For anyone who's been in skin to skin contact (you know, like hugs) with me or mnemex in the last month or so and hasn't already heard the news:

I've been diagnosed with scabies. This is annoying-but-curable, spreads through skin to skin contact, and has about a one month incubation period.

This is what I had at Arisia when I though that I might have found winter mosquitoes or that the hotel was using some noxious detergent on its sheets or something.

We also came home with con crud, laying mnemex out for a couple of days and knocking me out after I'd gotten the diagnosis and the cure for the scabies. Today, I am startled to note that I am actually hungry.

If you get itchy bug bite marks, see your doctor. Stay safe and healthy.

1. Dark Harvest: The Legacy of Frankenstein, an RPG. Premise: An immortal Victor Frankenstein takes over Romania at the beginning of the 20th century, and things get very dark. Not quite as dark as I had originally assumed, but a good setting for adventures, and something I can lift for Kerberos Club Fate Edition.

94. Black Butler, #7. Manga I've been following.

95. Manuscript for Tales of the Sleepless City, Miskatonic River Press's forthcoming collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios set in New York City. Delicious!

96. Manuscript for Horror for the Holidays, Miskatonic River Press's latest fiction anthology. Oddly, I don't generally seek out horror fiction to read, but this is solid.

97. Amaranthine RPG. I really want to try a campaign of this one. What's stopping me? The campaign I'm running, the two larps I'm writing, the pbem I'm running, the pbem I'm playing in... But we'll see if I can make this happen in 2012.

98. Alarums & Excursions #434.

99. Various Victoriana short supplements: Hounds of Hate, The Marylebone Mummy, and Rise of the Red God

100. Manuscript for House of Cards, a forthcoming RPG, urban fantasy, solid, tarot-based mechanics. I can probably make a one shot of this one happen in 2012.

101. Profane Miracles, a scenario for Esoterrorists which I'm currently running for Kerberos Club Fate edition. It's astonishing how well the themes on the story / human level fit in to the Victorian world.

102. Leverage RPG. I've not yet seen the show this is based on, but I think I can use at least the heist-building mechanics. Using the rest might be trickier, as, ideally, one wants one PC for each major role, which means five players is ideal.

103. Little Girl Lost, a scenario for Esoterrorists. I'm looking forward to part two, which I hope will be released next year.

104. The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston. This one was recommended at a panel at Arisia last year, a panel on "non-genre" works for the sf-and-f fan. It's quite good. I'm guessing it had more of an impact when it first came out, but I was way too young for it then.

105. Alarums & Excursions #435

106, and the final book I read in 2011. The Freedom Maze, by Delia Sherman. Solid YA about a girl in 1960 who finds herself in 1860. 1960 is less than a decade before I was born, and yet, in some ways, as alien as 1860.

Small Beer Press is having an ebook sale: 50% off everything until the end of the month. I picked up a couple of titles, including Delia Sherman's The Freedom Maze and this year's Gaylactic Spectrum Award Winner, Kathe Koja's Under the Poppy.

81. Borderland, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold (reread). This is the first of the Bordertown books, and I did a review of it on Logophile. It holds up reasonably well. I had forgotten that it only had four stories, and I hadn't realized how atypical three of them were.

82. Alarums & Excursions #432.

83. Kerberos Club, Fate Edition. I'm currently running a campaign using this system, so I'm hitting the bumps. Overall, it's solid, but finding the bit of information I want at any given time is harder than I expected. An index would probably help. That said, I like the collaborative aspect of creating the game world and the guidelines for calibrating opposition. And, of course, I like the detailed timeline, although technically, that part of the book is a reread for me, from the original One Roll Engine version.

84. Bordertown, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold. Still working on the review of this one. Again, four stories, of which I only remembered two of them. Those two still do it for me, especially the final story in the collection.

85. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume Three: Century #2: 1969, by Alan Moore. I get why this doesn't click for some people, and I can't quite explain why I like it, but I do.

86. Nobilis, 3rd edition, by Jenna Moran. This is the latest edition of the Nobilis RPG, and it's brilliant. It's also frustrating, as I try to sort out the bits of system in my head, but I think going through the actual character creation system, as opposed to only the nifty character background lifepath / project development system that I mistook for the character creation system, will help. And, this one has a very detailed index.

