Your humble critic didn't mean to drop the ball, but early August brought in a bit of the old "cripplin' depresh."
It's not that I didn't have ideas for posts. I wanted to write about how character creation sections tell us something about how much agency protagonists have in the setting. I had something about ancient adventuring parties of Central Asia. I wanted to write a review of the first have of Ultra-Violet Grasslands, just to keep the ball rolling here. I still had Delta Green's Labyrinth fresh in my mind, back at the beginning of August. There was material, is what I am saying. But instead of writing, I crawled into bed.
It's embarrassing to admit it, but I don't actually make any money from literary criticism of roleplaying. I know it seems like I'm some kind of Walter Pater figure, but, in this modern economy, my income derives from salaried corporate work. If this deflates the carefully built illusion of this blog, so be it. There's a man behind the curtain. And that man has a huge deadline at the end of September that has him losing sleep and questioning his personal and professional choices.
Life is hard, but what I try to remember is that there's a way of looking at the disappointments and burdens with such vitality that hope comes through, which is to say, a kind of sublimation. Not that sublimation means anything under materialism, but one hopes that hope itself is a sound from beyond.