Things That are Getting Me Through

Everyone is experiencing these times differently. I'm fortunate enough to have a job that I can do remotely and to not be alone in my isolation. But here's some of what's been keeping me going, and I hope it can help.

Pets

I have a cat. I feed her every day. She sits on my lap and purrs and bites me.

We also caught a sourdough starter. I feed it every day. It has not yet bitten me.

Self Care

Because I now live what my father has generously called "the life of a scholar", I don't get a lot of sunlight. I find that vitamin D supplements help me sleep better.

I was never a gym person, but the total lack of activity has started to wear on me. I've taken up the seven-minute workout, which I like much better than I thought I would.

The first few weeks without shaving are all terrible scraggly neck beard for me. With nobody to see it, what better time to push through that period and find out what other terrible scraggly facial hair I can grow?

I miss math and I also miss programming. I've taken the opportunity to write a couple of janky scripts: one that generates thumbnails for video files, and one that removes cruft from CBZ and CBR files, shrinks them a little, and converts CBR to CBZ. Use at your own risk, but I am proud of them.

I brûléed a Cadbury creme egg. It's worth doing at least once.

Media

Before this, we sometimes saw a comedy show called Spoons & Toons & Booze. They've become Spoons & Toons & Booze & Zoom now, and they're raising money for the employees of the theaters where they used to perform.

On a smaller scale, we've hosted a few movie nights with distant friends on twoseven.xyz. It works about as well as any new tool, which is to say, plan at least an extra half-hour at the beginning for socializing and troubleshooting. Test what you're planning to do by yourself first.

On Netflix, after The Great British Bake-Off, Terrace House might be the most bizarre and calming show I've found. Six young Japanese adults live in a nice house and get nice cars. There don't seem to be any stakes or anything? They all keep going to their normal jobs and stuff. After each episode, a bunch of enthusiastic commentators remark on all the drama that may or may not have happened. It's pretty good.

Sylvan Esso released a new live album.

Podcasts

Lots of podcasts will keep you informed or expose you to new and complicated ideas. These are (mostly) not those.

Phoebe Reads a Mystery

Phoebe Judge, host of Criminal, reads a mystery novel one chapter at a time. She started with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, then The Hound of the Baskervilles, and currently The Moonstone.

St Elwick's Neighbourhood Association Newsletter Podcast

Recently launched by Mike Wozniak, frequent guest on The Beef and Dairy Network. The usual arc of an episode is roughly: bizarre to sad to cringe to absurd. It's pivoted into the current situation seamlessly by releasing shorter, more frequent episodes, and I think they're stronger for it.

The Tranquillusionist

Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist (same feed) reads odd things in a calm voice, with musical accompaniment by her husband, Martin Austwick.

Make My Day

Josh Gondelman has a single guest on to play a made-up game show, where points are given to answers based on how much they cheer him up. Money is given to charity. Strange motivational speeches are delivered.

Seltzer Death Match

Self-explanatory, I think. They've been editing through a backlog recently, so there's a bunch of new ones.

372 Pages We'll Never Get Back

Two of the minds behind RiffTrax read through bad books. My cousin recommended this to me and in exchange I recommended

Bad Books for Bad People

Jack Shear and Tenebrous Kate read through books that they think the other will enjoy/hate.

Monster Man

James Holloway reads through old monster manuals, a couple entries at a time. I particularly enjoyed the episode about mind flayers, and why they are the perfect 70's Doctor Who villain. Nominally topical!

Others

Life is short. Also have these recommendations, with the understanding that I don't enjoy them any less for having lost the energy to describe them:

• Cooking with Paula McIntyre
• Scotland Outdoors
• The Boring Talks

Games

When there was less on our minds, my wife and I would set aside days to solve mysteries, things like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective or T.I.M.E. Stories. These days we play a lot of LEGO Batman 3, which is good because neither of us is any good at video games and it's fun regardless.

Quarantine has also gone on long enough that I found my old RuneScape account. While my old character is still sitting there in RS3, I've been playing Old School RuneScape, and it's really interesting to start again at the beginning.

I've started playing in a Lasers & Feelings game with a bunch of doctors and it's good fun and breezy. The same group is also getting ready for a more involved 5e game which should be interesting.

I've been playing in a West End Games/d6 Star Wars game and it's wild. The rules can be found online practically by accident, and they're worth a look.

