Aw geez, I am bad at keeping this website updated about Surrounded By Danger, the cooperative board game I was working on. When last I brought it up, three effing years ago, I was in the early days of making a version of the game that uses zombies as the enemies. Well, I am happy to report that I have a full working prototype of that version of the game now. The mechanics are pretty well ironed out and it has been playtested by over a dozen people, who seem to have enjoyed it.

The problem is, I don’t know where to go from there. I don’t know how one physically turns a prototype into a game. I know I’ll have to make the art for the cards and such, and a few years back I did tinker with drawing up some example cards, but I don’t know what file format the art needs to be in, I don’t know what dimensions it is supposed to have, and I don’t know what I do with it once I’ve got it. So I hit a wall.

I have not made any major changes to the game in a year or so now. It doesn’t need them anymore, the Zombie version of Surrounded By Danger is ready to be turned into a real game if I ever know how to do it. And I’ve got notes for other versions too! But I’m still at that wall.

I do hope that, if I have any measure of success with my Patreon then I could use that interest as a motivation to get past the wall, but right now I am stymied.

And maybe next month I will do a post that is more than just an update, but an actual discussion of the game…

Well, this has been the first month since I began my Patreon, so now I need to figure out how I’m going to deal with that. I think that every month I am going to do a newsletter like this in which I discuss what things I got done during the month. Let’s try that!

• First and foremost there is the article I wrote based on the choice of my Patron(s). My look into the first story found in the 1953 comic Young Men #21, Flash Foster And His High-Gear Hot-Shots. This is the first of what I intend as a series of looks at the kinds of stories they were giving to kids when superheroes were not the dominant genre of comics.
• Probably the thing I spent the most time working on this month is Cruciatus Animi Fracti, a one page solo-journaling RPG. I made it to submit to the One-Page RPG Jam 2026. I have enjoyed doing something for the Jam the last three years and I will continue to do so, though I’d really love to design a print-and-play RPG that isn’t designed to fit on a single page. Imagine the freedom! Someday, someday…
• To maintain my status as the world’s foremost reviewer of fictional beekeepers, I watched an episode of NCIS: Origins to review a guy named Linus Eckles. I gotta be honest, I didn’t enjoy the show, but that is never the beekeeper’s fault, and that’s what I am reviewing. Anyway, I can’t rebuke the show entirely if it is giving Patrick Fischler a paycheque.
• On the pop-culture website the Avocado I have an ongoing series of articles called Superman vs Bigots in which I take a look at stories from the Superman franchise that deal with themes of racism and such. This month I covered an episode of the television show “Superman and Lois” that was titled “A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events” that featured the show’s version of a classic Nazi superman foe.
• I did a profile for the Marvel Appendix website about a character called Shuffles. Shuffles is an shady underworld sort, an information dealer, who appeared in about five pages of comics in 1978 and has not been seen since. He’s a bit of a Blaxsploitation stereotype kinda guy, so maybe Marvel was embarrassed to acknowledge him (more likely I think nobody remembered him at all), but I think if you bring him back in a comic where he isn’t the sole representative of Black people he could just be a fun and flamboyant figure. I found absolutely no other profile for this guy on any of the Internet’s various websites where obsessive people like me track that sort of thing, so it is a point of pride that I got to him first.
• On the topic of Marvel, I decided that I am going to do a pixel art image of an obscure Marvel character each month for a while. I’ll only give my self a day to work on each one, because I could tinker with pixels forever and not be happy with the result, but my hope is that I will simultaneously be noticed by fans of the obscurities featured while also making them less obscure. It will surprise nobody who knows me that the first to get the treatment is the Rocket Racer.

Not everything I do is a project finished within a month that I can easily link to, but I will always have other things to talk about, so let’s do a category for that stuff.

• I admit that I’m still reluctant to this whole Patreon thing. I feel like if I’m going to pretend to be worth anyone’s time (let alone money), I need to be more professional-seeming. To that end, I’ve begun doing some cleaning-up around the ol’ Book of PDR here. A point of focus this month has been the webcomic Adventure Dennis, which is one of my earliest surviving works from on the Internet. For years now it has been confined to a little Javascript format that, while admittedly is kinda fun, is not a perfect format. So I’ve been giving each chapter of the comic its own page, hopefully easier for browsing. As I go I’ve also been including a sort of Commentary Track of footnotes at the bottom explaining references and stuff, when I can remember what I was referencing at least.
• During August I also participated in multiple online studies about aphantasia. It was into my thirties before I realized that I didn’t have the ability to visualize things in my head the way most people do, but to be fair aphantasia was barely acknowledged or studied before the 21st century. Years ago I joined the Aphantasia Network and have been receiving emails from them. I’d like to see the phenomenon more widely understood, so whenever I get an email about an online study I can participate in, if I have the time I try to do it. As I say, that happened twice this month.

It occurred to me that if I want to make myself seem human, I should talk about one or two of the things I enjoyed.

