I shouldn’t underrate it, but Juneteenth would be a more compelling holiday if the 13th Amendment didn’t legalize slavery to this day.

Working so everybody else can take the day off, which is why I didn’t have to work last Friday. Looks like a lot of customers also have today off, though, since there is not a lot of work coming in.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.3: Unsurprisingly, the person in charge of spies is Too Clever By Half (the extra half is thinking that nobody else is clever at all).

Read (fanfic): Take These Tower Stones (hermitknut): Non-canon sequel to The Goblin Emperor, covering the next year or so of Edrehasivar’s reign, from various points of view. It did not entirely please me for reasons that are hard to articulate. I think it’s that the author clearly wanted to get the AO3 tag and the other AO3 tag in there, and did, but they were just events without much of a narrative arc? Which obviously is an example of noticing most readily in others the faults we ourselves have.

Read (short): “The Name Ziya” (Wen-yi Lee): An antimetaphor (reification?) of the colonized giving up their identities for success in the colonizers’ world, and seeing their culture appropriated as fashion.

Written (game design): 223:

There’s no such thing as an hereditary ability to use magic. Anybody
can learn to do magic if exposed to the supernatural: cursed by a
sorcerer, near-death experience, lost in the cursed wood for three days
and three nights, haunted by ghosts, kidnapped by faeries, even
deliberately inducted into a wizard school or priesthood. Most people
don’t have an experience like this (and don’t want to), which is why
they aren’t PCs.

Everybody who can spend magic points (soul points? attunement? mojo?)
has something they can spend them on to push their natural abilities,
chosen at character creation. Extra movement or talk to animals or see
ghosts or something, not fireballs. Again, could be due to your ancestry
if you want to spin it that way, or a leftover from your origin story,
or whatever. That’s another list to create, along with actions, starting
feats, and saves. We haven’t even gotten to classes yet.

Earlier I was complaining about all classes casting spells the same way,
so how do we fix that? What spellcasting classes do we even want? Since
spellcasting is no longer how all powers are implemented, we can ditch
ranger and paladin, leaving wizard, warlock, sorcerer, bard, cleric,
druid. Four groups: magic from a higher power, a weird power, being
part monster, or actually learning spells with your actual brain.