Today is my birthday. I have no plans for today other than maybe watching an episode of Jujutsu Kaisen. I might go grocery shopping and pick up a cake, but I might do that a different day [I did that yesterday, so I could keep tonight clear in case my Thursday D&D game actually happens] since I’m planning to gather with some friends this weekend and will probably need to go at a better time of day for grocery shopping than seven or eight in the evening. Sure, there’s fewer people present and I can usually move through the store more quickly, but the selection is also worse. Most of the restocking happens overnight, so I usually need to get in during the morning or early afternoon if I want to avoid being greeted by an empty shelf instead of one or more of the items I want. Other than that, I have no plans. It’s a Thursday, after all, and it’s not like I’m taking time off of work. Next week is already going to be a lower income week as it is, thanks to the holiday and my unwillingness to force myself to work the longer days I’d need to make up for it (I can do ten hour days with too much of a problem, but if I go over that more than a couple minutes, it immediately throws me off and I start to rapidly get exhausted and burned out). My financial position isn’t super dire or anything, but it’s kinda dire what with my federal loan payments returning in October. That’s another pile of cash that’ll just vanish down the deep, dark hole that is debt repayment every month. Too bad my parents outright lied to me about student loans and how paying them off would go back when I was still naive enough to believe them.
Continue readingMonth: August 2023
Going Off The Rails After Adding Trains
I genuinely did not think that I’d ever look at a game of The Ground Itself that I’m using as a means of doing collaborative worldbuilding for a different game and think “this has clearly gone off the rails,” but that’s what I’ve found myself doing as I review the notes from my Sunday group’s latest session. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just something that has gone far beyond all of my expectations about what we’d accomplish in a session or two (which will soon be three since we once again ran out of time without finishing our game). We’ve wound up more focused on individuals and their places in the area than the game is designed to be, but we’ve also gone from slowly developing an area over time to wildly inventing things. It’s honestly a great energy, even if I worry that we’ve lost the plot a bit. I’ll be able to weave it all into the world we’ve going to play in when we finally get to Heart: The City Beneath, but there’s just so much stuff happening and so many vague characters introduced that I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to include it all in any kind of interesting and meaningful way.
Continue readingA Faint Connection In The Isolating Distance That Is My Family
Ever since I separated myself from most of my biological family, I’ve only gotten news from two of my siblings. Which isn’t that different from before, since most of my family doesn’t really share news so much as need to have news dragged out of them. All they really share without extensive prompting is silence or gossip. I got all the silence I wanted by not talking to them and I have historically had zero interest in family gossip, so I never really got news about the extended family outside of holidays or the rare time something was important enough that my mother felt like she had to call people to tell them. Now, though, my siblings are my only sources and they can be unreliable about the family as a whole because one of them doesn’t really talk to the family either and the other just forgets to share stuff until I ask (which I almost never do as a rule) or until something major is happening. All of which is to say is that I learned that my grandmother had a health scare recently (that looked like it could be fatal when I got the initial news but turned out to be decidedly not even potentially fatal by the end of the following day) and that one of my aunts was homeless and in the process of falling out with most of the rest of the family for reasons that, as far as I’ve gathered, are entirely of her own making.
Continue readingA Feeling Of Relief 32 Years In The Making
After a lifetime of wanting it and a few weeks of dreading the impending appointment, I’ve finally gotten the mole removed from my face. As of writing this, I am sitting in my office, wondering how much my face is going to hurt once the acetaminophen wears off [turns out not at all, which is nice] as I try to carefully sip some water without stretching my upper lip too much or getting the bandage wet. As it turns out, I do not have a metal straw (despite definitely getting one with the bottle and straw brush set I bought last year), so I’ve had to practice at delicately pouring liquids into my mouth with little involvement from my upper lip. I don’t know if you think about it that much (I certainly didn’t prior to today), but being able to shift your lips around is a rather fundamental part of drinking things. Sure, since I have fairly full lips, I can press things to my mouth and use the pressure as a means of creating a liquid-proof seal, but that’s kind of painful at the best of times and does absolutely nothing for me right now because of where the bandage sits. To drink something without wetting my upper lip, I have to not only change the angle at which I normally hold my cup as I drink (a less horizontal angle than I’d normally like, which requires that I risk inhaling my beverage with every slurp), but I have to carefully wrap my lip over the rim so that I can only come into contact with my drink via the inside of my lip. Learning to do that was annoying, but I’ve gotten quite good at it now. Mostly thanks to repition. I drink a lot every day, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get a handle on things.
