Today, (the day I’m writing this, which is the 23rd of December), I had to run into the office for a little bit. There was a test I’d left running of the weekend that I needed to shut down, collect the data from, and then clear out of the test chamber. It’s a shared resource, you see, and while there’s a good chance that no one else is going to be using it in the next two weeks (no one has reserved it as of the last time I checked, a few days ago), it would not do for me to leave all that crap there in case someone else wanted to sneak a little testing in during a historically quiet time at our employer. So I went in the early afternoon, wrapped up my test and put everything away, and then left the building. Took all of half an hour, plus fifteen minutes for adjusting my time card to reflect the fact that I’d shown up and worked for forty-five minutes rather than spent a full day’s worth of vacation time. In, work, and out. Still, in that short amount of time, I still managed to run into every single one of my coworkers who was still working at that point, have a couple conversations about the project I’m working on, and get sidetracked for a few minutes as one of them tried to shove good intentions under my fingernails. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a bit annoying to be trying to quickly finish something and leave only to get bogged down in conversation. Typical, but annoying. Once I was done with it, though, I’d hoped to be able to finally relax only to still feel just as tense and keyed-up as I felt this morning while I procrastinated going to work.
Continue readingMonth: December 2024
I’ve Decided To Take Another Day Off
I honestly haven’t rested much yet, between my day of going into work a week ago, holiday stuff, burning the shit out of my hand while making Christmas dinner, and then hosting my siblings, so I’m just going to take another day off. I’m gonna try to actually rest and get my head out of the weird funk I’m in as I’m writing this. I’ll have a new post tomorrow, to do one final check-in before the end of 2024, and then no new post on Wednesday the 1st. Starting on the 2nd snd carrying forward, I’ll be back to my usual “every work day” blog posts and, if I can ever get my feet under me properly, some new Saturday posts in the future. Not any time soon, though. Typing is a more laborious activity than usual on account of burning the shit out of my hand. It’s been a couple days, and it’s not horrific or anything, but it kinda aches unpleasantly, to the extend that I’m not even holding video gsme controllers with it. Just sort of literalized my burnout with thisnhand injury… So, maybe someday, but definitely not in January. The month hasn’t even started and its off to a rough start.
Happy Holidays! I’m Taking A Few Days Off!
I’m taking a few days off, this week and next! I won’t be posting anything further today (the 25th of December) through the rest of the week. I will have four new posts next week, every day except the first. I’m planning to take some time to rest, celebrate the holidays with the people I care about, and try to hope that nothing goes to shit while I’m resting during my last break before the project I’ve been working on since October of 2023 finally finishes sometime in March. Finally. After that… well, who knows? I have stopped trying to predict the future that far out and have resigned myself to taking it one or two weeks at a time. I hope you’re having a great day today regardless of what you celebrate and if you celebrate a holiday today, well, still have a great day. I’m going to be resting and doing nothing. Hopefully in a more positive way than my last few attempts at doing that. Happy Holidays!
The Magical Millennium’s First (Virtual) Dungeon!
Another wonderful session has come and gone with my players in The Magical Millennium. While we seem to be skipping every-other-session due to holidays, that’s about what I expected (so much so that I did zero preparation for the last session we skipped since I was all but absolutely certain that we would wind up canceling) and I’m very hopeful about things picking up in the new year. We’ll see, of course, but I think we’re finally going to be making some forward progress again. As much as I love all the stuff we’re doing and seeing in this endless Lock-In (which has been going on since October), I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Still, we’ve had a lot of fun in this school-event-turned-adventurous-teen-corral so far and that pattern shows no signs of changing after our latest session. This time around, we had an amazing set of rolls that started off the final match of the dodgeball tournament we began in our previous session, an unexpected downbeat as the time I’d set aside for a drawn-out final match was unexpectedly free that one of my players managed to put to EXCELLENT use, and then our first dungeon! It’s a virtual reality dungeon/escape room adventure experience, but my players took the gentle suggestion that this one would be competitive to absolutely dive in with a level of focus and teamwork that I’ve never seen in them for ANYTHING ever. Seriously. Every time these kids are stuck together, something happens to make them hate each other or deepen the existing fractures in this group and they threw that all aside so they could absolutely wreck this competition. It’s amazing and I’m so excited to continue our game in the new year!
Continue readingTaking The Rotten Into A Lively Dungeon
This post is a little late in coming. VERY late, technically speaking, since I seem to have forgotten to write about the first full session with my The Rotten group in the shuffle of moving the blog. And then last week, I started writing about the group’s dungeon experience and wound up writing about dungeons in general rather than the Dungeons and Dragons session that the dungeon featured it! Which means I’m a little behind when it comes to session recaps about The Rotten and we actually did quite a bit with the last two! We introduced our characters, established narrative connections, discussed the kind of game we were about to play, worked through details of what it meant to travel such a dangerous world, met some strangers along the road that bore a dire warning of what lay ahead, and spent the party’s first night camping outside beneath the stars. In our second game, we started down into a canyon the player characters were warned was dangerous, spent some time wandering around in the fog, discovered an eerie world within that fog, solved some puzzles, navigated through a maze based on vibes along, rolled a lot of natural 20s in an incredibly short period of time, survived our first combat encounter, and played around with some traps! It was a great time and only one of my players nearly died! Well, technically did die to the first attack roll in the game, but we all decided that was bullshit and we’d just not have it be a crit. Chaos then ensued, the party emerged victorious, and they learned a lot about the difference between rolling for something and working their way through a puzzle free of rolls. It was a good session! Not that the first one wasn’t good, mind you, it was just a lot of settling in and figuring things out rather than focused play. And, ridiculous string of natural 20s from this latest session aside, I’m just happy I got to start running my first proper, DEEP dungeon in a long time! And I’m definitely not stressed about it and how old patterns (which I mentioned in last week’s blog post about dungeons) seem to be repeating despite this being an easy-mode dungeon I haven’t even finished building yet!
