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hollandspiele.bsky.social
Hollandspiele
@hollandspiele.bsky.social
2.7K followers 120 following 200 posts
Dinosaurs everybody. Posts by Mary, who along with @amabel.bsky.social runs Hollandspiele, a publisher of weird games for weird people.

https://hollandspiele.com
https://youtube.com/@hollandspiele
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hollandspiele.bsky.social
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August 21, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Reposted by Hollandspiele
hollandspiele.bsky.social
Hollandspiele is at this moment working on the backlog of orders for Amabel's City of Six Moons. Once we're caught up, we'll have a better idea of the exact release date for BELINDA'S BIG BONUS. But we expect it to be in September or October.
July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
hollandspiele.bsky.social
Until then, feel free to pester @amabel.bsky.social with any questions. She's been wanting to talk about this for *months* and is eager to blab. :-)

She's also available for interviews. Jus' sayin'.
July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
hollandspiele.bsky.social
Hollandspiele is at this moment working on the backlog of orders for Amabel's City of Six Moons. Once we're caught up, we'll have a better idea of the exact release date for BELINDA'S BIG BONUS. But we expect it to be in September or October.
July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
hollandspiele.bsky.social
CONFESSIONS OF A BELINKER 4 / 4
I absolutely adore this convoluted soap opera stuff, and so it’s no surprise it’s when that kicks into high gear - after the books pivot from near-plotless picaresque to espionage spoof - that I really fell in love with the series. Though the first three books contain some of my favorite characters and moments - Jim’s transplant, Giselle’s hen-do, the utterly grim incompetence of Ken Dewsbury’s cellar turned bachelor pad - it’s the spy stuff I look forward to the most whenever I revisit the books. I’ve done so a few times in the last five years. Though my life is filled with joy, it is not, strictly speaking, the best moment in world history to be a trans lesbian living in America. And so Belinda, Bella, and all their friends have continued to be a comfort. These people and the strange, silly world they inhabit have become quite dear to me. And so imagine my surprise and my delight when I got an email from Rocky Flintstone asking if I wanted to do a Belinda Blinked board game. I’ve never done a licensed game before, and had assumed that would remain the case. I’m not the kind of designer and Hollandspiele isn’t the kind of company where that kind of thing is usually feasible. Like, I love Godzilla but no one’s gonna let me within a hundred feet of designing or publishing (ha!) a Godzilla game. But, Belinda Blinked isn’t necessarily the kind of property that the people who make Godzilla board games would want to touch. And so, in a way, I’m sort of the perfect fit to make a jet-setting deal-making calendar-managing game based on this property. People expecting a salacious or titillating game from Belinda’s Big Bonus are going to be disappointed, but, in a way, people expecting salacious or titillating books from Belinda Blinked would be, too. While they’re stuffed to the lids with sex, they’re not really “dirty” books. I think that’s because Rocky doesn’t write the sex as dirty or shameful. It’s always treated as something joyful and exuberant. And I wanted to make …
July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
hollandspiele.bsky.social
CONFESSIONS OF A BELINKER 3 / 4
And none of these characters are particularly nuanced or complex, but boy, there sure a lot of them. In that sense, the books remind me of nineteenth century literature. Which isn’t to say that these books give me the same kinds or depths of pleasure as Austen or Trollope. Only that we have a large cast of characters, often defined by one or two traits or ambitions, tied together in a complex web of professional, romantic, and familial relationships. (Here there is a diagram showing a small sampling of important character relationships.) Belinda is betrayed by her best friend, Giselle, who works for Bisch to pay for the medical treatment of her own mother’s “weird illness that’s ill-defined and hard to say”. Which is, again, a line that’s funny on purpose.
July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
hollandspiele.bsky.social
CONFESSIONS OF A BELINKER 2 / 4
Rocky’s prose is often joyfully inappropriate and quite playful. There’s a moment in the first chapter of Belinda Blinked 4 where Belinda struggles to find a parking spot at Giselle’s wedding: Belinda parked her jaguar in the last available space in the very large Church carpark. “Good God,” she thought, and then remembered she was on hallowed ground, “Sorry God, but I didn’t really think so many people would be here.” God nodded, even he was surprised if truth be told. “God nodded” slays me every single time. It’s a perfect joke. And it’s also a nice character beat for Belinda to be surprised people would want to attend Giselle’s wedding. One of my favorite running gags is that Belinda is loyal, kind, and optimistic to your face, but often quite catty when there’s no one around. In the ad copy for Belinda Blinked 6, Rocky refers to himself as the “author who put the ‘rot’ in Erotica” and trumpets the many “totally forgettable characters” – a degree of cheeky self-awareness that runs throughout the books. But I actually think his characters are, to borrow one of his phrases, “instantly rememorable.” Herr Bisch is a cartoon supervillain, whose rapidly deteriorating body is as much of a gross-out gag as Jim Sterling’s penis transplant. (Like “God nodded”, Bisch’s “stinky gentleman woof” ends me every time.) Des Martin is a sad sack par excellence, too hapless and repulsive to be truly pitied. And I love Bella Ridley with all my heart. Belinda uses sex to get what she wants, but what Bella wants is sex. She is a creature of pure and unashamed appetites – always eager to eat or to fuck or to drink, and to do all these things in great quantities. Only Bella would wake from a coma because people nearby were having sex without her.
July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
hollandspiele.bsky.social
Included in the game's rulebook is "Confessions of a Belinker", Amabel's personal account of why she loves these books.

1 / 4
CONFESSIONS OF A BELINKER. Like many people, I first came to Rocky Flintstone’s work through the podcast “My Dad Wrote a Porno”. I stumbled across it in 2020. It was an especially vulnerable time in my life. In addition to the pandemic, I had finally accepted myself as a queer trans woman. Or, to be more precise, I knew I was queer and trans, but didn’t know if I was going to do anything about it. The idea of casting off my old life for an uncertain and dangerous future felt impossible and absurd. The only thing more terrifying than chasing what I really wanted was recognizing how easy it would be to remain within the tight confines of my slow, dead life. Belinda’s misadventures provided distraction and comfort. When I didn’t want to think about everything, when I didn’t want to feel any of it, I binged the show, one episode after another. People so often look down on “escapism”, so often diminish it, but I needed escape. In order to move forward, I needed time away from the constant shocks of pain and terror. Before I reached the end of the fifth series, I had made my decision. When I tell the story of how I became Amabel, I don’t usually mention the dozens of hours I spent with Belinda. It’s not because I’m embarrassed of it being smut. I’m openly quite promiscuous, and have centered my life post-transition around the pursuit of pleasure without shame or apology. In a way, Belinda and Bella are girls after my own heart. Role models, even. I have myself written smut, and talked publicly about how it helped me find community. So what gives? What gives is I find it difficult to communicate the nature and genuineness of my affection for these books. Because I’m not enjoying it “ironically”. It’s not “so bad it’s good”. There are certainly ways in which one could argue it is “bad”. The sex scenes aren’t really arousing (and in some cases, aren’t anatomically feasible). The punctuation and spelling are, uh, idiosyncratic. But my enjoyment isn’t rooted in laughing at the…
July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM