For the first time in maybe the whole campaign, we had an extended roleplaying scene between one of the player characters, the party’s Artificer, and one of the teachers at the magical high school (Adak’s Academy Of Magic). This happened a couple hours into the lock-in, as the rest of the party sifted through the aftermath of their previous encounter with the brother of one of the other player characters (the party’s Bard) and then moved to join the screening of Shrek. Rather than join them in doing something they felt was pointless, the Artificer snuck off to work on a personal project in one of the magic item fabrication labs and was found out by a teacher who proved to be more sympathetic and understanding than maybe the Artificer had expected. Once the two of them had talked it out, the Artificer rejoined the rest of the players in the gym since the party had left the Shrek-themed movie room when Shrek had finished to playing volleyball against some of their classmates in the open gym. They played another game of volleyball and we wrapped up our session with a bit of chitchat afterwards. Other notable events include a quick but momentous B-plot during the “catch the Artificer up on what had happened during the previous session and then talk about the revelation that the Bard’s brother had been part of the group that had accidentally started the growing anti-magic movement” segment, a quick hack of volleyball rules that wound up taking much longer than expected, and a long post-game discussion of whether or not the Group B party was there to play the part of character-opposites that the party (Group A) would need to eventually kill. It was a pretty great game and the first time I felt like I was absolutely at the top of my game since early August. In short, it was another great session with this group.
Continue readingTaking A Day Off: The Ups And Downs
You might think that, given how much I’ve been struggling to sleep and how I’m still fairly recently returned to the land of full consciousness and awareness after more than a month of forgetfulness and grey fog, I would take it easier on myself at work or even make use of my ample time off to cut myself some slack at work rather than continue to push myself to do as many fifty-hour work weeks as I can physically handle. You would be wrong, unfortunately, since my whole fifty-hour schedule exists for a multitude of reasons, only some of which have to do with the demands of my job. Sure, there’s tons of work to do and I currently need a bit more time every day to do the same amount of work that I used to do in shorter weeks, but I also need to cover my rent, buy groceries, and pay my bills as a single adult living alone. It’s expensive to do that in my city and in this modern era. I can’t tell you how many times my coworkers have expressed shock at how my monthly rent payments are higher than their mortgages because I stopped counting years ago when it became spiritually exhausting to hear that common refrain. So, in order to have any kind of comfort and to live in a space that won’t make me feel trapped and miserable constantly, I work longer weeks and have to carefully ration the weeks when I don’t get my ten hours of overtime since they inevitably result in a significant drop in income. It’s usually better to take full weeks off than partial ones since I won’t be getting overtime anyway, unless the day(s) off in question is a holiday, so I can actually get an extended rest. After all, if I’m not going to be able to get overtime for the rest of my days (I’d merely avoid the need to spend paid time off for taking a day away from work), what does it matter to me, financially, if I’ve worked some or all of the days in that week?
Continue readingPolitic Advertisements Are Like Intrusive Thoughts I Can’t Silence
I have not gone more than six hours without getting some kind of text, email, or mail advertisement about the upcoming presidential election. If we throw in general online advertisements, then I haven’t even gone an hour (and I know I should start spending less time online. It’s a difficult habit to break, but I’m getting there). Sure, both of these numbers exclude time I’m asleep, though even that time doesn’t change much if I include my dreams since I still get political advertisements invading those as well. Which is a wild thing to be happening considering I’ve still never once dreamed of being on the computer or using my cell phone. It’s mostly billboards in my dreams, but I also still get mail and hear people talking about the upcoming election, so I really can’t escape it except when I’m sleeping dreamlessly and you don’t really experience that passage of time so I refuse to count it. I probably wouldn’t mind as much if every single one of them didn’t assign absolutely dire and earth-shattering consequences to voting for whatever person the advertisement doesn’t want me to vote for. I already know that this election will have dire consequences and it’s abundantly clear that both results will probably have dire consequences because this is the US I’m talking about and we haven’t had an election that wasn’t choosing the shiniest of two turds (to quote an Epic Rap Battle of History that gets stuck in my head every election cycle) in longer than my living memory. I mean, I still remember when it was controversial to run attack ads at all and when people began to comment on how often attack ads showed up, but now that seems to be all there is. Endless, direly worded attack ads that are also attacking me.
Continue readingDragon Age: Inquisition Is Stressing Out My Completionist Heart
Originally, I started this post complaining about how my completionist nature felt more like a curse while playing Dragon Age: Inquisition than while I was playing any other game, but then I started making comparisons to and excuses about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and I had to admit that that game, actually, was the one that made me feel the most cursed by my compulsion to do things completely and perfectly. That said, my experience with Dragon Age: Inquisition is no walk in the park, as much as it feels like a walk in the park in comparison to FF7: Rebirth. Sure, I don’t feel constantly stuck and like the only interesting or fun parts of the game are trapped behind horrible, long, and boring stretches of open-world exploration whose only benefit is to provide you with the crafting supplies you need to use a crafting system that feels like it was built solely to justify the expansive, open, and empty maps of the game, but I definitely feel like there’s way to much junk to do in this game. I’m about forty hours into the game as I writing this and I’ve only just finished the first major plot (the first face-off with Corypheus and the destruction of Haven). All because I’ve spent so much time trying to do side quests, collecting resources, gathering influence, and trying to make sure I’m well-enough supplied to make all my own armor and weapons because the stuff you find usually pales in comparison to what you can make, all of which requires a pretty significant investment of resources and time. Time you have to spend pretty regularly if you want to keep everyone wearing top-notch armor. Which feels funny to do, considering most of my party members are wearing accessories that I got in the first ten to twenty hours of the game.
