Another journal

Did you know that most library cards come with access to Hoopla? Free movie watching! And comics and music etc etc. But mostly I use it to watch documentaries (and trashy cable sci-fi movies). Here’s some of my go-to docs for both naps and “second screen” watching (also straight watching).

Some faves:

• Ken Burns: The Brooklyn Bridge: This was my first Ken Burns. It broke the seal. I get accused by some people about watching nothing but “bridge documentaries” but I need to clarify I only watch like five over and over. The guy who designed the Brooklyn Bridge (and the father of the guy who built it) was quite a type of guy. This is a cute doc and has some great talk of the history and importance of the bridge and also has a bit where a bunch of kids are building a block version of one of the towers.
• American Experience: The Rise and Fall of Penn Station: What a hell of a building and what a wild time of tech. Getting the bends building train tunnels! Building train tunnels because holy shit you have to commute across the river on a ferry and that gets squirrelly during winter. Also some interesting stuff about historic places there at the end.
• American Experience: Riding the Rails: No lie, I did watch this a couple extra times to scoop some slang and context for a Fallout: New Vegas fic (read over on AO3). But I did also watch it originally as the dessert to a Ken Burns Prohibition/Dust Bowl double feature. It’s super interesting, the whys of kids riding the rails, and how that changed as the depression went on. Because of when it was made, we get to hear from the (former) kids who travelled around jumping on trains, and it’s just a lovely bit of history and story.
• Nature: A Squirrel’s Guide to Success: Squirrels are simple creatures but, like all living things, have some surprising complexity! Just a fun animal doc.
• BingePass: French Chef with Julia Child: The thing about watching TV on Hoopla is you have to check each episode out, which can suck. But for some things they have the “Bingepass” which is just several days of all eps available. They’re great especially for archives like these, the earliest Julia Child episodes! Black and white and old TV quality and there’s so much about what the world was at the time (she got so many kitchen tools from the hardware store?) you can pick up in passing. Also: fun food, great host.

If you read my newsletter, then you’ve seen me talk about the two most-repeated docs on Hoopla for me: The Poison Squad (the Pure Food movement and why our food says what’s in it now) and The Poisoner’s Handbook (ostensibly about forensic medicine, but also about denatured alcohol deaths and leaded gas). My history is honestly mostly these over and over. I’m a simple fellow.

Anyway, some starter docs! There’s loads on Hoopla though. If you haven’t given this library resource a go, I seriously recommend it! It’s free and often available with the “e-cards” some libraries offer that you can get for only digital checkout and resources. You get an amount of checkouts a month and they last about three to five days, depending on the title. In this world of streaming mess it’s nice to have a way to watch stuff that’s not only free but ad-free. And yeah, there are normal movies on there as well. If you’re a Hallmark or a Lifetime fan they get a lot of those titles, which is nice. Get a library card and guarantee yourself some comfort watches.

I’m trying to get back into blogging for real – so I gotta make a post a week. Which is partly to make me not like… make every post precious? Like I used to blog the stupidest shit on LJ. And still do on Tumblr. So, because this is all that is on my mind today*, let me talk about Fallout: New Vegas.

Now, I’m not “a gamer.” There are a handful of games I like and I replay those with light regularity. They include: the LEGO Batmans and Saints Row. We’re a household that buys games used, and the game console is used more for DVDs than anything. So it made sense that I didn’t pick up Fallout: New Vegas (FNV) until 2015. By then, Chase had played it some on PC, and my best friend had played it through and loved it immensely. They are both life-long Fallout players, having first scampered around the isometric early entries into the world.

I wasn’t immune to the draw, however. On our first trip to Southern California, I took a picture of a plant and sent it to my bff captioned something about bannana yucca added to the inventory.

My Twitter is nuked (deleted all the tweets), so I don’t have exactly when I first picked up playing FNV, but I know that a year later, in 2015, during one of the seasonal colds I used to get all the time was when I first played the game.

