Scott Parker
Scott is a generally okay human
He writes on this website sometimes
scottparker.co
Each year I eagerly anticipate my friends’ “Best Of” lists, but I rarely contribute my own. Pitiful! So here I am, making amends just a little bit into the new year.
Fine, you win - this is quite late. Now let’s move on, please.
It’s true! I am terrible at keeping up with the zeitgeist so I mostly play catch-up. Instead, these are merely things that I encountered for the first time in 2023.
This format is shamelessly adapted from Noel Rappin. He’s a great writer - do me a favor and go read his blog, then buy his books so he won’t get upset about this flagrant style heist.
Summary: Two men struggle with the challenges of friendship in increasingly extreme ways.
I try to be friendly but I have few friends. Friendship is hard for me in many subtle, hard-to-articulate ways. It feels like an extraordinary commitment and significant cost, but also I just feel so bad at it. So I tend to cultivate acquaintances rather than friends.
I thought I was alone with these feelings but Banshees of Inisherin is a study of weirdos like me. It’s a wonderfully told story of two men who were friends and now aren’t. Maybe. Like friendship itself, it’s simple and yet complicated.
It’s directed by and stars the principal players of In Bruges, another of my favorite movies. Banshees of Inisherin holds up to that high standard.
Summary: Two people learn how to be human. Oh, but one of them is a farting corpse.
Swiss Army Man is perhaps the hardest movie sales pitch ever. There is no way to make it sound appealing. I had it recommended to me at least five times before I finally gave it a shot, and even then it wasn’t totally voluntary.
Don’t be stupid like me. Don’t see “farting corpse” and write this movie off. It’s fun, sweet, and has two incredible performances from Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe. THEY EVEN SING ON THE SOUNDTRACK! And they don’t make a big deal about it!
It’s from the Daniels who you may know from Everything Everywhere All at Once, or perhaps from the delightful Turn Down for What video. This is just as good as either of those amazing films.
Summary: Guy Pearce in a grim modern western set in a post-semiapocalyptic Australia.
The Rover is a western stripped bare. You learn little about the characters and less about the setting. What remains is a vivid performance from Guy Pearce, playing an unnamed character in the remote stretches of a desolate Australia. He seethes with quiet rage, a violent man in a violent world.
I especially loved the setting. It’s never made clear what happened to Australia and the movie trusts the audience to be okay with that.
Also, I think I’m the last person to figure this out, but Robert Pattinson is kind of amazing, right? He’s fantastic in this and did yeoman’s work in making Tenet watchable.
Summary: A comedic journey of two people wandering through an increasingly surreal night, seeing the many strange ways we’re interconnected.
Every other movie on this list is a short, focused tale that is almost too simple. Not this. I spent the first half-hour of this anime thinking it was a beautiful, well-intentioned mess. An amusement without direction or purpose. Later-era David Lynch if he was inclined to make anime instead of… whatever he’s been doing lately.
However, Night is Short, Walk on Girl then starts to come together by somehow getting stranger. Mysterious trains that run on phantom tracks, a whole segment of raunchy jokes, walking into a random stage performance - the movie gets more unhinged and yet comes together, bringing characters back to show that we’re all stumbling through life with each other’s help.
Okay, I take back what I said about Swiss Army Man - this might be the most difficult movie in this list to pitch.
Summary: Nominally a mystery, it’s really a tapestry of interconnected stories about life and race in a small Texas town.
Lone Star could easily have been a moralizing tale with one dimensional characters all imparting Very Important Messages. It could have been the 2005 movie Crash but in 1996. It’s too smart for that though, and besides, 1996 already had a different movie called Crash that was an extremely different thing. But I digress.
Chris Cooper delivers a fantastic performance as a small town sheriff investigating what might be a crime and which might be committed by his father when he was sheriff. He’s joined by great supporting performances as side characters repeatedly reveal unexpected depths. The joy is just seeing how deep that goes.
It also probably has the wildest ending of anything on this list.
(movies I enjoyed but can’t recommend quite as strongly)
Summary: A cute, deep deckbuilding game with a clever one-dimensional combat system.
Cobalt Core joins the crowded space of the zillion games framed as “Slay the Spire, but…” Most of these games forget that the genius of Slay the Spire is clear, evocative effects and complexity through combining very simple mechanics. Instead, they just add complex base mechanics and quickly overwhelm me.
