God Bless America for What?

A new playlist, some brief musings on the country + more.

Author

Joshua Justice
July 04, 2025

Howdy folks!

The first track on this month’s playlist is also the title of this post. It’s perfectly fitting for the moment, as our country closes hospitals to build concentration camps, our neighbors are ripped off the streets by unidentified government agents, and the most vulnerable among us continue to see our rights eroded. I also think (perhaps naively and certainly due to my own privilege) that it’s a moment for hope. I come back to this quote from Rebecca Solnit often:

“Hope is not about what we expect. It’s an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles — not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don’t know. And this is grounds to act. I believe hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, pp. 109-110

I also want to encourage those of you with the means to support folks that continue to try and make the world a better place. Here are just a few organizations I believe are doing really crucial work:

TRANS LIFELINE

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS

INDIGENOUS ROAD WARRIORS

And you can still catch me on XRAY.fm every 1st and 3rd Wednesday at 9pm PST. Next episode is going to feature my first guest DJ, Felicity Fenton of Bachelard’s Panty Drawer. I’m gonna have a theme and everything! You can hear past episodes of the show HERE.

Lastly, what most of you are likely subscribed for: TTRPG stuff! I’m skipping the TTRPG freebie this time around. I likely won’t have anything next month either, BUT I do have something in the works that I’ll be sharing previews of here before anywhere else. Also, if you’re a reader here, interested in something I’ve released, but can’t afford it — don’t hesitate to shoot me a message at joshua @ ghosttropic.org.

For now, here are some projects I think are worth picking up:

Graveyard of the Gods: Unearthed - A remaster of sorts for the original Mothership module, Graveyard of the Gods. I’m a big fan of the tools and setting, and excited to see how they expand from here!

Bite The Hand - A Cyberpunk TTRPG built on the Mothership engine. I was lucky enough to get a preview (and you can check out the Beta version RIGHT NOW!), and Alex has done some really neat stuff with their system.

Twisting Unseen - I mentioned this one last month, but I’m such a fan of Chris Airiau’s work! Described as a module in which the crew wake inside a superstructure twisted by Gate technology. The PCs must work together to escape to their own spacetime!

Okay, that’s all for now!

Signing off,

Joshua