It immediately crawled under my skin and set up shop. I hadn’t got into game writing yet so it wasn’t like my later experiences with RPGs (particularly from Obsidian), where I was admiring the skills of a good dialogue tree. I bought into the story HARD, I played all four of the DLC, my character died a bunch (I am not good at shooting in games, even on easy). I was in the clutches. Then, not two years later, I picked it up again.

This time around I printed out a list of unmarked quests and went hunting. I think this might have been the only time I took the perk that shows all the locations on your map also. I was determined to stretch this play out as much as possible. It looks like I picked it up in April 2017 and only entered the final bit of the story during the winter holidays. I found my js file of downloaded tweets, so have one:

I continued my accidental habit from Fallout of making my characters dumb and lucky as a shiny rock.”

This was the playthrough that really locked it in for me. I was cooked.

2016 was when I locked down a lot of things about who I am, an embarrassing number of which I realised via Fallout New Vegas.”

In the intervening time between then and my next playthrough, FNV started weaving into my life more and more. I learned Twine and started building a FNV fan-game with bit Zorro-related energy. I learned about how games were written and how dialogue trees looked in a CSV (and one of my first works on AO3 is just a dialogue table).

I posted a lot about that game in 2018, but we also moved states and life got weird, so it is on a permanent backburner. Here are some related tweets.

On the off-chance any of you have fave rancheros or boleros from like, mid-century, I’m trying to make a Spanish-language Fallout: New Vegas playlist, so: share ’em!”

Anyway, it’s late but some of you are up. What’s the first “oh shit” narrative moment you can think of encountering in a video game play through?”… [one was when] I fast travelled back to Goodsprings on my first play through of Fallout: New Vegas and a glitch had let loose a scorpion that had just killed everyone and then turned to attack me.”

I never ended up playing any other Fallout game other than a little bit of the mobile Fallout: Shelter. It didn’t matter. FNV was all I needed. When I did the Pixeles Writing Portfolio Program, most of the work I did was around that FNV AU Twine game I never finished.

And so, in 2023, I picked it back up. I have mentioned FNV multiple times in my newsletter, but the relevant bit about this particular playthrough was in my very first one:

At the end of November I started playing Fallout: New Vegas again. It had been six years since I’d played it through last–which means I’ve never played the game in California. The enticement of playing was a carrot I dangled in front of myself for years. Oh finish this novel draft, then you can play. Actually do this other thing now, and you can play. No, you need to [finish/achieve/be better at THIS thing] first…

November went to shit. Like, the back half of the year things had been degrading in ways that are nobody but family’s business, but November is when they peaked. But we got through it! And there, at the end of November, I realised actually I could do something without earning it–and as it was I think I’ve done enough in 2023 (even before November) to justify playing a video game to my brain worms. So I fired up Fallout: New Vegas for the third time.

I’d joked at the time “maybe this playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas will fix me.” And then it did.

I played 160 hours of it (far less then the first playthrough, which tbf was extended because FNV is notoriously laggy and buggy and then our XBox died 200 hours into the game). I don’t actually track my hours much, I only know because when I booted it back up in May, I went and looked at my last save.

I, of course, wrote about this playthrough again in my newsletter. I can’t complain, I guess. Fallout: New Vegas is just part of my blood at this point. One of many such cases. Fifteen years on from release and the fandom is still thriving and modding and writing and daydreaming and making incoherent sounds at seeing a glimpse of a particular Securitron in a trailer because of the implications.

*The trailer for season 2 came out and I am not well about it

Yeah that’s right another bunch of cool links I’ve come across and need to file or finish reading! I guess these will be living under the so-original tag “tab cleanout.”

