Rings Of Reminder
It wasn’t an existential threat like it was for many—but 2025 was for me still quite a wrestle. The past two years have been.
I am still not over stuff that happened in 2023. Maintaining friendships is hard; I am often angry; I always feel like I am nothing at all.
But hey! I am finally getting the therapy I need; Sharon and I have been working more on our house; and my personal + political convictions took a hard, clarifying tack left.
Unalloyed goods.
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A practice I began as a countervailing force against the internal roar of:
“You have made nothing! You are too slow a writer! You don’t know how to design games! You are not worthy to make art! You are too naive and stupid to understand the way the world works!” etc
are these rings. They don’t fit me super well and scratch easy; none of them cost me more than RM50. I like how understated they are.
I get a ring whenever I finish a personal project and it is fully out in the world. I have five rings now:
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SHRINESHARE, an art folio made with Sharon Chin and David Blandy. Featuring 16 (and counting) artists from around the world; exhibited over a half dozen (and counting) times around Malaysia and the UK. Inspired by Amze Emmons’ Help Yourself, and explores ways we can shared ideas of the sacred without depending on the temples of the state (museums, institutions).
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A PERFECT WIFE, a contemporary horror adventure made with Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and David Blandy. (Physical copies here!) About a pontianak, a refugee community, and the impunity of patriarchal power. (This ring is also shared with A CROCODILE, EATING, a shrine and art installation about how pain is metabolised, for WEIRD HOPE ENGINES. That show is the reason we made A PERFECT WIFE—it was a fundraiser to get Amanda, Scrap and me to the UK. But the crocodile should really have their own ring!)
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TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, an adventure campaign for David Blandy and Daniel Locke’s ECO MOFOS!!. About dead mecha, and what to do what to do when the ruins of hypercapitalism still poison the garden you’re trying to plant, after its collapse. Pretty personal to me, as I live next to an aging petroleum refinery; it is the focus of our IRL environmental activism. (Sequel coming soon!)
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CHAPTER SERF, a full TTRPG fan game for Warhammer 40K. (It’s free, obvs.) You play peons serving the setting’s demigod supersoldier man-children. About toil under feudal lords who were never raised to mind your humanity. My most recent project, and one am unreasonably proud of; a lot of the design work in this is me test-running stuff that will be part of my big 2026 game project, Inshallah.
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THE TIDE RETURNING, an adventure campaign for Yochai Gal’s Cairn; it is part of the Cairn 2E Box Set. About mangroves as a landscape; conflict between a settler-colonial project and an indigenous resistance; cycles of repetition, of consequence, of justice. Colonialism that I return to often, given my homeland’s own history and the horror abroad in the world today. Every return comes with more clarity.
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Because these rings are loose, when I wriggle my fingers they turn around and around and rub against each other with a pleasing (annoying?) clinking sound, and they help remind me I matter.
I am working on a book now—the wayang puppet on our library shelf isn’t ornamentation; they are both patron and research informant!
Maybe I can add another ring, soon.
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In 2026 I will still be fidgeting my fingers, clinking my rings together—but it is a tic I hope to rely on less and less, as time passes.
In 2026 I hope I will be less angry.
In 2026 I hope I can be well enough to be a better friend to the many, many people who were friends to me, who I can never adequately thank.
I hope 2026 will be kind to us, all.
I wish you all bread, and I wish you all roses.
TO DRINK UP THE SEA
Islands of Weirdhope, the maritime expandalone to ECO MOFOS!!, by the fearsome pairing of David Blandy and Daniel Locke, is currently crowdfunding.
Scant hours left! The Backerkit campaign ends Tuesday. Go back it NOW.
You should back it because I am part of it. I will be in Four Fathoms Deep, an adventure anthology launching together with the core rulebook. I will be in very good company.
I am still writing my adventure. But I have a title, and I have a blurb:
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TO DRINK UP THE SEA
The tide is falling—continuing to fall. The tide has been falling for three days, now.
On the sand are jellyfish lumps, drying out. Look closer! Their tentacles are bundles of optic fiber.
On the surf is a dolphin, poisoned, dying. “Stay away!” he wheezes. His blowhole sputters blue blood.
In the middle of the bay the waves are breaking. What is it—a shoal, a wreck?
A head, a metal head, the size of a comet. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its temples. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its eyes.
Its eyes are open. It is awake. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its hungry mouths.
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This is a follow up to TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, the dead-mecha adventure I wrote for ECO MOFOS!!.
In SWORD the giant robot was an obvious metaphor for hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry. In SEA the giant robot will be the same. I keep writing about the same things; hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry is personal to me, I guess? I live in a petrogas town. Every breath I take reminds me of hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry.
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Was going to post some images / references that make up my moodboard for this adventure.
The first is the Salton Sea Monster, from the Hellboy / BPRD comics:
A kaiju sitting at the edge of a dead sea, spewing a deadly gas. I can’t help read her as a refinery gas flare.
But she also lays eggs. BPRD as a whole concludes by the world ending—but also beginning again, with the earth now an Eden for the amphibian people born from monsters like her.
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Another is “Dragon’s Breath”, one of five short stories in AS Byatt’s The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye.
I’ve never liked this story, but also I’ve never forgotten it: its disgusting dragon(s) like lava flows, like landslides. I believe Byatt wrote the story for / during the Siege of Sarajevo?
In it is the sense of unavoidable catastrophe. That to be human is to dodge around it, prod at it, find boredom in it, rescue what you can from it.
