Last night (as of writing this and a bit over a week ago as of this being posted), A More Civilized Age announced that they would not be covering the second season of Disney’s Andor. According to the podcast episode (which appeared in their feed instead of the first episode of coverage that everyone was expecting) shared along by the social media posts, members of the podcast felt it would go against their moral and/or ethical beliefs to cover something on the BDS boycott list, which they’d just learned included Disney+ specifically. This recording specifices that this was a difficult decision for them to make given that the members of the podcast had differing views and that they had to make it in under a week since they only learned of the Disney+ boycott the week that the new season of Andor began streaming. It makes sense that they might struggle with this choice since their weekly coverage of the first season of Andor launched them into a position of relative fame that has contributed to their current success and included perks like being able to watch the final episode early in order to release their final episode of coverage at the same time that the season 1 finale aired. That said, it speaks to their strength of character and their overall morals that the eventual decision wasn’t to cover Andor season 2 without the members of the group who objected to breaking the boycott but to pivot to covering something that isn’t being boycotted.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Messing With Powers Beyond Your Ken In The Rotten Labyrinth
We’ve had another session of my incredibly maze-focused Dungeons and Dragons campaign, The Rotten Labyrinth and this one was a bit of a doozy. Well, from a certain perspective. Most of which I can’t actually post about because it features stuff that my players have yet to discover, chief amongst them being the ramifications of what they did in this last session. Sure, we all started with fun and games as we slowly reassembled where negotions with Steve the Goblong had been before all the sirens and the fire alarm had forced all thoughts of tabletop gaming from my mind. He safely led them through the maze, carefully pointing out that they should just follow him and not poke around other hallways that much since those paths weren’t definitely safe like his were, Which was immediately punctuated by the party finding a trap and then failing to disarm it by enough that they set it off instead, which triggered not just a normal trap, but a new secondary trap that was right next to it. They all survived thanks to some healing, but they stopped exploring other hallways after that, obediently followed Steve to the place he said there was a problem his community of Goblongs needed solved, and then wound up performing a religious ritual at an alter to a representative of the god of mazes and pathways and whatnot that this whole labyrnith had been built to worship. Once that was done and the strange tinnitus-like ringing noise had faded, Steven revealed his true movement speed as he quickly left the party behind. Which is fine for most of the party because the ones who performed the ritual can’t get lost in the labyrinth any more now that they have been magically connected to it. Like I said: it was a bit of a doozy.
Continue readingThe End Of My Ceaseless Exhaustion Is Hopefully In Sight
After three months of miserable side-effects, unending exhaustion, and sleepiness that dominated my every waking moment, I’ve finally hit the end of my “wait it out” period for the antidepressant my doctor recommended. I had some small improvement from it at the highest dose I took, but I was also so tired on it that I’d be falling asleep every afternoon even when I was sleeping a minimum of seven and a half hours. Which, you know, wasn’t exactly a viable outcome for me. It took me a couple weeks to even recognize that the medication was having a positive effect on me because I was just too tired to feel anything but nigh-overwhelming exhaustion. It was a bit of a lateral move rather than an improvement or worsening of my general well-being, but I can work through feeling incredibly depressed and I cannot work through exhaustion that complete, as I learned throughout the last three months. It never quite got bad enough to actually make me mess up at work, but I also took a lot of vacation time during the peak of the exhaustion and I had plans for that time later this year. So it wasn’t great but I got through it, told my doctor it wasn’t working for me at any dose, and now I’m officially on the “slowly wean off the antipressant” path. As of this blog post going up, I’m one week away from my last dose of it and what will hopefully be the end of my constant sleepiness.
Continue readingThe Economy And Society At Large Are Failing Artists
Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.
Continue readingFeeling Ambivalent About The Switch 2
I don’t think I’ve ever felt as truly ambivalent about something as I do about the Switch 2. These days, the word gets used to mean “no strong feelings one way or another” or something similar that implies a certain amount of neutrality. The definition of the world does involve a degree of neutrality, which is where the confluence of meanings began, but it’s pretty specifically about a net neutrality as your mix of feelings about something essetially cancel each other out. All of which is a bit of a hair to split even for me, but I have never felt quite so strongly and truly ambivalent about something before in my life so it felt like the specificity was worth the pedantry. I mean, better that than to continue endlessly spinning my wheels about the unanswerable question of whether or not I want to get a Switch 2 any time soon. It’s a bit of a moot point as of writing this (not quite) a week ahead of time, given that all of the preorders have been consumed and, even faster than the original switch, everywhere has sold out, so it’s not like I need an answer right now. My current policy of “get one if it’s easy to acquire without going out of my way” will work just fine for this situation, so there’s really no need to religitate it all over again. But then again, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t always relitigating things in my head and then writing about them on my blog, would I?
Continue readingSetting The Table For Mythological Mayhem With The Demigods Of Daelen
We’ve officially had session 0 for my new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Demigods and Dragons? Dungeons and Demigods? Anachronistic Mythology? I don’t know what I’m going to call it yet [I figured it out by the time of publication and it’s in the title of this post now], but it’ll have the word “Demigods” in the title because that’s an integral part of the concept. Probably, anyway. The longer I think about it, the more ideas I come up that don’t use the word, but I’ll definitely keeping tagging the posts I write about this campaign with the word, so at least I’ll be organized still. I thought for a while about doing something with “Scattered Divinity” or “Inherited Divinity” to emphasive how everyone was playing children of gods, but then one of my players wanted to play a mortal raised to demigodhood, so I had to toss out most of those titles since that character doesn’t really fit with that theme and it is important not to misrepresent something as important as the source of everyone’s powers. That’s kind of a big deal, you know? All of the campaign ideas I’ve got for this general concept involve that in the later stages at the very least. For some, it’s an important part of every major arc of the campaign. I still need to solidify what direction I want to go in, though, so that clarity will come in the future. For now, it is enough that everyone has a divine parent or patron, character concepts and connections, and a rough draft of their character sheet. That’s what I needed most of all during our session 0 and I managed to get through it all by the two-hour mark when one of the players had to leave.