The End Times by Benjamin Percy. Man, I missed out on the physical subscription to this, but the digital is still open. I LOVE-love serialised stories and I’m super into what I’ve read about the whys and wherefores of this project (see this interview at Counter Craft). Short novel about a post apocalypse, delivered in a newspaper format monthly? Yes please.
status: subscribed

Curate your own newspaper with RSS from Molly White at Citation Needed. This is just a nice run-down of how to set up RSS feeds for yourself, to make the focus of where you’re getting info somewhere that isn’t centralised social media. I’m currently using Inoreader as my RSS base, which is especially nice as more of my pals get blogs.
status: dropped as a maybe link in September’s newsletter

Company Logo Gallery from VGDensetsu. This is such a rad thing, all sorts of company logos, and crediting the folks who actually designed them! Roger Dean is in there a lot.
status: moved to REF: Assorted

Older LGBT Science Fiction Database, built on Notion by Remnantglow. This is a pretty dope filterable database of “Generally, any novel published before the 21st century that can be called 1. sci-fi, and 2. a queer book in some sense is included.” Very much something I’ll probably pull into a spreadsheet and start marking off what I read at some point.
status: moved to REF/TOOLS: Book Organisation

Linkfest #37 from Clive Thompson. Basically someone doing blogging of links better than me, in newsletter form, though I will admit these posts are partly just for me/soft sharing. I just don’t have it in me to blog to that level! Grateful for others who do it.
status: subscribed to newsletter

A VPS Tutorial For Those Who Want Control from x. This is a pretty rad and comprehensive guide on starting your own server! Probably too complicated for me at the moment, but going into my files for later. I am happy with paying for hosting and servers the same way I (would) pay for an electrician to do some fixes (if I were not a renter).
status: moved to REF: Web & Computer

Peacock feathers can be lasers from Rachel Berkowitz over at Science. It’s what it says on the tin!! Peacock feathers use structural colour (reflecting light to create colour, basically??!!) and apparently that can be laser-fied? It’s neat and it’s neat to think of non-traditional ways to focus lasers.
status: dropped as a maybe link in September’s newsletter

Also now just some links I read and kept open so I could dump ’em here:

“The First Homosexuals” Is a Dazzlingly Overwhelming Chronicle of Queerness in Art at Observer. An article about a show at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, a very nice rundown of the content and intent of the curation.

The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905) A Silent FIlm Review from Movies Silently. A very thorough review of both the silent film in question and the picture postcard world around it. Love it!

A plaintext subject line is all email has ever needed from Buttondown’s Blog. They always have something fun about email history. The whys and wherefores of the email header.

Really, when it comes to fanbinding I clearly love a gimmick. My last go was making a mock Samuel French script and this time I decided to go for my beloved classic mass market paperback, soft paper and all.

I think I did okay for a first try? I was at the end of my glue bottle and pushing beyond my skills for the cover illustration (which is based on Gay Vets Ross Hossannah), but I am pleased with the end result. I’m already re-laying out the text block to incorporate what I’ve learned. I think the next try I am going to break the collection up so I can have two slim volumes that better fit the look of the mid-century era I was trying to evoke. See how thick this is next to the real thing!

Anyway here are the deets!

• Story: Take Your Shot (series, unfinished) by Inbox.
• Paper: Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in Manila for the body, 60lb double-sided Polar Matte from Red River.
• Types: Overseer and Body Grotesque (Cover), Bahnschrift SemiBold and Constantia (Interior).
• Binding style: Perfect binding.

Okay, pics!

I think I did okay for the cover!! This is not my style and I straight up did a version to completion, hated it and tried again. On the rebind I’m going to have to make another cover illustration and I’m D: about it. That sprayed edge though–airbrush bb, thank you Createx Airbrush Colors in Opaque Aqua.

Now have some interiors.

See, the whole build. All of this madness that consumed me for like two weeks-plus as I hunted paper etc.–this was all for this final thing.

My answer for “how do you bind an unfinished fic?” Like, how does one convey: this is complete but not done? I don’t know how much truly beat to shit paperbacks you’ve handled in your life (or if you’re part of the elite who have several with no covers), but there is a flavour to the texture of pages ripped out of this kind of book. Which is part of why the paper type was so important. I needed the effect to feel right and “nice” book paper isn’t it. Anyway:

I feel like this story ends on an emotional fade-to-black. Like YES I would like to read more, but the last update was in 2016? We’re almost a decade from that. And part of me is like, “these guys need their privacy for how they ended this,” in a way. So this felt right. And, I have kind of a thing around Books As Objects and that the wear on an object, how it degrades and is used over time, is a huge part of what actually informs the experience of a book. So: I added a bunch of blank pages to the end of the text block, bound this whole thing and then ripped them out.

