For fans of Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs and Murata Sayaka's Earthlings, this Japanese bestseller from renowned anime director Makoto Shinkai features four inspirational and heartwarming vignettes following women and their cats in their quests for love and connection. Lying alone on the edge of the sidewalk in an abandoned cardboard box, a nameless narrator contemplates the indifferent world around him. With his mother long gone, his only company is the sound of the nearby train. Just as he fears that the end is near, a young woman peers down at him, this fateful encounter changing their lives forever. So begins the first story in She and Her Cat, a collection of four interrelated, stream-of-conscious short stories in which four women and their feline companions explore the frailty of life, the pain of isolation, and the limits of communication. With clever narration alternating between the cats and their owners, She and Her Cat offers a unique and sly commentary on human foibles and our desire for connection. A whimsical short story anthology unlike any other, it effortlessly demonstrates that even in our darkest, most lonesome moments, we are still united to this wonderous world--often in ways we could never have expected.

Is your roleplaying in a rut? Flip the table and try something new! Proactive roleplaying will re-energize your players – and your game.

Most adventures in traditional TTRPGs start out the same way: Something bad happens and your players have to muster their courage to stand against it. Whether it’s rescuing the little dog that was kidnapped by the local troll, stopping an assassination attempt at the archduke’s wedding or recruiting an army to disrupt the construction of a world-ending ritual site, the party will always find a way to save the day. After all, what kind of heroes would they be if they let the dog, duke or entire population die? Saving the day is fun, but it starts to get repetitive after a while. If you’re using a “bad guys try to do stuff, good guys try to stop them” engine to drive all your sessions, you’re taking all the agency out of your players’ hands. Bad stuff happens, good people have to try to stop it, roll, rinse, repeat.

There’s a better way to play (and prep) your sessions. The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying shows you how to convert your TTRPG gameplay from predictable action/reaction cliches to player-driven narratives that put all the choices (and most of the prep work) in the hands of your players. The goals are theirs. The decisions are theirs. Everything that happens in the world you’re building together occurs not because you planned it, but because the PCs are following their own paths, rather than Game Master breadcrumbs, to the scene of the next adventure.

The proactive approach ensures every battle has tension, every faction has a function and every session is high-stakes (and an absolute blast), putting the players and their characters in the driver’s seat so you can sit back and simply put giant goal- (and soul-) crushing roadblocks in their way.

You’ll also find:

• Foreword by Ginny Di with an afterword by Jeff Ashworth
• Writer’s block-breaking charts
• Case studies from decades of sessions
• Templates for goal-driven NPCs and factions
• A modular adventure setting and much more!

The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying is compatible with your favorite 5th edition Fantasy Tabletop RPGs!

Where does our food come from? Is farming different around the world? In this charmingly illustrated book, follow sustainable farming around the world to discover how farmers from Hawaii, to Sweden, the UK and beyond grow the fresh and tasty food we enjoy eating. Explore the seasonal workings of farms around the world, and how food can be grown using sustainable methods that focus on quality versus quantity to ensure an environmentally healthy future. The World That Feeds Us explores fascinating farms and farming techniques around the world, including: Global cacao production City farms, on rooftops and beyond Heirloom crops and heritage breeds Farmer's markets across the globe High tech machinery such as farmbots A glossary defines key sustainable farming terms. Through this colourful and global look at farming, children will learn how farmers, and us, can make choices to protect the planet, whilst still enjoying delicious and nutritious food.

Maybe I Should...Case Studies on Ethics for Student Affairs Professionals is designed to help graduate students and new to midlevel student affairs professionals heighten their knowledge of sensitivities to professional ethics in practice. Hamrick and Benjamin encourage professionals to identify and articulate plausible-as well as preferred-strategies for addressing ethically problematic situations, and develop rationales to justify particular ethical decisions and actions. Readers are provided with strategies for analyzing cases as well as a number of targeted cases for consideration and analysis. Additionally, resources and suggestions are offered to instructors and facilitators who seek to incorporate professional ethics and case study analysis into formal educational or staff development activities in student affairs.

