This year, I'm going to reverse my process of previous years and post the updates up top so readers don't have to scroll down to see my latest activities. For roundups of my 2024 and 2023 activities in podcasting, gaming, media, videos, etc., please see here, here, here and here. Activities from before then are listed further back in my blog. And as always, check this running blog entry for links to my reviews that have appeared on Skiffy and Fanty's website.
June 12, 2025
ArvCon: The annual charity stream on Arvan Eleron's Twitch (and YouTube) channel went well, raising just over $5,100 for the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation over Memorial weekend, May 23-26. I ran most of the viewer giveaways.
GAMING/STREAMING: On Shaun Duke's Twitch channel, AlphabetStreams, we launched a four-shot mini-campaign of Cats: The Conspurracy. Brandon O'Brien is GMing this adventure, called "The Nine Lives of Mrs. Bouvier." Shaun Duke, Stephen Geigen-Miller, Jennifer Brozek and I are all playing intelligent cats who are secret agents trying to save Mrs. Bouvier, a nice old "crazy cat lady" whose children are decidedly not nice.
The first episode, from May 28, is here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2471092097
and the second, from June 4, is here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2477322584
We expect the third session to happen on Wednesday, June 18.
PODCASTING:
On June 3 Skiffy and Fanty released a Speculative Dispatch Patreon-only podcast that Shaun and I had recorded, a retrospective look at the SFF writing career of Tanith Lee:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/speculative-44-130562460?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share
CONVENTIONS: I'm attending 4th Street Fantasy, a one-track mostly literary convention, this weekend. They require masks and proof of vaccination, so I feel nice and safe going there.
I feel less excited about attending the Seattle WorldCon, for various reasons, but I'm almost certainly going to attend anyway. Please let me know if you're a friend and/or follower and think we might meet up!
May 21, 2025
PODCASTING: On May 18, Skiffy and Fanty released a Patreon-only podcast, "Speculative Dispatch #42: The Most Iconic SFF Books of the 21st Century?" In this, Shaun Duke and I react to a Reactor post, discussing what we think iconic means and what the online magazine's post missed.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/speculative-42-129259317?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share
GAMING: On Saturday, May 3, I playtested a Cold City/Hot War game on The Good Friends of Jackson Elias server. "Perry Mason in ... The Case of the Banausic Burst" was set in the 1950s, like the TV show but with some mild horror elements. It was interesting and entertaining for me, but not yet fully baked, with possibly not enough horror for someone really interested in that element, and with play a bit unbalanced -- one of the players felt that the others were ganging up against him, but it's hard to see how that could have been avoided, with the adversarial nature of police and district attorney characters vs. the pool of suspects.
On Friday, May 16, we sort of wrapped the Cold City 2 playtest GMed by Groundhoggoth. We managed to identify and defeat a traitor at our multinational agency's headquarters in the divided post-WWII Berlin, although there were still evil occult/weird science adversaries out there in the city. There were several really satisfying emotional beats for all the players. My character, Ursula Weisskopf, got to deliver a really satisfying speech about not compromising with Evil for allegedly good purposes, how your good aims inevitably get tainted that way. This may have been a bit hypocritical for her, given her backstory, but then again we were talking with a guy whose eyes were turning oily sparkly black, an obvious marker of his eldritch corruption. Anyway, the players and GM had a great time.
Finally, Twitch and YouTube streamer Arvan Eleron, for whom I'm a channel moderator and paid assistant, is holding his 11th annual ArvCon this Memorial weekend, May 23-26. It's a fundraiser for the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. There will be 6 TTRPGs, an interview, and a concert. Prizes will be raffled away to viewers as donation goals are met, and I'll be helping to run those giveaways. I submitted a press release to Rascal News, but until that goes live, here's a link to the Google doc I drafted: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Dbz6hCOmffDLJd-J2rLAPMcoI5tgcDTb5u002F4Ycs/edit?usp=sharing
May 14, 2025
PODCASTING: I've been neglecting to mention the Speculative Dispatch podcasts that I've been on lately. These are specials that the Skiffy and Fanty Show pre-records for our Patreons. As of today, the Patreon levels have been adjusted so that there's just one tier, so anyone who's a member at all can listen.
On March 10, Shaun Duke and I recorded a retrospective on Tanith Lee. This has not yet been released.