87. One Salt Sea, by Seanan McGuire. I'm mixed on this one. On the whole, I like it. I like the pacing, I like the characters, I like how it's different from all the other books in the series, and I like how it builds logically on what was established in those books. The things I don't like fall into Spoiler Territory, so I'll wait until I've got something longer than this and coherent enough to call a review. I will, of course, be buying the next book in the series.

88. Repairer of Reputations, by Robin Laws. This is a scenario for the RPG Trail of Cthulhu, based on the Robert Chambers story of the same name. I love that story. I like the scenario, but there's a central question that I wish the author had addressed. That is, the scenario is set in the world of the story, which is not our world, and not the version of our world that most Lovecraftian scenarios are set in. And, the player characters may have a sense of wrongness about this, an idea that maybe their world isn't the way it's supposed to be. All right, but what does that mean in terms of resolving the scenario? I'm wondering if the author plans to address this idea in future scenarios based on Chambers' work.

89. Insylum, by Dennis Detweiler. Fascinating and frustrating, but I can't really say more about this RPG without hitting spoiler territory. I think I'm going to have to let Insylum simmer in my hindbrain for a while.

90. Dragon in the Smoke, by Kristrian Bjorkelo (reread). This is an adventure for the RPG Victoriana. I'm repurposing it for Kerberos Club, Fate Edition. We've done one session, and it'll take another one or two to complete, I think. On the whole, it's quite good, but it has an extraneous NPC, whom I unceremoniously cut.

91. Stealing Cthulhu, by Graham Walmsley. I've added my annotations to my copy. This book talks about how to create good Lovecraftian RPG adventures by a) going back to Lovecraft's works and b) expanding and swapping the various elements he used. The second sounds very basic, but it's given me a couple of wicked ideas I want to try. I think Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Stupid Plot Tricks explains why these tricks work. Among other things, she says, "If you have one plot presented three ways, you have three plots." And, I think I can make this work for me.

92. Alarums & Excursions #433

93. Neonomicon, by Alan Moore. I loved "The Courtyard", which is the first part of this graphic novel, and I'm glad to see more.

I'm not counting these as books, but I've also read the three Dresden Files Case Files, free scenarios for the Dresden Files RPG, complete with pregenerated NPCs. I used Night Fears for the first Kerberos Club session, without the pregens, and I'm using Neutral Grounds for a different game, taking just the bare premise of it. I've not yet used Evil Acts.

With thanks to osewalrus for the link:

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith posted this. As Seanan McGuire said, this was a very brave post.

One should not have to be brave to do this.

The quote in the header is from Joanna Russ. And, at WorldCon, I held my tongue when a woman said that she thought Russ should have been more forgiving. She was probably of Russ's generation, and I doubt she would have been at all impressed if I had quoted The Female Man: "We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them."

After reading the new Bordertown anthology, Welcome to Bordertown, I went back and reread the first anthology, Bordertown. It held up reasonably well.

I've decided to put lengthy reviews on my WordPress blog, Logophile, so that's where it is.

I'm trying to get some things off my shelves so I can shelve what is on the floor. Contact me if any of the items on the list appeal to you, and we'll work something out.

( List of Books and RPG products )

Here's what Red Hook looks like. Thanks to agrumer for the link.

Note that these are the three most annoying things to me. Others either have different mileage or did not get as lucky. Note, too, that this presumes a rapid return to NYC normality, which is by no means assured.

3. We pulled the library / study air conditioner in. I may feel like this is #2, but honestly, it's near the end of summer, and we can cope. It came back in smoothly, and mnemex was able to close the window. We did this because water was leaking under the air conditioner. The other air conditioners stayed in place.

2. Six minutes of the Netflix DVD of Hot Fuzz were not accessible. We were watching it to keep entertained during the storm, and at a climactic point, the DVD froze. We could go past the bad part. We found a summary online, reading just what we missed, and we picked up from there. The deleted scenes gave us a clearer idea of some of what we missed. But, even if we catch it again, in a better copy, we can't really experience the thrill we'd have gotten if we saw the movie all the way through the first time. I'm okay with this being the second most annoying thing.

1. See previous entry.