I took a day off this week. I spent all day Sunday convincing myself to spend one single day’s worth of PTO so that I could have an extra day added to my weekend. It was actually incredibly difficult and I only fully committed to my choice when it was one in the morning and I still wasn’t asleep. I just couldn’t imagine trying to do a day of work, much less one of my ten or eleven hour days of work, on so little sleep, so I submitted a PTO request, notified my boss, and changed my alarm time so that I’d wake up with just enough time to work out before my late-morning therapy appointment. I also had another appointment, to get some blood work done as part of monitoring a medication I’m taking, so it made sense to just take the day off, get some rest, and then, as a result of taking the PTO, force myself to work a week of normal, eight-hour days. Part of forcing myself to stick to those normal work days is the fact that I wouldn’t get paid for any overtime I worked until I passed the forty hour mark with non-PTO hours and doing so would also pretty much make taking a PTO day pointless since working those extra hours would negate whatever rest I got. So I’ve done my best to work eight hours days since then and mostly failed because this week wound up being so much busier than I expected, but at least I can just leave early on Friday come hell or high water.
Continue readingMonth: February 2024
The Nightmare Of This Capitalist Dystopia Can Always Get Worse
Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.
Continue readingLove Languages Are No Substitute For Good Communication
Today, as I waited for a response from someone I know is not typically a swift responder to text messages, I started thinking about love languages. The whole concept is a pretty useful shorthand for talking about the ways in which people show and feel love, but I’ve grown to feel that they’re more limited than useful when it comes to communication in a relationship. Sure, a lot of people’s modes of affection, given and received, can be captured in one of the five categories (acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch, and giving/receiving gifts), but they’re collectively broad enough that pretty much every type of action someone might take can be lumped into those categories. Where they become limiting is in the idea that people tend toward one over the others, sometimes with a secondary or tertiary option, and that this answer is, actually, an answer that will stay true for an individual. Most people are not boiled down so easily and I, personally, chafe under any attempts to take something as complex and nuanced as the ways people express and feel love and reduce it to a personality quiz where most of the questions can be honestly answered with “well, it depends on the situation.” Most of which means that I don’t particularly enjoy the whole concept, even if I can see it as a useful tool for opening communication or giving people a resource to express themselves while they’re still working through how to communicate better.
Continue readingMy Unplanned Break From Heart: The City Beneath Has Ended
Six weeks after our last session, my game of Heart: The City Beneath has finally come back around again. We even got through a full session, even if our metaphorical table wasn’t entirely full. One of the players couldn’t make it, since they have been firmly knocked out by a pair of sicknesses that have left them unfortunately unable to do much without needing to take a nap to rest up. We didn’t get much further through the delve than we were before, but I think we made some good progress overall, especially after being away from the game for so long. In total, they dealt with a difficult fight (which was the result of a fallout one of the players gained right at the end of the previous session) and then started in on the rest of the delve. They have not made much progress, so far, since they’ve rolled incredibly poorly on every single one of their delve roles save the very last one. They’re not super happy about that, either, since that delve roll brought them right up to another difficult fight and they no longer have the moves they used to make the earlier fight less potentially hazardous. Plus, due to the player missing the session and their character having a fallout come due right at the end of the session before, they party is once again split up. There’s a group of three and two isolated party members wandering around on their own, hoping to eventually meet up again. It’s a rough spot for them to be in.
Continue readingViolin Concerto in the Quay of Baldur’s Gate
Notes for the reader:
This is a piece of fiction I wrote almost two and a half years ago for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I was playing in. This is about the same character that I’ve mentioned several times in past blog posts and even wrote another short story for. This is Lewis, my favorite TTRPG character I’ve ever made and the only one I still miss playing, even after about a year away from the game. What this piece is, more specifically, is me expressing my enthusiasm for this character to my fellow players and GM by writing about a specific night my character endured while waiting for his companions to return.
