Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and so much more, passed away this month. I learned about it last night (on the 7th of March, since I’m writing this on the 8th and you’re reading this on or after the 15th) and have spent the last day reflecting on the impact he had on my life. I don’t really talk about it a whole lot (because it was more than two decades ago and for other reasons that will become apparent soon), but I got into manga, comics, and graphic novels as a whole because of Dragon Ball. Before finding those bright red volumes on the “new” shelf at my local library one day when I’d ridden my bike there for some books to read, my entire conception of comics was confined to the syndicated comics that ran in newspapers, so much so that I didn’t call them comics. I called them “funnies” because they showed up in the “funny pages” of the newspaper. Sure, I’d read tons of picture books as a kid and a few things that rode a fine line between graphic novels and picture books, and sure, I knew what comic books were, but they’d never been a part of my life before I picked up one of the brightly colored books and was transported to a whole new world via a whole new type of story. That moment, that first borrowing of the first Dragon Ball book, was a major inflection point in my life to the degree that I can’t even imagine the person I’d be if I never picked it up. The change wasn’t drastic in the moment, but it laid the groundwork that I’ve built a huge portion of my life on since then.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Exhaustion As A Side-Effect Is Preventing Me From Overworking Myself
I recently (aka, two days ago after one hell of a delay due to so many convoluted bits of bullshit) changed up the medications I’m taking and have been knocked on my ass more completely by this change than by anything but that time I got the flu back in 2019. I spent an entire day basically immobilized once I discovered that the medication didn’t make me weak, it just SEVERELY limited the amount of energy I had in a day. I literally worked out and then immediately discovered that I was so worn out that I had trouble walking down the stairs. Needless to say, that and another side effect ensured I spent the day working from home as much as I could manage. The other side effect was some stomach stuff, no worse than my lactose intolerance inflicts on me when I fail to manage my dairy intake properly, but the muscle weakness and exhaustion were incredibly defeating. Since then, I’ve been slowly recovering. The stomach issues are mostly gone (though apparently eating more than a couple cashews makes me nauseas now?) but the severe limit on my energy has been slower to depart. I wisely didn’t complete a full workout yesterday, which meant I was able to get through almost an entire day of work before the exhaustion drove me into my chair (which is a problem considering that my desk at work is a standing desk, isn’t adjustable, and my chair is meant for a sitting desk). Today, I managed a full workout and am still standing at the end of the day, but I can feel the exhaustion starting to bear down on me. Literally the only thing making this tolerable is the knowledge that, ultimately, even if these side-effects diminish beyond this point, I can stop taking this medication eventually.
Continue readingGetting Lost In Warframe With My Friends
I started playing Warframe pretty recently. Well, sort of. I started playing Warframe past the introduction recently. I started playing it years and years ago, because one of my friends was really into the game, but I was getting into it as he was falling off it and I didn’t really have it in me to stay focused on the game by myself back then. I still don’t these days, but I’ve got a pair of friends (the same pair who got me into Palia and most other new games I’ve tried over the last year) who have been investing their time in the game recently and, since I’m more interested in doing fun stuff with my friends than the specifics of most games, I decided to launch myself back into it. Plus, this game gets around most of my aversion to guns in games since the enemies in this one are rarely human, melee attacks are my preferred mode of combat, and I can actually not use any guns at all if that’s what I want–for instance, I’m doing a Bow, Shuriken, Hammer thing right now and having a blast. I don’t really understand more than the very basics of whatever plotlines exist in the game since my friends have been powering me through the various advancement-critical missions so they can open up the world for me, reveal something they’ve been trying to keep a secret (which is working really well, aided in part by the fact that I genuinely don’t know enough to spot whatever stuff they might be trying to hide), and get me all of the cool abilities that usually take a long time to unlock. So I’m having fun but I’m also confused to the point of just sort of sliding through the missions without them leaving any kind of lasting impression on me.
