Appendix Liz

     Marcia of Traverse Fantasy thought it would be a cool idea for us all to post our own personal Appendix Ns, and we ended up choosing September 8th because its International Day of Reading or something like that. Idk, I love literacy, even though I'm not currently practicing. With that in mind, here's some of the stuff that percolates through the back of my head when I'm blogging, running games, and so on and so forth. 

Books

• The Emberverse by SM Stirling is my Lord of the Rings. One night in March of 1998, all of a sudden physics work differently. Steam engines and anything more advanced than that suddenly stops working. Untold numbers die, and the survivors have to build a new world from the ashes. The whole series is a multigenerational story that goes some weird places (I never actually finished it because to me the story felt finished before the start of the last trilogy), but it was my first time thinking about what people's lives were like in fantastical worlds. Like, one of the heroes of the second series thinks about how a high-bison diet would make him get super constipated. It's great, and I'll probably give it a spotlight later on.
• On this note, Stirling's planetary romance The Sky People is amazing for this same reason-anthropology and paleontology on a Venus with neanderthals and dinosaurs! I need to read Conquistador and his Conan book at some point. 
• The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. I've written about this before, but I actually started the First Law series with the fifth book written, and it blew my mind as an impressionable young man. This was fantasy, sure, but fantasy where people had sex and said fuck. Plus the whole accidental hyperdiegesis thing. I still use the term "First of the Magi" occasionally when I write.
• The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road by Geoffrey Parker. Feeding armies is hard. Like, really hard. The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road goes into the process of trying to feed the Spanish army during the Dutch war of independence. Its a bit of a dry text, but I found it fascinating.
• A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Bret Deveraux is probably my favorite blog. Dr. Deveraux is a historian and talks about both history and pop culture, sometimes combining the two. One of the big things it has reinforced in me, again and again, is how much work getting stuff done was before the industrial revolution, which has changed a lot of how I see fantasy settings. 
  
• I didn't start reading Elric of Melnibone until this year, but I've grown to love the lad. He's my pathetic little meow meow. Even his sorcery and magic sword can't help him with the fact that he sucks at everything, and that's beautiful and tragic and hilarious. My own Eunice the Nun stories are based in part on Elric, right down to the magic sword (I was disappointed to find out Stormbringer didn't talk.)

He's so pathetic, I love him so much

• In every white boy's life there is a time when he reads a book in his early 20s and gets really annoying about it. For me, that book is James Scott's Seeing Like A State: How Certain Attempts to Improve the Human Condition have failed. Scott's discussion of things like legibility in the context of authoritarian high modernism, applying this lens to the failures of mass agricultural reform in the 20th century, opened my eyes in a way few other books have. Its genuinely changed how I see the world, and its probably influenced my gaming as a result. 

Television

• Andor, you know, from Star Wars. God Andor is such good television. I'm normally the worst kind of Star Wars fan because I loooooooooove Jedi and Sith bullshit when the smart people care more about the Han Solos of the world. Andor, however, as a show about rebellion and the terror of living under fascism, hit at just the right moment for me as I was coming into my own. God I want a whole episode that's just the ISB talking about taxation of trade routes. That and more Karntent. 

He's so pathetic, I love him so much

• Archer was one of the first tv shows for adults I watched, and I've grown to love the "everyone fucking sucks" brand of sitcom, much to my parents' chagrin (god I need to watch Always Sunny at some point). This is where I grew my love of the hypercompetent dumbass in terms of a protagonist, which to my mind suits a lot of peoples' conceptions of a modern D&D game.

Video Games

• A Song of Ice and Fire for Crusader Kings II is a fanmade mod that ports the ASOIAF universe into CK2. CK2 itself also deserves a spot on here for consuming my brain but I want to highlight the Game of Thrones mod in specific because it led me through to the ASOIAF wiki, a beautifully maintained loredump on so much stuff. I haven't read the books, and instead gained all of my knowledge through extensive wiki-dives and research, seeing how sickeningly inevitable these events were. Now part of that is Martin's own nihilism but its still fun to inhabit for a bit. 
• Speaking of nihilism, Far Cry 4 is a tale of doomed revolution that's a hell of a lot of fun in the process. To my mind, the single thing in the back of my head while playing, moreso even than the apocalyptic stakes of 5, was that Kyrat was doomed. It wasn't doomed due to prophecy, or writer fiat, or anything like that. It was doomed due to the ongoing damage of centuries of colonial rule and the last bloody gasps the Min regime had in its dying struggle. I'd love to run something like it, albeit with like...mechs or something. But I doubt many people would actually be interested in that.  
• The Batman Arkham series (specifically Asylum and City, and to a much lesser extent Knight) introduced me to a concept that is perhaps perfected in the comic series Astro City: namely, the people in a superhero story take all of this comic-book shit seriously and don't make excuses for it. You have to kill the irony poisoning in your head, telling a straightforward genre story is the new punk rock. Let stuff be weird and unapologetic. Superman (2025) also excels at this, and also David Corenswet is really handsome, you know? 
• Rimworld is where my love of procedural storytelling came from. Random events, hyper-detailed simulationism, and humans being made into hats. Its why I love Combat As Story, of being able to see exactly what happens. The only reason I don't play it more is because otherwise I'd never do anything else. 

    I don't know what Appendix Liz says about me, but it's probably nothing good. Lots of kinda depressing stuff mixed with odd goofball shit, which I guess really is me in a nutshell, huh? Who can say.