On March 24, Skiffy and Fanty released a podcast that Shaun and I had recorded, "Speculative Dispatch #38: Social Media is NOT a Private Space"
https://www.patreon.com/posts/speculative-38-125086817?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share
On April 28, Skiffy and Fanty released another podcast that Shaun and I had recorded, "Speculative Dispatch #39: 2025 Hugo Award Finalists!"
https://www.patreon.com/posts/speculative-39-127513576?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share
(Also, see the Podcasting/Streaming entry from April 9 for free public streams/podcasts that overlapped with this time period.)
STREAMING:
On Friday, May 2, Shaun Duke and I interviewed Tochi Onyebuchi about his upcoming (May 27) book, Harmattan Season, live on https://twitch.tv/alphabetstreams (Shaun's channel). That was released the next day at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IbhUUmtovc&t=675s on Skiffy and Fanty's YouTube channel and at https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/818tochionyebuchi/ on the Skiffy and Fanty website as a podcast.
On Saturday, May 3, I was part of the "studio audience" (online) for Inestimable, a gameshow for The Incomparable network. We answered questions like "how many zeppelins would it take to fill the Grand Canyon" and ranked various apples-and-oranges things in order of age. Audience wisdom won out! The podcast doesn't seem to be available yet in public, so I'll try to check back on this.
STREAMING/GAMING:
On Friday, April 11, I drove to Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., to watch the final session of Hearthglow, Arvan Eleron's D&D 5e campaign based on his sourcebook, Tales and Tomes from the Forbidden Library, for which I've been editing the podcast and videos (and that's finished now). The Gamemaster had invited me to stay the night at his house with the family and other guests, so I did. It was lovely. Excitingly, they invited me to participate in a previously unannounced game stream the next day! This game was Negocios Infernales, a role-playing game that imagines aliens coming to help ignorant, superstitious humans (ruled by someone comparable to Isabella during the Spanish Inquisition) and the humans who take their gifts of technology or knowledge imagine that they have sold their souls to devils. It's a DMless, diceless game that uses cards for character building, goals, and actions; the cards are beautifully imagined, written, and drawn. I've participated in several Writing Salons that just used the cards as writing prompts, but this was the first time I'd actually played in the RPG. The other players were C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, the co-creators of Negocios Infernales, Arvan Eleron, Zac Clay, and me. We had a lot of fun! You can watch the video of our game on YouTube.
GAMING:
On April 26 and May 10, both Saturdays, our campaign of Stargate SG-1 with Andrew Pontious as GM continued. It continues to be fun and interesting! Due to health issues for one of our players, we knocked off early on May 10, so this is actually turning out to be a three-parter. I'm not getting into details in case Andrew wants to publish scenarios eventually.
On Monday, April 28, I played a oneshot of Star Trek Adventures (first edition, although the second edition came out a while ago). Morpheus was the GM; I've played several other oneshots with him GMing (met him via The Good Friends of Jackson Elias' Discord). We played it via Roll20; my other, ongoing STA campaign where I play a Romulan has all been theater-of-the-mind, so it was a little different using the Virtual TableTop, but it certainly helped in some ways. I assisted Morpheus by making up six pregens for the other players, whom I hadn't met. This was the first time I'd done that, and I found it to be rather fun, especially after he'd found a tool for me that offers options and keeps track of the numbers: https://sta.bcholmes.org/
The game itself involved a small party in a shuttle checking in on a science station on an out-of-the-way planet; it turned out that Orion pirates had raided it, so we faced them down after fighting some critters similar to Smilodons (my human engineer, Charles, jiggered his tricorder to emit a painful whine). I'd definitely be willing to play this again.
On Friday, May 2, I was in another playtest of the Dreamland RPG created by Jason Thompson. The creator was the GM this time, and the scenario was entitled Neverland. This worked out well for me, since I had just read Pat Murphy's The Adventures of Mary Darling. We had fun, but we only made it halfway across the island, and ended up having dinner with fairies, and there appeared to be strings attached!
Sooner or later, Groundhoggoth's group wants to finish our Cold City 2 campaign, that started as a playtest. Currently, we're pondering May 16 or 23.
And ArvCon is coming up May 23-26! I expect to be heavily involved behind the scenes, as usual.