Continue readingFinally Revealing Tabletop Secrets Two Years Later
It took a year and a quarter (from December of 2022 to March 2024), but I finally managed to run another session of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I started back in 2022 to give my DM and friend a way to rest between running his own sessions without having as much downtime for our group. That wound up not working as well as I would have hoped since we only played this campaign six or seven times total, including a few sessions of playing The Ground Itself to build a new home area for our Player Characters, but now we’re back at it! At least once, anyway. We’ll see if we can keep up our “every other week” schedule. Which, you know, I get the appeal of that for a lot of people, given the general demands on everyone’s time nowadays, but I really miss my weekly games. I miss having that dependability and repetition. I miss knowing what I’m going to be doing every week. The consistency was nice, even when it was only ever me running weekly games (or, in more recent years, trying to run weekly games and ending up in the “monthly at best” zone), but every-other-week is way better than “not at all” and probably a lot easier for most people to consistently attend. Regardless, I’m glad to be back at this game I was super excited to be playing in 2022, that I wrote about multiple times (since all but the latest of my GM Suggestions posts were about creating this world and I posted the introductory short story I wrote for it), and that I had to set aside for a while. I wound up bringing back an altered form of it last year, for my Heart: The City Beneath game, but that version of the world changed pretty significantly to reflect the mechanics of Heart: The City Beneath and never quite felt the same as my first version of it did.
Continue readingWorking Toward The Zenith Of My Heart: The City Beneath Game
After less time than I expected, I’m working toward the conclusion of my Heart: The City Beneath game. As it turns out, everyone really dug the vibes of the world we built and the game as a whole, but no one other than me and a couple of my more experienced players was ready to handle the much more open-ended nature of the game’s mechanics. I’ve been struggling a bit myself, partly due to the distance between sessions over the last couple months and partly because we’ve wound up way more focused on character arcs and overall story than the punishing Stress and Fallout system of Heart really allows. With a couple exceptions (one of which I tend to discount offhand because of the unique situation of the player character involved), most of the players wouldn’t want to see their character die. They’d be disappointed if they came to any other end but achieving their Calling or exiting the game via a Zenith ability, so I was holding back a bit. We were also all incredibly new to this game as a whole and didn’t really set ourselves up for success when we were starting out. After all, Heart is incredible for one specific type of game and its a rough hack for any other type. You don’t need to use all the horror stuff, of course, since you can freely make up your own fallouts and describe things however you want, but the game is built for selfish characters bent toward goals that end in either horrible self-destruction or some kind of horrible destruction of something else. Without those, the whole system starts to feel a bit off.
Continue readingReturning To Dungeons & Dragons With The Strongest Session 1 Of My Life
After over a year, I finally ran a session of Dungeons and Dragons 5e again. Two, actually, in quick succession (which in this case means one on Sunday and one on Monday). It was like settling back into an old, familiar chair that, despite feeling exactly the way you remember it, is sitting in a room that only looks like the place it used to be. It was familiar and everything worked exactly how I thought it would, but everything also felt a little off. Like there was some detail that I was missing that would explain why the desk was slightly further from the chair than I thought and that the sunlight was in my eyes more than it used to be. Which can pretty much be chalked up to that year being my longest break from running some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game since I started playing it in 2010, coupled with my still-settling feelings about returning to a game that has as troubled a history as D&D does thanks to the shit Hasbro has tried to pull as the owners of Wizards of the Coast. Still, I was able to work through those feelings and, despite the frenetic pace of my prep during the forty-eight hours prior to the first of the aforementioned games and the twelve hours prior to the second of said games, run what felt like a pair of good sessions.
Continue readingThe Creeping Death Of Public Creativity
Blogging–and most creative work, if I’m being honest–feels like an exercise in futility these days. Even putting aside all my doubts about my small audience, my questions about my own motivations for blogging (and the work I have to do in order to make sure that I’m not obsessing over numbers instead of focusing on honing my craft and expressing myself), and the constant grind of fighting against my own mental health and worsening burnout in order to continue creating, I still think the rising theft of creative work would be an existential threat to my public writing. I’d still write privately, of course, no matter what. I’m too much of a storyteller to ever stop telling stories, be it in tabletop games or in my own creative writing, but no part of me needs to post things publicly. I like posting things publicly. I like seeing that people are reading what I’ve written. I like having this level of public accountability. But I absolutely don’t need it. So it is incredibly difficult for me to keep writing posts for this blog as I slowly work on finding an alternative hosting platform and figure out what shape I want my blog to take on that platform. Normally I’d say something like “it would be really easy to ignore this and just carry on,” but it’s actually not easy this time. This time, I can barely make myself focus on my writing for more than a couple minutes at a time and my buffer, a staple of the last two and a half years of writing, has started to slip as I lose the energy and willpower required to push myself to write when I’m feeling worn down.
