I went to see Across the Spider-Verse last weekend. It was my third time seeing a movie in the theaters since the pandemic started. Last one was earlier this year, a couple months ago really, to see the Dungeons & Dragons movie, and then before that it was when a friend’s family rented out an entire theater for her birthday to see the latest Spider-Man movie (No Way Home). I really haven’t gone to the movies much, given that Covid-19 is still a problem (one that seems to be getting worse again, given how many people seem to be getting Covid from going to conventions) and I don’t really want to sit crammed into close proximity with a bunch of unmasked people who might be carrying it and still going out because it’s “just allergies” or “just a cold” or whatever bullshit people use to rationalize this kind of behavior. Still, I’m an avid Spider-Man fan and Into the Spider-Verse was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, so I wanted to make sure I caught the sequel while it was still in theaters.
Continue readingMonth: July 2023
Infrared Isolation: Chapter 24
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
~ Content Warning for limb removal and related descriptions. ~
Continue readingWorldbuiling Without Building Anything
One of my favorite parts of preparing for the start of a new tabletop game is the moment when everything crystallizes. Whatever errrant thought, subtle influence, or bright flash of inspiration you needed arrives and suddenly it all makes sense. You can see the strings the world dances upon and understand the way everything moves within it. It is the moment when you go from wondering what might be and pondering unknowns to knowing what is and looking for what might change. In the world I ran in a few Dungeons and Dragons campaigns starting back in 2019, this moment came as I was taking a break from my then-panicked preparations to do something fun and relaxing. I was watching Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse on Blu-ray not long after it was finally available for purchase and the whole campaign setting crystalized around the idea of missing heroes. It was a fairly simple idea, but that last piece of information fitting into the puzzle meant everything else clicked into place as well. Suddenly, I knew what was going on and what everyone was motivated by. It was a relevatory moment and something I’ve enjoyed every time something like it has come up any time I’m considering a story, be it something I’m writing, a tabletop game I’m putting together, or even just a video game I’m playing.
Continue readingI’ve Been Playing A Lot of Pathfinder, Actually
As I’ve continued to learn how to play Pathfinder Second Edition, partly because I already bought the book and partly out of a dogged desire to find the fun in a system that some of my friends enjoy immensely, I’ve begun to slowly see the patterns and rules underpinning it. I know I’m fairly late to the game, especially with the revised or remastered version of PF2e coming out sometime soon (maybe later this year, if what I saw was correct?), but I can see why people like it. Systems within system. Slowly stacking benefits as your character gains levels, eventually giving you massive numbers for everything you do and making you incredibly capable of some absolutely devastating actions. When the Fifth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons said “what if we kept all the numbers within an expected range so that very little is impossible if you’re lucky,” PF2e said “What if everyone got absolutely banana pants numbers and you could eventually do a whole bunch of stuff super well if you built your character right, but only a few things at a time because there have to be SOME limits?”
Continue readingSleep Cycles And Bad Habits
I read a review by Linda Codega (the reporter who broke the Dungeons and Dragons/Wizards of the Coast OGL news back in January) the other day. They were covering Pokémon Sleep, the latest app in Nintendo’s continued pursuit of becoming a lifestyle company. The game is fairly simple, in that it monitors your sleep habits (by being open on your phone, which you’ve left facedown on top of your bed) and scores you based on how much you moved around in your sleep, how long you slept, and who knows what other data. Based on your score, you get the chance to power up your Pokémon, capture new Pokémon (via taking pictures), and advance in the game. It’s fairly simple and straight-forward and, to me at least, does not seem terribly appealing. I sleep pretty poorly, though, so maybe I’m just not interested in a game I won’t be good at. That said, what has me thinking about this fairly bland game days later is what Codega muses on in the latter portion of their article. If this app is the last thing we think about before we go to bed and the first thing we think about when we wake up, what does that do to us as Humans? What are going to be the long-term consequences of the continued gamification of life, as we turn sleep from something meant to prepare us for another day into another form of entertainment? They end the review without coming to a conclusion, saying they would need more than one night of using the yet-unreleased app to really dive into the cultural implications, but I realized that this is something I’ve already done to myself and have been doing for years now.
Continue readingOne Week Of Rest Later. Sorta.
I am officially one week into dropping streaming and specifically not replacing it with other projects. I have actually done my best to rest, even if I wound up spending an entire weekend busy and emotionally exhausted from a variety of frustrations, some disappointment (which has only contributed to my emotional exhaustion because I spent the time and energy to emotionally process it), and a very Midwestern party. I have not entirely succeeded in resting over this past week, since my sleep schedule is still royally messed up, but I actually had the energy to write two long blog posts and most of a chapter of Infrared Isolation (which will be going up the weekend after this post does, meaning I’ll have skipped another Saturday update) yesterday. It felt great to be able to work on something and actually have the mental fortitude to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which I mostly lost between yesterday and today because I was up too late playing a game (Cassette Beasts is great and I’ll eventually be writing about it), but that will hopefully be mostly fixed if I can actually get some sleep for once.
