Author: Chris

Violin Concerto in the Quay of Baldur’s Gate

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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.

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A Chance, Tangential Encounter

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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.

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Late-Winter Depression Posting

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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.

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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 24

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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.

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My Bittersweet Return to Dungeons & Dragons

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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.

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Schooling My Players In Dungeons & Dragons

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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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No New Infrared Isolation Chapter Today

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You’d think I’d have learned not to make promises I’m not certain I can keep when it comes to this story… I mean, I learned not to make the promises explicitly, but I definitely implied in last week’s post that I’d have another chapter ready by today and I absolutely do not. I got close to having one finished, but it turns out that you can’t work your way through depression and burnout. They just get worse if you try, actually, and so I’ve only make small progress since last week. This past week wasn’t nearly as stressful as last week was and I’m hopeful this trend will continue long enough for me to get SOME kind of rest, but I expect this will all shift back by sometime in early March, so who knows if writing this will be sustainable even if I manage to get it going consistently again. I might try to alternate chapters with Flash Fiction pieces, but I absolutely do not have it in me to write any kind of fiction in the next twelve hours before this post is supposed to go up. So this week you get another little note and a suggestion that you should check out my Flash Fiction category for some fun, light reads (in terms of length, not content) or my Short Story category for some fiction that is about fifty percent stories I wrote for tabletop games. Those should tide you over until I figure out how I’m going to balance my creative goals with my current lack of energy and writing time. Or, you know, until whatever I get together for next week’s Saturday post.

Using Kirby Music As An Antidepressant

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My latest musical obsession (when I’m not subjecting myself to the 10-hour version of the “He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah” song), is a pair of videos by a music compilation channel on YouTube. The first one, appropriately titled “30 minutes of kirby music to make you feel better” is a collection of bright and cheerful tracks from a variety of Kirby games, classic and current (though it leaves out some of the latest games to avoid the litigious arm of Nintendo), that absolutely lives up to its name. The second one is the sequel to that first, wonderful video, titled “45 minutes of kirby music to make you feel even better” which also absolutely lives up to its name. There’s a lot of familiar tracks in this second one, showcasing songs by the same name that had been updated or changed for newer games, along with a collection of new ones as well. The channel can get away with these videos because it is not monetized and exists solely to create these compilations of video game music according to a central theme. There are a lot of channels out there like this one, but this one takes it all a little step further. Rather than just posting a static image, there’s a little animation of Kirby wearing headphones and bopping along to the music on the first one and, on the second one, fifteen minutes of bright and happy comments from the first video showcasing just how warmly this collection of music was received. The bright and cheerful music the compiler chose for these videos is enhanced by the cheerful and friendly nature of the comments they selected for this video and, for the most part (more so than any other video I’ve ever seen on YouTube), further enhanced by the bright and cheerful comments below the video.

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Digging Deeply Into A More Civilized Age

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While I might have started listening to Media Club Plus first thanks to what felt like a premise made specifically for me and my podcast listening time opening up right as it started posting, the podcast that actually got me to stop avoiding media discussion podcasts as a category was A More Civilized Age. I might not seem like it, but I’m a pretty ardent fan of Star Wars. I mostly avoid it because the online fandom is, perhaps, the most toxic and miserable fandom I’ve ever seen and not only do I want to avoid being associated with it in any way, shape, or form, I don’t want to ever catch its attention. The worst of them have way too much time on their hands and these miserable fucks have driven numerous people off the internet already, so I want to avoid them at all costs. Still, I love a good bit of Star Wars and while I might have some mixed feelings about the modern media landscape of the franchise (especially after all the books I’d read as a child and teen got launched into the uncaring and non-canonical oblivion that is “Star Wars Legends”), I figured that listening to some media-savvy folks discuss it might be a great way to push myself to finally sit down and watch some of the TV shows. I’d already tried and failed, after all, since I let myself get caught up in a bunch of online message boards that listed each episode in what was supposedly the “correct” timeline. I bounced off it pretty hard when I tried that method since none of it made any sense and it was a pain in the butt to cycle through seasons for the next episode I was supposed to watch. This podcast, though, declared that they were watching it in release order and, this January, when I ran out of other things to do, I resubscribed to Disney+ and started working my way through the show and the podcast in tandem.

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Modern Game Opinions Poisoned By Rampant Nostalgia

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Today, as I took a break from the frenetic pace of my work day and turned my mind toward what I should write for today’s blog post–I landed on writing about my time listening to A More Civilized Age and watching The Clone Wars as a part of my foray into media review and discussion podcasts, a topic I will now be addressing another day–I remembered my first foray into media discussion podcasts and why I not only fell off the train but stayed away from all of them for multiple years. In fact, the only reason I’ve gone back is because the idea behind the current run of Media Club Plus (which I recommend more strongly than I’ve ever recommended anything), of watching Hunter x Hunter with someone who hasn’t watched much anime at all, was so charming that I couldn’t deny myself the opportunity to follow some of my favorite podcasters on this particular journey. It took a lot to overcome the reason I stopped listening, a reason that seems pretty trivial and small when you consider it on its own, but this reason was the final straw of a growing resentment that had been building for a while. You see, the podcast I listened to back then (merely because it cross-polinated with other stuff I listened to) was the video game review podcast “The Besties.”

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