March 24th, 2026

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He had at first been amused by the English girl’s interest in this American family, shrewdly diagnosing that it was inspired by interest in one particular member of the group. But now something out of the ordinary about this family party awakened in him the deeper, more impartial interest of the scientist. He sensed that there was something here of definite psychological interest.

This came to the top of my list of books set in Jordan a few weeks back; the first few chapters are set in 1930s Jerusalem, but the scene then moves to Petra, where the actual murder takes place, and then to Amman, where Poirot spends about half of the total page count solving it. The victim is a horrible character who has bullied her entire family into terrified submission; the question is, which of them bumped her off and how? There’s some very well done Christie-style deflection, where they try to cover for each other, though the actual solution to the crime is not really flagged at all to the reader, so I think it counts as one of the less fair whodunnits in her oeuvre. But the family dynamics are very well depicted.

There is a happy flashforward at the end to show all of the survivors living happily ever after. The book was published in 1938, and we are meant to think that 1943 will be the same only a bit better.

I looked into the setting of the King Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem; it’s pretty clear that this is meant to be a fictional version of the King David Hotel (though in fact today there is a King Solomon Hotel on the same street). There is a little local political commentary in that Mahmoud the dragoman (guide/ translator) keeps boring the Western tourists by going on about the Zionists / Jews. (Nice and a little surprising to see anti-Semitism portrayed as a negative character trait for a change.) But in terms of politics, a much more interesting character is Lady Westholme.

Lady Westholme was a very well-known figure in the English political world. When Lord Westholme, a middle-aged, simple-minded peer, whose only interests in life were hunting, shooting and fishing, was returning from a trip to the United States, one of his fellow passengers was a Mrs. Vansittart. Shortly afterwards Mrs. Vansittart became Lady Westholme. The match was often cited as one of the examples of the danger of ocean voyages. The new Lady Westholme lived entirely in tweeds and stout brogues, bred dogs, bullied the villagers and forced her husband pitilessly into public life. It being borne in upon her, however, that politics was not Lord Westholme’s métier in life and never would be, she graciously allowed him to resume his sporting activities and herself stood for Parliament. Being elected with a substantial majority, Lady Westholme threw herself with vigor into political life, being especially active at Question time. Cartoons of her soon began to appear (always a sure sign of success). As a public figure she stood for the old-fashioned values of Family Life, Welfare work amongst Women, and was an ardent supporter of the League of Nations. She had decided views on questions of Agriculture, Housing and Slum Clearance. She was much respected and almost universally disliked! It was highly possible that she would be given an Under Secretaryship when her Party returned to power. At the moment a Liberal Government (owing to a split in the National Government between Labor and Conservatives) was somewhat unexpectedly in power.

You don’t read Agatha Christie for sophisticated political commentary – the notion that the Liberals could have formed a minority government in the 1930s was ludicrous. (In the 1935 election they had lost half their seats and were reduced to 12 MPs.) We are clearly meant to read Lady Westholme as a direct parody of Nancy Astor, who was also American, had an aristocratic husband, was the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons and was an outspoken Conservative (and anti-Semite and anti-Communist). One can only take those comparisons so far, of course, because…

Spoiler

For

A

Book

Published

In

1938

…in an unexpected twist, it turns out that Lady Westholme is the murderer, having been a convicted felon before she became Mrs Vansittart and her political career began. She was being threatened with blackmail by the murder victim, an ex-prison guard who recognised her in Jerusalem. As often happens in Agatha Christie novels where the murderer is otherwise respectable, Poirot allows her to commit suicide rather than face human justice.

It seems hugely improbable that such a visibly controversial political figure would have been able to conceal a criminal past from public scrutiny by the time of the 1930s. (The nature of the crime is not revealed.) Some very strange people became MPs in the early twentieth century (I give you Trebitsch Lincoln, for instance), but they did not usually last more than one term. In today’s panopticon age, politicians’ life stories can be traced from before their birth; while it was more difficult ninety years ago, it was far from impossible. Christie ventured into politics occasionally, and usually (as in this case) got it wrong.