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The most recent is from my own life.
Last week, Senyar, a tropical cyclone, formed in the Straits of Malacca. This never happens in the Strait of Malacca, you understand? Ours are relatively halcyon waters, protected from monsoons, weather systems, tsunamis.
Not any more, I guess.
Hundreds have lost their lives in Sumatra and Thailand.
Senyar hit my hometown last Thursday. The wind wailed; the trees did jigs. I shut what I could, and tried to sleep. The next morning I woke to mess: pools of rainwater in the living room; a porch strewn with pots and branches; trunks and power lines had fallen all around town. (Later the news would report a hundred homes damaged.)
After checking in on loved ones the next thing I did was hurry to our favourite beach, to check in on our favourite mangrove trees. These trees would’ve been worst-hit by the storm.
They survived—though the bedrock around them has eroded further. I worry for them.
Still: our mangroves survived. They survived when concrete did not. During the night, a jetty platform owned by the Petron refinery collapsed into the sea. This is a platform where the tankers moor, to offload crude.
That morning I squinted at the jetty’s rump remainder, water gushing from its broken edge. (No oil spills, thankfully!)
Is the giant in TO DRINK UP THE SEA the cyclone storm, or the petroleum platform?
I don’t know yet. I’ll be writing to find out. It will be an ecocidal disaster, of course. But perhaps such disasters will be calamities for each other—
And I hope imagine us rescue ourselves from them, and belonging, transformed, to the world that comes after.
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Go back Islands of Weirdhope >>>HERE<<<
TO PUT AWAY A SWORD
David Blandy + Daniel Locke’s post-apocalyptic hopepunk TTRPG ECO MOFOS is back from the printers. Meaning it will soon be in our hands.
Am fairly hyped for it, because I wrote an adventure!
To Put Away A Sword is about the woes of building a home on poisoned earth. The terrible powers that hurtled us to the end of the world continue to bear bitter fruit in your garden.
You are villagers living under the shadow of a fallen giant mecha. Its reactors and warheads leak into your groundwater, poison your goats. What will you do about it? What can you do?
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Mechanically it is a pointcrawl around your local valley. Not super complex, design-wise; but I was pleased with my gimmick solution for mapping both the adventure’s dungeons:
Grab a mecha figure, pose it, place it on the game table; each part of the figure corresponds to a location in the dungeon key. Solves for stuff like relative orientation.
Easy!
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To Put Away A Sword is me making a mecha adventure.
Disclaimer: I am not a mecha nerd. I am unfamiliar with most of the genre. Anything I know about Gundam I’ve absorbed by osmosis.
I was mainly into giant robots in childhood. Receiving a Macross figure for my birthday. Pouring over the manual for The Crescent Hawks’ Revenge, which my brother left behind:
While I was not much a fan of mecha, I was very much a fan of Evangelion. I spent my middle teens obsessed with it. The biomechanical, pseudo-mystical stuff; the teen angst. I wanted to be Shinji. I thought trauma was so cool.
So cringe. Anyway:
One of the inspirations for To Put Away A Sword is the survivors-rebuilding-a-town-and-planting-rice sequence in Thrice Upon A Time; probably my favourite part of the whole franchise, now.
The joy and difficulties of trying to build your paradise in the weird ruins of the old world:
Yeah, the adventure has a lot of Evangelion in it. There’s a Nerv HQ analogue to explore. There’s a content warning for child soldiers.
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The other inspiration for To Put Away A Sword is this piece of box art, an accessory set for Macross’s iconic Stonewell Bellcom VF-1 Variable Fighter:
I don’t know what this kind of arrange-your-missiles-in-front-of-your-fighter-jet photo is technically called. Hardware porn parade?
You see it often enough. Here’s a real-life photo of the Lockheed Martin F35 Joint Strike Fighter:
Fairly or not, in my head I associate mecha with seeing copies of Jane’s Defence in airport magazine racks. The genre feels like such a natural way to riff on the hyper-charged corpo-military-industrial complex.
After the brush war ends, and the natural resources extracted, and the ethnic cleansing concluded, and the profits announced, who gets to clean up after a Raytheon missile?
In To Put Away A Sword—you do.
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Ultimately, as always, I am writing and designing from my lived experiences.
See that? The gas flare from the Hengyuan Refining Company? It is about 200 metres from my living room.
That gas flare surfaces constantly in the stuff I make. As I write this post I am breathing its acrid chemical smell. My nose itches. I was asthmatic as a child; I seriously worry about cancer, nowadays.
At night it lights up the sky like Barad-dur.
The plant obviously and continuously flaunts regulations. We’ve tried lodging complaints: with its corporate management; with the Department of Environment. Nothing has worked so far.
“A home on poisoned earth” is a visceral fact of my life.
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To Put Away A Sword is wish-fulfilment, I guess? In the world of the adventure, at least, the forces that are poisoning your home are post-peak oil.
It is nice to imagine a reality where a kind of survival and flourishing is still possible. My partner Sharon and I talk a lot about imagining hope.
Last month she bought this small mecha-looking thing. A wireless camera! She built a little hut for it on our garden wall. It is trained, 24-7, at the gas flare.
Environmental activists we’ve met say video evidence of emissions is important. We’ll see. We imagine it helping.
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Anyway. David just sent me this photo of my adventure, in print:
Looking good. I hope folks play it and enjoy it.
Preorder ECO MOFOS and its adventure bundle >>>HERE<<<