Finally, it looks like I will be GMing again, likely 5e. I've never actually run 5e proper, but I'm hoping I pick it up easily enough.

Podcasts (Fiction)

Following Dan at Throne of Salt, I decided to review some of the podcasts I listen to. Because "Oh God I Listen to So Many" is a sentiment I can share. I found his post very useful, as it finally convinced me to listen to the Magnus Archives, so I hope that someone else may find some gems here.

To keep the list manageable, I'm only listing fiction podcasts for now (not actual play, history, etc.), and I've broken it into "Abandoned", "Caught Up", "Underway", and "On My Radar". "Serialized" means you should probably start at the beginning, and "episodic" means you can probably start anywhere. "Nondiagetic" here means that the people doing the recording know there's an audience, but I've probably applied it inconsistently. "Explicit" means you'll want headphones, at least.

Abandoned

I started these, but have no intention of finishing or catching up right now.

Archive 81

• serialized (?)
• horror
• nondiagetic

If the act of producing The Magnus Archives was itself a ritual of some kind. I just didn't have the time to get a feel for it.

The Signal

• serialized
• sci-fi

I remember listening to this, but nothing else about it.

Steal the Stars

• serialized
• sci-fi

A para-military organization guards a UFO. Too tense for me. I can do horror, but I can't do suspense generated by human decisions. I imagine this is like how some people just cannot handle cringe comedy.

The Black Tapes

• episodic
• horror
• nondiagetic

A podcaster follows an experienced paranormal investigator looking into his "black tapes"—the tapes he could never explain away. I liked individual episodes well enough, but they felt "unfinished". I didn't care at all for the metaplot, which from what I understand dominates later episodes.

It Makes A Sound

• serialized

An obsessive fan of an obscure musician searches for an early tape. I think? It wasn't what I was expecting, so I left quickly.

The Other Stories

• episodic
• horror

Short horror stories. Seemed workmanlike, but I may revisit it. There is a different podcast also called The Other Stories, which is unrelated.

Kench!

• serialized
• comedy

I was only in it for the first miniseries (5 episodes), starring Ben Partridge of Beef & Dairy Network. If you like Beef & Dairy Network, you'll like that, but the rest is wildly different from what I can tell.

Mission to Zyxx

• episodic (?)
• comedy
• sci-fi

A space-diplomat gets sent to the sticks. It's not bad, but there are too many podcasts. I do enjoy the episodes that crop up on the Max Fun bonus episode feed.

Caught Up

I've listened to all of these that there is to listen to.

Adventures in New America

• serialized
• horror
• comedy

Satire in future America with space vampires. Very camp. I probably would have bounced off it, but I had a lot of time on my hands.

Beef and Dairy Network

• episodic
• comedy

Absolutely one of my favorite podcasts, but very difficult to explain. When I try to explain it to friends I just get weird looks. I recommend starting with the first episode ("Dr. David Pin") or episode 52 ("Tusk Henderson", guest starring Nick Offerman).

The Bridge

• serialized
• horror

Traffic reports broadcast from a watchtower along the (abandoned) trans-Atlantic bridge. I think I'm a sucker for both alternate history settings and horror about people with boring jobs.

Bubble

• serialized
• comedy
• sci-fi

Inside the bubble is a city of relative safety, and outside is wasteland with devils in it. The devils occasionally break through and fighting them is subcontracted through a ride-share style app. A weird premise, but well-executed.

Deadly Manners

• serialized
• comedy
• crime

Basically the Clue movie but with different famous people (LeVar Burton, Kristen Bell, Michelle Visage) and a good dose of cold war paranoia.

Dreamboy

• serialized
• horror
• explicit

Weird things happening to a horny gay musician spending a winter as a zookeeper in Cleveland Ohio. It's a mood.

Getting On with James Urbaniak

• episodic
• comedy

Comedian James Urbaniak, whose voice you know, adopts a variety of personas to deliver deranged self-centered monologues. A true gem, but sadly dead.

In Darkness Vast

• serialized
• horror
• sci-fi

Season 1 is "when Star Trek goes wrong". Season 2 is a about identity and celebrity, but more about survival on a hostile planet. I really enjoyed these, and hope for more.

Middle:Below

• episodic
• horror (?)

Aims for Doctor Who with Ghosts, but sometimes ends up a little on the "community theater" side of things. Charming though, enough to compensate.

