New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
My Year In Haiku: 2023
In what will probably become a yearly tradition (two years in a row does not a tradition make, but three definitely does so I look forward to calling this a tradition next year), it is time for my yearly Haiku post! Before I share all these little glimpses into my day-to-day life in 2023, though, I’ve got a couple notes. First and foremost, they’re all titled as the date I wrote them, which can be a bit troubling sometimes since there’s a few from the same date, but they’re not necessarily connected beyond sharing the title. I leave it up to your interpretation to decide if they’re a part of the same message or disconnected expressions. Additionally, and probably most importantly, these aren’t traditional Haiku. Or really Haiku at all, since the structure of them is a part of the poetic form and the whole 5-7-5 thing is an English adaption of a Japanese form of poetry. Unfortunately, we changed a poetical form and reused the name, so I’m pretty much stuck calling them Haiku for the time-being. If you’re one of the handful of people who was about to bust my chops before I wrote this disclaimer, just think of them as structured free-verse poetry. If you weren’t about to bust my chops, then it’s fine and we can keep calling them Haiku because language shifts and changes and I think its fine to reuse names in new ways for things that people used to be confused about.
Continue readingWorking Out My Aches And Pains
Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a new medication that has given me the primary side-effects of drier skin along with more joint and muscle aches. One of the potential side effects is horrible sunburn, so it’s probably for the best that I’ll be doing the majority of this course of medication during the less sunny months of the year, but the losing battle I’m fighting against keeping my skin from drying out and bleeding all the time has me wondering if maybe it’d be better to have waited for the spring when the heat wasn’t on full-blast at work. I mean, the humidity dropping into the single digits in my workplace is rough enough during a normal year and thowing a medication side-effect that is causing my skin to dry out in places it never has before (namely my face, though everywhere else is also drying out worse than it ever has before) has me feeling pretty exhausted most days. Which might also be another side-effect of the medication I’m on, but that’s difficult to say one way or another given my penchant for insomnia and that moving through the stiffness that accompanies the joint aches requires more effort on my part than moving around usually does. Still, given why I’m taking the medication, it’s probably worth it. After all, these side effects are a temporary problem and the medication will hopefully fix a long term issue (and all signs to point to it fixing that issue, so far, even after only two and a half months).
Continue readingSpider-Man 2 Moved Me More Than Any Triple-A Game Ever Has
I finally finished Spider-Man 2 over my holiday vacation. I actually finished it so early in my vacation that I forgot that I never wrote about my final thoughts and impressions of it, which feels like a disservice to what was an incredibly memorable game. As I said in my last post about Spider-Man 2, this game has improved on every part of the previous games, not only mechanically but in terms of storytelling and game craft. It feels like a triumph that somehow got overlooked by most of popular media as it somehow vanished incredibly quickly from the public consciousness in the weeks after its release. I honestly don’t think I could recommend any other Spider-Man game after playing this one, except as a way to get caught up on the plot and so the payoff of events from older games can actually hit as hard as they would if you’d spent so much time getting to know the characters. All in all, Spider-Man 2 is definitely one of my top games from 2023 and I think I got more genuine emotional responses from this game than I did from my hundreds of hours playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (which is the only comparison I’ll make since any other comparison of these two wildly different games is a disserve to two stellar releases from 2023). It just delivered on everything I wanted from it and even went so far as to deliver plenty that I didn’t even know I wanted.
Continue readingSlowly Stepping Away From Social Media
Over my little break from work (which I say a little tongue-in-cheek because 12 consecutive days away from work is the longest break I’ve taken in years other than my trip to Spain which I’m excluding since that was fun but definitely not a break and also because 12 days isn’t really that much of a break considering a third of those days where weekend days and a third of those days were holidays), I stopped using most social media. I pushed myself to log on at least once a day to share my blog posts and would occasionally find myself browising Cohost to see what was going on, but I think I spent maybe a total of an hour on Bluesky, Facebook, and Cohost combined over that period. I’m not saying that I miraculously found my lost ability to focus or that I somehow managed to break free of the grip that social media has on my brain, just that I didn’t really wind up in a position where I felt like checking out social media. The times I did feel like checking it made it abundantly clear to me that social media is only for when I’m bored and tired. If I’m just tired, I’ll usually just keep doing whatever I’m doing since I rarely let being tired stop me from doing things (which, honestly, is probably not super healthy for me given the way it impacts my bedtime). If I was bored, I usually just pushed myself away from wherever I was sitting and found something new to do (since I’ve liberally sprinkled my apartment with various forms of entertainment). Only the two combined could push me to check social media since I didn’t have the willpower to push myself to move on to a new thing and I was too bored with what I was already doing to continue doing it.
