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.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Modern Game Opinions Poisoned By Rampant Nostalgia
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.”
Continue readingReading The Animorphs For The First Time: Part 1
One day last December, while incredibly bored at work, I stirred up some drama in a discord server I’m in by admitting that I had no idea what a “warrior cat” was and, as that started to die down, that I’d never read any of the Animorphs books. Since most of us grew up in or after the 90s, I discovered that I was one of the few who had never been exposed to either sprawling franchise and, since I wanted something fun to do, I suggested we do a book club centered around reading all of the animorphs books in a single year. Someone drew up a schedule, another person shared a link to a freely available PDF of the books (which had been shared during the early days of the pandemic, when everyone desperately needed something to do and parents struggled to occupy their children), and I briefly tried to get everyone to figure out if we were going to do a proper full book club or just post our reactions to things. Since we landed on just posting reactions, as I was apparently the only person who explicitly said they wanted to discuss the books as we read them, I’ve felt a lot less motivated to keep up with this largely solo experience. Despite that, I’ve managed to mostly keep up with the schedule (we’re reading book 8 this week, after having read the first seven and then the first “Megamorphs” book) and I’ve had disappointingly few conversations about what we’ve read so far.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 23
I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in my evening game time for the last month or two. I’m trying to re-experience the game without all the urgency I felt last summer and to take the time I feel I need to explore and enjoy it more fully. So far, it has been a better experience. I’m frequently lost and unsure of what I’ve been doing or have already done, but having the Hero’s Path means I can at least check where I’ve physically been. That, plus getting the Korok Mask and Sensor upgrade much, MUCH earlier this time around means that I’m reasonably confident that, for everything but my first twenty-to-forty hours of this file, I found all the Korok seeds and Shrines in those areas. Being on my second pass of the game means I’ve been able to more specifically target my efforts. I can easily prioritize the stuff I encounter because I already know how most it will turn out and I can more directly tailor my nightly gaming experience to what I want. Some nights I focus on shrines and filling up my map of the Depths with marks for lightroots. Some nights I spend trying to explore the depths in a fun but still efficient manner (so it stays fun to explore them rather than getting tedious like it did in my first playthrough). Some nights I focus on running quests, filling out my map, or just exploring interesting looking ruins. It’s a lot more fun this time around, even if I’m not as excited about it as I was the first time around.
Continue readingNo New Infrared Isolation Chapter Today
I’m taking a week off to help rebuild the buffer of chapters I once had. The whole thing vanished due to the business of December and January and while I’ve finally got time and energy to write again, it isn’t much and I’m not going to have a chapter done with enough time left to edit it myself, much less ask someone else to look at it. So I’m taking a week off. I’ll be working to get my buffer back in place and to figure out some kind of sustainable writing routines for these multi-thousand word writing projects. I don’t exactly double the writing I do for this blog (by wordcount, anyway) with each of these chapters, but only if you consider the average. I’ve defintely done that more times than I’d like to admit. It’s a lot of work to write, edit, review, and then edit again for each chapter, but this is the process I’ve got and there’s no way I’m posting anything as faulty and poorly edited as the chapters I originally wrote in 2017 and 2018… No, these will be done well, according to my current standards.
Anyway, if you need something to do, I suggest checking out the Poetry category or just browsing through old posts. I’ve written about so much over the last two and a half years that I’m sure there’s some hidden gem you’ve never read. Too bad wordpress doesn’t let you sort by things you’ve never read… Honestly, just type some keywords into the search bar and, as long as they’re specific enough, you’ll find something interesting to read. See you all next week for chapter 31!
Motivation And The Little Things That Irk You
In my last apartment, I spent a year and a half being woken up way too early during the warmer months by sunlight streaming into my apartment through the blinds on my eastward facing windows. I thought to myself on numerous occasions that I really needed to do something about this fact so I could sleep in late enough to get some proper rest (especially after my insomnia resurgence in January of 2021) and just never did anything about it. I had already put up all the curtains I owned in my bedroom and I couldn’t close the door because I needed the AC from the unit in my living room to reach my bedroom in order to sleep at all, so I didn’t have a ready-made solution I could implement. Eventually, after I was starting to come apart at the seams, I finally did something about it. It took all of an hour, including the forty-five minute trip to and from my local Target to buy curtains and a curtain rod, to solve the problem. I got to sleep in the next morning and went from struggling with how much light was streaking into my apartment to being able to control my environment again in a way that allowed me to priortize my comfort and well-being. Following this event, where I realized I’d been cursing a problem I could easily solve with a little effort, I swore to never let myself be that miserable about something so easy to solve for that long ever again.