Not so with Cobalt Core. The game cleverly models dogfighting as a one-dimensional affair. You control only your ship’s left-to-right position relative to your foe. It’s simple and immediately clear but creates a very interesting mechanical space.
Also, it’s adorable! Each deck is a combination of three different pilots with their own charming animations, lines, and cards. It’s the first game since Slay the Spire that hooks me in similar –but novel– ways.
Summary: Minesweeper but awesome, a game of pure logic without guessing.
Polimines is a simple, inexpensive set of 30 logic puzzles based on Minesweeper. In each puzzle, you must determine which squares are empty and which are filled, based on clues that are increasingly open-ended as the game progresses.
Later puzzles introduce new types of clues, and the magic of the game is in deducing paradoxes and impossibilities from overlapping clues to determine what must be filled.
This is the first game since the masterpiece Hexcells that compares. It’s a great game and a bargain.
Summary: A racing game with adorable graphics and approachable controls that reveals a great deal of depth.
I love racing games but I’m hard to please. I have no patience for simulations - ask me to select tires or think about my car’s aerial dynamics and I’m out. However, most arcade racers are so simple that they can’t maintain my interest.
Circuit Superstars seems made for me then. You can jump straight into the action but there’s still a rich depth to each race. I fell in love after my first endurance race that required me to carefully plan my pit stops and avoid being too rough on my car in-between.
Pit stops! Tire wear and grip issues! It’s easy to look at screenshots and be fooled into thinking this is some slight game. It rewards patience and a light touch though. And for a cheap price, it offers a wealth of cars and races. What a gem.
Summary: A procedurally-generated, film noir take on Deus Ex.
These lists aren’t ranked and I don’t pick “Best of the Year” in anything. But disregard that: Shadows of Doubt is my game of the year for 2023 and easily the best game I’ve played this decade.
Shadows of Doubt has you play as a private detective in a grimy, randomly generated urban painscape set in a 1980’s gone terribly wrong. You choose your own cases – maybe you specialize in tracking people, finding stolen items, or even “finding” “stolen” items. Perhaps you even get a little rough with people. Oh, and every so often you’ll need to solve a murder of course.
Shadows of Doubt gives you tools and toys but then lets you solve these cases as you see fit. You may start a case with a name; if so, lucky you. Other times you’ll work from as little as an age and handwriting sample. Murders are especially open-ended. I’ve cracked cases on call logs, eye-witness testimonies, and CCTV footage.
It’s an amazing experience but I must warn you it’s very much an Early Access game. I fell through the bottom of the world a few times. Janitors seem to get stuck opening and closing the same doors frequently. Once, I loaded a saved game to find myself in a totally unfamiliar location. The difficulty is wrong, with the game getting progressively easier after your first few hours.
Bad bugs are rare however, and if you’re not afraid of some rough edges then I heartily encourage you to check it out.
(games I enjoyed but can’t recommend quite as strongly)
Summary: A funny and moving documentary series on YouTube that answers the question “What if Ken Burns loved charts, had a sense of humor, and a budget of about 500 dollars?”
I don’t follow sports and have no particular interest in baseball or Seattle teams. However, I’m a sucker for great stories and moving heroics, especially those found beyond the headlines.
This Youtube series seamlessly alternates between hilarious, random asides told with droll narration and riveting sports stories I never knew of. All of this is done with a new, lo-fi form of documentary filmmaking unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.
A still image of a player’s glove gave me goosebumps. How is that possible?!
I know a multi-hour, data-heavy docu-series is a hard sell so I’ll just leave you with this quote from the show’s first few moments:
“This story begins the only way it ever could have begun: with 140 acts of arson.”
Eat that, Ken Burns.
Summary: West Wing meets Gilmore Girls meets 24, but somehow it comes together.
Any given episode of The Diplomat alternates between comedy, romantic drama, and fast-paced international affairs. It requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Strong writing and even better performances from Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell make that a very easy pill to swallow.
The Diplomat doesn’t moralize or engage in hero worship like some of its inspirations. While the show touches upon some international affairs with expertise, clean heroic victories are rare in this series.
But it could be half as smart and I still wouldn’t care because it’s such a joy to watch the entire cast bounce off each other. Keri Russell is particularly delightful and it’s great to see her finally get a meaty, worthy project after The Americans wrapped.
Summary: A dramedy about petty revenge escalates into… a thoughtful, introspective and surprisingly relatable show?
Beef’s framing device is a road rage incident that escalates to increasingly unhinged acts of petty revenge. The show is brilliant in many ways, but I particularly loved seeing the complicated, messy lives of these characters (portrayed brilliantly by Stephen Yeun and Ali Wong).
