Week 40 of 2026: play

This week was the anniversary of the Queer RPG Night that I've been organizing for a year now. That's a year long running RPG games almost every Tuesday as a GM, with a few exceptions where I was a player and only two or three evenings we had to cancel because of low attendance. It's a lot of RPGs, and I love them, so I treated myself to a week of only playing them as a player.

Read

• continued The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth 3)

Listened

On Sunday, I went to the concert of Joe Hisaishi in the Ziggo Dome. (This is the composer of the music from most of the anime movies by Studio Ghibli.) It was amazing to see him live, hearing all these songs I know so well, hearing him play some tunes on the piano and just the amazing orchestra that is quite impressive in itself. The Dutch choir bothered me a bit since their sound is just so more... classical? than the one I know from recordings, but the woman who sang the vocals of Princess Mononoke in Japanese was truly amazing.

Watched

• Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Not sure how this popped up, but since Tim Curry's recent passing I ended up having a song in my head, then listened to the soundtrack all day at work and then finally decided to watch the movie on Friday evening. The first and only time I watched it was in July 2025 at a screening in Ruigoord where there was a lot of audience participation (as one should!) but because of all those stimuli I didn't grab all the details of the movie. Watching it on my own really helped to understand the story better – as chaotic as it is.

Played

On Tuesday I played "Stonetop lite", which was really an adaptation of Homebrew World and using a location from Stonetop. This game, you see, is quite a commitment that one should only play with a closed group of players for at least 20 sessions, and we tried to do a one-shot with it. The GM did an amazing job of weaving the three players with extremely different expectations into one story. Chaotic evening with cake, but happy I got to play.

On Wednesday I went to Utrecht for Foul Play, which is a game by Hendrik ten Napel and he ran it for us, in a play test for the new version. In the game, you are a goose and with your fellow geese, you terrorize a community garden. This was exactly what I needed, I loved it.

On Saturday we had our "session -0" of Triangle Agency, which basically came down to hanging out with snacks, talking about content and vibes, not really playing, but I'll mention it here too. Looking forward to my third real campaign as a player!

Ran

The marathon is nearing. On Monday, I ran 13km easy, on Thursday I did 800m tempo intervals for 11.3km and on Friday there was an easy 8k which I dubbed "Ach" on Strava and I haven't got nearly as many kudos as I thought that post deserved but hey, there is me, thinking about the Strava title during my run.

On Sunday I did the last long run for the marathon: a 23km easy run past some of the small rivers south of Amsterdam. It was beautiful.