The Orbiting Human Circus

• serialized

Julian Koster of Neutral Milk Hotel tells surreal Christmas tales for children. If it had actually been broadcast in the 20th century, I expect that listening to it would be a family Christmas tradition, like a sharp-edged Rankin-Bass film.

Pounded in the Butt by My Own Podcast

• episodic
• comedy
• explicit

Podcasting celebrities read the works of Chuck Tingle aloud, sometimes with friends, rarely sober, and apparently with very little preparation.

Sandra

• serialized

What if the engine behind the newest voice assistant was actually just a secret warehouse of people with access to all of your personal information? Despite that setup, this is not a satire or sci-fi show. It hit the same "tension comes from people's decisions" note that I found very stressful in Steal the Stars, but I made it through.

Tides

• serialized
• sci-fi

A scientist is trapped on the surface of a strange planet, with only intermittent communication. A weirdly meditative experience.

A Very Fatal Murder

• serialized
• crime
• comedy

The Onion does Serial. If you're the type of person to read a whole Onion article, you'll get a kick out of this. If you're the type of person to laugh at the headline and then move on, you'll probably be content to know that it exists. The ads are memorable.

Your Attention Please

• episodic
• comedy

Monologues delivered without context. Dead at two episodes, but I was laughing out loud at both of them (well, giggling madly).

Underway

I have listened to some of these and either finished, or intend to finish.

Alice Isn't Dead

• serialized
• horror

Season one, a trucker makes odd deliveries around the US while searching for her wife (Alice) and running from things. Season two is all conspiracies and paranoia. It's really good.

The Cryptonaturalist

• episodic

Each episode describes an encounter with a fantastical cryptid, and also has some poetry and other ramblings. Took me a couple episodes to get into, but I think it was just me.

The Ghastly Tales Podcast

• episodic
• horror

Scottish people read short stories.

Hello From the Magic Tavern

• serialized
• fantasy
• nondiagetic

A podcaster fell through a gap in reality to the mystical land of Foon and this podcast is his lifeline. Every episode he and his friends interview a different resident of Foon. It's like an improv game, where the only rule is that anything anyone says is canon. It's hilarious, and I understand there's a great second season and a spinoff podcast, but there's just so much of it.

Lake Clarity

• serialized
• horror

Strange goings-on around Lake Clarity. A pastiche of classic campground horror.

LeVar Burton Reads

• episodic

LeVar Burton Reads things to you. It's good.

Lightspeed Magazine - Science Fiction and Fantasy

• episodic

A small stable of narrators read stories from recent issues of Lightspeed Magazine. I'd recommend a lot of them.

Limetown

• serialized
• horror
• crime (?)

A radio host looks into the historical disappearance of a secluded research facility. Really good tension, satisfyingly banal evil. I haven't listened to season two yet, and I understand there's a show on "Facebook Watch", which I unfortunately do not care enough to learn how to use.

The Lost Cat Podcast

• serialized (seasons 2 & 4)
• episodic (seasons 1 & 4)
• horror

Nominally, the host looks for his lost cat. Each episode in any season is a well-crafted horror story, and in the first three seasons, each one has a brief musical interlude. I really love the worldbuilding.

The Magnus Archives

• episodic
• horror

I'm listening to this as I write these reviews, and it occurs to me how many other podcasts must have been aiming for this, and how skillfully it avoids all of their pitfalls. An archivist inherits a backlog of supernatural witness statements, and sets about recording them on tape and sometimes taking new statements. It's a very clean premise: every episode, of necessity, has something supernatural, and then the host is allowed to poke at it after. I appreciate that this poking is usually disbelief, but not always because it might be more likely within the world of the Archives.

Old Gods of Appalachia

• episodic (?)
• horror

The Appalachain chain was a prison for unspeakable things, and also there's witches. It's pretty good so far.

The Orphans

• serialized
• sci-fi

A bunch of crash-landed amnesiacs try to survive on a weird planet. I'm not far into it yet.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour

• episodic
• comedy

Different titles recall different types of show from classic old-time radio, but with modern comedians doing the voice acting. I particularly enjoy "Beyond Belief" (what if Nick and Nora saw ghosts) and "Sparks Nevada: Marshall on Mars" (self-explanatory).

The Truth

• episodic

Each episode is a fully-produced, sharply-written, short drama. There's a lot of them, and a lot of them walk that same uneasy line as Limetown and Sandra.

Welcome to Night Vale

• episodic
• horror
• comedy

"Community radio from the Twilight Zone". Justified and ancient. Sometimes gets a bit caught up in its mythology, but when it's good it's really good.

