Crate Digging: December 2025

4 of Breakup Gaming Society’s Favorite Finds on the Internet

🎙️ What Am I Rolling? I ran across Fiona K.T. Howat’s solo TTRPG playthroughs in the course of learning more about the Long Haul ‘83 game. What you’ve got in Howat is an expert wielder of audio who paints a table, what’s on it, and her string of roleplay choices with warmth, wonder, and lucidity. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about what a solo TTRPG session feels like, you couldn’t ask for a better guide.

🎵 “Dark in My Heart,” Lee Hazlewood A production, songwriting, and arrangement legend puts one of the funniest and most bitter songs you’ve ever heard over a rollicking tambourine and some simple picking. A sliver of sunlit instruments briefly lights up the head of a narrator who sounds like he’s working on a 7 a.m. drunk in a rank North Hollywood bar.

🎙️ How’s It Goin’ Fucker? Trinidad, Colorado doesn’t have many podcasts, but probably the most infamous was made by Dave Gutierrez and Glenn Walters, who teamed up to do this epic and violent journey of a friendship. How’s it Goin Fucker? never really got off the ground. Pete and Glenn were lifelong friends who spent enough time on YouTube to think they could “get in on this Internet podcasting thing,” but the “episodes” consisted only of a few promo teasers of them driving around the Trinidad-Raton area, likely north of .08 BAC, with a camera pointed out the window, shouting the show’s title at people. You think you’d get tired of seeing downtrodden pedestrians gaping at the camera, but I’ve watched all the promos at least five times. They made dozens of these and claimed an auto body shop was their sponsor, but I don’t know.

Dave and Glenn’s friendship was a weft of brotherly feuds that flared up in the potentially lethal and sometimes ingenious second incarnation of the “show”: Glenn got hopping mad at Dave over a weekend house-sitting debacle that involved a suppressed .22 rifle, a starlight scope, and a mound of trophies, some of which may or may not have been neighbors’ pets. Their content scheme devolved to a pretty popular series called Bet You Can’t Get Out from Under This, Fucker — an escalating duel of trap-setting capers. The capstone was Glenn luring Dave into an abandoned coal camp-era schoolhouse and collapsing the entire second floor on him. This is documented in some detail in a series of stories that tripled street sales of the Trinidad Chronicle-News.

After multiple surgeries for Dave and a speedy trial for Glenn, both had time to reflect. Their rapprochement resulted in the poignant third incarnation of the show. I Miss You, Fucker features Dave reading Glenn’s letters from Trinidad Correctional Facility from the comfort of his therapeutic scooter, which features a large picture of Glenn on the back strap. Because Dave spent two weeks watching YouTube Shorts about Chinese influence on YouTube, he has deleted the channel. But if you ever see him motoring down Commercial St. and you hear a lot of “How’s it goin’ fucker?” being shouted across the thoroughfare, don’t fret, it’s all love.

♣️ 52 Duels The ingenious Postmark Games boys are at it again, spinning off a deck dueling game from their affordable and clever 52 Realms Adventures dungeoncrawler. If you like to battle your friends and just want a game — as opposed to a giant, litigious casino that just happens to contain a game — here’s one of the off-ramps from being a Wizards of the Coast paypig.

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Hear my sessions from Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts.

Hear my sessions from Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts.

Alula’s Top 8 Podcasts: A Magical Continent Strip-Mines Itself for Content

Alula, a hidden land that reveals itself to travelers in the Faraway card game, has now become an ecotourism paradise. The residents have changed as the place comes to grips with an influx of wiry fintech people in Mercedes-Benz sprinter vans, bringing with them what might be the modern analog to blankets infected with smallpox: podcasts.

Dornackl now makes jerky out of endangered animals, but he’s doing numbers

My last visit there, I saw my first boutique store run by a transplant and everybody had started a damn Ululu podcast. I had to listen to a lot of them because it would have been rude not to, so for better or worse, here are my reviews of Ululu’s Top 8 Podcasts:

1) That Uddu That You Do, hosted by Dornackl of the Desert 
Listen, I have no shaman-level knowledge of the folk medicine of Alula, but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to carve pieces off an Uddu stone and use them in a proprietary burger sauce recipe. My last stop was 24+ hours in the desert, 6 of which I spent watching Dusteen carve off pieces of it, mash them up with Okiko fat, and rant about how his clan was the worthiest of all the desert folk. His mic wasn’t even on. I think the worst part was when the light went out of the stone and it stopped hovering and crashed to the floor, that was the most demoralizing thing I think I’ve ever seen.