This textbook helps students in the health sciences prepare for the social foundations portion of the medical college entrance exam. It provides a solid understanding of the fundamental concepts, theories, and methodologies in sociology that the exam requires. This book offers a condensed overview of the sociological concepts covered during a 15 week semester. It helps students gain an understanding of the social foundations of behavior, and the social determinants of health within the professional context of medicine. Students are provided with the necessary basics in addition to case studies, learning and research activities, recommended external resources, and study questions. These are meant to develop pre-health students' understanding of the importance of the social factors that influence health outcomes. The featured activities contain various exercises using examples of sociology of health and medicine, including social factors shaping health, social relations between doctors and patients, and the health care system, among others. As a result, this book well informs not only those who wish to prepare for the medical college entrance exam to pursue a career in the health profession, but also anyone who is interested in social perspectives on health and medicine.

What does it mean to be a civic actor who is Black + Young + Female in the United States? Do African American girls take up the civic mantle in the same way that their male or non-Black peers do? What media, educational, or social platforms do Black girls leverage to gain access to the political arena, and why? How do Black girls negotiate civic identity within the context of their racialized, gendered, and age specific identities? There are scholars doing powerful work on Black youth and civics; scholars focused on girls and civics; and scholars focused on Black girls in education. But the intersections of African American girlhood and civics have not received adequate attention. This book begins the journey of understanding and communicating the varied forms of civics in the Black Girl experience. Black Girl Civics: Expanding and Navigating the Boundaries of Civic Engagement brings together a range of works that grapple with the question of what it means for African American girls to engage in civic identity development and expression. The chapters collected within this volume openly grapple with, and disclose the ways in which Black girls engage with and navigate the spectrum of civics. This collection of 11 chapters features a range of research from empirical to theoretical and is forwarded by Black Girlhood scholar Dr. Venus Evans-Winters. The intended audience for this volume includes Black girlhood scholars, scholars of race and gender, teachers, civic advocacy organizations, civic engagement researchers, and youth development providers.

This is the story of a woman entering a consular career on her own after the death of her Foreign Service officer husband. She describes the consular world with humor, empathy, and anecdotes. She served for twenty years as a consular officer in four posts, first looking after American hippies in India and after that a huge American business community in Hong Kong. She was principal officer in the Yucatan area of Mexico, then consul general in Bucharest, Romania, before and after a revolution that resulted in the demise of dictator Nicolae Ceau escu. "This fine memoir, told with much humor, details the many high points of Young's time abroad and traces her growth from a diplomat's wife to one of the best representatives of the U.S. government." -JOHN NEEDHAM, former UPI correspondent and L.A. Times reporter and editorial writer "Wonderfully readable and sharp as a stiletto, Peregrina tells the memorable story of a State Department wife who, after the untimely death of her husband, reinvents herself as an American consul general." -JOHN POWERS, Movie Critic, Vogue "Ginny Young emerges as a warm, self-deprecating, thoroughly committed Foreign Service officer whose approach to the world around her is tinged with a keen appreciation of the ridiculous. Her writing style is lively and engaging, strong in the many instances in which her values and opinions emerge." -BRANDON GROVE, U.S. Ambassador (ret.) "As unique as its author, this story takes us on a journey that includes the Hill, Africa, Western Europe, India, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Romania during the collapse of the Ceau escu dictatorship, with cameo stops in Haiti and Afghanistan... A must read for anyone who may doubt the importance and variety of consular work, the "human face" of the Foreign Service." -NICHOLAS VELIOTES, U.S. Ambassador (ret.) "Anyone would be lucky to lead a life as full and meaningful as Ginny Carson Young's. Even more, we would be lucky if we could capture it so elegantly and with such wit in prose." -BOB PACKWOOD, former U.S. Senator