Within the Wire

• serialized
• horror
• sci-fi
• nondiagetic
• second person

A series of guided meditation tapes help you escape from some kind of dystopian institution. Immersive experience.

Wolf 359

• serialized
• sci-fi
• horror
• comedy

Comms officer on a remote monitoring station broadcasts his logs into the void. There's a lot of Red Dwarf in the DNA, but also some alternate history world-building and some banal corporate evil.

On My Radar

I haven't even started these yet.

• Darkest Night
• DUST
• Empty
• Twilight Histories
• The Walk
• The White Vault
• Wooden Overcoats

Discourse & Discord

“The Discourse”

I can't keep up with The Discourse. There's always something happening, and I mostly don't care. But I try to be a good person and also to not support shitty people, so I have to care a little.

I stopped using the "OSR" tag on this blog, because it has been associated with a lot of terrible people, and also it seemed unnecessary¹. This was an imperfect solution because "OSR" has a defined sensibility that it was useful to have a name for. (*DREAM is a cool group, but I think it's turning into something different—compare a game like Songbirds V2 with a game like Bastionland.)

Then Zedeck had a thread and pointed out that it was selfish to continue playing in the space but to disown the label. I still respect people who used to be "OSR" and then decided that it didn't actually describe the games they enjoy, or that it wasn't worth dealing with the people. But I'll try to use the "OSR" tag for my stuff where it seems relevant, and also to be a decent person.

Discord

Where is the OSR community now? As far as I engage with it: mostly Discord. Many Discord servers are runaway reactors of creativity. Unfortunately, they're also transient, and brief conversations get lost. Here's some things to come of them that I hope others might find useful.

Troika! Backgrounds Jam

I may never play Troika! proper, but it's an infectious idea. Similarly, I don't know if I'll ever sell my games, but itch.io seems to be where the cool games are these days. The Troika! Backgrounds Jam was apparently the push I needed to throw something together and put it on itch². The jam is over, but this clip of how-to seems worth keeping:

(Instructions from Jared Sinclair, used by permission.)

And here is my entry, loosely inspired by Dial H:

I went ahead and put Bloodring up there too:

Alternate Beholders

Something about a beholder demands an answer. "Dungeons and Dragons" is nominally about dragons, but you know you're really playing D&D when you see a beholder. The 5e Monster Manual has three or four variant beholders. The AD&D Monstrous Manual has twelve. Everyone wants to do their own take³.

So the OSR Discord server was brainstorming alternative "beholders": burning wheels of eyes, disco-laser robots, etc. And I had what I thought was a pretty good idea, and now a bona fide meme: An Octopus with Too Many Wands. Now that we've survived one in Spwack's game, I thought I'd take the opportunity to share the idea here for posterity. It's a great monster: it's weird, it's dangerous, it's intuitive, and it makes its own treasure.

(Art from Nate Treme, used by permission.)

---

1 I call all the games I play "D&D" in speech, even things like Mothership. It's just easier sometimes.^back

2 Looking back at my blogging, I find I am unexpectedly motivated by challenges and competitions, even though I am not a competitive person by nature.^back

3 What I can find on short notice includes:

• The Panopticium
• The Lookyloo
• The Ones Left Behind
• Improved Beholders

But there are many many more, I'm sure.^back

Hapaxes in Context

My last post about Hapaxes in the Ultraviolet Grasslands was well received, even though I was not satisfied with the strength of its conclusions. Here, I attempt to add context to the hapaxes through the use of some inadvisable perl scripts.

Process

Again, I'll assume some familiarity with bash. I'm also using a pair of perl scripts I wrote which probably don't generalize well, but which were fit for purpose. If I'd planned ahead, I'd have written them both as one script.

First, we'll do some very similar things to what we did last time:

$ python3-pdf2txt.py -o UVG.txt UVG.pdf
$ cat UVG.txt |
tr A-Z a-z |
sed -E "s/\s+|['‘’]s\s+|[–—-]+/\n/g" |
sed -E 's/[][<>.,();:+?!%/©&“”"#*]//g' |
sed -e "s/^['’‘]//g" |
sed -e "s/['’‘]$//g" |
grep -Ev "^[0-9d]+$" |
sort | uniq -u > UVG.hapax
$ /bin/diff -i /usr/share/dict/words UVG.hapax |
grep ">" |
cut -d " " -f2 > UVG.hapax.new


As before, linebreaks have been added for clarity, but you'll have to escape them to use this code directly. Also note that this time we remove the possessive "s" from the ends of strings, and we split on hyphens as well as spaces.