Continue readingYou Can Accomplish A Lot In 10 Hours If You Can Focus
Today, after a few days of slowly circling the drain that is worsening burnout, I realized I had to find a way to stay focused despite how tired I’m getting and decided to skip straight to pulling out the big guns. I’ve been putting it off for a while now, since I don’t always enjoy the experience, but there’s no arguing with how effective it is when it comes to keeping me on task and at least marginally focused on fairly straight-foward work. So, rather than deal with the various thoughts swirling around my head about my job, my work hours, how I feel about doing this work, and literally anything else that might normally occupy my mind, I blasted them all away by subjecting myself to the ten-hour version of the He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah video (officially titled “HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA” but no one I know calls it that). I started the video shortly after I started work and have left it running all day, taking my headphones off when I need to be capable of complex thought and leaving them on while conducting rote tasks, doing simpler thought work (like writing this blog), and running the hours and hours of tests I need to do today. So far, I’ve kept my sanity and managed to be more productive than any other day this week, despite being four days into this parade of mounting exhaustion.
Continue readingWaiting Beneath A Heavy Silence
I spent most of my idle thoughts today thinking about someone I haven’t spoken to in almost nine months. I have a lot of people from my past that I haven’t spoken to in various lengths of time, most of them greater than nine months, but this one occupies me in ways that the rest don’t. Most of the rest of these long silences are the result of walls I built or deliberate choices to make a change in my life that took me away from people. Some are the notable ends of long-running and incredibly unhealthy codependent relationships that I was unable to change for the better as I changed for the better–it takes change on both people’s parts to better a relationship like that and I’ve only ever been able to control my own behavior. Some were relationships I ended because they were unhealthy for me, because the other person only ever took from me, because it was clear I could not rely on them when it really mattered, or because I simply grew tired of needing to overlook the ways they frequently hurt me without ever learning to treat me better. Some just faded into silence as time and distance took their toll. Only one was because someone else set a boundry and I have kept my silence for these past nine months out of respect for their request.
Continue readingCome To Palia For The Chill Farming MMO And Stay For The Intricate NPCs
Last September, I wrote about the end of a tabletop gaming group and, in the last paragraph, mentioned that I regretfully couldn’t get into a game, Palia, as much as my two friends were. Oh, how the times have changed. Mostly for me, since my two friends are just as into Palia as ever, but I’ve been getting into it more and more over the past month and finally hit the point where I was playing it by myself, even when they weren’t online, which is the sign that I’ve stopped playing a game because my friends are playing (which is a perfectly fine reason to play any number of games and the main reason I’ve played pretty much every single massive multiplayer online game I’ve ever played) and started playing it because I enjoy it. Not much of the game itself has changed, aside from various quality-of-life improvements, additional story elements, and some expansions to the core aspects of the game (it is still in pre-release development), but I’m currently enjoying it more than I have before. It took me a couple weeks to figure out why, but as I finally locked into the gameplay loop over the past few days, I was able to figure out what about this game has caught me this time around.
Continue readingMood Music For Themes And Villains I Might Never Use
When I start building out a world for a tabletop game, if there’s a particular feeling that I’m trying to achieve as part of that build, I will usually create a playlist to help me zero in on it. I’ll do the same thing for villains, sometimes, though I tend to avoid it since I generally want my villains to be a framework with some goals and ideals that will be given greater detail and a final shape through their interactions with my player characters (however remote or limited those interactions are). I make playlists a lot more as a player, usually one for every major step along the path of my character’s journey that go from being vague ideas to solid, smaller playlists as I hit those major beats and see what shape they’ll take, but the practice that started as a player in a D&D game has grown far beyond that point. I’ve relied on it as a part of my worldbuilding and NPC development more heavily in recent years, as I’ve moved away from standard fantasy worlds and instead built worlds to reflect past failures (from when my weekly Sunday game had a Total Party Kill and we decided to start a new game in the distant future of the world they failed to save) or to reflect specific themes (like the one I built and adapted to first a Heroic Tragedy D&D campaign and then to a game of Heart: The City Beneath). For these more thematically focused worlds, the playlists have been super helpful in reminding me of the tone I’m supposed to be setting as I flesh out bits of the world my players are about to encounter or create things out of whole cloth on the spot as I run the sessions.
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