You can get Appointment With Death here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

shewhostaples: (Default)
Chapter 9, and Lucy and Max are trying to rescue the dolphin. Read more... )

Chapter 10 takes them both to the Castello to dry off and warm up. Read more... )

In chapter 11 it's finally time for Lucy to find out what Max has been up to. Read more... )

Well, that was quite a night! Discuss in comments once you've got your breath back. Chapters 12-14 for next time.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)

Okay, it was lovely to see the heron again on my walk today. I wonder if it had decided that the eco-pond, with its shoals of Invasive Predatory Goldfish which people have dumped in it to the detriment of other life (frogs, newts, dragonflies) is a delicious all-you-can-eat buffet.

Assuming it is the same heron and that the first did not just tell a friend.

***

In more annoying news, today partner had a go at fixing my printer, which has been giving 'Paper Jam in Tray 1' error messages -

- and after doing pretty much the equivalent of open heart surgery on the thing, lo and behold, there was, entirely concealed from view, a page jammed in the works.

I depose that having to eviscerate a printer to discover this is something of a design fault?

Unfortunately, once the printer was put back together, it decided that the gate was open and it was not going to print anything.

Partner is going to have another go at it tomorrow, but I suspect that New Printer is in the future.

***

Meanwhile, I copied my paper for tomorrow to a memory-stick and took it to partner's computer so that I could print it out there.

This was accomplished successfully.

Posted by Andrew McConachie

The RIPE community has spoken and the results are in. The RIPE Code of Conduct Team presents an analysis of the feedback received, discusses next actions, and shares a detailed breakdown of the results.
posted by [personal profile] jazzyjj at 06:38am on 24/03/2026 under
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
posted by [syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed at 11:03am on 24/03/2026

Posted by Bruce Schneier

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.

In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an AI Interviewer walks them through the subject, answering their questions, interrogating their experience, even challenging their thinking.

Voters get immediate feedback on how their individual point of view matches—or doesn’t—a party’s platform, and they can see whether and how the party adopts their feedback. This isn’t like an opinion poll that politicians use for calculating short-term electoral tactics. It’s a deliberative reasoning process that scales, engaging voters in defining policy and helping candidates to listen deeply to their constituents.

This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election.

It’s how Team Mirai, which translates to ‘The Future Party,’ does politics. Its founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56 candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement.

Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national legislature—the Diet—and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing politics a reality.

In this recent House of Representatives election, Team Mirai shot up to win nearly four million votes. In the lower chamber’s proportional representation system, that was good enough for eleven total seats—the party’s first ever representation in the Japanese House—and nearly three times what it achieved in last year’s Upper Chamber election.

Anno’s party stood for election without aligning itself on the traditional axes of left and right. Instead, Team Mirai, heavily associated with young, urban voters, sought to unite across the ideological spectrum by taking a radical position on a different axis: the status quo and the future. Anno told us that Team Mirai believes it can triple its representation in the Diet after the next elections in each chamber, an ostentatious goal that seems achievable given their rapid rise over the past year.

In the American context, the idea of a small party unifying voters across left and right sounds like a pipe dream. But there is evidence it worked in Japan. Team Mirai won an impressive 11% of proportional representation votes from unaffiliated voters, nearly twice the share of the larger electorate. The centerpiece of the party’s policy platform is not about the traditional hot button issues, it’s about democracy itself, and how it can be enhanced by embracing a futuristic vision of digital democracy.

Anno told us how his party arrived at its manifesto for this month’s elections, and why it looked different from other parties’ in important ways. Team Mirai collected more than 38,000 online questions and more than 6,000 discrete policy suggestions from voters using its AI Policy app, which is advertised as a ‘manifesto that speaks for itself.’