Next, we go back to the PDF, but we extract it as XML to access the character position data:

$ python3-pdf2txt.py -t xml -o UVG.xml UVG.pdf
$ cat UVG.xml | ./xml2tsv.pl > UVG.tsv
$ cat UVG.hapax.new | ./pdfmarker.pl UVG.tsv > UVG.pdfmark


The scripts I mentioned earlier are xml2tsv.pl and pdfmarker.pl. The former (very naively) strips extraneous markup, leaving each line with a character, four coordinates, and a page number. The latter reads that tsv file (given as an argument) and locates the coordinates of each word piped to it. (As each word only appears once, this is straightforward.) It outputs these coordinates in pdfmark format, a way to annotate PDFs.

Finally, we merge the annotations back into the original PDF as highlights:

$ gs -o UVG.ann.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress UVG.pdf UVG.pdfmark

Results

This method is much pickier, in part because of the difficulty of parsing a PDF consistently. From the text file, we extracted 164 words of interest, but there are only 139 annotations in the final count. I expect that the difference is words that are represented differently between the txt and xml formats. For example, if the space between two words isn't represented by a whitespace character in the xml, it does not detect as a word boundary when we look for it. But the heuristics that build the text output may still correctly "add" the space back in. This method also considers each half of a hyphenated word separately, so they are more likely to appear multiple times or to be in the dictionary.

These numbers are smaller than before for a different reason also: I have been using the free sample version, so that I can share the results. This is 78 pages, down from 158 pages in the backer version I was using before. So while we can still get a list of the output as before:

rewatch
pusca
eskatin
ashwhite
demiwarlock
vidy
engobes
tollmistress
dejus
orangeware

We can also then go find where these words are highlighted in the PDF:

In the highlighted PDF, it's easier to see that the majority of the hapaxes are proper names and normal words that my dictionary doesn't contain, like "lunchbox" and "calcinous". There are still lots of gems though, like a sign that reads No Lones to Adventerers, Frybooters or Wagonbonds, the goddess Hazmaat, and zombastodon lair. You can take a look here:

Disclaimer & Plug

I still back Luka on Patreon, and I have backed his Kickstarter as well. The Kickstarter campaign is now in its final week, and I'm very excited for it.

The free version of the PDF (available unannotated in the Kickstarter description), is licensed under a CC By-NC-ND 4.0 license. Arguably, because all the changes I have made to it were procedural, maybe this still complies with the "NoDerivatives" part of that. But I don't actually know, so I went ahead and asked Luka and he said this was ok anyway.

Hapaxes in the Ultraviolet Grasslands

At the beginning of the glossary of the Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG), Luka asks: What have I missed? What needs more details? One way to find things that might be missing is to look for hapaxes in the work. This is not a good plan, but I tried anyway.

Process

The following stuff was done in bash. I assume some familiarity with the commands, but comment on particular decisions that I made. It could be cleaned up.

First, we need the corpus as text so that we can work with it:

> python3-pdf2txt.py -o UVG.txt UVG.pdf

Then we clean up the text, and select all the words that only appear once:

> cat UVG.txt |
tr A-Z a-z |
sed -e 's/\s/\n/g' |
sed -E 's/[][<>.,();:+?!%/©&]//g' |
sed -e "s/[‘’]/'/g" |
sed -e 's/[“”"]//g' |
sed -e 's/[–—]/-/g' |
sed -e 's/[-"'\'']$//g' |
sed -e 's/^[-"'\'']//g' |
grep -Ev "^[-0-9'd]+$" |
sort | uniq -u > UVG.hapax

Line breaks have been added for clarity. Parts of this bear closer examination:

sed -e 's/[“”"]//g' |

This could be folded into the second sed statement, but it might be useful to keep but normalize double quotes for some purposes.

sed -e 's/[-"'\'']$//g' |
sed -e 's/^[-"'\'']//g' |


Quotes and hyphens at the beginning or end of a word are unlikely to carry much information, so they are stripped. This must happen after all the dash and quote characters have been "normalized".