Ultimately Beef is about people who are trapped within their fixed worldviews, and how that influences everything from the role of church in their lives to how they choose a spouse. I felt these characters deeply despite how little their lives resemble my own life at first glance.
(shows I enjoyed but can’t recommend quite as strongly)
Summary: A two-character, Rashomon-esque novella with fascinating takes on the quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
A road trip with your average scientist from any space opera and a heroine who could have been plucked from any fantasy novel. These two share a language but lack any shared culture, context, or mutual understanding. The adventure itself is fine (candidly, I’ve already forgotten most of it) but the real draw is seeing key events from each character’s wildly different perspective.
Great, fun concept that is perfect for the novella format - doesn’t overstay its welcome at all.
Summary: Simultaneously a thrilling adventure and a deep, thinky scifi tale spanning thousands of years (and light-years).
Let’s get this out of the way. “Sentient spiders.”
I rejected this book so many times because of those two words. It’s not the ick factor – working from my basement requires some level of spider tolerance. I just immediately fall into a unwakeable slumber when a scifi writer goes deep on some truly alien species with a different mode of cognition.
But I liked Elder Race by this same author, so I decided to get over myself and give this a shot.
Once again I was being dumb - this book series is great! It has big ideas about how we choose our tribes and how we have (and haven’t) overcome our evolutionary biases. But also, it’s a rollicking good time full of adventure and conflict and derring-do and wild AI personalities.
Most smart scifi books are boring. Many exciting scifi books are shallow. I really don’t know how Adrian Tchaikovsky managed to be both deep and thrilling with Children of Time.
The third and final book in the series, Children of Memory, was also quite good. It skews more towards “smart” than “exciting” but there’s a few passages that will stick with me forever.
Summary: Did you know that Magellan didn’t actually circumnavigate the world? That’s only, like, the seventh-most interesting fact about his voyage.
I only stumbled into this because of a strangely named achievement in Civilization 6 that I found. Then I read the summary of this voyage and thought “no way, that’s crazy” and needed to learn more.
YOU GUYS THIS WAS WILD.
I loved this book. The author peppers the story with historical context and does a reasonable job of balancing the remarkable achievement of Magellan & his crew against their horrible actions. You can see why some celebrate his accomplishments and others celebrate his final end.
I enjoyed The Wager too but if you’re only going to read one book about naval disasters in the Age of Sail, pick this.
(books I enjoyed but can’t recommend quite as strongly)
Random things I enjoyed that don’t fit in anywhere else.
We love puzzles and escape rooms, so this riddle-focused legacy board game was a major hit with us. It’s wild that this simple, focused game is from the same designer as another of my favorites, the sprawling and unwieldy board game Star Wars: Rebellion.
This is perhaps my most pointless recommendation since it’s a podcast behind the paywall of a different podcast that it spun out of. There’s no sane person who would bite at that. But you’re missing out - each episode is a hilarious, free-wheeling conversation between improvisers playing unhinged characters and leaning hard into every mistake they make.
This past weekend I emailed the following to all registered users of RPG Seeker:
I’m shutting down RPG Seeker on March 23rd, 2024. I’ve had a great time building and operating this site, but doing so costs me time & money on a project that frankly hasn’t found traction.
To provide some context, the site has been running for two years but this email is going to fewer than a hundred people. Of that small group, I’m guessing most people reading this are thinking “Wait, I have an account at whatever this site is?” :)
Regardless, whether you’re a power user or signed up in a long-forgotten drunken stupor, please accept my sincere gratitude for using the site. I had a blast and you have made it a joy to get this far on this project. Thanks for going on this journey with me.
I want to be clear to any users reading this - rpgseeker.com as it exists today is indeed over. It will be gone in a month’s time.
But I want to talk further about the bigger picture and my hopes & dreams for the roleplaying market.
Finding and buying roleplaying games digitally is just as frustrating in 2024 as it was when I started RPG Seeker in 2020.
Most creators end up begrudgingly listing their games on both DTRPG and Itch, pushing Itch to their fanbase but relying on DTRPG for discovery.
There have been a few attempts at creating a competing RPG-focused marketplace, notably Indie Press Revolution, but they’ve remained niche and difficult to use.
We deserve better. I want better experiences as a player, creators deserve a better option for their livelihoods, and the community as a whole would benefit from another choice.