After factoring in all this feedback, Team Mirai maintained a contrarian position on the biggest issue of the election: the sales tax and affordability. Rather than running on a reduction of the national sales tax like the major parties, Team Mirai reviewed dozens of suggestions from the public and ultimately proposed to keep that tax level while providing support to families through a child tax credit and lowering the required contribution for social insurance. Anno described this as another future-facing strategy: less price relief in the short term, but sustained funding for essential programs.

Anno has always intended to build a different kind of party. After receiving roughly $1 million in public funding apportioned to Team Mirai based on its single seat in the Upper Chamber last year, Anno began hiring engineers to enhance his software tools for digital democracy.

Anno described Team Mirai to us as a ‘utility party;’ basic infrastructure for Japanese democracy that serves the broader polity rather than one faction. Their Gikai (‘assembly’) app illustrates the point. It provides a portal for constituents to research bills, using AI to generate summaries, to describe their impacts, to surfacing media reporting on the issue, and to answer users’ questions. Like all their software, it’s open source and free for anyone, in any party, to use.

After last week’s victory, Team Mirai now has about $5 million in public funding and ambitions to grow the influence of their digital democracy platform. Anno told us Team Mirai has secured an agreement with the LDP, Japan’s dominant ruling party, to begin using Team Mirai’s Gikai and corruption-fighting Mirumae financial transparency tool.

AI is the issue driving the most societal and economic change we will encounter in our lifetime, yet US political parties are largely silent. But AI and Big Tech companies and their owners are ramping up their political spending to influence the parties. To the extent that AI has shown up in our politics, it seems to be limited to the question of where to site the next generation of data centers and how to channel populist backlash to big tech.

Those are causes worthy of political organizing, but very few US politicians are leveraging the technology for public listening or other pro-democratic purposes. With the midterms still nine months away and with innovators like Team Mirai making products in the open for anyone to use, there is still plenty of time for an American politician to demonstrate what a new politics could look like.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.

posted by [syndicated profile] daily_otter_feed at 09:26am on 24/03/2026

Posted by Daily Otter

Via Oregon Coast Aquarium, which writes, “A special thanks to the donor who shopped our wishlist! It’s safe to say that the otters are thoroughly enjoying their new enrichment items!”

james: (Default)
posted by [syndicated profile] apod_feed at 05:10am on 24/03/2026
March 23rd, 2026
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
posted by [personal profile] sovay at 11:26pm on 23/03/2026
[personal profile] selkie's birthday was duly observed with my parents and my husbands, a meal of much carnivory, and an apricot marmalade cake doused in whipped cream, strawberry sugar, and candles that burned like driftwood salts. Many deeply goofy photos were taken of various combinations of us. So much is wrong with the world and it is still true that my family for an evening is happy. A photogenic snow began to drift the streets as I drove everyone home.

Music:: Emitt Rhodes, "With My Face on the Floor"
posted by [syndicated profile] questionable_content_feed at 10:01pm on 23/03/2026
hudebnik: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] hudebnik at 07:34pm on 23/03/2026 under
And I do mean "wars" plural: we spent the weekend at the Military Through the Ages timeline event, which had military units ranging from classical Greek and Roman through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, through recent wars like Desert Storm, and current National Guard. Our group, La Belle Compagnie, presents an English knight's household in the Hundred Years' War.

The show takes place every spring at Jamestowne Settlement, in Williamsburg, VA. Which is some distance from our home in New York City. When we were younger and foolisher, we would drive it straight through (particularly if I had classes to teach on Monday), but this year I took Friday and Monday as vacation days, packed the car on Thursday, hit the road Thursday about 8 PM, and spent Thursday night at a motel in Maryland. (We would have hit the road earlier, but when we closed the garage door we realized that the newly-poured concrete floor was a fraction of an inch higher than the old floor, so the door didn't go quite as far down, so the latch no longer latched. So with the car completely packed and [personal profile] shalmestere sitting in the front seat, I went back into the house, grabbed some tools, and moved the latches up half an inch so I could lock the garage.) Anyway, we got to the site around 3 PM Friday, set up our pavilion and trestle-tables, and drove to the hotel a few miles away where La Belle Compagnie had reserved a couple of adjacent suites.

