Between everything else I’ve had going on (include falling behind on Animorphs books because I’m too tired to stay awake reading most nights), I read a book recommended to me on Cohost called Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant fame). The user who wrote the post held it up as part of an example of the great talks Beaton gives since she doesn’t just discuss the book at hand. In the talk that user shared, Beaton took the themes of the book as the starting point and talked further, focusing on the way that class impacts the arts and how a person’s conception of a place doesn’t necessarily reflect the place so much as it reflects the person. Even a person’s experience of a place can sometimes reflect them more than the place they’re at because if someone excepts a ruin, they will find a ruin. If they expect a garbage dumb, they’ll find a garbage dump. The Cohost user brought in some examples from their own life, mainly focusing on how they dislike the common depiction of gas station attendants as vapid wastrels with no prospects who are sometimes even depicted as being a waste of space. Those jobs need to be done and a lot of people doing them are more than just their job. There’s a lot more to people than their situation or the brief context in which you see them, for good or for ill, and one of the things that Beaton’s autobiographical graphic novel does is examine that idea through her experience working off her student debt via jobs in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.
Continue readingMonth: May 2024
The Descent Into The Rotting Heart Ends With A Slow Fade
Last night, after several months, many delays, and little bit of ad hoc scheduling, my remaining two players and I wrapped up our campaign of Heart: The City Beneath. Both remaining players hit their zeniths, we wrapped up the last trailing bits of story, and then did a post mortem since the player whose character had died/zenithed-out last session was around and available. It was a long night for all of us since we moved back our planned start time an hour, used up the the entire hour and a half of game time we’d set aside, and then wound up talking through the end of the game and what we’re going to do next for another hour. I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of all that and still am a full day later. Still, I’m glad we got to do it and I’m looking forward to a relatively quiet weekend without needing to run any games (though I will be playing in one, most likely, and doing some preparations to play in yet another game). I could use a bit of a break this weekend, after the last few weeks I’ve had, especially because I’ve got a new game to start preparing.
Continue readingWarm Feelings And Even Warmer Weather
I’m doing better this week. I’m still depressed, exhausted, and burned out, but I’m feeling a bit better about it right now than I have in a while. Work is still busy as hell and I’m still struggling to get enough sleep most nights, but it all feels so much more manageable, even during a week when I did a bit too much over the weekend and didn’t end it feeling much more rested than the week prior. As I’ve gone through a very busy and exhausting day at work that has nevertheless felt much less emotionally taxing than previous similar days, I’ve been thinking about why that might be. Not that much has changed, after all. I’m still not getting as much sunlight as I’d like and maybe less than ever since the warm, almost-summery weather we’ve been having means I can’t take my midday walks at all and the time that the UV level has finally dropped enough that I can safely take my walks has progressed passed 5pm. Sure, I’ve had my tabletop games more regularly than usual, but that can also be exhausting. I haven’t had the time to figure out a solution for my desire to continue blogging without supporting a company that would sell my work to a plagiarism machine. I haven’t even gotten to the point of being able to fall asleep at a better time most nights since the rise in ambient temperature has made it more difficult for my apartment to feel comfortable and cool at night (and I refuse to turn the AC on when temperatures are dropping into the 50s overnight. It just feels too wasteful). So, if nothing has changed, why do I feel better about all of it?
Continue readingLasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory
One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
Continue readingStarting To Party With The Party In The Magical Millennium
After two skipped sessions, we finally returned to playing The Magical Millennium. When last we left our beleaguered students, it was their first day of magical classes and they’d survived a harrowing encounter in the lunchroom. They’d breezed through their first day of classes–aside from that one disastrous lunch period–even earning a commendation from the teacher of their Adventuring Class for a stellar performance, and then went their separate ways at the end of the day, united by their experiences, the assignment that they perform as a party, and the single group chat one of them put together. It took three sessions, but we’d finally finished the first day of school!
Continue readingTurns Out I Wasn’t Burned Out On Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
After two weeks of struggling to even force myself to play Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth (much less WANT to play it) amidst a burst of burnout, depression, and other pastimes that needed my attention more immediately, I’ve finally figured out why I’ve been avoiding it. In retrospect, I think the main reason it took me this long was because I was up to my waist in denial, and the rest of it is made up of my general patience, my habit of having a podcast to listen to when there’s not much going on in terms of audio, and my genuine love of Final Fantasy 7: Remake. It is difficult to see clearly past all of those blinding or rose-colored filters. But now I have and I can firmly say that the reason I’ve been struggling to play Rebirth is because the open world is boring and empty. Sure, there’s lots of little collectibles, but having junk to pick up doesn’t make the world feel any less empty. It actually makes it feel even more empty most of the time, especially when I have to wander further and further afield to get all of the random junk I need to craft my own items since the people who made the game decided it would be better to fill your inventory with junk than to just give you chests with items in them. And it’s not like you can just keep collecting this stuff so that you never run out. No. You can have ninety-nine of something and then you can’t pick up any more, which sucks because this is your main avenue for collecting potions and items. You have to craft all this crap, mix up weird combo items, and make sure you’re leveling up your item crafter device so you can make level-appropriate items. It’s a whole-ass crafting system created for the sole purpose of filling this empty world and all it has accomplished is to draw attention to the fact that the world is pointlessly massive.
