Alright, so it's been ages since I've really used this for anything consistently and I don't want to make a new blog because I have Too Many, sooooo
My name is Crow :)
I like puzzle games and want to yap about them :) they make me happy, and I kind of want to make some someday? But well, I want to explore what's out there, have fun, see how folks are making these things!
So I'm gonna start yappin'. I do not have tags locked and loaded ahaha, but I'll try and use my read mores as is appropriate.
Thanks loves, first big yappin post comin in a lil bit♡
Seeking 1st Time AD Writers- Horror/Comedy Audio Series *UNPAID*
We are looking for writers! Season two of our horror/comedy anthology para/Normal is hungry for your pitches!
para/Normal is a horror/comedy audio drama made up of bite-sized episodes where classic fears turn out to be… extremely boring. “Normal,”if you will. Your new apartment is haunted by a creepy doll? Kick her out the window, she’s 11 inches tall! Got a scary VHS tape in the mail? Throw it away!
We are looking to expand our current pool of writers and give underrepresented voices a chance to join our community.
If you:
a) like horror and understand its tropes
b) have always wanted to write for a horror podcast but are overwhelmed with the potential workload, and/or c) are perhaps a little weird?
This could be the call for you!
**At this time we are only accepting submissions from writers that have never written for audio drama before. **
For full details, check out the pitch form below.
Deadline for pitches/submissions is April 26th at 11:59pm PST.
Links to the form and season one are below!
Submission Form
para/Normal website
There will be no use of generative AI on any part of this project for any reason.
Upriver, Downriver is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game about sailing along a magical river, and persisting on an impossible journey.
Together, you and your crew will swear a magical oath to reach either the Source of the Great River or the Sea. No one has ever come back from either destination, and each has their own challenges and rewards.
Whatever bends your journey takes, once you’ve sworn your Oath, your soul is committed to continue on towards your goal. Even in death, your ghost will be bound to your Oath and your ship, compelled to complete your voyage.
During your travels, you'll visit enchanting, enigmatic and hostile locations along the River. Each location is tied to one of the major arcana, and is home to its own unique characters and challenges. Your trials and triumphs are determined by dice and tarot cards.
What you do with the hand that fate and the River deals is up to you.
The Detective is a 6-minute minisode offering a glimpse into the world of The Lion and the Adder, our 1920s supernatural detective audio drama launching this autumn! 🎧
The Detective introduces DI Nicholas Hawthorn and his protege DC Edwards as they take a break from investigating magical crimes in to do a spot of shopping... ✉️✨
Give it a listen here and if it piques your interest, you can support the show by following our Kickstarter at monstrousproductions.org/fundraising 🥰 The campaign launches in a few weeks, so sign up now to be notified when it goes live - and don't forget to share with anyone you think might like the show!
Englewood After Dark: Disclosures is the second season of Englewood After Dark, a horror/drama audio drama. It is not necessary to have listened to Season 1 of Englewood After Dark to enjoy Season 2, though there may be mild spoilers.
It is 2012. The new Parapsychology course at Englewood University is drawing all kinds of attention. Three grieving students chasing answers for a lost loved one. One YouTuber with her sights set on infamy. A disgraced Professor clawing back his credibility. A Private Investigator piecing it all together. And Erin. Erin just wants to get to the bottom of his dreadful premonitions. Circumstance forces them together, but, it turns out their discovery saw them first. And has been watching for an age. Our unlikely heroes must race against time to uncover exactly what the watcher on the hill is, before it buries them all.
Englewood After Dark releases Tuesdays at 3 pm (CT) every other week. The first episode will premiere released October 2025.
We've been on and off watching Murder She Wrote which is extremely fun and fascinating in like -
The black guy butler was an undercover IRS agent. Multiple agents, actually, were.
An episode really scared us cuz it was reaaally gearing up to be DiD THE EVIL SIDE FINALLY SNAPPED AND GAINED CONTROLLLL kinda shit right? And then it just like. Was a guy framing the girl trying to make her out to be craaaazy, but oh man, sometimes just.
Watching and reading these older mysteries you really feel the age of them. And sometimes half the tension is "oh whew, you weren't as shitty as you could have been, but given when this was made, this is a real pleasant surprise but also you really were leaning hard into that man so I'm not sure I really feel relieved but hm."