I hoped RPG Seeker would appeal to gamers who wanted a better search experience and improved sale notifications.
But that was just step one in my previously unannounced secret plan. This is from my personal journal, written in early 2021:
- Get a critical mass of users by helping them find good sales on great games
- Use that critical mass to solve one of the classic problems of bootstrapping a new marketplace: you won’t get sellers offering their products without users, but you won’t get users without sellers.
- Turn RPG Seeker into a better marketplace for buying RPGs
I couldn’t talk about this dream openly as RPG Seeker existed only through the good graces of the awesome DriveThruRPG marketing & engineering teams. We spoke every so often, they are lovely people, and if they had decided to shut down my access then I would have pulled the plug on RPG Seeker much earlier.
So if there’s an upside to calling it quits on this incarnation of RPG Seeker, it’s that I can finally talk openly about how much I’d love to build a better marketplace for roleplayers that directly competes with the existing players.
And here’s the main point I want to make:
Building a platform for finding sales across Itch & DTRPG was not the right way to attract users. However, I’m not abandoning my goal to build a better marketplace someday.1
In the meantime, if you’re a creator or publisher reading this and have thoughts, get in touch - scott at rpgseeker.com or on BlueSky. I’d love to connect with folks in the industry to get more perspectives on this.
Until next time.
I am taking an extended break from pursuing that goal, however. My life has changed from when I started RPG Seeker – notably, I enjoy what I’m doing professionally unlike ever before in my career. Choosing to do something means choosing not to do 10,000 other things. ↩
With no particular order or structure, these are random things I’ve been enjoying lately
In case you missed the detail I buried at the tail end of my last update, I’ve been part of the team at Deku Deals for about two weeks now. It’s great! Working with Michael is a joy, and it’s a delight to work on a product I love and use every day. As I get more up to speed I’m sure I’ll have more to say about my experience there.
Couch co-op games used to be a regular feature in the Parker household but no more - too often they demand excessive time, focus, or ability. So Escape Academy is a delightful return to form for my wife and I to play together.
The idea is simple - you and a partner run through increasingly fantastical and expansive escape rooms. The “rooms” are clever without being obscure, the controls are incredibly approachable, and the art style is bright and colorful. It’s perfect for us - we’re obsessed. It’s ideal for sporadic 20-30 minute gaming sessions too.
I can be a pop book snob, turning up my nose when a book is extended into a long-running series or adapted into a television show. Slow Horses is both, so I had to hear about this book a stupid number of times to get over myself and read it.
I am obsessed, now anxious that there are only eight books in the series. I have to parcel these out carefully lest I spend too much of my lifetime without another Slough House book to read.
I don’t care about spies and I’ve never been able to finish a Le Carre book (a major character flaw, I know). However, Mick Herron made me forget I don’t like spy novels through his delight in language and his touch with characters. Each chapter revels in a different subset of oddball spies who despise each other and themselves in equal parts. Funny, exciting, and surprisingly relatable.
We cook asparagus all the time. I’ve tried a number of techniques but I always come back to roasting them with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic. Everything else just gets in the way.
So I was recently surprised to love this dish so much. Lemon and shallot I understand, but does asparagus really need cheese? YES – and roasted red peppers and za’atar. Absolutely delicious and something I’d happily serve to company, the highest praise I can give a recipe.
Will it replace simply roasting them, one of the all-time great recipes? I have no idea but it will definitely be in our regular rotation.
I only stumbled into this book about Magellan’s circumnavigation because of a strangely named achievement in Civilization 6 that I achieved by accident. Then I read a brief summary of his expedition and thought “no way, that’s crazy” and had to learn more.
THIS WAS WILD. Five boats set out on this journey; only one makes it, with only about 18 of the 270 original sailors surviving. None of the captains–including Magellan–survived the circumnavigation.
I loved this book. The author peppers the story with historical context and does a reasonable job of balancing the remarkable achievement of Magellan & his crew against their horrible actions. You can see why some celebrate his accomplishments and others celebrate his final end.
One of the better histories I’ve read in awhile.
a few things I’ve recently enjoyed, with caveats
The movie “C’mon C’mon” overstayed its welcome but what great performances from the two leads. I have been sleeping on Joaquin Phoenix – I need to go back and check out what else he’s been up to.
Like most Games Workshop properties, Mordheim: City of the Damned is both deeply interesting and deeply flawed. I love evolving my little haggard war band through the campaign. Tactical encounters have occasionally brilliant details like the risk of bringing your best equipment - enemies will routinely loot your KO’d squadmates if they fall in battle, so caution is warranted.
