A while back, I rewatched one of my favorite older animes, Trigun. I had pretty mixed feelings about the depiction of guns in the series, since I had recently done an active-shooter training at my day-job (which went pretty poorly from my perspective, given that none of my coworkers seemed to take the reality of the situation as seriously as I thought they should have). I’ve also dealt with active-shooter preparations in school, a lifetime of anxiety pushing me to consider active shooter situations every time I go to a concert or convention, and life in the US where guns are more respected in the legal and political spheres than women or people like myself. I can’t go a day without hearing about gun violence or from the various pro-gun and pro-violence factions of US politics. It is difficult to be aware of the world around me and then enjoy a show like Trigun that is all about guns despite featuring a character who actively did his best to avoid killing anyone.
Continue readingMonth: February 2023
Saying Farewell to My Favorite D&D Campaign
Last night, I sat down with the remaining players from my almost three-year-old Dungeons and Dragons campaign to talk through the end of the campaign. Though we struggled to have more than 1.5 sessions a month for most of that time, we got pretty deep into the paint. This was a world I created back in 2019 and have been running a weekly/weekly-adjacent game in ever since. It has a customized magic system (not THAT customized, but still tweaked a bit), an entire set of pantheons, complex geopolitical and economic systems, and was my attempt to create a “young world” for roleplaying games. I planned to carry the world through many campaigns, playing out its entire history with my friends as we progressed from one campaign to another. Now, as we move toward other systems and science-fiction themes instead of fantasy themes, I am revealing everything I’ve spent so long creating and saying my own farewells to this world as my players and I say farewell to the story we’ve spent time over the past three years telling.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 16
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingDark Days And Long, Sleepless Nights
As I was going through some notes, I realized it has been two and a half months since this one night where I was so stressed out that I wound up staying up all night. I wasn’t exactly well-rested going into that evening, but I thought I’d be able to handle it without too much of a problem given how frequently I used to be able to go without sleep. While I did, eventually, get through the day, it was not the simple but tiring experience I remembered. Much to my chagrin, given how much I relied on this ability to carry me through my bouts of insomnia, I have slowly but surely reached the age where I can’t function without any sleep. It is an unfortunate fact of getting older, but more unfortunate is that this loss hasn’t come with a corresponding increase in my body’s day-to-day demands for sleep. I still struggle to fall asleep just as much as I used to and the impacts of losing sleep seem to hit me harder. At least until it comes time to fall asleep, again. At that point, it pretty much counts for nothing.
Continue readingThe Weather Patterns Have A Bit Too Much “Pattern” To Them, Lately
In the past two weeks, we’ve had pretty much the same pattern of weather. Early in the week, temperatures rise and we get some rain. The rain and warmer temperatures melt all but the most packed-down, stubborn traces of all the snow that came before it. Then, before the ground has time to dry out, the temperatures drop, everything freezes, and we get a heavy snow. Two weeks ago, it was a wet, heavy snow that made travel miserable and that threatened to break the back of anyone forced to shovel it by hand. It was a damp, clinging thing that forced me to cut my daily walk short as it soaked through my clothing and left me exposed to the bitter bite of the heavy winds. Last week’s snow was light, letting itself get cast about by the raging winds so much that it was almost impossible to tell how much snow had fallen. Sections of my walk were free of snow while others where treacherous as the ice that formed from the puddles that remained the night before hid beneath blankets of snow. After each snow, there was a day of cold as it all settled in and froze before warmer temperatures returned, melted the snow, and rain finished off what remained.
Continue readingLike Most Myths, Wildermyth Is About The Characters
I’ve been playing a bunch of Wildermyth recently. I’ve played through almost all of the campaigns on my own, some of them multiple times with different groups of people, and there’s only one left that I haven’t played at all. At this point, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the storytelling pieces of this game, even if I don’t always remember the particulars of every encounter. Throw in a general understanding of the strategy behind the game and a nearly complete understanding of how all the abilities synergize (except for Hero Theme abilities, since I’m still working on collecting all of those), and I feel like there are no real secrets left for me. I’m sure there’s plenty of random encounters I haven’t run into, given my penchant for creating specific types of heroes, but I’m working to correct those biases and hopefully I’ll eventually be able to tick through all the achievements as evidence of my gameplaying breadth.
Continue readingMy Journey Through The Pokémon Games Continues
After many long months, I finally finished Pokémon X. I still have a legendary or two to capture, but I’ll admit that I’m happy to be through the game. None of the post-game stuff in this generation is particularly interesting to me and I’m very tired of how cinematic parts of the game are. I’m not there for cutscenes or to watch movies I can’t skip. I’m there to play Pokémon while riding my exercise bike and going to sleep. I don’t want to be actually engaged or entertained, just mildly distracted. Which is a bit of a problem, since I moved from Kalos to Alola. I decided to skip straight to Ultra Sun rather than consider playing Moon since I remembered how painful the first iteration of the game was and how much of that pain they eliminated in the Ultra version of the game, but I completely forgot how frustrating it was to hunt for Pokémon in a world where the Pokémon vary from one grass patch to the next on the various routes.
Continue readingGMing Withdrawal and Melancholic Musings
I haven’t run a tabletop roleplaing game of any kind in a month and a half. As of just this past weekend, I’ve gone from having three regular-ish groups (weekly or at least twice a month on average) and one occasional group (with no pattern to our sessions) to having a weekly-intential group that hasn’t successfully met and might never since we’re now down to three players and me. As far as my tabletop gaming ecosystem goes, I’ve removed one player for picking the dumb wizard game over doing the right thing (along with assigning me blame for making him feel bad about it, amongst many other issues), lost two players to family difficulties that will keep them away for an unknown number of months or years, and two entire groups have dwindled to nonexistence thanks to scheduling difficulties and general burnout. I do not know when my next TTRPG session will be and I do not know what it will look like since my groups have all shrunk or haven’t scheduled a session in two months.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 15
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingPicking Up the Pieces One Week Later
Content Warning for Harry Potter and JK Rowling again, though this piece is more of a reflection on my experiences talking about that with people over the last two weeks than about those topics themselves.
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