This time the tabs weren’t open necessarily so I could organise them into other, better, folders. They were just open because I wasn’t getting around to reading them. But there was some good stuff here, so sharing again!

la la la more link cleaning

On not being a naturalist – but being one anyway over at Scientist Sees Squirrel, a lovely look at what being a naturalist means and how it is more about interest in the natural world than knowing a lot of IDs.
status: finally read

Preserving the USC Optical Sound Effects Library from The Freesound Blog, a very cool dive into vintage optical sound effects and how they worked and were created. Gosh I love archives and people who archive, and the way we learn when we archive.
status: moved to TO-DO: Sounds

The Animal Photo Reference Repository, a very cool site of loads of reference photos, strong anti-generative AI stance. There’s also a gallery of work created from these reference photos! I collect photo reference libraries then never use them, that’s fine.
status: moved to REF: Draing & Pose Reference

Art of The Great Mouse Detective from Art of Animation. This one has been making the rounds but it’s very fun and cool stuff!
status: looked at and admired

The Terror of Blue John Gap from the ACD Society. I’m no Arthur Conan Doyle-head, I think I got to this via reading about some interesting minerals (oh! it was link jumping from something in a recent newsletter from Failbetter Games), but it’s an interesting site layout and an interesting project, plus scans of Doyle’s manuscript!
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

The archive saving home sewing history from the trash over at The Verge, which talks about sewing pattern archives–notably the Commercial Pattern Archive. I found this via a post somewhere about the big four sewing pattern brands getting sold to a liquidator (more info here), which puts everybody in a pickle, because physical patterns are vital not just to sewists but to smaller pattern makers who use the same large-scale tissue paper printing machines.
status: moved to REF: Fibre & Sewing

E-COM: The $40 million USPS project to send email on paper over at the Buttondown blog is a delicious little slice of history that I feel will be haunting my back-brain for a bit for several reasons.
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

New Game Series – Art & System: Games for Expanded Play is some very cool archiving happening by Central Michigan University Press with crowdfunding upcoming.
status: signed up to be notified when they launch

We’re Really Just Going Through With All This, Aren’t We by Luke Plunkett is really such a mood (negative). It’s about how game releases etc. are approached, but my job has me looking at TV and film release cycles and it’s just!! Ugh.
status: haunting me

Which is what makes it incredible to behold that this week we are just carrying on through it all, as though nothing has changed. We’ll all be subjected to too many trailers to remember even a fraction of them. We’ll all create and digest the same console launch coverage we always have, with midnight launches, photos of people rushing home with their Nintendo-branded shopping bags, first impressions, review scores of a machine breathing only its first breath. We’re cosplaying as the 2000s, when these things meant something and were built for the occasion, even though literally everything around us–the economy, the industry, the platforms and ways we learn about and experience games–has changed radically.

A Radioactive Pen in Your Pocket? Sure! over at IEEE Spectrum is a fun quick look at some concept pens from the late 1950s. Love a Concept Object (TM). A cool thing that then led me to Parkercollector.com, which is one of those unchanged gems of the internet.
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

Okay so I guess, I am not going to get better at tab and link usage so I am going to do these more often, hmmmmmm, will think of a naming process next time.

I love to make problems for myself. So, when I fell in love with a FNV fic and decided to fanbind it, decided it needed to evoke the pulpy mid-century mass market paperbacks that I myself read and collect. The thing is!! To really get the right tactile umami of these books you have to have the right paper. But who wants to buy the kind of paper mass market paperbacks were made with in bulk? It’s not acid free, it’s toothy but squishy, off-white in a way that is delicious only to the real freaks out there.

