Maybe my favorite living artist is Seattle’s Mandy Greer, who works in crochet, textiles, costumes, installations, and video. Her work has a strong fairy-tale, archetypal component that I adore. I’ve followed her career for almost a decade and now own two of her early works, but this article is maybe the most concise evocation of what makes her work so magical to me.

Stitching Together Yarn, Memory and History

“Mandy Greer: The Ecstatic Moment” is a multipart installation at the Hudson River Museum that includes textiles, photography, video, sound, found objects and dozens of items from the museum’s decorative arts collection.

This is a news article eight months in the making. I lead the board of directors for Café Nordo, a Seattle arts nonprofit, and today we shared the good news that we’re leasing a permanent home in Pioneer Square after five years as an itinerant pop-up restaurant-theatre. Café Nordo takes up most of my personal time these days and I’m thrilled at the progress we’ve made towards the next chapter in its artistic life. Thank salt!

Café Nordo’s next act to fill ex-home of Elliott Bay Book Co.

Café Nordo plans to establish a long-term home in Pioneer Square for its popular dinner-theater shows.

In 1995 I published Puppetland, a storytelling game with strings in a grim world of make-believe, on my website. This diceless, experimental RPG has gone on to have a long and strange life. It was reprinted in 1997 in the UK games magazine Arcane and then appeared in an expanded edition from Hogshead in 1999. Edge Entertainment published a Spanish edition soon after and then MIT Press included it as an appendix in their 2007 anthology of academic essays, Second Person. And bizarrely enough, I sold the movie rights for Puppetland in 1997 to the producers of the first Dungeons & Dragons movie.

But Puppetland has not been widely available in more than a decade. So I’m very glad to announce that the Hogshead edition has returned, for a very short time, as an ebook through the Bundle of Holding’s Indie Initiative special offer:

http://bundleofholding.com/

It’s included with a lot of other early indie RPGs including My Life With Master, Dogs in the Vineyard, and the indispensable Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

If you want to follow what’s happening with Puppetland, I suggest you like the game’s Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/PuppetlandRPG

because a brand new edition of Puppetland is currently in development. Meanwhile, however, please check out the Bundle of Holding for an amazing deal on a bunch of great indie RPGs.

The Indie Initiative – groundbreaking tabletop RPGs

Adventurer! The fellowship of Groundbreakers brings us their Indie Initiative, a landmark collection of indie games that helped reshape the tabletop roleplaying hobby. For over a decade these legendary RPGs have been showing us new ways to play. And these RPGs are still actively played today, becaus…

I’m really enjoying this new album and you might too.

Beyond Addis is a compilation of new music by bands around the world who are inspired by 1970s Ethiopian jazz and funk. To be clear, I don’t know anything about 1970s Ethiopian jazz and funk, but this album is great: moody, sweeping, a little exotic, a little familiar, with a fast pulse and a drowsy-woozy manner.

It’s great stuff. Give it a listen.

Beyond Addis

Preview and download Beyond Addis (Contemporary Jazz & Funk Inspired By Ethiopian Sounds From the 70's) on iTunes. See ratings and read customer reviews.

Delta Green comes to the Bundle of Holding! Get a ton of DG ebooks for the price of one redirected federal invoice. There’s a ton of books here and this is a great bargain:

http://bundleofholding.com/

Wow. About ten years ago this jackhat pioneered a particularly trendy piece of state legislation that attempted to make it a crime to sell R-rated videogames to kids. Other lawmakers picked it up nationwide and passed law after law. The videogame industry fought these laws and defeated every single one of them, costing the states millions of dollars in legal fees and penalties.

Leland Yee was the vanguard for this movement, which was nothing more than opportunism: it let politicians do something they knew was unconstitutional but that let them beat the protect-the-kids drum.

As one law after another was overturned, the politicians beat a retreat. But Leland Yee remained in office until today, when the FBI arrested him for being a corrupt sack of shit.

I can only applaud. So long, sucker.

Anti-Violent Video Game Senator Leland Yee Arrested on Bribery, Corruption Charges | Side…

The man in charge of the anti-violent game bill has been arrested by the FBI. More »

This Kickstarter for a new videogame is worth a look. It’s a great concept: a strategy game where you play out a dynasty of heroes across hundreds of years, each one’s choices influencing the next hero and their world. I worked with Scott Brodie, the creator, at Xbox LIVE Arcade and I know his passion for great game design. Please take a look and consider helping this original project come to life.

Way back in 1995 I worked at Wizards of the Coast and oversaw the Magic: The Gathering comic books being made by Acclaim. We wanted to do something special with the comics for the release of Homelands and Acclaim agreed to do a special fully painted comic book. They recruited Dan Chichester as the writer and a young artist named Rebecca Guay.

We flew Dan and Rebecca out to spend the day at our offices with myself and Scott Hungerford, the creator of Homelands. We taught them to play Magic and Scott shared the world of Homelands with them. It was a great day with a couple of very talented creators. She did a mermaid drawing for me that hangs in our house even now.

Rebecca has gone on to have a brilliant career as an artist. I’ve encountered a number of her books for children since Vivian was born and her work is spectacular. Now she’s doing a Kickstarter for a retrospective book of her work. It’s going to be beautiful and thanks to the money she’s raised, she’s including a signed print with every copy of the book.

I’m very pleased to see that Aron Tarbuck and J Kovach’s Kickstarter for their original Lovecraft-Shakespeare mashup comic book is live once more. The DMCA takedown has been rescinded and they are back at it. Please check out their project — I think it sounds pretty great.