W.M. Akers is a writer and game designer. Games include Deadball, which uses real baseball stats, the Apocalypse World engine-powered Comrades and the solo game Letters to the Stars.
There are now various editions of Deadball, and it’s interesting to see how well a game that uses actual history can do. “Actual history” is the hook to Strange Times, too.
In 2017, W.M. Akers started writing a free history letter that runs through the 1921 New York Times. Why? Well, the author was doing the reading to research the book Westside, which was published two years later. However, the online project evolved.
Strange Times became an “exploration of the funny, thrilling and just plain strange stuff that once packed the columns of our daily newspapers”. For example, a recent write-up has covered a Blimp on rampage.
However, W.M. Akers took a break from the project. Perhaps, in part, that was due to Substack’s mess with transphobia.
Now, a year later, the project is back with beehiiv.com, a Substack rival, as the new home.