• This month I came across Chucky: The Game, a board game based on the horror movies about the killer doll. I am a horror fan and I am not kidding when I say that of all the long-running slasher franchises, Chucky is my favourite and it is not a close contest. But what really appeals to me about this game is that it is cooperative. I’m not a competitive person by nature and I find games where you have to compete against the other players annoying at best because I genuinely do not care about winning against my friends. But winning or losing alongside my friends is great! (I have, for years now, been working on Surrounded By Danger, a cooperative board game of my own design.) For the record Chucky: The Game does work with a single player, so even though I haven’t had a chance to try it with others yet, I have played alone and both killed and been killed by Charles Lee Ray.
• the Drifter is a point-and-click adventure game that came out last year. I had heard good things, so I was happy to finally check it out. I have loved adventure games for as long as I can remember and this one does some things I greatly enjoyed, especially with the interface. The genre is even now plagued by the soul-crushing difficulty and jankiness that cursed it in the olden days, so any time a game simplifies the interface in an elegant way, I am happy to think it might make it appealing to a younger generation. I sometimes find modern adventure games too easy (they are so afraid of the stigma of difficulty) but I didn’t mind this one. The only negative I can think to say at the moment is that there didn’t seem to be much in the way of alternate solutions to puzzles or different endings. I always maintain that the thing games can do that movies can’t is allow player agency, so I like when every player has variations in the story making it their own experience. The Drifter’s seemed very linear to me, so it isn’t the perfect adventure game ideal that exists in my head, but I can’t punish it for that. After all, it joins games like the first Gabriel Knight and Space Quest III in having a late-game location that is shaped like a cylinder.

Finally, I’ve got a file on my phone that is nothing but dumb little jokes I’ve thought of. Maybe if I dole them out once a month on here I can finally be free. Here’s this month’s!

Why shouldn’t you trust a small harp?
It might be a lyre.

I liked this episode a lot. One of David Vincent’s war buddies, Charlie Gilman, brought in Vincent because he thinks a guy he works with (Fred Wilk) isn’t human. Unfortunately this escalates to a fight between Gilman and the man and Gilman hits Wilk in the head with a wrench of something and Wilk dissipates in the way the Invaders do when they die. Even more unfortunately, this fight took place in front of a big industrial furnace and was partially witnessed by a security guard who has to assume that Gilman killed Wilk and threw the body into the furnace. And EVEN MORE unfortunately, Wilk was married to Gilman’s ex-girlfriend Janet so he has a motive to have killed Wilk that has nothing to do with him being an alien. So now, to free his friend David Vincent has to prove to the court that the dead man was not ever human.

I won’t go beat-by-beat or anything, but here’s some stuff I feel worthy of comment:

Vincent brings in a private investigator named Brennan to help him determine that there is no history of Wilk from more than a year ago. I love a good PI and Brennan may not believe Vincent’s story but he’s willing to help. Shame that he ends up dead (“What did Brennan have for us?” “A cerebral hemorrhage.”)

In their attempt to prove that Wilk did indeed have a past, two more Invaders show up as elderly humans posing as Wilk’s parents. After they do this Vincent follows them away and they mock him (they do, of course, know full well who he is) and poison themselves so they can die and burn away. We’ve seen Invaders who will sacrifice themselves for the cause, to burn away taking their tech with them or whatever, but I know of no reason that these two had to kill themselves after their testimony. It really makes me wonder about the alien attitude to life and death if they can throw it away so casually.

Janet has an infant child! I was uncertain on this one at first. Did it mean that the Invaders can mate with humans? It seemed so unlikely. They don’t have blood, they need technology to even simulate a pulse, I assumed there was no way the Invaders be jizzin’. But it makes sense, because it turns out that the kid was Charlie’s all along. (Charlie Gilman be jizzin’.)

It’s a good plot for not knowing who to trust. Vincent and Gilman prefer a trial by judge rather than trial by jury because that leaves less chance to Invaders to slip in. Until he knows of her romantic history with Charlie, Vincent is suspicious that Janet might be an Invader. There’s even a beat where Vincent can’t be sure that Charlie didn’t actually kill his love rival and call Vincent in to use Vincent’s alien stories as an alibi of sorts. Gilman does shut this down by pointing out that he’s willing to go to jail and if the exact same circumstances had happened but Wilk had been human, he probably would have done it.

But in the end, it turns out that Gilman’s lawyer (played by Russell Johnson, who also played the Professor on Gilligan’s Island!) is an Invader! We’re suspicious of the prosecutor all along, but no it turns out it was the guy we thought was on our side! In fact, we actually have no idea why the Invaders had one of their guys pose as Wilk and marry Janet. Maybe the company that Wilk and Gilman work for is in some way important to their cause, but here’s the thing: Gilman is a friend of David Vincent and they know they hate him. I would not be surprised if the whole thing was done just to strike at Vincent through his friends. And maybe it was a distraction to keep Vincent dealing with that while they did other things. We just don’t know, and I like that.

Anyway, after the lawyer is discovered he gets shot and burns up and Vincent has more witnesses than he usually does. Good episode.

Also, I just need to note that there’s a Black man in this episode. I’m pretty sure we’ve seen exactly one other Black person in this show so far and I think it was a train porter with no lines, so I was already mentally planning on addressing it in my final thoughts post when I’m done with the show. When it comes to diversity, Star Trek this show ain’t, but the guy here had a line. He was just an expert witness on the stand to confirm if a body could have burned up in a furnace. It’s hardly representation at its best, but in a way the fact that is so incidental works to a good end. Now let’s hope we can get a few more before the show ends.