Preparing To Dive Back Into Heart: The City Beneath

Just in time to prepare for our upcoming session, I’ve finished running all of the smaller one-on-one sessions for all of my players from my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath. I feel like I’ve managed to at least partially maintain the game’s tension and even add to it a little bit by giving each character some focused attention (to move their personal plot forward) and by keeping up a steady (if small) stream of information in the Discord server I built for my this group. I still (as of writing this) have a lot to do to finish preparing for the session since I actually know what the group is going to do ahead of time for once, but it’s work I’m genuinely excited to do since I’ve figured out how to tie the stories of all my players together in this moment. Maybe not permanently (the improvisational nature of our game makes that impossible to claim with any confidence), but enough to give us a major inflection point in the overal game as we walk up to and past what might actually be the halfway point of this campaign.

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Suffering At The Hands Of My Parents’ Religious Orthodoxy

As I’ve had plenty of time to myself over the last couple weeks, I’ve been doing some thinking. It has almost been a year since I stopped doing family therapy and was able to make peace with the idea of probably never talking to my parents again. Prior to that moment in late January of 2023, I’d been feeling guilty for cutting them off while they were still paying lip service to the idea of fixing things. Thanks to that incredibly awful two-month period, I was able to confirm that it was just lip service and that neither of them possessed the emotional maturity to recognize their part in the travesty that was my childhood. Since I’ve had enough time to process all that, I’ve been thinking about it again, mostly by way of reviewing in my mind what we talked about and how gaining a better understanding of my parents has or has not changed the way I see some of the events of my past. As I’ve slowly worked through this process (largely deciding that not much needs to change at this time), I’ve found myself thinking that, for all their faults, at least my parents never denied me my humanity. For all they put me through, for all the horrible and wrong things they taught me, at least they never taught me that I was somehow less “human” than other people. However, the more I’ve thought this, the more I’ve started to wonder if this is actually true, or if it is only technically true because they never explicitly used those words or tried to teach that specific lesson.

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On My “To-Enjoy” List For 2024

This is my first post after my vacation. I actually wrote it yesterday (which means that everything you’ve read up to this point was written, reviewed, and scheduled before the 22nd of December), because I was so exhausted that I actually got sick for a bit there. Not with a cold or Covid or anything. Just exhausted enough that I felt terrible in a lot of ways. So, instead of taking a long weekend and making up for my days off by spending a little extra time working in the days after my break, I decided to just not do anything and then, starting the first non-holiday of 2024, write two blog posts every day for a week. It will be pretty easy, considering how much time I’ve had for reading, watching shows, playing games, and spending time with people I care about. All of which wasn’t enough to actually make a dent in my backlog of stuff to read, play, and watch even if it did provide me with plenty of stuff to write about. I did make a pretty significant dent in my gaming backlog, though, so that’s nice. It got bigger though, not long after, since I got games as gifts this holiday season. I’ve got so much to do, still. Well, that I want to do. I don’t NEED to do most of it. I just want to do a lot of it.

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Reflections On Grief And The Future

It probably seems weird to start out a year this way, but I’ve been thinking about grief a lot lately. I lost a grandmother last year and its almost exactly five years since I said my final goodbye to my grandfather a few weeks before he passed away. However, since I’ve had time to mourn and process the loss of my grandfather and had already begun to mourn my grandmother before she passed (since I have been estranged from the family for almost five years and hadn’t seen her since my grandfather’s funeral), there’s all sorts of grief mixed up in there as well. For instance, I grieve the way things are with my biological family. I don’t regret the choice I made (nor do I doubt that I made the correct decision), but I grieve both that I had to make this decision at all and that things might have been different if my family had, even once, done the work they needed to do to show my they could change. On a less dire note, it has been just over ten years since I moved to my current city, a place I expected to be for five years at maximum before I finished paying off my student loans and left to go pursue a post-graduate degree in some form of writing or English literature. I am still paying off those loans and have given up on pursuing a higher education because there’s likely no financially viable path forward for me down that route. I also thought I’d be in a committed relationship of some kind by now, living in a house, and surrounded by my adopted family made of friends and the biological relatives I’ve chosen to carry forward into my future. There are a lot of things I thought would someday be and that now might never come to pass, and I grieve those too.

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Happy New Year!

I’m taking today off writing, so there’s no big blog post today (it is a holiday in the US, after all, and I’m trying to get better at resting when I need it). Instead, I’m just going to remind you that my Infrared Isolation series will start updating again on Saturday the 6th, that you should check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube for some fun videos of hilarious moments from a variety of media (including media that is VERY AWARE of him, often to a hilarious extent). That’s all I’ve got. Happy New Year and I hope you’re taking some time to start the year off in a way you find fulfilling!

