Also Random Acts of Crab Racing Day.

Went to the office, listened to the thunder and rain, ate some underheated Chinese buffet for Lunar New Year, got nothing from my scratch-off lottery ticket, did some work, got most of the way home and was betrayed by the bus.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 3 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Maomao visits home, which has more mysterious mysteries.

Read (short): “Barbershops of the Floating City” (Angela Liu): Classism, unexplained magic hairdressing, generational trauma.

Read (short): “When He Calls Your Name” (Catherynne M. Valente): I figured out what the name was pretty quickly, but still good.

Written (game design): 394:

I see two kinds of maneuvers. One is like Hero maneuvers, where you
modify what you’re doing: charge up your power to get a strong
effect, spread it out to affect more, etc. The other is based on
what you’re trying to accomplish: grind them down, take them out,
disable their abilities, set them up for a teammate, trick them
into doing something they didn’t mean to, temporarily incapacitate
them, etc. These are intentionally broad and like a PbtA move, you
have to say what you’re actually doing. Are you grinding someone
down by getting them to use their biggest attack until they’re
exhausted? Taking them out by machine-gunning a crowd so they faint
from trauma? Et cetera. But the first is mechanical means, the
second is narrative ends, so I’m not sure these even belong in the
same game.

Is it even possible to allow for cleverness instead of grinding hit points
without becoming a story game? It definitely could be if the need for
cleverness was preplanned and rigorously documented as a puzzle to
solve, but when it’s ad-hoc or even based on player input, how are
wargame players going to believe that it’s fair and accurately priced?
Reducing the granularity of points helps by not setting expectations of
careful accounting, but is it enough? There’s precedent for judgment
calls in Presence attacks and mental powers, but those aren’t the
primary way of taking someone out, so it’s not as much of a problem to
have the GM make up stuff on the fly.