I'm not sure like... how satisfying the mysteries are? Idk, they've never felt super like they've hooked me, and the way they tend to be solved is like. She does a big exposition dump at the end where she hooks together all the little clues and such, but things are usually so subtle it feels more like excluding people than going AHA! LEFT HANDED SMOKER!
I really like their font in the opening, tho.
Oh - and also, god, I hope somebody, somewhere, has attempted to put together Mrs Fletcher's family tree, because it must be fucking wild. We were watching season 1 and already joking about how many cousins she has, but season 2 literally has an episode that starts with her aunt calling her and talking about a relative and Mrs Fletcher being like who???
Robin Sylvester, gadabout demonologist, finds time between gin martinis to solve the most magical crimes 1920s London has to offer.
Our Kickstarter pre-launch is now LIVE for our next big show, The Lion and the Adder!
Set in a paranormal 1920s London and featuring a full cast, original music and sound design and a lot of gay people, TLATA is the culmination of years of hard work by the Monstrous Productions HQ team and we can't wait to share it with you all!
Sign up now to be notified on launch and help support independent audio fiction, and keep an eye out in the coming weeks for updates (possibly including something on your podcatcher feed that may or may not rhyme with schminisodes 👀)
Started another more current mystery in a desperate bid to keep up with Libby and the protag of this one is painfully, agonizingly autistic. Girl is going to get absolutely screwed and it feels like a semi truck about to hit her and I'm not sure if this is good tension or agony tension.
I could sob I was beginning to think I was the problem when I struck out on two in a row ahahaha
In my continuing quest to read mysteries more modern than 1950, a shockingly difficult quest apparently, I finally.... found one that was fun.
"How to Solve Your Own Murder" by Kristen Perrin!
It actually kind of makes me laugh, right, ok - so the book I struck out before on, which I will not name because I would then not shut up bashing the hell out of it - had a kind of sorrrt of similar structure? You'd have your current day plot, and then the chapter would end with a cut away to a journal/letter, and in that other book, I fuuuucking loathed it. Probably because the person writing the letters was insufferable, but then! Perrin's book has a similar kind of structure (where, granted, the letters are actually journal entries written by the woman who is murdered near the start of the book) but oh my goddd it works?
I think it's probably because just overall, I like how Perrin writes. Her characters are fun! They feel more like people and not like little cardboard cut outs being puppeted around like the last book, and I think the journal entries are less disruptive and more exciting because I know they're relevant to the story; they're by the murdered Aunt! They're folding back her past in a way we are unable to learn directly, because she's dead now!
Ahhh. I think my greatest nitpick with the book would be that the pacing is a little odd; the main character is unfamiliar with the town and its history and spends a good chunk of time wandering that may feel a bit like dawdling, but I think she's active enough to fend off the worst of that, and the past unfolding thru her view is also interesting enough to carry some slow inaction on the MC's part.
I won't say much more, but I had a fun time, and I'm at least not feeling like every modern book is absolute garbage now :)
My impromptu battle with Libby has given me a bit to stop and ponder over the current book I'm reading; it's "A Murder is Announced," by Agatha Christie, and there's been so much like.
Emphasis on how can you know who people are? Esp post war, with people so uprooted and new folks coming in, you just have to take their word of who they are and have been and there's a lot of suspicion being thrown at the two younger folks in the household, that they're after the inheritance their aunt/cousin is going to come into shortly since they'd inherit it after her - but that can't be what's going on, that's too straightforward.
I think - I'll put in my bet now.
I think the person who is lying about who they are is the Aunt herself. There's this thread of her having gone to Switzerland during the war with her sister and her sister dying there, and I think who we have here is actually the sister pretending to be her. I'm not sure if it's because of the inheritance or just her wanting a life not her own, so this might be where things fall apart on this theory ahaha, but so much is being pointed at the likely siblings that I'm squinting hard.
I bet the siblings are actually real ahaha. The Aunt is also noted to have not gone to visit someone who would have more recently seen her - still not *recent* recent, but it's convenient, hmm? - and the only person who appears to be vouching for who she 'truly' is, is her "childhood friend" who would not have seen her since she was a girl. And that's so long ago!! If she's not a fraud I'll eat my hat. I think the guy killed at the start knew who she really was so she set up a situation to get him out of the way.
She'd have to have someone in on it with her, but this is my theory!!!