Continue readingConcluding The Second Arc of The Leeching Wastes
After five sessions, which feels like both more and less time than I expected, we’ve wrapped up the second arc of my The Leeching Wastes campaign. The first arc involved fleeing from a home that was directly in the path of a horrible monster in hope of finding a new, safer place to call home and the second arc has been all about settling into this new home while dealing with some of the consequences of people’s actions as that integration occurred. In the last session, one of the player characters was brought under the influence of the monster sealed within the heart of the tree that made up the center of The Grove and given the command to free it. The party failed to stop her despite the emotional price they were paying in their attempts, but the unnamed goddess (connected to her by a bargain said goddess made with the player character’s former lover who had sacrificed herself to save the player character) had one last trick up her sleeve that she’d been holding off since it could easily kill that player character. In order to save everyone, the player character risked her life and ultimately survived, but only just barely. The session ended with the remaining members of the party–two NPC allies in tow–settling down to rest while they waited for their tied-up friend to regain consciousness so they could figure out what the hell had just happened. It was a very draining session that lasted less than an hour and a half and quite a place to pick back up from this week as we went through the arc’s denouement and moved forward in time.
Continue readingWant To Be A Better GM Or Player? Play Widely.
One of the best pieces of advice to give someone who wants to improve their writing skills is to read widely. The idea is that you will be exposed to more and more writing in a wider variety of forms, including those outside of whatever genres you might choose to focus on, all of which is useful to you as a writer because it will give you more tools to use in your own creative work. After all, the various writing tricks authors use, their various stylistic quirks and so on, aren’t limited to a genre. If you see something cool and interesting in a science fiction story, you can figure out how to incorporate it into a fantasy story. Or if you find a particularly interesting way of phrasing an idea in a piece of nonfiction, you can find ways to do similar things in your own fictional works. The more you’re exposed to, the more you’ve learned and can incorporate consciously and unconsciously. Which is also true of running tabletop games (and storytelling as a whole, but you can pretty much extend any of this advice into any type of storytelling with enough abstract thinking, so I’m going to stay focused). The more games you play or run, the better you are. This is fairly self-evident to most people since that tends to fall under the “experience makes you better at things” bit of wisdom. I’d suggest taking it a step further, though, and suggest that you play a wide variety of games rather than just sticking to the ones your prefer.
Continue readingI Don’t Dislike Many Books, But I Definitely Don’t Like Dune
Due to a combination of luck, limited new book selection, and having trusted sources for new book recommendations, it has been a long time since I read a book and was left with the impression that it was, as a whole, a swing and a miss. I mean, I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow The Ninth, but I still enjoyed the book enough that I wouldn’t even call it a foul ball. It just wasn’t the home run I was expecting after reading the first book in the series. Pretty much everything else I’ve read over the last few years was a good choice, even if it gave me complex feelings, and I’m struggling to remember the last time I just did not like a book I’d picked up to read other than the notable exception of when I tried to force myself to read the Game of Thrones Series and literally threw one of the books away from me when I got to the Red Wedding bit because I was sick and tired of the constant “every decent person gets killed because ninety-nine percent of the world’s population are total bastards who will kill you given a chance and even the most pitiful motive.” I’m not a picky reader, by any means, nor do I restrict myself to only what I know I like, but I tend to wait for something to be recommended or look for certain signs in reviews before choosing to invest my time and that means I rarely spend my time on a book that I genuinely dislike.
Continue readingThe Penultimate Session Of The Descent Into The Rotting Heart
One more session of Heart: The City Beneath behind us and now we’re down to the last two players of a group that originally had six. One fell by the wayside immediately, before we even began the second session of our worldbuilding game. The second left after she realized this game was not for her and that she needed more time in her weeks. The third left when her character died a single session after the second left and she decided to reclaim some time for herself rather than carry on. The fourth has now stepped aside, one more session later, as his character finished a transformation that has been brewing since that first worldbuilding game. The final two players are both on the cusp of their own ends, each carrying a Zenith move they have either already used and are seeing play out or are saving to use at the right moment, whatever that might look like. Things are coming to a head and every single roll holds the potential to spell the end for each character, as it did for the fourth player’s character. Still, the story holds us all bound and determined to see it through and. at the very latest, in just another week from when this post does up, I will be writing about how it all came to an end.
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