APRA Website

It’s a new wiki site for APRA!

APRA: Anomalous Parks & Recreation Areas is a supernatural comedy setting that centers around the clandestine Anomalous Containment Foundation's efforts to ‘save’ the world on a budget. Particularly, their use of the APRA subsidiary to shore up losses by converting contained anomalies into public-facing, for-profit attractions.

Abiotic Factor is a fantastic gem of a game— what starts as an amusing Half Life parody slowly reveals more and more of its own strange, wonderful ideas the deeper you go. AF, to be clear, is more like Half-Life meets Subnautica— a survival game where you play as a scientist in a legally distinct Black Mesa facility during a legally distinct Resonance Cascade.

Like Subnautica, your goal is to escape with you life, while braving your surroundings, keeping your stomach full, and the cold at bay.

Uniquely, AF does a fantastic job of putting you in your role as a GATE scientist. Much of the game’s mechanics and mysteries are flat out not explained, and you’re left to puzzle much of it out yourself. It gives you the most important information, of course, but to really survive to the best of your ability you’ll have to pay attention and experiment with things. It’s akin to an immersive sim in how deeply its mechanics interact with one another!

These puzzles and mechanics aren’t so obtuse that you actually need to be a scientist to figure them out, either. Most are fairly reasonable for players to discover so long as they take the time to connect the dots. It does a great job at making you feel smart without actually requiring you to be. I’d give an example, but I think a lot of the fun of AF comes from these discoveries and “ah-ha!” moments. I don’t want to deprive anyone of those!

It’s a wonderful time, I’ve been slowly picking my way through it with a friend, and while we enter the game’s final chapter it still throws surprises and interesting discoveries at us!

It doesn’t come up much publicly, but those who know me know that I LOVE sandwiches. I’ve always had a particular affinity for ingredients slapped between two slices of bread, but after my injury and resulting chronic hand pain, sandwiches have become a staple.

It’s often one of the more accessible regions of food for me to cook, and for someone who physically cannot cook much of what she’d like to— anything I can do is a blessing.

So, when Jim Behymer first appeared in my TikTok feed with cooking videos focused on this same region, I was hooked. He covers sandwiches of all shapes and sizes from around the world, but he doesn’t simply cover their recipes. No, Jim gives us the full context of each and every sandwich as he prepares them. Where it came from, who made it, who eats it, the history of when and where it originated, and what it might represent.

He’s got a calm, soothing voice that’s perfect for narration, paired with a true love and respect for the sandwiches he’s making that bleeds through the screen.

It’s comfort food in video form, and it gives me great joy every time I see a new one in my feed. I highly recommend anyone interested in sandwiches, culture, or history, to give him a look! He’s on both TikTok and YouTube.

Clayton Notestine does a lot of things, he’s a TTRPG designer, graphic designer, writer, educator, an awards show judge, blogger, and more! What I’d like to highlight in particular here is the Explorer’s Design blog, where Clayton explores (ha) TTRPG design, educates people on layout and graphic design, and critiques various aspects of the industry.

His recent series, The Awards Debrief, which served as both exploration and critique of TTRPG awards shows was particularly fascinating. As noted earlier, Clayton has been an awards show judge. In specific, he was a judge for the ENNIES, which presently serves as the tabletop industry’s biggest awards show. In this series, Clayton talks about the judging process, as well as how he thinks it could be improved to benefit both the industry and the ENNIES themselves.

The series also goes into the purpose of awards shows and how they fit into the industry, including insights on their benefits that I honestly had not considered prior.

His whole blog is quite insightful and worth your time, to highlight another section; his Explorateur series acts as a monthly curated list of links to tools, game jams, TTRPGs, and other blogs— this is real useful for keeping up with the community! You can find it all here.

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