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who am i and what the fuck i wanna talk about

 I'm Spyros, a lot of people know me as Sagjer (nickname stuck since middle school), some few have called me Hakim for reasons I never understood. Let's go to the whole identity declaration.

I'm Cretan of Turkoarab descent, most likely from Ottoman pirates that settled in south Chania; as far as we know at least. I grew up in an awful suburb of Athens, have lived in Crete for about a decade, and generally aim to retire there - if it doesn't go full resort mode like the rest of this cesspool called Greece.

I've studied Physics (quit, hated all of it besides Climatology), Marine Engineering (quit, left me with a phobia of the sea that I managed to overcome after 11 years - 2 weeks prior to this post actually), electric bass, and History of Science (loved, still do, went on and got a History of Science MSc, and started doing my PhD with an absolute moron, and then quit that shit). I quit a lot of things. I get bored easily, I think I master them quickly, I lose interest, I got a crippling fear of any commitment, whatever; end result is, I quit a lot of things. Politically, I wanna claim I'm a communist but it's a fkn skewed term with a metric ton of interpretations in a world infested with liberal morons, and last time I participated in any trade union was pre-covid. So, I'll just say that I believe and wholeheartedly support the proletarian revolution, Stalin did very few things wrong, and there is no actual left in the US. At the moment, I'm head sommelier at this wine place, proper nice job, wanna quit that and move on asap. 

During my history studies I heavily focused on Islamic science, Foucaultian historiography, Leninism in history, modelisation of history, and historiographical structuralism. I can claim two positive things about me with confidence. I know music to a degree that I'm not ashamed to say that I know shit about it, and I know how to read history and write historiography to a degree that whoever disagrees with me needs to either read more or get a real job for 30 fucking seconds in their life.

My relationship with stories begins at a very young age. Massively awful household, sexual molestations, beatings, like, all the nice stuff that make you go extra hard at life. CBT has helped a whole fuckton, leaving and never looking back has helped more. Point is, only refuge in an age where internet did not even exist, was books. RPGs in particular, came into my life around 2005; I was 15 at the time and this mate of mine invited me over to play this cool new shit he discovered. I played an Elf Ranger named Remy. Down the rabbit hole we go.

In the years that would follow I'd stick for more than 2 weeks with dnd4e, L5R 3e and 4e, MnM, DCC, Runequest, Degenesis, 40k RPGs from FFG, VtM, and nowadays, I'm into Lancer a bit, Pendragon 6, and a lot of designing.

Which brings us to this blog. Currently, my main project is "Gamocles: Glitter and Grime" or GGG. It's a near-future military fantasy RPG. You'll hear a lot about it here. There's also an insta page; I post some lore snippets there: https://www.instagram.com/gamoclesgg/

Other projects are a GGG card game, "Ao" (name pending) a primal fantasy RPG, and "For the Badge" a football management RPG.

In this blog, I just wanna communicate some thoughts I've had over the years about narrative structure, playing practices, communication of concepts, the inherently political nature of gaming and storytelling, RPG labour, the ethics and morals of writing and publishing, aesthetics, I don't know. I wanna go into sailing, write a few novels, run some historical research on i dont know what, coach a kids football team, give birth to a treatise on historiography,  and open up a Michelin-worthy place serving craft beer and sandwiches. Fuck around and find out. I know I will.

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