Apollo Lemmon on

Social Digest 2026.08.15-2026.08.21

This week felt overflowing with speculative fiction and games on and off the fediverse.
Tiles from the game Carcassonne have been placed to build a landscape with a river, roads, fields, cloisters, and cities. Purple wizard and pink princess meeples have been placed on some tiles.

This week felt overflowing with speculative fiction and games on and off the fediverse.

I’m listening to the audiobook of Tanya Huff’s The Wild Ways and a segment set on Spring Garden Road played just as I walked past the restaurant the characters were eating at. It’s not often I read books set here in Halifax, and it was such a surreal moment.

The book is good and weird and exactly what I love about Huff’s writing.

The cover of The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff, showing a woman with a guitar staring at the shadow of a dragon on a seaside cliff.
Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117106286522344042
Post by @Beurkeek@peoplemaking.games
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Sunday afternoon I sat down with Celestine to play Carcassonne. She chose princess and fairy character meeples while I had wizards and a medusa.

Tiles from the game Carcassonne have been placed to build a landscape with a river, roads, fields, cloisters, and cities. Purple wizard and pink princess meeples have been placed on some tiles.
Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117110413641866074
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Post by @dinchenix@mastodon.art
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Gladden Design now has 10 different versions of each of their print-and-play Paper Apps games, meaning they can be played with 10 unique experiences, more like the printed versions.

Dungeon and Galaxy are lots of fun. Labyrinth is still on my to-play stack. Golf is fine from my experience, but yours might be different.

Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117121879951206761
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Post by @drahsturgis@universeodon.com
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I’ve been reading Saul Williams’ Martyr Loser King this week. It’s a wonderful anti-colonialist cyberpunk comic illustrated by Morgan Sorne.

A black, blue, and white illustration of a person with body art that looks like circuits.
Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117127549706474695
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I continued watching The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.

Episode 2 started at BETA Mountain, where Earth’s Bureau for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs is headquartered and where Dr. Owen Negata, a brain in a floating flat box, let the team know that the pirate who kidnapped Foxx’s wife was offering intel for a trade deal. Negata’s design is one of my favorites.

Heading to an outlaw planet gave us the outlaw alien bar scene that dovetailed with Cowboy Bebop episode 1.

A futuristic military base has been built into a mountain.
A green brain is contained in a dome of a floating flat metal box.
Four Galaxy Rangers stand beside robot horses in front of a saloon.
At an alien bar, two aliens sit at a table, two others stand at the countertop, and a barkeep stands behind the counter.

Walter Hartford is introduced as the hacker and roboticist of the rangers. He’s a cringey mix of smooth and corny, but the visualization of his coding is a delight and the robot horses he tends to made a lasting impression on me.

A black man in a ranger uniform sits on a horse. He wears a cowboy hat and sports a neat mustache.
A man in a ranger suit sits on a robot horse.
A man in a spacesuit writes code in an octahedron interface.

Rounding out the team of four rangers we had our family man with a cyborg arm, Zachery Foxx, our psychic woman (stealing tropes from Jean Grey and Deanna Troi), Niko, and the Eastwood-inspired cowboy, Shane Gooseman.

A man with a cyborg arm flexes and powers up his implant, which glows yellow.
A man in a coat and cowboy hat enters through saloon doors.
A man and a woman sit in pilot seats of a starship. The man has short brown hair and the woman has red hair. Both wear uniforms.

Other notable elements of this episode included a dumb saloon name, a weirdly sensual CGI shipboard computer, a villain storing life essence of captives in psychocrystals to make Slaver Lords, and the sweet starships.

A saloon on a planet has the name Rim Shot Saloon.
A pink CGI eye serves as a computer interface on a starship.
A sinister woman looks at the viewer while holding a large red crystal.
A starship rockets away from a planet.
Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117133604422300366

My lunchtime walk brought me to the wetland of an abandoned park.

A wetland landscape can be seen below a blue sky.
Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117135379522748679

I got Tiny Wanderer through the School’s Out for Summer bundle on RPG Trader. It’s exactly the kid-friendly game I wanted.

Tonight I gave Celestine the game. She coloured in the blank paper figure and had a terrific time going around our home to stage scenes such as “lonely oasis”, “modern cliff”, “cozy river”, and “dark Island”. It was a way to have her practice thinking about nouns and adjectives that kept her attention.

A coloured Tiny Wanderer stands on a chip bag in a cupboard.
A coloured Tiny Wanderer with a pink dress, a purple hat, and black hair stands on a blue blanket.
A coloured Tiny Wanderer stands on the keys of an electronic keyboard.
A coloured Tiny Wanderer has been placed on the head of a child who is creating claws with her hands and pretending to be a monster, with her teeth showing in fierceness.
Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117136357791126257

Prisoners of Gravity was a formative show for me, with interviews from so many speculative fiction creators. As I’m reading books by Tanya Huff lately, I’m reminded how important the interviews with her were for encouraging me to start reading her novels. This episode about vampires was fun to experience again and hear her thoughts on the vampire stories she has written.

Posted at https://cozymech.com/@apollo/117136571524319846

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