As a bit of background, this scene follows my character, Lewis, taking out a collection of local thugs and bounty hunters who belonged to an organization called the Zhentarim. He pretended to know where their target (one of his party members and another player’s character) could be found, lured them out of their base in smaller groups, and then ruthlessly murdered them all in the street while remaining entirely undetected until the last survivors hid in their base where he then killed the remainder.
It was not a fight that should have worked out as well as it did (it resulted in the DM nerfing one of the magic items I used in this series of murders) and it was the one time I made myself feel awful for actions my character chose. It was a turning point in the character’s journey as he realized he’d become what he hated: a powerful person hurting people because he could and he knew he wouldn’t be punished for it. Sure, he had a decent enough motive, but not everyone who died that day was a vile criminal. One was a petty criminal who still had a chance to turn his life around until Lewis ended it. That’s where the scene picks up, actually. Right after he left the bar where he’d offered weregild to someone who cared about the young man he’d killed.
As for the rest of what this piece is… Well, this format was one my friends and I used a lot while we were in high school, as we wrote stories or drew comics about our self-insert characters in the slightly fictionalized version of reality we collectively made up. This is as close to fanfiction as I’ve ever written and only isn’t fanfiction because I don’t think, by its very definition, that you can write fan fiction about your own characters…
Anyway. See this video for the vibe I’m going for (dude walking around playing music) with most of Lewis’ performances. Andrew Bird also did a pretty good Tiny Desk Concert that can give you a sense of his energy and the way he uses a violin, which is my mental image for Lewis making music. To show you the looping thing I mention a few times, and the way I see it, see this TEDTalk Andrew Bird did a while ago (the first song shows it off, you don’t need to watch the whole thing).
This information and the music is mostly about setting a tone and a vibe, sharing some stuff I use as a touchstone for the way I view this character in these moments and the music he creates. In the text below, any time there’s a link, just load the video attached and listen to it as you read (there won’t be any songs with lyrics unless the lyrics are incorporated into the writing somehow). If you get to a new song before you’ve finished the old one, you can pause and listen to the rest or move one. Just don’t, you know, overlap the songs.
Continue readingA Chance, Tangential Encounter
I don’t know if its my general mood lately (which, if you read yesterday’s post, you know is still Super Depressed), but I’ve been thinking about my place in the world and my perceptions of the world around me as I move through it. Not as deeply as that sentence probably implies, though. More of the “what does it mean to be here and myself in this moment, as I move through the world, go about my daily life, and occasionally enter into the worlds of other people?” than the “what is the purpose of my existence.” Both are a lot to think about, but the first one really only ever matters in context while the other only really matters in the abstract. Plus, I spent most of the first thirty years of my life thinking about the latter and spent most of that same period of time avoiding the former. Now, I don’t have any major conclusions to share or even any deep questions that occurred to me since that’s kind of not the point of what I’m thinking about and why I’m thinking about it. These sort of things are the result of constant moment-to-moment choices and the instant I settle on one answer or solution or whatever you want to call it, it’ll no longer be true unless I force myself to stay the same somehow. What I do have, instead, is two chance encounters that kind of exemplify this type of thought that play off each other better than anything else I could describe as part of a mundane moment in my life.
