#422
Nov 1, 2026
Books
This week I read:
Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
This was kind of like a combination of American Psycho (also by Bret Easton Ellis) and Fight Club. It takes the shallow appearance-obsessed culture of American Psycho and dials it up to 11, while also bringing in the weird irreality and delusions of Fight Club. The book follows Victor Ward, a model, but people keep seeing him at places and events he doesn’t remember going to. He gets caught up in a missing person case and is sent to London by a mysterious figure to go find them, and while there gets taken advantage of and caught up in a terrorist cell composed of other models and actors. But it’s really unclear how much of this is real.
The book is from Victor’s point of view, and he describes everything as a “set”, in terms of “scenes”, and frequently talks to “the director” and interacts with “PAs”. Are those people actually there? A lot of the time it seems like he might be talking to himself or imagining a conversation, but at other times it seems like there is someone there. There are two competing “film crews”, and one of the “directors” is confused and concerned by this whenever Victor brings it up: is this him subconsciously realising that something is very wrong about the situation he finds himself in? At the end he disappears into a witness protection programme, or is abducted (one of the two), and when he calls his sister for help he himself answers the phone and says “hey man, whoever you are, it’d be cool if you’d stop bothering my sister.” So who is the main character?
The whole book is an exercise in the dissolution of the self, of identity, into a sea of shallow people and their appearance-obsessed concerns.
Roleplaying Games
Traveller
We kicked off our Secrets of the Ancients campaign this week. We spent basically the whole session on character creation: we ended up with three great characters and one person clearly destined to be a henchman, or perhaps a goon, all of whom have strong connections to Vlen Backett and the other important NPCs of the campaign.
I ended the session giving them the hook for the first adventure. We’re doing one short adventure first before getting into the campaign proper, as I didn’t want to spend a whole session emphasising how good a friend Vlen Backett is and also how mysterious he is only to then say “Right, characters done, let’s start playing! You receive notice of Vlen Backett’s death.” So we opened the game in Regina Highport, with their ship in the docks for the next two months getting some extensive changes (they rolled multiple ship benefits in character creation, which we turned into one lab ship + a few turrets and some software upgrades), where they received a message from Vlen asking if they were looking for work, as he had a wanna-be noble in a crisis. This then turned into the opening of Marches Adventure 5 - Safari Ship, which I moved to be closer to Regina, and swapped out the corporate quest-giver for Vlen. I had the NPC patron thank Vlen for helping him out “yet again” and joking “I hope you don’t intend to call all these favours in at once!”, dropping another hint than Vlen does lead a strange life and has unexpected contacts.
And there we ended.
We’ll pick up in two weeks time with the adventure proper, and I’ll start with a quick recap covering how all of them know Vlen (we decided the broad strokes in character creation, but I’ll come up with some detail) and the mission they now find themselves on. The hope is that they start to wonder what Vlen’s deal is, because then when they complete the mission (which will be fun in itself) and return to Regina the news of his sudden death will hit harder than if they’d never interacted with him as a character.
Miscellaneous
I managed to hurt my neck getting out of bed on Monday. It was really bad, I wake up and move and there’s just this crunch and it took all week to stop being sore.
Is this old age?