[personal profile] shalmestere and I portray household servants in the knight's household, hired for (among other things) our musical talent (our boss is rich, but not rich enough to hire servants just to play music), and we normally spend most of a show demonstrating c1400 musical instruments and repertoire for the public.

A month or two ago we were wondering what "new" we could bring to this year's show. We didn't have any new instruments suitable for a 1415 camp. There were a couple of two-part musical pieces we'd been learning recently, but they weren't off-book so we hadn't been performing them at living history shows (modern sheet music and music stands would Not Look Right). So we've been practicing them after dinner to memorize them. We'll look at the last few measures, then close our eyes and play them. Once we've got that pretty solid, we'll add the previous musical phrase, and play from that through the end with our eyes closed until it's pretty solid. And so on until we've reached the beginning of the piece. We got one of them (entitled either "Petrone" or "Retrove", depending on how you read the paleography, from the Robertsbridge keyboard ms) to the point that we played it a couple of times during the weekend. There were a few memory slip-ups, but no crash-and-burn-and-start-over episodes. Another piece from the Robertsbridge codex has no title so we call it "Robertsbridge Thingie", and we haven't quite got it good enough to try to perform off-book.

And we did the usual spiels and demonstrations involving recorder, pipe-and-tabor, shawm, citole, fyddel, and harp. I think two visitors asked me about medieval musical notation, and I restrained myself to about twenty minutes on that topic. And one asked me about the difference between twelve-tone and pentatonic scales, which led into a discussion of tuning and temperaments and difference tones, and then another member of the group who's a voice-technique professor chimed in with some comments about reinforcing overtones, and then we got into solfegge syllables (the visitor had grown up with shape-note music, so he knew some of the syllables, but had no idea that they came from a Latin chant).

Anyway, the whole weekend had pretty good weather, and a decent flow of visitors asking questions. It was warm-ish on Saturday, and warmer on Sunday, but I can put up with that as long as we don't have to pack out wet, and we didn't. The event closed to the public at 5 PM Sunday, our group was off-site by 7:00, and we all went to a Chinese buffet (where we swapped stories of "the weirdest question anybody asked you") before hitting the road to our respective homes. We had the longest drive (the voice professor had driven from Iowa, but I don't think he planned to drive back there immediately), so we got home around 3:30 PM Monday. Unpacked the car, cleaned a few things, put a few things away, went through the mail, etc. I think we'll sleep well tonight.
hannah: (Travel - fooish_icons)
posted by [personal profile] hannah at 08:12pm on 23/03/2026
This last Friday afternoon, I held my hand out and a ladybug landed on me. All I'd seen was a tiny bit of movement coming my way, and in holding my hand out, I gave a ladybug a place to sit a moment. Yesterday, I got sunburned from walking around under early cherry blossoms on an absolutely gorgeous late March day. I'm still sore and a little itchy, and I'll be wearing high-necked clothes for a while. There was boba tea, and three different bakeries, and pizza and tacos and a lot of fandom talk with the friend I was staying with - making the other laugh was something we both tried to do a fair amount of, in a game where both sides come out ahead of where they started.

The train got me there early, and got me back a little late. I gave my friend excuse to take me to some of her favorite places, and reason to visit a few more. The both of us stepped away from our regular lives for a while in a mutually beneficial relationship, and now the prospect of the real world looms for tomorrow morning. There was a lot of freedom to be found in basically cutting myself off from the internet - the extent to what I could do on a practical level was check email. My phone wasn't connected to a wifi network, so I couldn't get anything but plain text messages, and it was a surprise to see how many non-text messages I'd missed when I got back to my place.