Now, at one time the illustrious French Paper company had Dur-O-Tone which was based on “everyday utilitarian newsprint paper” and came in a lovely “Aged Newsprint.” But it is no longer available in text weight! So I set out on a mostly-free sampling (good paper places will at most ask you to pay shipping for a couple slips of paper as you test finishes and colours) of possibles.

First up, a couple colours of Royal Sundancefrom The Paper Mill, because I thought maybe “speckle” would hit something evocative. It did not.

Not the right vibes at all.

Well, that’s fine. How about a selection from the folks who’d made the good stuff? French Paper has white text weight, all of which were 70lb, which I felt would be too “real” and stiff but we’re trying here.

Like?! I guess the top one here (Kraft Tone in Index Off-White) could do okay (it looked better in person)? I ordered some more samples from French, focusing on their Kraft Tone and Construction lines. Still, I felt like there had to be something better our there. I poked around looking for 50lb text weight and found something that absolutely is not meant for bookbinding: Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in Manila.

I know it’s not acid free, or whatever whatever. But neither are the literal hundreds of my much-loved and read mass markets. And a ream of 500 sheets, delivered to pick up at my local Staples, cost half what a ream of not-quite-it from French would be. I figured, if it sucked for this particular need, I would enjoy having a bunch of drawing paper.

Because I have no chill, I opened the box in the parking lot. Having read many a book in the glaring Southern California sunshine, tiny black letters dancing in afterimage, I could tell right off that this was it.

Once home I ran a test print and under the warm house lights the vibes were even more spot on.

That second round of samples from French Paper are still wending their way toward me and I won’t be sad to have a more full understanding of The Nice Paper. However, every step of this latest fanbinding project has more and more solidly proved that this drawing paper is exactly what I’d been searching for.

Thinking about how, even if stamps were 22 cents and you were maybe using your student status to get cheap or free copies, setting your horror review zine at 50 cents a copy in 1987 is still mostly about the love of the game.

I’m so curious about what era someone slapped the $1 price sticker on this. My copy? I picked it up for $10 and it came in a heavy-weight sheet protector, yet the staple was still in (and un-rusted, somehow?! I immediately removed it). Worth it, honestly.

I used to have trouble falling asleep as a kid and I spent a lot of those hours staring up at my TMNT poster through through visual snow, doing the math for how many ads I’d need to sell to break even printing a comic book that was X pages long. I am not great at math but the simple building blocks of X pages total minus Y pages of story, leaving ? pages for ads, then break that down, etc., etc., I could do that.

I’ve mentioned I’m getting back into zines, collecting my newsletter as little 16-page black and whites. I haven’t done the math on these until now. I’m printing them at home and my laser printer is basically free tbh, stamps are going to be 78 cents in July. A four-sheet (16 page) zine is little over a penny in paper if I get the cheap stuff. A dollar would put me probably in the same comparative range as what Scareaphanalia was going for in the ’80s.

And I did actually put them up to buy but with another dollar of shipping on top of that dollar. I have learned, from my Itchio, that a dollar is a weird price to ask people to pay, maybe $2 is less weird. Whatever! Chase saw a 20 page laser-printed black and white zine for $40 the other day. Like you do you but also, lol what.

I do want to figure out that true dollar-zine. Like, same format as this horror review one that has my brain churning. Two sheets, stapled at the top corner, easy to fold and put in a normal business envelope, one stamp, one dollar total, just for the love of the game. But I’ve not got a reviewing soul, really. And that format, in its monthly distribution, is so ideal for newsletters and discussion of relevant and recent things.

Another zine that caught me by the throat, at the same book fair, was from Deep Listening. A mixed-media combo focusing on archives and distribution, each riso-printed zine is accompanied a flash drive. The zine has images and page spreads from queer publications, and the USB has pdfs of the originating issues, as well as page layouts for the zine itself. Talking with their creator, Sasha Fuentes, I kept thinking about The Trans Literature Preservation Project from Transfeminine Review. Physical media is a kind of distribution we can own (setting aside obscenity distribution laws) more easily than via the web–especially via any social media.