Continue readingWrapping Up The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom over the weekend. Took more than one hundred fifty hours of gameplay over the course of two months (with, you know, a three and a half week gap of not playing at all), and I still have tons of quests, Korok seeds, and unexplored areas if I ever want to spend more time in the world before whatever DLC there will be comes out. It feels a little unreal, if I’m being honest, since I wound up doing the last few major portions of the game in a relatively short time. Mostly because I’d accidentally done huge sections of them while wandering around the world in search of shrines or just exploring something that look cool before I got to the part of the game that prompted them. I’ll admit I really struggled to do some of those things when I stumbled across them because it was clear that I wasn’t supposed to be doing them yet (I got the Sage of Spirit as my second sage, because I wanted to see what was inside the permanent thunderstorm and literally just got lucky since my interrupted flight toward said clouds landed me right next to the final shrine of those sky islands), but at least it let me do them when I got there. It was a pretty fun game and I definitely enjoyed it overall, but there was a lot of stuff that just doesn’t really feel like it landed (pun absolutely intended) well.
Continue readingSkipping Another Week
There’s no Infrared Isolation post today. While my rest is having a positive effect, it is not an instantaneous one, nor is it swift. It is a slow process that will hopefully bear fruit in coming weeks. The chapter for next week is already written and sent off to my editor, so it will be good to go for next week. Since I finished that early, I’ve even already started work on the next chapter (by which I mean I renamed the document, moved some things around, and reviewed the old chapter that is being rewritten into Chapter 25). If I manage to actually get more work done on it this weekend, between my various other activities, that will be even better. I don’t know if I’m quite that recovered, though. Just because writing during the week has gotten easier doesn’t mean that I’m quite ready to start spending time on the weekends working on writing projects. Especially this weekend, with my last two days of preparation for my new tabletop campaign and my on-going attempts to not mess up my sleep schedule all over again. I’m a bit more hopeful than I used to be, though. Now, recovery and a return to my old, non-exhausted way of living actually seems possible. Only time will tell, though.
Enhancing Your Games By Stealing Ideas From Other Game Systems
I was listening to some old Friends at the Table Patreon content (it is so much easier to access now that I’ve got an RSS feed to pull from and am using an actual podcast app to pull it instead of flipping through patreon posts like I just assumed I had to for every podcast I’ve supported prior to March of 2023) and I heard one of the players talk about some of the lessons he has learned over the years from his experience playing tabletop games and taking comedy classes. He said that some of the best advice he’s ever heard was that, after you spend a bunch of time mastering a creative skill, that you should go do anything else for a few months so you’ve got things to pull from when you return to the improvisational or creative skill you’ve learned. The broader context that this came up in was about preventing yourself from becoming too focused on one type of game or play experience. Play a lot of different things and then, when you return to the thing you want to spend a lot of time on, you will be better at it for having enriched yourself with other experiences. This is something I’ve always felt was true of pretty much every form of creative work. Spend some time honing your chosen craft and then spend time learning about a lot of other things so you have information to pull from when creating things. This is why I’ve spent so much time reading about various bits of history, different occupations, and generally learning about how the world works and why it works that way. Everything informs my writing, so the better I understand anything other than writing, the better my writing will get.
Continue readingFilling My Free Time
As I go about planning how I’m going to spend my time, conscious of both my need to rest and my desire to fill my day with things I feel are fulfilling and rewarding, I am finding it difficult to strike a proper balance. Since I stopped streaming because I had overburdened myself, I now have a bunch of time available. Sure, it used to be filled with something that I found enjoyable, but it was also frequently more draining than it was restorative. Right now, I’m trying to keep this time clear so I can actually get the rest I need to recover from the past eight months, but I’ll admit that I’ve already begun to think about what else I could be doing with that time. It might seem like this is happening too quickly, but I’m pretty surprised that it took two whole days, one of which used to be a streaming day, for me to get to this point. Normally, I’d have expected myself to start planning what I could do with this “extra” time before I’d even made the decision to stop streaming. I dislike feeling like I failed at something, after all, and it is more difficult to feel like I failed when I stop doing something if I can convince myself that I can now do something else of equal or greater importance to myself. It isn’t more restful, though, so I’m trying to take it easy. And I mean actually easy, not “easy in comparison to my usual amount of effort.”
Continue reading