Continue readingFinally Dropping In To Dimension20 on Dropout TV
Over the last week, I finally cleared my podcast backlog and dove head-first into Dropout TV. I’ve seen tons of great clips, heard many great things, and wanted to get into the channel for a long time, but I’ve been in a position where I wasn’t really spending a lot of time watching things. I had a massive video game backlog, so most of my non-video game media consumption was listening to podcasts while driving, working out, doing chores/cooking, and playing video games. Something I could enjoy while my attention was moderately occupied elsewhere. Now that I have more attention to give and fewer video games to give my attention to, I loaded up my tablet, logged into the account I share with my sister, and started watching Dimension20 from the very beginning. Sure, I could have watching Fantasy High: Freshman Year for free on YouTube, but I figured I might as well use the account while I’ve got it. I’ll also admit that I dragged my heels on starting any new actual-play visual media because I got super burned out on Critical Role and have never really gotten hooked on any of the other video-centric actual play shows despite really wanting to. I was worried the same thing would happen here.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 26
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here. If you’re unsure of what just happened after my extended break from the series, you can start from Here (two chapters back) to set the stage again!
Continue readingPreparing To Dive Back Into Heart: The City Beneath
Just in time to prepare for our upcoming session, I’ve finished running all of the smaller one-on-one sessions for all of my players from my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath. I feel like I’ve managed to at least partially maintain the game’s tension and even add to it a little bit by giving each character some focused attention (to move their personal plot forward) and by keeping up a steady (if small) stream of information in the Discord server I built for my this group. I still (as of writing this) have a lot to do to finish preparing for the session since I actually know what the group is going to do ahead of time for once, but it’s work I’m genuinely excited to do since I’ve figured out how to tie the stories of all my players together in this moment. Maybe not permanently (the improvisational nature of our game makes that impossible to claim with any confidence), but enough to give us a major inflection point in the overal game as we walk up to and past what might actually be the halfway point of this campaign.
Continue readingSuffering At The Hands Of My Parents’ Religious Orthodoxy
As I’ve had plenty of time to myself over the last couple weeks, I’ve been doing some thinking. It has almost been a year since I stopped doing family therapy and was able to make peace with the idea of probably never talking to my parents again. Prior to that moment in late January of 2023, I’d been feeling guilty for cutting them off while they were still paying lip service to the idea of fixing things. Thanks to that incredibly awful two-month period, I was able to confirm that it was just lip service and that neither of them possessed the emotional maturity to recognize their part in the travesty that was my childhood. Since I’ve had enough time to process all that, I’ve been thinking about it again, mostly by way of reviewing in my mind what we talked about and how gaining a better understanding of my parents has or has not changed the way I see some of the events of my past. As I’ve slowly worked through this process (largely deciding that not much needs to change at this time), I’ve found myself thinking that, for all their faults, at least my parents never denied me my humanity. For all they put me through, for all the horrible and wrong things they taught me, at least they never taught me that I was somehow less “human” than other people. However, the more I’ve thought this, the more I’ve started to wonder if this is actually true, or if it is only technically true because they never explicitly used those words or tried to teach that specific lesson.
Continue readingOn My “To-Enjoy” List For 2024
This is my first post after my vacation. I actually wrote it yesterday (which means that everything you’ve read up to this point was written, reviewed, and scheduled before the 22nd of December), because I was so exhausted that I actually got sick for a bit there. Not with a cold or Covid or anything. Just exhausted enough that I felt terrible in a lot of ways. So, instead of taking a long weekend and making up for my days off by spending a little extra time working in the days after my break, I decided to just not do anything and then, starting the first non-holiday of 2024, write two blog posts every day for a week. It will be pretty easy, considering how much time I’ve had for reading, watching shows, playing games, and spending time with people I care about. All of which wasn’t enough to actually make a dent in my backlog of stuff to read, play, and watch even if it did provide me with plenty of stuff to write about. I did make a pretty significant dent in my gaming backlog, though, so that’s nice. It got bigger though, not long after, since I got games as gifts this holiday season. I’ve got so much to do, still. Well, that I want to do. I don’t NEED to do most of it. I just want to do a lot of it.
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