April 9, 2025
No gaming lately! I've done a few more Skiffy and Fanty transcripts but have slowed down due to other factors.
AUDIO/VIDEO EDITING:
I edited the audio for another session of Gregory A. Wilson/Arvan Eleron's Hearthglow Actual Play TTRPG, so there's another YouTube episode and three more podcasts (#s 16, 17, 18) posted from that.
PODCASTING/STREAMING:
On March 28, I was on a Twitch stream for Skiffy and Fanty, discussing Torture Cinema: Bad Camp Experiences: "The Monster of Camp Sunshine" (1964), directed by Ferenc Leroget, with co-hosts Shaun Duke and David Annandale. I can't recommend the movie, but we had a good discussion. It was released as a podcast and a YouTube video.
On April 4, I was on a Twitch stream for Skiffy and Fanty again, for a Mining the Genre Asteroid discussion with Shaun Duke and Paul Weimer about The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974) by Patricia McKillip. I loved the book and the discussion, which was later released as a podcast and a YouTube video.
March 26, 2025
GAMING: As mentioned above, I played Foretold: From Earth
at Capricon during the first weekend of February. Shaun had wanted to
record something since we were all going to be there together, but there
wasn't any particular topic that strongly appealed to us. I had played a
couple of versions of Foretold before on Groundhoggoth's Discord
channel (more about that in the Jan. 21 gaming roundup), and I thought
we could get it done in an hour or so, so I suggested it and led us
through it. We had a lot of fun!
On Jan. 25, I played a one-shot of Swords of the Serpentine: Takedown,
organized by someone on The Good Friends of Jackson Elias server. Paul
Weimer was also in this, so that was fun. The SotS system adapts "the
GUMSHOE investigative roleplaying system to create a fantasy RPG with a
focus on high-action roleplaying and investigation inspired by the
stories of Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett, Robert E. Howard, and others."
So we were doing detection and political intrigue; we had conversations
with various people in the city (involving some verbal fencing), ended
up sneaking into someone's mansion while they were at a party elsewhere,
and interrupted a magical ritual that could have doomed the city.
On Monday, Feb. 17, I played a one-shot of Deadlands
on the Wacky Wednesdays channel, an offshoot of TGFOJE. They set it up
for Wednesdays, but the games usually start too late for me, but this
one was held on the afternoon of Presidents Day. Deadlands is based on
the Savage Worlds RPG; it's Weird West with steampunk elements. This was
my first time playing in Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE), and
several others were beginners too, but we had fun learning it together.
First, the team worked together to stop a runaway stagecoach; later, we
were investigating a town and suddenly got ourselves into a gunfight.
On Feb. 22 our Stargate campaign (using Wyvern's system,
adapted from D&D 5e) launched Season 2 (S2E1 "Welcome to the Jungle"). Gatemaster Andrew Pontious
figured out a way for us to move forward in time despite one of the
players not wanting to be spoiled beyond Season 2 of SG-1: Our team has
been transported to another galaxy along with some refugees from Goa'uld
tyranny, and we don't have a way back yet. The Tinkerers, the leaders here, are aware
of the G but don't want to get into war with them; they don't want to
send us home until they're sure they can trust us. And they want us to
gain their trust by doing some missions for them. So far, we're going
along with it.
On March 15 we continued with S2E2 "The Labors of
Hercules" by starting one of those missions. A spaceship has started
attacking a peaceful mining world with drones at regular intervals. We
figured out that these attacks started a couple of years after the
people of that planet started broadcasting radio, and convinced them to
stop doing that. The attacking spaceship left, but NOT by
wormhole/hyperspace, so we figure it's from just a few light-years away.
Stinger at the end: My Aturen character, Jileria, found a mystery box
in a locker at our lab with the Tinkerers; some kind of organic-metallic
"fly" was inside, but we managed to contain it before it escaped.
