Daisy plopped onto Emett’s bed. “Now that I’ve explained the entire saga, what’ve you been doing lately?”
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Sensible Precautions In A Wisconsin Winter
It is snowing as I write this. It is not the first snow of the season–that came after Thanksgiving, falling after midnight in a powdery coating that lingered for days, even through warmth and sunlight that should have sent it away. It is the first snowfall that happened during what could generously be called daylight hours, though. A light, gentle dusting that will stick mostly to the snow left over from a week ago as the brined, salted, sanded, or grit-covered roads force whatever lands there to vanish swiftly. There will be more snow, soon, at least according to the forecast, and we have reached the time of year where it will likely stick until we get another mid-winter heatwave of temperatures in the fifties [which has already happened]. Snow in a brown winter can be a deceptive thing, lingering longer than you would think as the regional draughts isolate it so long that it has no choice for survival but to hide in unseen corners and mix with dirt until the muddy slush it becomes is finally melted down by the weight of its disguise. It can last weeks, maybe even months if its cold enough, but people who desire some semblance of the frosted winters they recall from years past will often seek it out and, like a flower plucked for a vase, bring a swift end to something that might have lived longer on its own.
Continue readingBack To Baldur’s Gate 3 Again
Larian, the studio behind the incredibly popular and much-nominated-for-game-awards Baldur’s Gate 3, released a new major patch to the game today (well, a week ago today). There’s a whole lot of stuff in that patch, but the thing I’m most excited for is the opportunity to return to my only complete save file and beat the final boss again so I can see the epilogue they’ve added! My main criticism of BG3’s ending was how abrupt it felt given that you sorta just get through the final cinematic, see a couple other scenes, and then it’s over. No idea who followed up on what and how anyone is doing since, like, the last I saw of Asterion was him running from sunlight as it slowly burned him to a crisp. So now I can go back and see how it all wraps up an appropriate in-game six months after the final battle! I’m very excited for this, which is important because I still haven’t gone back to playing ANY of my other BG3 save files since I stopped playing after hurting my own feelings with how evil and awful I was in my Evil Dark Urge file. I’m finally almost ready to get over that. Ready enough to update the game, anyway, though it might take a bit for me to actually play it since I’ve still got Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars and Spider-Man 2 to finish [I actually played it for too many hours the day after I wrote this and haven’t stopped playing it since]. And Armored Core VI at some point, though I might not make myself wait until after I’ve played that since it’s entirely possible that I might just not really enjoy it. I still haven’t played more than the first level and a couple training things.
Continue readingThis Is About The Scott Pilgrim Graphic Novels And Definitely Not About Burnout
After last week’s post about the end of National Novel Writing Month and my goals for maintaining my writing habits going forward, I feel kinda bad writing about my continued deep and abiding exhaustion. Being at work has been draining, as it always is, and I’ve found myself frequently feeling spread too thin. Doing too much is kind of my defining character trait at this point, since I can’t really seem to figure out any other way to live my life and do the things I’d like to do. There’s just too much that I need (or desperately want) to do. So, I’m going to talk about the thing I bought myself as a treat for being a Responsible Adult (aka, doing all my DIY and cleaning projects before people showed up for Thanksgiving) and then read during my post-Thanksgiving recovery weekend. I finally decided to buy and read all of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. Specifically the large color ones. This has been on my to-read list for at least a decade at this point, but I usually just forgot about them (my reason for not buying them in the past five years) or didn’t have Graphic Novel Money when it came to buying books (you can get more book per buck with a paperback and I spent a lot of years needing to manage my entertainment budget very closely). I mean, I really enjoyed the movie and one of my closest friends loved the graphic novels, so it felt long overdue. Plus, I got a huge Black Friday discount on them despite ordering them over a week before Thanksgiving, so that helped. It also helped that there was a Netflix show that recently released and I figured I ought to read the graphic novels first.