Continue readingI’m Choosing To Hold A Grudge This Time
While I wrote this a day after I wrote last week’s post, this one got to marinate for a week before it went up and while I didn’t change much beyond my usual editing (grammar, spelling, word choice: the basics), writing this without the sense of urgency inherent to last week’s post means I spent more time thinking and less time reacting. There’s a time and a place for reacting, of course. We should respond with outrage when something awful happens and the corresponding urgency should drive us to act when we otherwise might not. That said, that initial reaction or series of actions doesn’t mean that we’re done with it. We can’t blow up and then move on because that will let companies like Automattic get away with bullshit like creating an opt-out system for actively selling the media created and shared by their customers and userbase because they’ll know they can just ride out the first reaction and do whatever they wanted to do when everyone has moved on. After all, it would be incredibly easy to take more than they want and pretend to be magnanimous and caring when they dial it back down to what their actual goal was. It’s basic negotiating strategy, to aim high and then slowly work your way down to what you actually wanted. So I’m going to keep this particular topic fresh in my mind so long as I continue to use a service I paid for that is now trying to wring extra money out of me by doing whatever they can to benefit from the exploitative and extractive actions of Venture Capital funded plagiarism algorithms.
Continue readingBreaking People To Fit The Mold
To sort of pick up where I left off last Tuesday, railing against overly broad classifications that some people use to avoid doing any work to improve themselves, I’ve recently encountered another system of categorization that rankles. This one comes with more caveats, though, because I think the tools it provides for communication are more useful, but I will add that I’m even thinking about this at all because I saw it used poorly and in a way that stifled communication rather than fostered it. I think this might have something to do with the group that was discussing it, whose examples provided me with the minor frustration required to develop my normally casual disregard for this stuff into a blog post, but any system used to sort people or apply labels based on supposedly innate traits will be easily turned toward ill ends by someone with an agenda. This one, though, rather than playing out in the sphere of popular culture or online quizzes disguised as methods of determining interpersonal compatibility, is sanctioned by many workplaces the world over. This one is called “Predictive Index” and that’s an evaluation tool that even some of the experienced people who advocate for and administer the system won’t praise without a few caveats of their own.
Continue readingOne Busy Weekend Has Made A Huge Difference
Last week ended with me feeling incredibly overwhelmed and struggling to deal with what had mostly been a week full of good things [and I am once again reminded of the downsides that come with writing these things a week ahead of when they post since the week before this got posted went VERY DIFFERENTLY than the week before I wrote this]. A four-day work week, a week totaling only forty hours of work instead of my usual fifty, getting to leave work while it was still light out, some major changes at the company I work for, and even a new work computer and related peripherals. The whole week had a lot going for it, even if the exchange I’d negotiated with myself was that I could take it easy for a week in exchange for doing my taxes and taking care of the final receipt submissions for my 2023 Flexible Spending Account, and I got to end the whole thing by spending my weekend buried in video games with my friends, prep work for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and then a successful (and incredibly delightful) first session of that Dungeon and Dragons campaign. Unfortunately for me, this did not fix my burnout. It did lessen my mental load by a huge amount [to be honest, I probably would have had a mental breakdown if I hadn’t had this weekend before everything went to shit], since I was able to take care of a bunch of tasks that where weighing on me (like activating my new FSA card, dealing with some junk mail, sorting through the records I needed to keep to close out my pile of 2023 documents, and ordering some replacement items for stuff that had worn out and I’d been meaning to replace for almost a year), but it was definitely not restful.
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