Continue readingOne Star Morning
This poem is from a month after last week’s. I had noticed a pattern evolving in my life–though it would take until September to notice it in my writing and poetry–that seems so obvious in retrospect. The general pain and stiffness caused by the medications I was taking had turned even the ordinary and simple activities of my life into tasks that now cost me more than they ever had. A cost that would continue going up. I wrote this poem shortly after the first time I realized that my old way of doing things wouldn’t work any more. I had to find a new way to manage myself, my emotions, and where I chose to spend my slowly dwindling energy.
Continue readingUnreliable Detection And Definition Of Unreliable Narrators
This post contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you wish to remain unspoiled, you should probably bail out now since you’ll probably be able to guess some amount of them by the time you get to the point below where the spoilers are (there’s text in all caps to let you know). That said, I kind of hop on that particular point somewhat tangentially, so it’s entirely possible that you can read this whole post minus the paragraph with the spoilers and still not figure anything out. Knowing the game and what these spoilers are, though, I wouldn’t risk it.
Continue readingPutting The Past Behind Us: Feeling Unmoored In The Endless Present Of Tears Of The Kingdom
“When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world.” I was a child the first time I heard those words. A bipedal meerkat spoke them as the camera zoomed in on him and he alternated between gesturing at an imaginary world behind the camera and pointing an instructive finger at the young, depressed lion that was just off screen. As far as scenes go in The Lion King, it’s important for the plot but maybe not the most visually interesting. The sort of thing that would normally slip past a child of five or six, which is how old I was when I first saw it, but one of my younger siblings became obsessed with the movie and we watched over a hundred times before a new movie caught their attention. If you watch something that much, enough that you can still recite the whole movie, front to back, about two and a half decades later, you wind up taking it all in even as a child. Maybe especially as a child. It was an interesting thought to me, back then, as it was the answer that meerkat, Timon, offered in response to the suggestion that there is, in fact, something you can do when bad things beyond your control happen to you. It was a big thought for a child, but it was something I thought about constantly and so it stuck.
Continue readingBuilding A Dungeon All My Own
For the first time in what feels like YEARS (and is definitely at least “years” if not “YEARS”), I started running an actual dungeon in one of my Dungeons and Dragons games. For a long while now, as I’ve tried to explore more expansive storytelling and dealt with groups more interested in narrative than mechanics, I’ve avoided putting my players in what one might consider a stereotypical dungeon. I’ve had some dungeons, sure! I had my players run through a dungeon-esque wizard’s tower that was actually a testing site for traps and puzzles to be used in other dungeons. I trapped my players in a nightmare realm where they had an “ever-renewing” eighteen hour period to solve the puzzle of this time-and-space-locked demiplane. I’ve even made proper dungeons that wound up not getting explored by my players because they chose a different route forward. I think the last time I had a proper dungeon was back in 2019 or 2020, the last time I had a “classic” Dungeons and Dragons group with a “classic” mix of characters played by players who were interested in what it meant to be a D&D Party and to play their classes, specifically. Which is a bit funny to admit because, once upon a time, I loved nothing more than a good dungeon. I was scattering those things every which way. You’d think that would have still happened even in my more expansive play style now, if it was something I cared about, right?
Continue readingCoping With The Specter Of Human Fragility
I mentioned in last week’s “welcome” post about the stress I was dealing with as I was forced to confront the fact that the products I work on and test are zero steps removed from the potential to cause significant structural damage, debilitating injury, or even death if things go wrong enough or are used deliberately incorrectly. It was all for a presentation that didn’t REALLY go the way I’d hoped it would–either completely silent as everyone grappled with the fact that the Specter of Human Fragility loomed large over all the work I do or vocal recognition of the same–but I have also been thinking about it pretty much ever since. Not constantly, mind you. I’d be pulling my hair out if I was constantly thinking about it. I can put the thoughts away for a time now that the presentation is over and I don’t have my usual anxiety constantly bringing it to the front of my mind. Which has made me wonder why the presentation made me anxious enough to think about the potential for harm inherent in my work while the potential for harm inherent in my work doesn’t seem to register nearly as much. I’ve also been polling my coworkers about how they think about it, if they think about it all, and how they handle the thought all the while. Most of them seem to handle it much like I do (just not thinking about it/working to ignore it) and the few deviations aren’t particularly remarkable in their deviation. None of us are immune to the thought. None of us are uncaring. We all live with it in our minds as we each work through our parts in making sure something horrible never happens, but it doesn’t seem to weigh on any of us particularly heavily.
Continue reading