Another recent zine get (before the fateful book fair) was Appalachian Transsexual by Kyrsten Nerys Hodge. You can either get the beautifully pink 40-page (!!!) zine for $5 at her shop or go download the PDF for free, which I adore as an approach. I actually ended up with both of her zines, which is good as I’m trying to learn to love poetry in English and I very enjoyed her poetry in these.

There’s a great site that archives the covers of various cinema magazines, including Scareaphanalia. Moviemags is, like most archive sites, very fun to browse through. An enjoyable place to start is their classic monster collection.

I scanned my copy, obviously, and sent the cover in to add to their archives. I’ve never put things up on Archive.org before, but there’s one up over there and I will figure out adding mine.

Zines have been on the mind for a while, obviously. I spent like all week before last making a zine of all the campfire crafting recipes in Fallout: New Vegas. It’s up at Itchio and 100% free, with both reading and printing versions. For fun, here’s the nice little embed from Itch:

Something something, archiving and sharing and how the line wavers between the two.

Here’s a meme:

It's very funny, I was looking at my bff's LJ and mine through Wayback Machine but neither of us much used the various mood/music/etc. Though I was a more thorough tagger than her.

I did remember I'd imported my blog entire over to my *actual* blog, which has been WP for about one million years (I actually just dug into my email and it's been bzedan.com since 2007, before that it was bzedan.us). I'm glad I did. With Twitter I just did the mega-erase, didn't import a thing to Bluesky. What's done is done. But my blog posts? My wretched little written memories from as far back as 2007? Can't tear them away. I'm not sure what happened to posts from 2005-2007, but that's fine, we can't remember it all.

Anyway, point of this is to see what the bells and/or whistles look like.

I do not keep one million tabs open on my browser. I keep simply several dozen across multiple devices. And, since I also do normal, long-ingrained maintenance things like turning off my computer once a week, I can’t just let them fester in there forever. So what I do is make horrible little bookmark folders. It’s a bad habit! This isn’t even looking at inactive tabs in my mobile browsers! So, as I clean my tabs, let’s look at some cool stuff.

Advanced Marionette Making Techniques over at Storm the Castle. It’s a seven string marionette walk through! Very cool stuff. I am still learning marionettes, I had a couple as I grew up but was not good at manipulating them. I’ve made a couple recently but they were more about aesthetics than function. Function next! Hence having this tab open.
status: moved to Ref: Craft (Paper/Costume/Miniatures)

NBOS Character Sheet Designer. A free and very cool way to design character sheets. I encountered this through a tumblr post that is now somewhere deep in my 400+ item queue about blorbos/OCs, and using a character sheet as a template for understanding your story’s main character is genius. NBOS in general slaps.
status: moved to Ref: Assorted, downloaded and installed

Do You Maze. This is a really cool site with printable mazes, but most importantly, guides on drawing mazes. I’ve been adding mazes to my zines as I lay them out, this is where I am learning!
status: moved to Ref: Art Collab & Drawing Tutorials

In that same vein, Super Teacher Worksheets and Discovery Education Puzzlemaker are both incredibly dope ways to make cryptic puzzles and stuff. Also using those in zines (and for fun).
status: in general TO DO folder for easy access

Basic Sprang Moves at Solrhizaarts. I do NOT need to learn or fall in love with new to me fibre arts but dang I am all :eyes: about sprang. I do not have space for this in my heart or day at this moment, I need to close this tab.
status: moved to Ref: Fibre and Sewing

Skink Zine from BlackMudpuppy. Skinks! Zine! Love pics of these little guys, this looks fun.
status: moved to Want: Books

Queer Palestine from Pinko. A zine curating a “small archive of queer Palestinian life”. Obviously relevant to me.
status: moved to Want: Books

Appalachian Transsexual by Kyrsten Nerys Hodge. I actually already bought this (physical copy) I just need to close the tab.

