Week 17 of 2026: changing plans

This week had a lot of plans that changed, but most were for the better.

Read

finished in Unmasking Autism by Devon Price
continued in Game Changer by Rachel Reid
started in Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of ADD by Gabor Maté

Finished the book about Autism and started a book on Attention Deficit Disorder – also known as ADHD, but not everyone who has it is hyperactive, hence the ‘new’ name. The Autism book was interesting, especially the part about masking and the activistic stance the book took for “unmasking”: refusing to try to fit in with a neurotypical ableist society. I have not finished my thinking on this yet, but it was thought provoking.

Game Changer is really just gay porn at times (which I don’t mind) but I really read it for the love story. It warms my heart in ways that is needed – apparently. It feels uneasy, yet healing.

Played

This was a week of changing plans and card-based story games, but I love the outcome.

On Tuesday I was supposed to run the Dead Man’s Hand mystery for Brindlewood Bay, but only one person signed up. Luckily, this was a regular, so instead of cancelling the table, C. and I decided to play a game of Desperation: Dead House. This is a card based story game about a small town in Kansas in the devastating winter of 1888. It was a sad story but very good.

On Friday, we had the half-baked plan of me running Brindlewood Bay again for some friends who can’t make it on the Tuesdays. One of them was sick, however, so we were with too few people for it, so we pivoted into playing Beak, Feather and Bone, a game in which you color and describe buildings on an existing map, using a normal deck of playing cards.

On Saturday, I was going to play Pasión de las Pasiones with some members of my old (beginners) improvisation theater group. We had a lovely dinner and very good conversations and in the end we decided that there was just no time left for the game and just carried on the conversations. (So I guess this doesn’t count as “played” at all.)

On Sunday, I went to the Utrecht RPG Extravaganza, where I was previously signed up for Honey Heist. At some point, however, I noticed that I really wanted to be signed up for the other game, and that I must just allow myself to play that. (Therapy is working?) I therefore played Zhenya’s Wonder Tales – yet another card-based story game – by the same creator as Desperation.

Jason Morningstar really has perfected the genre: Zhenya’s plays very smooth and gets a story out in a way no other game has, in my experience. By giving each player a clear role and “moves” they can make, you really get this somewhat directed story, with a lot of individual freedom, without the need for a game master. Desperation is like a book you can shuffle, Zhenya’s is like a movie that improvises itself.

(Maybe I should try to capture what I mean in a separate blogpost.)

Ran

I attended the volleyball training on Monday, but soon felt my calf muscle aching again. I skipped all volleyball and runs for the week, except the 5km social run with Proud Strides on Saturday. I figured it was only five, and it would be easy anyway. I previously was following my Runna plans too closely to just add a 5k to it, but now that I’m not training super hard there was a place for it.

Turns out they nowadays run in three different pace groups, and based on the paces they mentioned, I went for the fastest one. From a condition perspective, this was fine, but maybe my left calf would’ve wanted something easier.

We’ll see where this goes for the Bijlmerrun Half Marathon – which is rather soon.