when I do these digests.
With Twitter becoming increasingly unhinged, Mastodon is becoming a better, fuller place each week. There’s now an embed post option available on the platform so I’ll make use of that when I do these digests, particularly when I reshared a post, and include my own content here within the post.
I’ve been running with Zombies, Run! for years and, with an update today for the game’s 10th anniversary adding new buildings, my Abel Township is a cozy bastion in the zombie apocalypse.
Four years ago we spent the holidays in Marikina in the Philippines, where I saw this along Gen. Ordoñez Avenue. This faded mural must have been more impressive in its prime, but it still had some magic.
Each December my work sends out a pewter ornament from Amos Pewter to all employees. This year, my 12th with the company, we received an ornament depicting the lighthouse from Peggy’s Cove.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was my game of the year. No other game released this year has drawn me in like it did. The story, gameplay, astounding world, and quality of life elements were unmatched. Nothing else came close.
Growing up in rural Nova Scotia, I didn’t have a local library I could visit, but I did have the magic of a bookmobile. The bookmobile, a bus filled with books, would visit on a reliable schedule and stepping onto it was a wonderful experience. I remember vividly browsing the shelves and choosing a pile of books to take home. It was on the bookmobile that I found Asterix and Tintin volumes and cemented my lifelong love of comics.
I would later devour Choose Your Own Adventure books and game books, planting seeds for my love of TTRPGs. Later I would take out novels and nonfiction books ravenously. I’m shaped profoundly by the bookmobile and my politics are informed as profoundly as my reading life. Bringing people what they need and desire requires systems like libraries and their bookmobiles to be pushing out access to every person where they are.
Here in the Halifax Regional Municipality, bookmobile service ended in 2011 and that was, I believe, a mistake. Bringing services to folks living in rural areas can be a lifeline, especially for marginalized folks and should be prioritized. Communities served by bookmobiles even today have poor internet access and books have special value because of that.
Cory Doctorow’s (@pluralistic) Poesy the Monster Slayer is Celestine’s favourite book. We either read the ebook or listen to the audiobook most days. She can now recite portions of it and here she is explaining Great Old Ones.
I was fortunate to grow up in a household with countless speculative fiction around. My father had many novels around, and I’d eventually read everything by some authors like Tolkien and Terry Brooks, and read extensively from others like Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin. Alan Burt Akers’ Dray Prescot books (Transit to Scorpio, etc.) always intrigued me, but I never got far in reading them. I wonder if it would be worth revisiting that sword and planet series.