Continue readingWhen It All Falls Out In Heart: The City Beneath
In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game from here on out), things finally came to a head and then blew up. A bit literally. Turns out the “message” one of the players was supposed to deliver was a bit of a weird cursed energy bomb meant to disrupt the efforts of a capitalist extraction machine masquerading as a public benefits science corporation. They, unfortunately, went to deliver the message first and then went looking for other stuff, so they got a bit caught up in the blast as it went off. They survived, thankfully, one of them without even getting hurt in any way (my players roll their own stress and the result the delivery peron rolled was equal to the amount of protection they had, so they took no stress) and the other was only hurt in a way that made a great plot hook. This was, if you remember my last post, the Office crew, who were down their most capably violent member because the player couldn’t make it to the session and he had a beat that was going to take him out of the action anyway, so they’d just come out of a situation that should have gone very poorly for them but didn’t go TOO poorly. One of them picked up a bunch of fallouts, but they were all fairly minor things that should be fixable. I will definitely need to make sure they get more loot, though, since they did a lot less body-looting than I expected them to do.
Continue readingStill Having A Wild Time In Wildermyth
After most of a year away from the game, I’ve returned to playing Wildermyth. My return from this extended absence was prompted by the group of people that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with on Fridays suggesting we play Wildermyth as a fun activity we could all do together. We even had one pleasant but incredibly late session of it, though we’ve since struggled to get together to continue playing. I suspect this will be a bit easier than scheduling a D&D session, on account of it taking less time to play in general and Wildermyth’s ability to be easily shortened or stretched to fit into whatever time we’ve got. I don’t expect us to play it weekly, by any means, but hopefully we’ll be able to return to the game we started before a full month has passed. Also, while waiting, I can continue to play by myself. It’s tons of fun to play in multiplayer mode, but still almost as fun to play in single player mode, so I’m beginning to slip it into my regular gaming rotation again. I’m also, once again, discovering that it is incredibly addicting to play and that it is incredibly easy for me to lose track of time while I’m playing it. I’ve already had a couple nights where I stayed up way too dang late to play it and I’ve only been back to playing it for a week as of writing this post.
Continue readingBackup Your Backups
Lin tapped on the keyboard. She didn’t expect the melted computer to boot, but she felt obligated to try.
Continue readingReflections In Post-Holiday Silence
After just over three full days of hosting (about seventy-three hours), my siblings have left and I am alone in my apartment except for the occasional quiet cheeps of my bird, Fidget, who is both missing the noise and attention of the last few days but also relieved that there are far fewer humans wandering around in her view. Which is, in its own way, a little bit like how I feel. While I am much more relieved to have the silence than I am missing the noise and attention, I do miss it a little bit. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to have people around all the time. Incredibly exhausting, but nice. Nice to say good night to people as they went off to their beds and nice to know there would be people around when I woke up. Sure, the only time to myself I got during that whole three day period was either bathroom trips or when I’d tuck myself away in my writing closet to continue hacking away at my various writing projects once everyone had either left for the night (my sister’s partner and her friend were both staying at a nearby hotel) or otherwise gone to sleep, but it was also nice to have people to talk to. I’m definitely ready for a weekend to myself, though, especially knowing I’ve got some pre-planned social activities to help prevent me from getting too lonely and melancholic (both of which are tabletop games).
Continue readingConsenting To Being A Part Of A Digital System
I’ve been thinking about the various systems of the world around me, mostly digital, and my place in them. For instance, under a different name (a username), I’m one of Google’s top 10% of reviewers for pretty much every major category they track. I have achieved this mostly by writing clear, sensible, and informative reviews of three to five sentences that touch on all salient points of the business I visited. I fill out all the information I can, answer a question or two, and move on with my life. Sure, that seems like a lot, but when you consider how few places I actually go and how infrequently I actually go anywhere (unlike most of the US, I’m still actively aware that I’m living in a pandemic and avoiding any unnecessary risks in public, indoor spaces), I am writing maybe a dozen of these reviews a year. And that’s enough to get me into the top ten percent. In a completely different direction, I went back to a pizza place for the first time in many months and then got eight emails form the business (with no repeats) in the next twenty-four hours. I got more junk email from them than I got for Black Friday sales in the same time period. It was intense and unnerving. Made me want to never go back again because they seemed to sense my return and, rather than actually offering me things, keep trying to get me to spend money on them without providing any incentive beyond the exchange of money for pizza.
Continue readingThe End Of National Novel Writing Month 2023
Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.
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