Bread Furst, Rose Ave, Un Je Ne Sais Quoi, Comet Ping Pong, 801, Spot of Tea, various Smithsonian cafeterias, my friend's kitchen. Various Smithsonian museums, the tidal basin and its various memorials, the circle at Dupont Circle, Metro stations, my friend's apartment. Her roommate and her two cats. A short walk along an urban trail that took us to the Ann and Donald Brown House, which I knew looked impressive enough to be worth talking about. A lot of time with nothing to do and no reason to worry about that. Some TV watched, some movies, not much writing but a good deal of reading and talking. She'll be leaving Washington DC soon, possibly to another coast, possibly somewhere still reasonably close by. I'm glad I got to visit her before she left, when I could still do it by train and be home well before bedtime when it was over.
Music:: Best Kept Secret - case/lang/veirs
Mood:: 'thankful' thankful
delphi: A carton of fresh blueberries. (blueberries)
mrissa: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mrissa at 04:34pm on 23/03/2026 under
 

This is more partial even than usual, because I've had some download problems that I've since fixed. But we can let that filter out to the second quarter; time waits for etc. etc.

This Is Not a Love Poem, Alexandra Dawson (Reckoning)

I Met You On the Train, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)

The Doorkeepers, A. T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)

Unsettled Nature, Jordan Kurella (Apex)

Straw Gold, Mari Ness (Small Wonders)

No Kings/No Soldiers, A.M. Tuomala (Uncanny)

Blade Through the Heart, Carrie Vaughn (Reactor)

Antediluvian, Rem Wigmore (Reckoning)

unicornduke: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] unicornduke at 05:33pm on 23/03/2026 under
Hey all, if you'd like to join the crafting hangout, it is tonight from 6-8pm ET!
 
Video encouraged but not required!
 
Topic: Crafting Hangout
Time: Mondays 6:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
 
Join Zoom Meeting
 
Meeting ID: 973 2674 2763

posted by [personal profile] cosmolinguist at 08:24pm on 23/03/2026 under , ,

I'm reading, and really enjoying, Annalee Newitz's Four Lost Cities.

I'm currently reading about Pompeii, and I was struck by the mention of about how little was recorded about that volcanic eruption and the cities that were "lost" in its aftermath.

I thought of how conspicuously absent our society's cultural response to the covid pandemic has been, even before Newitz themself drew an explicit parallel with the Spanish flu epidemic which apparently also had a similar effect.

I was struck by this because just this morning, I was in a meeting about an upcoming Mental Health Awareness Week event at work. I had to join a bit late so I don't know the context but as I joined, someone newish to my org -- which covers the whole country so we're mostly hybrid/remote -- said that starting this job was hard for me because going back to working from home was something he hadn't done "since covid." #CovidIsNotOver, of course. (I felt some kind of way listening to someone talk as if they were triggered by an event that is still ongoing if you ask me.) But he's totally right about how we haven't really addressed it in any meaningful way -- the lack of pragmatic mitigations almost requires us to participate in this cognitive dissonance of referring to the pandemic in the past tense when it's only the lockdowns, the testing, the mask mandates, the period of taking it as seriously as it warrants, which is past.

I was immediately reminded of that Audrey Watters piece I linked to the other day, about grief that isn't observed. If she's right that "it matters that GPT was released during the COVID pandemic (and ChatGPT shortly 'after')," (and how I appreciate the scare-quotes around "after" there!), this is a meaning that's lost if we don't talk about the covid pandemic.

I think covid is intimately linked to changes in transport infrastructure and the built environment that make my job harder -- hastily-enacted legislation to allow more tables and chairs on pavements means more obstacles that never had to undergo an Equality Impact Assessment; "pop-up" cycle lanes led to lasting trends in active travel infrastructure that still deprioritize pedestrians; e-scooters were seen as more useful in a world where people were discouraged to go anywhere but particularly to use public transport; I could go on -- and the further that lockdowns and other facets of pandemic mitigations get, the harder it is for me to address those things properly.