Lots of the words that only appear once (6832 now) are not exciting. So we'll remove all the dictionary words:

> /bin/diff -i /usr/share/dict/words UVG.hapax |
grep ">" |
cut -d " " -f2 > UVG.hapax.new

Again, line breaks have been added for clarity. The full path to diff is specified because I've otherwise aliased diff to colordiff.

Results

Of the 1612 hapaxes now left, it might be interesting to see how the characters are distributed.

> cat UVG.hapax.new | fold -c1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr

This gives a table of character frequency:

3223
1647	e
1295	a
1155	i
1106	o
1097	r
1016	s
1010	n
916	t
877	l
837	-

. . .

4	3
3
3	8
2	ô
2	ç
2	9
2	7
1	Ö
1	ñ
1	ë
1	â

The most common "character" is blank, and I suspect this is related to newlines (3223=2*1612-1). The other "blank" character appears to be a space that did not get stripped out initially, or which was later re-introduced. Perhaps it is some kind of other whitespace.

The most exciting thing in this table (I think) is the high occurrence of the hyphen. This means that roughly half of the "hapaxes" are likely composite words, and worth considering separately. For example:

sub-node
six-lives
noble-pillared
mercy-is-weakness
marrow-beet
curse-maddened
six-limbed
force-glass
stock-piled
self-regenerating

Disregarding hyphens, these are all words a dictionary knows, but which Luka may be using in novel ways.

The remaining (unhyphenated) words, are a mixed bag. Take this random sampling:

pyrokinetic
skalin
psionics
dustland
irshe
replicator
10x
visec
mearls
mirodar

Many of these just show the limitations of my dictionary ("pyrokinetic", "replicator"). Some of them show the limitations of the process ("10x", "jrientsblogspotcom"). Some are ad-hoc compound words ("dustland", "malicereflective"). The rest are either made-up, proper nouns, or typos, and I don't have a way to distinguish between them. It's possible that some of these were "created" by pdf2txt, which uses tunable heuristics to decide where to draw word boundaries.

If you're interested in playing with the lists, I've uploaded them here. They are split into "hyphen" and "nohyphen", and should be alphabetical.

Disclaimer & Plug

I back Luka on Patreon at the $1/mo level, which grants me access to early drafts of his projects. The version used for this project was the most recent version available to backers, but it has not been edited.

UVG is currently running a Kickstarter for a fancy printed version with editing and more art. There's a link to a free version of the manuscript there too.

About Zak

Apparently Zak S is an abusive PoS (CW: abuse, sexual violence, violence). Later today he is planning to make a statement, but what could he say?

I feel things, but obviously not nearly to the degree of his actual victims. From my place of relative privilege, what can I do? I'm not a large voice in this community, but I don't think that should excuse me.

What to do with his social media presence?

• Unfollow him on Twitter, Tumblr, G+, and Instagram, even where I am not active on these platforms.
• Unsubscribe from his podcast, and its associated media.
• Stop my Patreon contribution ($1/mo).
• Remove his blog from my sidebar and feed reader.
• Leave his Discord server. I won't be updating the Gygaxian Democracy doc anymore either.
• I don't have any of his porn, but like, I wouldn't watch it? I wouldn't watch James Deen either.

What to do with his stuff?

I've got some things of his:

• Vornheim (print/pdf)
• Maze of the Blue Medusa (print only)
• Death Frost Doom (print/pdf)
• A Red & Pleasant Land (print/pdf)
• Dial H (print)(he drew one page of it)

For now I'll keep them I guess, but I don't think I'll be using them. None of them can't be replaced by other books.

What to do with his associates?

Some of his collaborators and friends are waiting for his statement, although most of them have already distanced themselves. The ones I'm still watching are:

• LotFP. I have always thought of LotFP as an accepting place for minorities that got a bad rap from some corners because of their publicity-stunt GWARness. I believe that many of the other creators at LotFP have already cut ties with Zak, but if Jim continues to work with him, then I am not sure I can continue buying their products.
• China Miéville. China Miéville is one of my favorite authors, and has collaborated with Zak in the past. I'm not sure if they are in frequent enough contact that he would comment unprompted, but I'll certainly think much less of him if I see a future collaboration without some significant statement.

What to do with myself?

I have recommended Zak's blog to people in the past, and given his books as gifts.

• I'm attempting to reach every individual who I've recommended or gifted his stuff to to let them know, so that they can make their own informed decisions.
• On this blog, where I have linked to his blog, I am adding the rel="nofollow" property to those links.
• On posts where I have mentioned his things, I will comment with a link to this post.