Introduction

Dunilggux! Cama’i!

Hi everybody I’m Alewife and running my mouth is a neurological condition (If you’re more familiar with my musical output, you likely know me as MISANDR).

If you’re entirely unfamiliar with me, welcome! I am a lifelong Alaskan born in the late 1900s, though I have been to most continents and once I cross-country skied on Antarctica. I spent the first half of my life at the edge of the world in the Sugpiaq archipelago staring across the angry North Pacific. Now I mostly look at birch trees and handle produce on the Dena’ina homelands.

Some of the recurring themes in my work include: decay, reclamation, adaptation, transformation, and the fuzzy edges where taxonomy breaks down.

For most of my late teens and 20s I was creatively atrophied and insecure (please help yourselves by developing time management skills and creative habits as early as you can), so I didn’t even really get a start on seriously learning a musical instrument till I was 25-26 (my severely deficient fine motor skills especially have always acted as a deterrent). Since 2016 I’ve released music across a variety of genres, mainly industrial, harsh noise, dungeon synth, and neofolk. While I always have more outlines and concepts for albums/cycles lying around, almost all of them require further development of specific skills/familiarities and therefore a corresponding degree of attention.

I first found some old D&D books at my public library as a child in the late ‘90s and thought the pictures were siqq as hell, but I also had no fucking idea what I was looking at. While I had a classmate in my final years at Catholic school who was playing D&D with his older brother’s friends, there was no way they were inviting me (reasonable tbh). This was within a year or two of the 2000 Dungeons and Dragons movie being released, which I highly recommend everybody watch at least once. It wasn’t until 2003ish that I was educated in the ways of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. Well actually this was right around when 3.5 was being released, and tbh the guy(s) who were teaching us neophytes had come from ADND2E so they brought along a lot of those assumptions/conceits . Oh and also our primary DM was really into Palladium so there was a lot of that grafted on as well. Sometimes we even actually played a Palladium game. Yes! It really happened! This DM died in 2025, so I should really do a memorial post for him sometime. He was quite a character and I don’t think this aspect of his life really got touched on in any of his other memorials.

Earlyish in ‘21 I got the idea of a social simulator/tavern management game, and while it deserves its own post(s), I bring it up here as illustration of when I started actually thinking about game/system design as opposed to worldbuilding/narrative development for home games. I still entertain hope that I’ll return to the material we made for this, but realistically it’s very far down on the priority list.

Much later in ‘21 two TTRPGs showed up on my doorstep that reinforced my confidence in being able to Do This Kind of Thing, both in terms of my limited technical expertise and my areas of interest. Those two games were Ultraviolet Grasslands and Mörk Borg. I’d been tangentially aware of the Old Shit Re-evaluation during what are now called “the Google+ years” but my engagement was limited to reading some of those contemporary texts. Generally I either didn’t understand what was going on, or I was put off by how reprehensible a lot of those bozos are. So the aforementioned UVG and MB were my first exposure to not just more recent examples, but also hobbyist communities that develop around individual titles.

Those who have known me for any length of time are also likely aware of my reticence towards self-promotion and marketing, so I endeavored to ameliorate my tribulation through that most hallowed of human activity: cooperation. In ‘22 some like-minded individuals and I formed The Miserable Bogfolk, an international co-op primarily centered around TTRPG design. Our flagship game Lichoma already has a home here on ampwall, and I’m working on uploading the rest of its material, as well as the two issues of our system compilation zine Monolith.

All this rather neatly avoids the ale portion of my moniker, and that’s largely because none of you can really experience that aspect of my creativity without being physically present in Alaska. But to sum up: I’ve been making fermented alcohols, mostly beer, since ‘07, and it’s by far my most robustly developed set of skills. Most of my beers are most similar to those of rural Norway (ie cooked mash and no boil/hops), but I do still make a modern traditional from time to time.

For the most part this blog will serve to chronicle progress updates, navel-gazing, and play reports about my ongoing TTRPG project Basking Meadow, but as the name and hosting site imply, I’ll also be posting about brewing and music.

Chin’an! Quyanaasinaq! Thank you for reading!