However, battles are often anticlimactic and poorly designed with an AI that doesn’t know how the game works. I doubt I’ll finish it but I suppose I got my $4 worth?
I finally watched “Top Gun: Maverick” and mostly didn’t get the hype, but it was still worth it for the scene with Val Kilmer. It was inherently dramatic considering the struggle it was for him to even act, but lifted by two fantastic performances. More differently abled folks in movies, please!
Also there was a Danger Zone and they definitely took a highway to it to do Danger Zone stuff, I guess.
Cracking the case of “Who killed scottparker.co ?” is not particularly hard - it was Scott Parker, at his desk, with inactivity.
“Why?” is perhaps more interesting. Why did I largely stop writing here? Sure, it’s a navel-gazing topic of limited interest, but it’s not like I’m using this site for anything else right now.
The heyday of this blog began in 2005 when my soon-to-be-wife said “every nerd I’ve ever met has a half-built website that’s perpetually ‘coming soon’.” That was all I needed to finish coding it in PHP the next weekend. A torrent of posts followed, starting a golden age that lasted for about a decade.
Starting around 2015, posts gradually slowed from a stream, to a trickle, to what is now, if I’m generous, an occasional drip. Why is that?
Much has been made of social media’s impact on blogging but Twitter was only a minor factor. Tweeting never took the place of blogging but I think my brain became accustomed to thinking in 140 characters. Blog posts started feeling like so much work whereas they used to be a relaxing, natural outlet.
Aging also played a role. Words take more effort now, forcing me to spend more time with each sentence. Age also cooled some of the fires that inspired me to write in the first place. Early posts were frequently borne from playful frustration, outrages I felt, or outrages I wanted to instigate. Now I’m an old, boring man – things are fine and people are fine but no one wants to read a post entitled “Hey, everything is fine and I guess that’s fine.”
Both of the factors above pale in comparison to the impact of my career. Since 2015, I’ve held increasingly senior management roles. Before, I ran small teams that I would have called “an organization” only in my most pompous moments. For the past seven years though, I’ve ranged from being someone’s boss’ boss to being someone’s boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss, the latter being a nightmare of both organizational complexity and possessive nouns.
My folder of unfinished blog drafts became as unruly as my org charts. I’d write for a few moments and then wonder “Could someone in my organization take offense? Could someone take this out of context?” In large organizations, the answer is “yes.” Always. I’d abandon the draft shortly after this inevitable realization and decide yet another topic was off-limits.
Sidebar: There’s a reason that your VP probably doesn’t open up much. It is often just an opportunity for unforced errors, a way to create problems where none previously existed. Make a mistake and people will get hurt, or they’ll think you’re playing favorites, or minor omissions will balloon into major problems after people inevitably compare notes. The odds of a mistake are very low in any single interaction but you talk all day so it’s bound to happen sooner or later. Eventually it’s just easier to be boring.
(I’m not complaining - being boring came to me very naturally)
There’s other career baggage too - the pressure to be some kind of inspirational thought leader or the fear that my words could bring shame upon my employer. Occasionally a job seeker would mention they looked at my blog and I would think “shit, I wonder what stupid shit they found that I should take down or whether they found me using words like ‘shit’ on my blog.”
I’m sure much of this was self-inflicted, products of an anxious imagination. Nonetheless, these forces combined to make this site a ghost town where the only posts are sporadic, silly takes on games. It’s not that those posts are unauthentic – Edge of the Empire really is just a so-so roleplaying game and I still have mixed feelings about the board game Here I Stand – but these represent a single and increasingly small part of my life.
For a variety of reasons that are topics for another time, I’m delighted to have stepped out of senior management roles and start a new gig at DekuDeals as a… well, I don’t really know what to call my job and I have zero interest in sorting that out. But I know what it isn’t – it’s not Vice President of anything and I am delighted to lead an organization of zero direct reports.
I know myself too well to pretend this means the floodgates have now opened. Every other factor above remains true and I have no desire to add to the vast number of blogs where the latest post is ancient and says merely “I have so much to say! Watch this space!”
But I look forward to writing solely for my own pleasure once again at some irregular pace.
Lately it seems I can only express my concerns in images. I suppose that is some classic Pisces energy.
Here is my final take on the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire roleplaying game after five years of play as expressed in an actual players’ aid on how to roll.
It is not my favorite roleplaying system.