The Newest Act In The Modern Circus

Todd, phone to his ear, rifled through a stack of papers. When he found the one he needed, he glanced at his boss’ open door across the room and decided he could probably land it on his desk as a paper airplane.

As he folded, the hold music on the other line disappeared. The chipper voice was deafening after the tinny music. “Hello! Thank you for waiting. How can I help you today?”

“Hi.” Todd shifted the phone to his other ear. “I’m calling to check on the status of an order that was due last week but hasn’t been marked as shipped yet.”

“Ah, let me transfer you to our shipping department!”

“They just-” The hold music started playing again and Todd sighed as he tossed the folded report through the air onto his boss’ desk. Howard, also on the phone, quirked an eyebrow at Todd who shrugged as he turned his attention back to the email he’d been writing when Howard had asked for the report.

As he wrapped that up, a delivery woman stepped out of the stairwell. Todd flagged her down and pointed toward the meeting room next to Howard’s office. When she hesitated at the door, Todd called out “just go in. It’s just a group project.”

Todd shifted his attention back to his inbox before the woman had even touched the doorknob and started sorting through the messages that were piling up while he was stuck on the phone.

Instead of answering any of them, he took a moment to breathe and switched his attention to a different document. As he reflected on his attempts to punch up his resume in order to avoid getting another job like the one he’d grown to hate, he wrote “professional juggler” down under his Other Skills section. 

Ending 2023 On A Positive Note

I wrote a couple days ago about how I do not really care for all my year-in-review things that have been cropping up all over the place since they mostly just remind me of the incredibly varied and emotionally draining year I’ve had (and I’ve had more of these things crop up since then that just further cemented this unfortunate pattern), but I wanted to take some time to end the year on a more positive note. I spent all year writing about my struggles and what made the year difficult, often in broad strokes that brushed aside all the positive stuff that actually happened, so I wanted to take some time to paint my year in review by connecting all the bright spots in a way I rarely take the time to do. It is, after all, so much easier to be miserable. Still, I think it’s work worth doing before I wrap up 2023 (well, aside from one last piece of Flash Fiction that will be posting tomorrow) and maybe it will help lift my mood as I prepare myself for whatever heaven or hell 2024 will bring.

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Practical By Necessity

The other day, as my team at work was eating our traditional holiday Qdoba lunch, our boss asked was what we were planning to get ourselves for Christmas (at 32, I’m the youngest person in the group, so this is mostly adults with grown children or older adults without children with two other exceptions beside myself). We bandied back and forth a bit, talking about upgrades to home theater systems, parts for a boat someone is building, good suppliers for smart home appliances or gear until the conversation began to stymie and I tossed out my answer. Since my PC is about eight years old and can’t play more and more modern games (the latest updates to Cyberpunk2077 upgraded it out from underneath my ability to play it), I’ve been saving up for a new high-powered gaming computer and will just be tossing a bit of money that way rather than buying myself anything specific. One of my coworkers joked about Gamer LEDs, water cooling systems, and overclocking computers but, once we’d gotten all the jokes out, I said I was planning to buy a computer strong enough that I wouldn’t need to overclock it for the stuff I wanted to do since I could just save a bit longer and not potentially shorten the lifespan of my computer by putting too much stress on it. My boss commented that I’m so practical, which was probably just an offhand comment in his mind, but it’s been stuck in my mind ever since.

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A Warm Start To Winter

Aside from a two-day period of low temperatures, high winds, and biting cold (it was so windy on one of those days that I was almost knocked over by a particularly vicious gust and I’m difficult to even stagger, let alone topple), it has been a fairly mild December so far. Most days, the temperature spends a decent chunk of the day above freezing, there’s some sunlight, and my wall AC/Heater unit is enough to keep my apartment comfortable against the chill. Sure, we’ve had an oddly rainy and grey parcel of days lately, with occasional periods of snow sprinkled in for flavor, but it’s been kind of nice, especially compared to last year. Last year, it was so windy and cold that it permanently damaged the aircraft transportation network in the US (and almost made me miss my trip to Spain due to the cascading ripples of the week that so many flights were cancelled rather than rescheduled). This chilly, wet, and sunless weather might not be welcome, but it sure beats the pants off how awful last it was this time last year. I actually had to buy firewood and go through my plans for what to do if I lost power because I’m pretty sure my apartment would have frozen if I’d lost my ability to heat it against that drafty cold. So I can put up with this, even if I’d probably be better insulated against the cold and wind in my current apartment than I ever could have been in my previous one.

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