Continue readingI’d Rather Let My Coworkers Waste Our Time Than Bail Us Out Of A Horrible Meeting
I had a testers meeting last week. It was a bit impromtu, but such meetings usually are. My little team of testers is only three people these days, and while we do have an obvious senior tester who should be in charge, he’s not really the commanding sort. The next most senior tester, who has a few years in the job at the company on me (but I might have more total years testing thanks to my job before this one) and is the same “rank” as me tends to be the one to call the meetings. Usually because he’s got a lot of work coming up and knows he’ll need some help from someone else because our lab assistant (who usually helps him) won’t be available or because it takes a degree of expertise the lab assistant lacks. It helps him to sit down and talk through all this stuff when he needs more than just one-off help, which is why he calls most of these meetings. My other coworker and I just call on each other as needed and talk through that kind of stuff on a day-to-day basis, but we share a great deal of expertise and can ask each other to do things without worrying about how well it’ll get done. Which, unfortunately, is not something we can expect from this other guy since he has done his best to avoid learning anything about the deeper aspects of our testing over the years whereas all three of us are fairly proficient in most of his testing. Beyond that, we also have status update meetings from time to time, just to get together and talk about what’s going on and what’s coming up, but we haven’t done any of those meetings in a while because it has been pretty much the same stuff going on for over a year at this point.
Continue readingGetting Back To Work And Thinking About The Future
I’ve been taking it easy for about a month now. Maybe a little more than. After we found out that the final release meeting of my project got delayed until just this past week (as this gets posted), I decided to take my long put-off week of vacation. I unfortunately did it after a full day of work on a Monday, but I still got a decent week away from work by taking the next Monday off. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the fallout of pushing myself as hard as I did and my current medication-induced exhaustion, all of which means that I’ve been avoiding overtime in my work weeks. Mostly by taking days off every week, forcing myself to avoid even doing the “here’s how much overtime I could get” calculous because I can’t get overtime until I’ve got 40 non-PTO hours allocated to a week and I’m not going to work eight “extra” hours without getting my overtime pay. It’d be better to just not use the vacation time in the first place. Anyway, I’ve taken at least one day off each week, mostly dictated by my messed up sleep schedule, overwhelming exhaustion, or my poor physical health. I expected, initially, that I was only going to take it easy for the first two weeks, the ones involving my planned week-off of work, but something has come up every single week since then that has left me with one or more days where I could not force myself into the office.
Continue readingThe Draw Of Greek Mythology In My “Demigods” Campaign
As I’ve slowly gotten my players working on their characters, gods, and religions for our upcoming session zero, I’ve watched as every single one of them has turned to exclusively Ancient Greek Mythology for their frame of reference. Some have even just pulled from it directly. This isn’t a criticism, mind you. Given my own familiarity with ancient Greek mythology, the touchstone of the Percy Jackson series, and the sort of cultural space that ancient Greek mythology holds in the US, it really makes sense that people would gravitate towards this as their first point of reference. A few of them are taking it further, of course, starting at an ancient Greek god or an idea inspired by an ancient Greek god and then departing from that point of commonality, but not a single one of them even went with a known Dungeons and Dragons god of any pantheon (which also includes the ancient Greek gods, I believe, but that doesn’t count). Again, I’m not super surprised this happened, but I am now left facing the problem of how to continue developing this pantheon and world without getting too caught in the various trappings of ancient Greek mythology. I mean, that’s fecund ground to work from, but there’s a little too much rape and misery for the kind of game I’m hoping to run. I want things to be taken seriously, I want threats to have meaning, and I want my players to struggle with the power balance of the world they’re in, but I don’t want to do that by relying on the horrible yet pervasive tropes present in most of ancient Greek (and Roman) mythology.
Continue readingDepression Spikes And Shattered Healthy Habits
I’ve been dealing with the worst depression spike I’d had in years these last few days. I don’t think I’ve felt this bad since I was twenty-four and I was bad enough at that point in my life that maybe two people in all of existence know how poorly I was doing back then. Because that’s what always happened when I get this bad. I got quiet. I stopped talking to people. I stopped writing about it in any quantitative manner and just wrote in generalities, if I wrote about it all (back in those days, I mostly just stopped writing entirely). I would never bring up how badly I was doing out of a desire to avoid worrying people, to avoid taking up their mental space, and because I’m aware that these kinds of waves, the ones that show up and worsen without any kind of trigger, will last until they’ve over and nothing I can do but pass the time will bring them to an end. Which isn’t to say that I had no ability to influence my well-being or the frequency of those kinds of events. Over the years of my adult life, I’ve identified a few factors that contribute to these ways and worked to prevent those factors from coming into play. That’s why I almost never drink and avoid drinking to excess if I ever do. I go on regular walks for a mixture of fresh air, exercise, and sunlight, all of which contribute to a base level of well-being. I regularly exercise in order to create a firm basis for my daily routines, hone my discipline, and get myself feeling physically embodied. I also try to sleep at least six hours a night. If that last one didn’t illustrate the problem I’m having right now, don’t worry since I’m about to explain it in detail.
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