It's interesting to see what feels like such a modern ill also taking place as long ago as Pompeii, in as different a culture as that Roman one was. Is it such a fundamental human thing to just block out the bad times so thoroughly? I can't help but think we can do much better to look after ourselves, individually and as collective societies.

rachelmanija: (Books: old)


An epistolatory novel about the friendship between an American Jew, Max, and a German, Martin. As Hitler rises to power, their relationship sours, in some expected ways and some less expected, as their characters are revealed.

Very short, very powerful, very technically skilled, a quick easy read with an unexpected and unforgettable outcome. Seriously, don't click on spoilers if there's any chance you'll read the book. That being said, I read it because Naomi Kritzer told me the whole story and it was still great. Thanks for the rec!

The book was published in 1939 under a male-sounding pseudonym, but the style feels almost modern and the themes feel incredibly modern. There's an afterword about what inspired the book, which which is worth reading. Taylor had some German friends who seemed like kind, wonderful people, who became fervent Nazis and abandoned their Jewish friends. In a question so many of us are asking now, she wondered, What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty?

Read more... )
posted by [personal profile] cosmolinguist at 08:09pm on 22/03/2026 under

A couple of days ago, I determined that my webcam wasn't working on my laptop, for calls with my parents, or on my work laptop.

D kindly took it away the other day, and diagnosed it as Dead. He also reminded me we had one that I could use for work but doesn't work on Linux -- something I'd entirely forgotten about; I think I'd conflated it with the other webcam which had stopped working entirely...

He also sourced a replacement, sent me a link. Which I said was terribly sweet of him but I didn't really need, just for my parents when I could shuffle things around and just use the camera on the laptop. But it arrived the next day; he'd bought it for me anyway. "Thirty quid to keep your parents happen seems worth it," he said. Awww.

So, tonight I was so looking forward to the call with my parents starting with something other than my mom complaining that she can't see me.

Instead, the first thing she said when my camera pops on was "You're getting those deep wrinkles in your forehead too, like Grandma [my mom's own mother]."

Which a) only when I frown, or raise my eyebrows [so maybe this is the only way my parents will ever see me, lol] b) my grandma was a badass, so I hardly mind looking like her! c) to age is to live!

But most of all: she's treating me in a way she'd consider horrible bad manners if I behaved this way toward anyone.

Again. (A story I'm fond of trotting out is the time we were in a restaurant, my appetizer arrived, she looked disgusted at it and asked me warily what that was; I said "butternut squash soup" and she said "oh yuck!" A thing I'd have been told off for if I'd reacted that way to someone else's food that I both didn't have to and shouldn't have eaten!)

Can't believe D paid £30 for my appearance to be insulted like this, heh. It's a fancy webcam too; he said he got "only" 720p rather than the £50 1080p, and I was thinking this is already too big a number, I don't want my parents to see me in high definition (unfortunately for me, I said this as "that's too many p for my face!" which made D snigger because his mind is always in the gutter!). it's very zoomed-in too, which is unsettling for me too since I have to have my monitor so close to me. It's been such a long time since Mom commented on my facial hair and I'd like that to become a much longer time, an unbroken streak. She's gonna say whatever she wants as soon as she (thinks that she) is off-mic; all I ask is for her to be polite to my face!

ffutures: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] ffutures at 07:44pm on 23/03/2026 under ,
This is a bundle of material for Scion 2E from Onyx Path Publishing, an RPG about people becoming gods which seems thematically somewhat like the Percy Jackson background. I don't think it has been in one of these bundles before.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/ScionOrigin

  

This isn't a genre I particularly want to play with at  present, but it looks like you get quite a lot for your money. Layout and design seem good, and the art avoids some common cliches although some of it does veer towards one uncanny valley or another.

Later - I'm reliably informed that the Storypath system itself uses mechanics similar to World of Darkness 1e, which I'd somehow missed.

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