Continue readingLate-Winter Depression Posting
Thanks to a bit of foresight at the outset of my current surge of depression, I switched up my therapy schedule so that I’m seeing my therapist every week for the time being. I had no way of knowing during that first week that it would last this long, but I already knew that this surge felt different than most and managed to push myself through the lethargic, unfeeling haze to ask for something I felt I needed. Which, you know, is impressive on its own, considering how difficult I find it to ask people for something I want or to assert my right to take up space when I’m at my best, let alone when I’m doing this poorly (even if, in this case, I’m not really asking for a favor from my therapist so much as offering to exchange money for a service more frequently that I usually do). Still, I was able to anticipate a need before it came up and take the steps required to get that need met, all despite the overburdening press of this current bout of depression. While these sessions haven’t exactly helped me get through this extended wave of depression (there’s a reason I used to compare my experience of depression to being caught in a storm at sea with only a raft and that’s because it rose and fell in waves without me ever being able to get away from it), they have helped me figure out what combinations of influences, events, and various life factors probably contributed to it. Unfortunately, knowing why I’m currently incredibly depressed isn’t super helpful when there’s nothing I can do about it.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 24
When I started this series as an alternative to writing about how I felt and putting myself in a situation where I was just venting all over my blog in a way that wasn’t particularly constructive, I picked this title because I was frequently tired and sad. Most of the time, I was sad because I was tired and not getting enough rest was (and probably still is) the leading cause of periodic depression in my life. I was only occasionally tired because I was sad, though I sometimes descirbed other emotions that were exhausting me as being sad so I could write one of these blog posts to help me get over them, but the two things were always related. I was tired and sad as a result of something specific causing one or the other (or both) and then the missing one would follow immediately behind. These days, though, as I find myself writing these more frequently again for the first time in quite a while (perhaps, as I’ve begun to suspect, that I was too tired and burned out to be anything but physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted), my tiredness and sadness are entirely disconnected and will not be solved by writing about something I enjoy immensely. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a pretty apt metaphor here, somewhere, and I’m way too tired to see it from where I am right now [editing this, I can see it, but I’m going to let you find it yourself rather than call it out]. Instead of continuing to dig for whatever that is, I’m going to write about building weird contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and the three economies involved in that process. While I’m tempted to make the argument that there are two processes, since things work a bit differently if you’re building something you’ve already made in the past than if you’re putting something together for the first time, it doesn’t really make sense to deal with them separately because you can’t rebuild something if you don’t build it first.
Continue readingMy Bittersweet Return to Dungeons & Dragons
As I sat down to run what I was ninety-five percent certain was going to be the Session 0 of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I had to take a few minutes to put aside the misgivings and constant internal debate about whether or not I was making the right choice. I had spent most of the day already, and a lot of idle time in the weeks leading up to said day, trying to figure out how I felt about returning to a hobby I had so firmly turned my back on just over a year prior. It was a difficult time, back then, as the company that owned my most-played tabletop game tried to destroy the hobby in order to make a little more money, and it wasn’t a decision I’d made lightly. I’d been running some form of D&D game ostensibly weekly (up to four times a week, during the first year and a half of the pandemic), except for a year off after I moved away from my college town to the city in which I still live, since the summer of 2010. There were other gaps in there, but no more than a few months at most. My entire tabletop history had been built around the game and I still felt compelled to turn away, to withhold my money from the company that seemed to be actively trying to drive it into the dirt. I was the sort of person who bought every book as they came out, who owned physical copies and digital copies online, through DNDBeyond, who ran tons of games and could not only run a game reference free, but quickly homebrew up something custom for my players that almost always hit my desired balance of “overpowered but in a way that’s fun for everyone.” And I still cut all ties.
Continue readingSchooling My Players In Dungeons & Dragons
After weeks of thinking about it and planning (a number of weeks coincidentally similar to the number of weeks since I last got to run a game of Heart: The City Beneath due to outages and everyone being super stressed out), I finally got to hold my Session 0 for what has solidified into a Modern Fantasy game of D&D. Which, for us, involves a school for gifted youths that is basically like what if high school and college became a single thing that also included classes on how to use your Adventurer Powers as a Useful Member of Society, how to handle being in an adventuring party for those that want it, and how to control/use the powers that just awoke within you/finally reached potency worthy of recognition. It’s a pretty fun concept, taking all the ideas we talked through for what our Modern Fantasy setting might be (the same as our world but there were always fantasy races that chose science a long time ago which worked out great until Y2K caught everyone unprepared and brought magic back into the power vacuum created while all computer based technology was offline, resulting in what is essentially modern levels of technology except its powered by magic with science-y stuff lingering in the background) and throwing a bunch of high schoolers of various ages into the mix. It took a bit of work to get everyone’s ideas to mesh since we had a player who really wanted to be a first-year student while literally everyone else wanted to be at least a second-year student, but I figured it out. Now we’re all set to start playing in about a week (from when you’re reading this, anyway, though poor Writer-Me has to wait two whole weeks to play this game) and I’m incredibly excited to see where we go from here.
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