2) Daily Mushroom Forest Thoughts
My host played me an episode and the podcast started out with an ad for Red Robin because they’re hosting it on LibSyn. I don’t even know how that’s possible. And I’m not good at hiding my reaction to stuff, that was a long fuckin’ 1 hour 37 minutes, I can tell you that.

3) I Still Don’t Know How to Pronounce This Podcast’s Name and I’m Not Going to Try
I did a pit stop in a town where I saw my old two-headed pals, Klasaatz and Klaaseesin — or is it “pal”? I never quite grasped their conception of singular vs. plural. Anyhow, Klasaatz remembers details with eidetic clarity and Klaaseesin has a gift for interpretation and context. They’re like the play-by-play and color commentary team on an NFL broadcast, except they’re talking about all the people who move through their stacked pueblo of houses during the summer. At one point I appeared in one of the recollections and they reminded me about why I first came here. The live episode I saw them record was 8 eight hours long. Absolutely hypnotic. Five stars.

Maybe you’re just not spiritually evolved enough to afford the Tier 1 personal coaching package

4) Breath of the Okiko
I think the general problem with becoming a solo version of a media network is that your broadcast time and release schedule far outstrip your ability to meaningfully populate it. Turn on your local news during a flood or fire, they will have a couple poor schmucks at major intersections bouncing back and forth between graphics and the studio team for hours with no new information. The urgency is the information. “As you can see, there are some emergency vehicles moving around in back of me…” That’s what Breath of the Okiko tries to do, except it’s about a self-absorbed former tourist who settled here and now they’re trying to one-up everybody else for authenticity and turning every damn thing they see into some tarted up tale of transformation. Even back home, I get very nervous about people who advertise how centered and virtuous and empathetic they are right up front. People who do this are usually hopelessly lost or they’re hoping you are so you’ll buy their three-tier Alula Self-Actualization Coaching Package. Fuuuuuck that.

5) The Stave and the Garland
From the banks of a pristine river, this host talks over the ambient sound of moving water on the banks near where they practice martial arts. I tried to sit in for a bit of it and I have to say, I think I cracked a rib, but it still felt somehow playful. There’s one episode and so far it’s 136 hours, 28 minutes and climbing. They’ve definitely got the ASMR listener segment dialed in.

6) The Shifting Lands
I’d never considered double-decker teasers with the intro music. The first cold-open teaser made me feel a bit pandered to, but if you’re podcasting, it’s a very hard tactic to resist: “A missing donation box. A quiet town torn apart. Find out what happens when you don’t stay out of Riverdale.” But what I liked here is how the host flips the setup right into the first tale, which centered on Ululu’s forest taxonomy, which I never get tired of hearing about. It’s pretty slick.

7) Journeyed
Another dickhead for whom the most fascinating thing about Alula is…them. The intro was so laden with tautological statements, I actually whimpered a bit around the 2:48 mark, which got me a nasty stare. The show description has typos in it. Horseshit like this is one of the reasons nobody believes anything anymore.

Third question in every conversation ever is “Do you like hip hop?” Say no.

8) Crappshawn’s House of Bars
You know that look when you’re talking with somebody at a party who works at a dab store and hangs out with dab people who live the dab life but it’s still a fairly cool conversation until you realize they’re about to rap? It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Colorado or Alula, the few seconds of body language and the way they look into your eyes is universal and you think, “Oh God, please don’t rap,” and then they rap and you put your hands in your pockets and stare at your shoes and bob your head once in a while because they’re looking at you the whole time and gesticulating in your face? All I’m saying is please don’t rap, especially to a guest who’s trapped in your yurt for the night. You don’t have any bars and it’s not cool. Please don’t rap.