I'm so annoyed ahahah. This is lighthearted, nothing serious.
Ok, so, since I want to make mystery games, I have been trying to read a lot of mysteries. Figured I'd start working thru Agatha Christie's catalogue since hers are classic, right? And I've done a few of them - still have a lot left to go - but still, I've read enough of her things since January that I was like ok, lets break up the Christies and go dig around for some other authors.
I enjoyed The Thursday Murder Club - I like how it is written, I like how it treats its characters, it felt genuine and loved its people - so when I saw this other book the other day while I was snuffling around Libby, I thought ok, this sounds like it's trying to do similar stuff to Thursday Murder Club, let's give it a go.
Oh my goddddddddddd.
I didn't ping off it immediately, bc I really do want to give myself a wider breadth of mystery stuff, see how folks construct things, but just. Ugh.
Ok, so the book was The Marlow Murder Club, and maybe this is just me being mean to it, but it feels intensely like he saw The Thursday Murder Club and wanted to do something like that, but fundamentally did not *get* the characterizations and nuance that made that book good, and only took the window dressing. Except he didn't even do that right??
His main character is I think like 80, but he goes out of his way to start the book with her skinny dipping, having this cloak she wears all the time everywhere, running down pigeons on her bike, throwing herself into danger all the time really very rashly (and he keeps reminding us again and again about this mysterious key she carries on her and alluding not subtly to it unlocking a door with seeeecrettsss behind it) but like. While Thursday Murder Club was happy to have its elderly protagonists and... not revel, but let them exist with the reality of their age catching up to them, while also celebrating that they were still extraordinary people still capable of *so much*, this guy almost. Idk, it feels like he's pushing it too hard?
Like yeah!! She's still Vibrant, she's naked in a river and thrilled about it! Yeah, she's 80 but she's in a boat and throwing herself into danger left and right! Yeah she's 80 but she has zero foresight and has laser focused on things to a degree that makes her feel 23. She feels surface level old, with nothing underneath it to make her 80 years feel real. Yeah yeah you have dark secrets in your closet and like your whiskey, but why does a 30 year old feel more responsible than you? This doesn't feel like it's a flaw that's being explored; she's really not been punished in the story for her wild impulsiveness, and she keeps running up to suspected murderers and suspicious crime scenes/intruders and getting off easy.
And augh. Augh!!! Other writing just feels almost afraid? That it won't be clear enough? So it explains things way too cleanly in the prose, when a character themself will say I Just Have To and it's like well motherfucker, you might not have words, but this prose sure sounds like you did. A whole paragraph of them, in fact.
So I just had that above and then a whole huge theorypost by the main gal about what is going on, who murdered and why, and I just. I read it so straight faced, and then tapped by screen to see how far I was in the book, and it was like. 2/5ths of the way through. So it's all going to be wrong, and it doesn't even make sense at *this* point in the book, but you sure worked in your main gal connecting the whole setup mentally to crossword puzzle clues, bc that's her job!
... I returned it early.
orz
I know I probably should like. Take notes as to what *doesn't* work in a mystery, because that's just as important as what does work to make something successful, but I think I can boil this one down to trying too fuckin hard and it being reaaaaally obvious.
I unfortunately lost the original receipt so I don't remember when I bought this, but tonight, just a little bit ago, I finally sat down and finished Murdle Volume 1.
And it was fun! God I love these ahahah I'll have to space out doing the next so I don't burn thru them too quick - I have other logic puzzles I've gotten so I can pad it out - but ahhhh what a fun format. Maybe I should try doing the daily ones online? I know I looked once and bounced off, but it could be fun.
I rather liked the silly story strung through it all; I think my favorite chunk is probably the 3 star difficulty ones? The 4s can be fun, but too often it just felt like guessing which was just. Raaa I don't like guessing ahahah hence why I'll never be one for Ultimate TM Sudoku. There were a few though where I felt like I could logic it out real nice and oh! What a sweet spot! Those ones were admittedly *very* satisfying.
But it was fun and charming and I'm just stupidly charmed for Logico and Irratino. Good for them.
Hey look I did another one… this one took a while between the necessity of a less humanoid design and the decision to dye all the fabric myself… pretty pleased with how this little weirdo came out though and his flouncy robe really fills out the shelf nicely.
beholding did nothing wrong @fellpyrean - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