My Tuesday Author Interview over at Night Beats. This was rad! I love Night Beats and Zilla is a joy.
status: linked from TAG Serialised page

Both The Art of Future War and Pulled From the Deep are articles I have open so I can read/finish reading them. Both incredibly topics I am always curious about.

One link, for https://its-behind-you.com, is no longer working since I had it up. It was some really lovely personal site for a Panto actor who had recently passed. I’d set it aside to go through it more later, there were pictures from shows, and history and all the lovely stuff one finds on that sort of thing. I’m guessing the domain is no longer being paid for. A loss!
status: moved to ARCHIVE: Dead links I want back

Okay, I think that’s it. Whew, thank you for coming along as I cleaned things up. I need to do this (blogging and link cleaning) more often. Oh! Speaking of links, I have added a pal’s blog to the Links page! Go check out Groove Pit! You know you love spreadsheets and TTRPGs.

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

---

Then who slayed the dragon, exactly?

Well, Neihm landed the killing arrow in the beast’s throat, but it was the work of the group to give her that opportunity.

Okay, and this is the group you were the leader of for the past five years?

Yes, a really great team, I loved ensuring that they felt supported on missions.

And how did you do that?

Well, any real team leader doesn’t lead so much as they support the growth of the team, right? I listened to their needs, helped them identify growth opportunities, managed payroll so that they didn’t have to balance money worries while also fighting monsters, that sort of thing.

Ah.

I think really there’s nothing quite like seeing that the role somebody is in doesn’t fit their needs and working with them to figure out what will. Like our rogue, right? He actually started out as a wizard, but as we worked together, I realized that he had a great memory for spells but showed active curiosity in how locks and traps worked. So, I set up an apprenticeship for him, and that great memory served him very well when it came to traps and locks, plus his wizard background gave him a real edge in perception. Probably one of my most satisfying experiences with that team.

More so than, it looks like, overthrowing a demon lord?

Well, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if he hadn’t become a rogue. And same for the rest of the team, really. As a leader it was really just beautiful to see how much they’d all grown not only in their own skills but in how they worked together.

So, you feel that, as a leader, it’s not that your adventuring party supports you—

But that you support your adventuring party, exactly! And it’s not as though I think they don’t have my back. It can be tough to be ‘the face’ of a party, the hero, whatever. It’s you who has to interface with kings and merchants and whoever is footing the bill. And that can be stressful! But being the buffer between my team and the sometimes not quite reasonable demands of our employers is satisfying. And if things ever got rocky, I know they would be there to back me up.

When running your background check we did find that you had posted some inflammatory broadsides about a local prince?

Yes, I did. On researching his quest query, we discovered some pretty nefarious stuff and after discussion with the team we decided that supporting his opponent would be the best move. They ended up becoming a regular client of ours, actually.

I see. And what are you looking for in your position with us?

Oh, just fresh opportunity. Like I said, I really like supporting a team, and I enjoy the folks I work with but it’s only a small independent adventuring party. Working with a bigger team would be a really fun challenge that I think I’d excel at.

That’s great. And do you have any questions for us?

Yes! Did you know that the average retention rate for an adventure staffing company this size is something like 65%? Which isn’t bad, really, when you think about how volatile the industry is, but what’s really interesting is that if you remove all management above “hero” it drops to 50%? And then, if you also leave out the heroes it drops to 30%? That’s like, spectacularly bad. That indicates a real problem within the very structure of your company.

I don’t—

No, you don’t. But that’s okay! Because your current employees do. And they hired us, well actually we’re working pro-bono, but they hired us to shake up the management structure some and begin union negotiations. And what is really lovely about that is you have this big group of people who maybe 30%, 40% tops were going to finish out their year here, that’s how little they cared for your company, all joining together towards one common goal. So, the possibility of real cohesive and modular teams is there, you’re just not utilizing it. But that’s okay, we’re going to help you out. That’s what I love to do, help folks who need it. That’s what being a hero is.

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