Not that typewriters are used much any more, but I wonder what the original inventor of QWERTY would think of how ubiquitous keyboards are today?

Having two people out is super-annoying, although it’s not actually too much work. I’m just lazy.

I have accumulated enough manga that I need to start reading one every day, I think. Or rereading, as the inevitable has happened when I started going through books to get rid of.

Read (novel): This Princess Kills Monsters (Ry Herman): A whole bunch of (original, Grimm) fairy tales overlapped, but mostly the Twelve Huntsman, from the perspective of the bride who gets rejected in favor of the previous bride (this is not a spoiler, the book starts with a recounting of the fairy tale up to that point). It has so many great characters, it has so much fairy tale nonsense, it is great. Also more people should listen to their talking lions, although maybe with several grains of salt.

Written (game design): 330:

In D&D every monster is a member of species. The wicked witch who
lurks outside the village? Just one member of an entire species of
monsters that look like creepy old ladies, whose natural habitat is dark
woods near cultivated farmland. (There’s a closely related species that
lurks in foul swamps near villages.) This red dragon may have specific
plans and goals to play its part in this adventure, but it’s much the
same as any other red dragon of the same instar. Etc. Obviously this
works well with needing a lot of standardized monsters to build the
level-appropriate set-piece battles, but it goes back to the beginning
of geeks playing D&D (so, all the way) because geeks love classifying
and explaining things and writing dungeon ecology articles in Dragon
magazine. I can’t say it’s not a valid approach to fantasy, but for a
game, it seems insufficiently fantastical. (This is more a reflection on
me than anything else, obviously.)

I wouldn’t go so far as the suggestion of one OSR blog to replace every
instance of “a” monster with “the” monster, probably. It’s more
important that monsters not be natural, because if they are then they’re
animals or foreigners or maybe aliens, which aren’t monsters. (Yes,
earlier D&D had foreigners as monsters, but we don’t need that; we have
White House press releases.) A dragon that hatched from an egg laid by
another dragon and hunted for food until it reached the Young Adult
stage is not as interesting as one that was human until the lust for
gold overcame it. There was another blog (or maybe the same one) that
recommended having monsters be somehow the result of social conditions,
so killing them doesn’t actually solve the problem.