Week 29 of 2026: beach theme

Just a nice week of being productive at work, doing my hobbies and actual good weather (warm but not too hot). Also, I finally got a haircut and volleyball moved to the sand outside.

Read

• continued The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

This is such an interesting book, especially after the (pardon the term) pulp I've been reading in the past months. That's ok: light reading has it's time, but it's refreshing to have something more intellectual again.

Played

On Tuesday I played Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast. This was the first time running it at the Queer RPG Night, and we got here because I pivoted away from Wanderhome (also by Jay Dragon) after we spend the first half of two sessions in a row on character creation, leaving only 20 and 45 minutes of play time respectively. The nice thing about Yazeba's is that it comes with premade characters, so while there was still some explanation going on, after 45 minutes we were actually playing and I think we can get that even shorter in the future. Also: it was super fun! Looking forward to exploring the stories in this game some more in the upcoming month.

On Wednesday I ran Moonlight on Roseville Beach at the Utrecht RPG Night, because someone proposed we did a summer theme day, and I proposed "beach" as a theme and then it got voted as the theme and this is just a nice beach themed game. I ran it before and I wasn't happy with the system itself, and I must say: it went much smoother this time (I dared to improvise a bit more on the theme, instead of trying to follow the adventure to the letter) but I still dislike the game system. I totally adore this as a setting book and the vibes are amazing, but the dice pool with up to 6 different sources, and four or five tables to put those dice on... it just dissolves any tention you have been building up to. Next time I run this I would love to adapt this to something Carved from Brindlewood.

On Saturday I ran Escape from Dino Island at D&D Amsterdam, because hey, I guess I was a player in Yazeba's, so there was room for another session in which I GM? (And they were short on DMs, and this game has the best DM title: The Dino Master!) This is a game I can fully recommend! It was very easy to prepare: I already ran it once, so I just read through the 32 page booklet again and that was it. And since it's a one-shot game, it was perfect for this event. It's really an adventure and a game in one, and all the rules just push the story forward and eventually to good closure. Also: I completely surrendered to improvising the content based on the prompts in the book and it just worked. I love this game and would 100% run it again.

Ran

I'm doing four runs per week again! On Monday, it was 5km easy and on Thursday I did another 5km easy. They had a similar place and a similar low heart rate I was very pleased with, but I already wrote another post about that this week.

On Wednesday there were "Practice Race Pace K's", which meant a warmup and four times 1km at 10km race pace with walking in between, and a cooldown, for a total of 7km. My last interval stopped right in front of a guy looking through a garbage bin, and he got really angry with me for some reason. I guess he was a bit confused or under some influence, maybe he thought I had already picked up all the 'statiegeld' cans that he could trade in for money? It's hard to tell, as I couldn't understand a word of the language he was speaking to me as he walked after me (luckily slower) and tried to slab me with his plastic bag of cans a few times (luckily always from at least 30 meters distance).

On Sunday, I ran 10km in the World Pride Run organized by Rainbow Athletics. It's a bit of a tradition for me to try to run fast here: for the longest time my 5km personal best was here (2016 to 2025 when I finally broke it again). So despite the "this is not a PR run!" I tried anyway, as it felt doable. I ran 43:41, which is still very nice, but my PB is 43:10, yet I'm not disappointed. It was a very cute event with a lot of fun people and I liked the chatter along the way of other athletes trying to keep each other on pace. I probably ran a bit too fast in the part with headwind, but I kind of did it for the girl behind me and it felt good to share the race like that.