I see this play out with depressing regularity. “Golly, I’ll bet this new app will be totally different!” 🖕

Performance update, for those who are curious. The two scheduled posts for today appeared precisely as they were supposed to, but the original post I made about four hours ago has never appeared.

Since there appears to be no solution, I won’t bother anymore. 🤷‍♂️

Well, I was considering an upgrade to Micro.blog Premium, but ongoing issues with posts failing to appear have me reconsidering. On the one hand, I want to support a product and a mission I agree with, but on the other hand, I need something that works. 💭

Another movie anniversary inspired a one-shot I’ll run almost a year from now. John Wick was released in 2014, and I think a fun Wushu game would be just the thing to celebrate. 🎲

Ran across a Mastodon user being a snotty “but actually” jerkwad to someone on M.b and was reminded that Mastodon is just another sewer like X. The effluent flows from many pipes, but it’s still s—. 💭

It’s been seven hours since I last “posted.” That entry, along with two others, failed to appear. As before, I am still trying to figure out what to do. I’m not doing anything weird with Micro.blog and have a normal design for my page. There should be no problem pushing content. 🤷‍♂️

To give @manton more data to work with, I’m trying another experiment where I post something after several hours have passed without previous posts appearing. In the past, this has sometimes led to the missing posts showing up. Other times, everything stays the same. 🤷‍♂️

I was about to get excited when I saw one of my posts had appeared this morning on time. Then, the other vanished for about two hours as of this writing. There’s no way to know if it’ll ever pop up. 🤷‍♂️

Summer brings another game I’m excited for: Call of the Wildwoods, a short chronicle for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Set in the Hudson’s Bay region in the late 1700s, it involves Garou standing fast against rapacious fur traders. 🎲

I’m boosting the signal for this entry by @manton by saying that Premium is an attractive deal even for me. Suddenly, I’m thinking about doing a podcast. And soon there’ll be even more features? He’s spoiling us. 💭

From the looks of things, I will have to get used to things not appearing on my blog, sometimes for days. I wish there was a way to fix this, but there seems to be no fix. 😔

The Crow was released in 1994, and I’m set to run an Everyday Heroes one-shot using their related supplement. It’s a tale of parents, children, and vengeance. 🎲

Finished reading: Ways of the Wolf by Bill Bridges. It’s an interesting read, but its obsession with Garou breeding habits is borderline fetishistic. I could have done with less of that in favor of more on lupus Garou culture and its interaction with the Garou community. 📚

So. This is the fourth thing I’ve posted today. Despite telling @manton that the problem seemed confined to scheduled entries, the scheduled entry posted correctly, while everything else has yet to appear. One post is almost eleven hours old as I write this. 🤷‍♂️

Saw someone mention taking a truckload of vitamins, ostensibly for health purposes. It reminds me of an Adam Ruins Everything episode I’ll paraphrase here:

“Have you heard of vitamin megadosing?”

“I have! And I’ve heard of faeries, too, but they won’t help your [health], either.”

And Micro.blog hiccups again! I posted something almost six hours ago, and it has yet to appear. Similarly, I posted something that has yet to appear after nearly an hour. Will this appear? Who knows? 🤷‍♂️

After The Tundra’s Fury comes a short, four-part ICRPG campaign I mentioned a few days ago: This Land is My Land: Warrior Spirits. In it, players step into the moccasins of American Indian warriors standing against westward expansion in a fictionalized American West. I’m excited about this one. 🎲

Do you feel something special in the air? That’s because it’s International Ninja Day! Celebrate responsibly. 🥷

Oh, and another treat for the roleplaying gamers out there: it’s National Dice Day! 🎲

I was going to post something for Micro Monday, but then I realized that even @monday doesn’t seem to post anymore. 🤷‍♂️

As a follow-up to @manton, my morning post failed to appear again, so now let’s see if I can replicate what happened before, where a new post makes the old one pop up.

Checking the logs shows no activity. The last time I rebuilt the blog, nothing happened. So your guess is as good as mine. 🤷‍♂️

Whoever you have reading your stuff right now probably isn’t who you need reading it unless they’re not afraid to tell you two things: 1) it’s working, and 2) it sucks. Not one or the other. Both.

For the most part, you must seek out trusted readers. The latter can become the former, but only if you’re lucky. Because we’re in the territory of the trusted reader now, not the more common beta reader.

For most people, this means not your spouse, not your mom, and not your best friend. But, at the same time, it could be all three. It depends on how good their judgment is and how honest they’re willing to be. And hopefully, your best friend isn’t your mom, to whom you are married. Eek!

If you want the best of all possible worlds, then this trusted reader also knows how to modulate their feedback so it doesn’t destroy you when it’s negative but doesn’t pump you full of unearned confidence when it’s positive. You want to get better as a writer, not have your mood manipulated.

Anybody can give you an offhand piece of feedback. A trusted reader will get down in the weeds with you and take apart a work of fiction to get at its mechanisms. So not only will it be appropriate, but it’ll be detailed. This is an essential part of what makes it all work. Good luck.

If you’re curious about what I’m scheduled to play next year, I’ll go through the games individually. The first is The Tundra’s Fury, an ICRPG one-shot set during the last Ice Age. Primitive hunters versus the greatest threat on land! 🎲