Week 16 of 2026: make it gay

Busy week with many plays, reads and volleyballs, and even 22 kilometers of running. But most of all, I felt gay this week.

Read

• continued in Unmasking Autism by Devon Price
• started in Game Changer by Rachel Reid.

I will probably dedicate another blog post about this, but after finishing Closer (which really only want to mention with huge content warnings) I really needed a gay story in which love was actually good, hence I started in Game Changer. It feels healing.

Also, I unapologetically read this in the train on Sunday, and on the substitute bus running through the Bible Belt. After a particular change of trains, I was seated next to a guy and I thought it would maybe be inappropriate to read this book right next to him, but then I saw him reading some right wing blogs and I thought: pride is a protest, be gay do crime, I just want to read this right now and he’s not stopping me.

Played

On Tuesday, I ran the ninth installment of my ongoing Mausritter campaign. This was a session with some callbacks to previous ones, as my players found the other half of the rat community their previously broke up by burning their headquarters. They proceeded to sell stuff they bought from the one group they encountered before, to this new group they encountered today.

I feel like, since I decided that my Brindlewood Bay campaign must end, Mausritter feels a bit harder to manage. Good campaigns must end to keep them interesting, and I sort of decided that Mausritter not necessarily needs to end, but some of the current lines must be resolved within a few sessions for me to keep enjoying it. Luckily I talked a bit with some players individually and I have some new input for the next one.

On Wednesday I went to Utrecht for a last minute session zero for a new campaign of Pasión de las Pasiones, of which we’re going to try to play seven episodes. I am really looking forward to finally being a player again, and to the idea of a campaign with a recurring cast – all of my other games are one-shots and open tables. I guess we didn’t really roll any dice, but hey, character creation is a form of play!

On Saturday I was ready for running Brindlewood Bay at the D&D Amsterdam event in House of Watt. I was strangely not nervous about this, as I have ran Brindlewood a few times now and already knew this particular mystery pretty well. The only think I was a bit worried about was that my timing would be off, as this time slot allowed for one more hour of gameplay, but I figured that would be easy to fill, as my normal three hour slots usually feel jam-packed.

In an unforeseen plot twist it turned out that there was some mistake made: there was another event in the venue and we were scheduled for next week. All ten tables had to be informed and moved, but unfortunately I cannot attend next week. Player J. really wanted to play, however, and proposed moving the session to his house, arranging some players from the event and some of his friends to be there. With one hour delay, we started (which solved my timing issues too). It was a cool session.

On Sunday I went to Gorinchem for a walk around town and obviously more games. We played Camel Up, Oh Captain My Captain and Spots. It was nice to finally get to play Oh Captain – the story game – and it’s an interesting reskin of For the Queen, but I also felt the game was really trying very hard to be both applicable to pirates and sports captains and that felt a bit artificial at times. (We said we wanted to do classic pirates, but then we turned it gay anyway.)

Ran

Trying to get into this again, but also taking the opportunity of these easier running weeks to play volleyball – which I did three times last week.

On Tuesday I ran an easy 8km through Westerpark in gorgeous weather. Bit alarmed at a high heart rate at the end, but looking back at the data I accidentally sprinted the last few hundred meters a bit.

On Saturday evening I came home and finally landed on the sofa, when I thought: it is not that late, and I really should get a run in, but also I don’t want to. When scrolling through Whatsapp and later Strava, I found lots of members of my old club AV Cifla talking about Theo Terhaar, the trainer who passed away this week and who’s funeral was Saturday. A lot of members missed it, participating in a local event focussed on getting personal bests (Seven Hills Record Run at Goffertpark). Many dedicated runs to Theo on their Strava, and while I didn’t know Theo very well and hadn’t seen him in years, I surely appreciated the advice he gave me back then. I went out, ran 14km of which the middle 10km were with some tempo, and dedicated my run to him too.