Continue readingThe Reasons I Love Playing Host
I finally had the opportunity to host people at my new apartment. One of my friends had put together a one-shot game of Pathfinder Second Edition, in hopes of giving me a way to experience the game with people who are more fun to play with than the group I’d first started with (who now haven’t met in almost six weeks, thanks to two sequential skips in our every-other-week schedule). Since we first discussed this, I wound up joining an every-other-week game this friend runs, but everyone was excited for the one-shot, so we proceeded with it anyway. I wasn’t going to suggest we cancel, after all, since I was excited to finally have people over for an event. I was planning to go all out, after all, with frozen pizzas, plenty of snacks, and a pitcher of my special, super-sour lemonade (the point of it being that you need to let it sit in your glass and melt the ice a bit to dilute it, which also means it is a great lemonade to drink slowly). I may have been a little behind schedule the day of the session, but it was still really fun to have people over since it has been so long since I’ve gotten a chance to play host for something like this.
Continue readingI Found My Own Holy Grail: A Great Queer Adaption of Arthurian Legend
Recently, while doing my usual internet browsing during the spare moments between the events of my day, I came across some book recommendations. I can’t, for the life of me, remember where I found them or who was providing them. All I remember is that the first book this person recommended was one I’d recently read and loved (though I can’t remember what this book was either), so I wound up browsing the rest of the recommendations and bought all of the ones that sounded interesting. In my own defense, I haven’t been sleeping well for a while now and my memory has been pretty spotty. I probably wouldn’t have remembered this book at all if I hadn’t ordered it immediately since I have absolutely no memory of placing this order. But I did order it and, as it turns out, all the other books that I chose were preorders for things releasing this fall, so I had just one new book to read. After sitting on my table for a while (I was in the middle of my Dresden Files reading binge when I ordered it), I finally cracked it open during the day I was restlessly pacing my apartment a couple weekends ago.
Continue readingA Lot Of Good Things Have Happened This Year
I have written fairly extensively about the unfortunate, frustrating, and bad things that have happened to me this year. I have also written about some of the good things, but much less extensively. While I’m definitely not recovered yet and have enough other BS going on that my recovery is going slowly [I even had stuff that happened the day after writing this that set me back a couple weeks], I wanted to take a little time to focus on one of the best things that has happened this year. As I’ve mentioned, the exhaustion and burnout I’ve been recovering from hasn’t been a result of constant unfortunate events, but because so much stuff has happened. Once you hit your emotional capacity, you’re just as overwhelmed and unable to cope whether the thing that tipped you over was good or bad. The bad stuff just tends to seem more prevalent and constant because part of my emotional processing involves writing about it here. Good stuff doesn’t really require that kind of emotional processing, but I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned three of my top four things scattered throughout the last four months. Number one is being a part of my friends’ wedding. Number three was the trip to Spain I went on with those friends and the entire wedding party. Number four is definitely moving into my current apartment/out of my old apartment. Today’s post, to formally write about my number two thing that I’ve only mentioned in passing (if I’ve mentioned it at all), is about the surprising, powerful, out-of-nowhere friendship I’ve developed with one of the people I met on my trip to Spain.
Continue readingExploring Identity As I Search For Community
For most of my life, I was content to accept that I’d never really find an answer to the question that is my identity. I mean, I’ve had thoughts and feelings about my identity (gender, sexual, and otherwise) for as long as I’ve been capable of the abstract thought required to understand that the self is separate from the physical being that other people see and interact with. I just didn’t realize that those thoughts and feelings were not the way that other people felt about themselves until I was in high school. I hadn’t really had much of an opportunity to have conversations about the self with other people, after all, given that I was home schooled and didn’t have many close friends. Plus, I was too busy surviving and protecting my younger siblings to really indulge in that kind of reflection and introspection, especially when a core element of that survival was fulfilling the expectations of my parents. They had assigned me an identity based on what they wanted and expected me to be, so I did my best to play my part. I couldn’t afford to openly ask questions that might show that I was not the person my parents demanded I be, nor did I have the language or energy to have a conversation with myself about it. It wasn’t until years later, when I was almost thirty, that I actually started this conversation with myself and then it was another six months before I even mentioned it to anyone else.
Continue readingResurfacing For Air After A Weekend Lost In Baldur’s Gate 3
Other than preparation for and then hosting a Pathfinder Second Edition one-shot, I spent my entire weekend playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I was finally able to play it in more than drips and drabs (which, for me, meant an hour or two at a time, since I won’t bother to turn my computer on for anything else). I wound up starting a new game with two friends and then taking this large chunk of time to wrap up loose ends, finish map exploration, and, in the wee hours of the morning, finish the main quest points of Act 1. I rescued Halsin, helped the Tieflings, dealt with a swamp witch, got to absolutely wreck some weaker enemies with my brand new level 5 abilities (still haven’t cast Fireball, though, since I mismanaged Wyll’s spell slots and forgot to short rest before the next fight), and prepared myself for an underground adventure. After this, I’m moving into entirely new territory (I never did the Underdark stuff in Early Access) and I’m excited to play chunks of the game I’ve never encountered before.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 25
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue reading