On Feb. 28 I started participating in a playtest of Cold City 2, being run by Groundhoggoth. The kickstarter for Cold City Hot War 2nd edition
ended March 25, but the playtesting continues for a little while. Cold
City is set in post-WWII Berlin, with weird horror elements; each
player's character is from a different faction (usually American,
British, French, or Russian), so although we work together to
investigate and defeat some common threats, we're also working against
each other to keep secrets and gain advantages for our factions. I'm
playing Ursula Weiskopff, a German who openly worked for the Nazis while
secretly trying to help my queer friends escape and survive; later, I
secretly worked for the OSS. Sooner or later, I'm expecting Ursula to be
attacked by someone who only knows about her overt past. I'm not sure
I'd want to play her for a long campaign, but this was planned for a
short run anyway. After our first session, which was a couple of hours
focused on designing our characters, we played on March 7 and March 21;
we may continue for a few
sessions in April to wrap things up, although the playtest feedback
period will be over by
then. So far, we dislike that this version of CCHW seems to value
player input considerably less than the original, heavily leaning toward
GM planning vs. collaborative storytelling. But we're still having fun
together.
On March 24, I played what ended up being the conclusion of our Thunderchild campaign, in which Groundhoggoth had modified Cold City Hot War and set it a few months after H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. We played several other times in February and March; this was our 11th and ultimately final session. We had known we were approaching the endgame, but events just kept gaining momentum for the exciting conclusion. My character, Iris Worthington, had gained control of the Thunderchild program, but she ended up being killed. However, we did eradicate some lingering Martian influences, so that was satisfying. This has been one of the best campaigns I've played in, for setup, GMing, role-playing, and players working with each other (although characters were occasionally opposed) to build a story together.
March 25, 2025: Oh dear, it's been a while!
TRANSCRIPTS: I've made progress in transcribing the 2024 Skiffy and Fanty podcasts, but I'm not quite done yet. I hope to get them all done by mid-April.
AUDIO/VIDEO:
Only two Skiffy and Fanty streams that I've been on have been released since January. On Feb. 3, the podcast for our annual year-in-review-and-forecast show "Looking Back, Moving Forward" was released; the video released "last month" is here. (Why is YouTube so nonspecific on dates?) I was talking/streaming with Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer, and David Annandale; if you want to know my specific recommendations, check the shownotes or the transcript.
On Feb. 13, Skiffy and Fanty released an actual play podcast of a game Shaun, Paul and I played together at Capricon in Chicago (also on YouTube with just audio). We played the science fictional indie collaborative narrative game "Foretold: From Earth" and had a blast doing it.
Of course, I continue watching Skiffy and Fanty shows on https://twitch.tv/alphabetstreams on Friday nights at 8 Eastern, participating in chat even if I'm not on camera.
Jan. 21, 2025
AUDIO/VIDEO: I continue to edit podcasts and YouTube videos professionally for the Twitch streamer Arvan Eleron. The Hearthglow campaign based on the Tales & Tomes from the Forbidden Library D&D 5e module had a new video and podcast posted Jan. 15 and will get another podcast episode Jan. 22. This will probably wrap up in March, and he'll launch something else later. (UPDATE 3/25: Actually, Hearthglow will wrap up with a live show in Connecticut in April!)
AUDIO: For Skiffy and Fanty, one podcast and video that I'm on have been released so far this month. It's a "Mining the Genre Asteroid" episode about Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow (1955) that Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer and I recorded this fall on Shaun's alphabetstreams Twitch channel. Skiffy and Fanty will resume streaming there starting Jan. 31, at 8 p.m. Eastern, and should have new programs, mostly live, every Friday.
GAMING:
Jan. 13: Thunderchild: The modified Cold City/Hot War campaign, set in London a couple of months after H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, resumed after its winter break. As other characters explored their own agendas and objectives, my character, Iris Worthington (a suffragist and the daughter of an industrialist), finally won the trust of the head of the Thunderchild science/defense project when she realized her brother had secretly obtained and experimented with Martian War Machine materials, and turned him in to Captain Spencer.
Jan. 20: Thunderchild: It's worse than that; Ronny Worthington was also selling information to the French, and by the end of the session, they had established a beachhead in the south of England. Meanwhile, other characters are finding out horrific things about the Aurora Project to create modified humans who no longer need sleep, and the Royal cousin in our group has been marked for destruction by whoever has been wielding a captured heat ray.
Thunderchild is a game being run on a private Discord server, so I can't share it here. However, the DM, groundhoggoth, is great. He has a number of games for sale at itch.io; I've played two of the Foretold one-shot narrative card games and enjoyed them greatly.
Meanwhile, Cold City/Hot War will be launching a kickstarter for a second edition soon. That page includes a link to sign up for playtests. You can also find out more about the game at the DriveThruRPG link there.