Continue readingEchoes Of Wisdom Echoing The Legends of Zelda
I’ve gotten a bit further in Echoes of Wisdom now, far enough that I’m no longer travelling in disguise (which also apparently means being able to unlock additional outfits, as well as the “special” clothes given to the “Priestess of Legend”). What strikes me is that the entire game feels like someone was told to make a Legend of Zelda game where Zelda is the protagonist but the only stuff they can reuse from previous games is the names of specific characters. We’ve got plenty of familiar faces (Zelda, Link, Impa, the King of Hyrule, and even the bipedal pig/moblin version of Ganon) and even a few less familiar and interestingly odd choices from past games (Such as Dampe being an inventor now, rather than a gravedigger, and Lord Jabu-Jabu who is just sort of there, eating people again), but the power left behind by the three goddesses, in three parts, is called the “Prime Energy” rather than the Triforce or sacred stones or medallions or whatever else has popped up as some kind of source of power in the Legend of Zelda games. Which is to say that it isn’t strange that there’s a new kind of power in these games, just that it feels so strange for them to basically describe the three pieces of the Triforce but never actually call it the Triforce. Really, the whole game feels like it’s a shade off from what I expected. Not in a negative way. In an “uncanny valley” way. It feels like a Legally Distinct Legend of Zelda game and I can’t understand why they might have made something like that.
Continue readingHelping My Players Create Some Real Characters For My New Campaign, “The Rotten”
After more missed than played sessions, we’ve finally moved into the preparation process for the full campaign I’m still tentatively calling “The Rotten.” Given that we wound up focusing the game on building and protecting a community rather than far-flung adventures or something like that, the name feels less apt than it would for pretty much any other campaign idea I had. This still takes place in the world I’m calling “The Rotten,” so I won’t change the name or tags until I come up with something better, in which case I’ll go back and fix all my other posts. Gotta keep your tags organized! Other than settling on a general idea, I rolled stats with the two players who were available, talked through character ideas, made some modifications and flavorful tweaks to existing classes, and then ran through the Heroic Chronicle with both players. If you don’t know, the Heroic Chronicle is a system included in the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount Dungeons and Dragons book that is designed to help settle characters into the world of Exandria, of Critical Role. I mostly use it to give my player characters a few built-in hooks in the homebrewed world we’re using, a few extra tidbits of power, and some interesting secrets since rolling on a table is a great way to prompt that kind of thinking in people who maybe aren’t as practiced at it as I am (and that absolutely helps even if they ARE as practiced as I am). I also do a lot of soliciting my players’ opinions, offering ideas, and tweaking the results until we’re all happy, rather than rely entirely on rolls because the players often have at least a concept that they want to stick with and some of those results have VERY specific implications for characters. At the end of the process, I get some built-in hooks, my players get some fun secrets to keep from each other in order to build drama, and everyone gets at least a few interesting little power-ups. Everybody wins.
Continue readingThe Sudden Fall Of Summer Weather
After months and months of summer, fall arrived in a single week. I had my AC on not that long ago and now I have to close my windows because it’s getting too cold in my apartment. And yet we’ve got temperatures in the seventies coming up next week [or in a day or two, as this post goes up]. It has been an absolutely wild Fall, so far, and I’m reminded of that Spring from a few years ago where we went from cold, wet, and snowy to hot and humid in a week and a half in May. We had exactly one week of Spring after a very long Winter and then went straight to Summer. Sure, we’ve had more Fall than that already, and it looks like we’re going to have plenty more as the temperatures change up and down (which is usually a sign that most of the heat it coming from the sun rather than from the weather and prevailing winds), but it was a rather drastic shift to go from weather routinely in the high seventies and eighties that rarely dropped into the fifties to weather dropping below freezing and barely breaking out of the fifties for a few days at a time. It looks like, finally, a couple weeks into October, Fall is here to stay.
Continue readingCoffee Grinders Hate This One Weird Trick!
On the same day (the day I’m writing this as I doze off in my office at home, barely able to keep my eyes open), both my coffee grinder and my kettle briefly met their end. I was able to get my coffee grinder working again by slapping it, but the fact that it failed three times in the few seconds I used it this morning means that I’m on the hunt for a new one [and have already picked one, by the time you’re reading this]. Then, later that evening, I went to de-scale my stovetop kettle and the handle broke right off. There didn’t appear to be much holding it on, in the first place, so I’m kind of surprised it lasted almost a decade. I was able to get it in usable condition, but I’ll need to be very careful with it since the handle is only holding on to one side now, and that’s the side that allows you to detach it from the metal for the purpose of cleaning the spout. I can’t help but imagine myself dropping it or having the kettle, full of boiling water, slip off the handle somehow while I’m moving it from the stove to where my French press is set up. It’s nightmarish, which means I’ll be ordering a new one tomorrow, no matter what. I don’t want to have to use this disaster waiting to happen any longer than I absolutely must in order to get the caffeine I require to survive each and every day right now. All in all, it has not been a great time for my ability to make my daily coffee and quart of iced tea (I got a PERFECT mason jar for the iced tea and the self-sealing nature of it means that loading it up with ice to chill out seals it perfectly for the trip from my apartment to my workplace) and I’m looking to improve my setup now that the appliances I’ve been using have both broken.
Continue readingThe Sleep(less) Saga Continues: This Time With Some Answers
While I took some time out yesterday to write about some good old Legend of Zelda stuff in hope of buoying my mood, it only helped a little bit and most of that got undone by sleeping only four hours again. So, rather than get stuck in a negativity spiral, I’m going to write about what’s going on in a more informative than claiming manner. Or, I should say, I’m at least going to try that. Only the writing of this post will actually tell if I manage it, which is uncomfortably close to the process of going through physical therapy to fix my back problems. All you can do is try and see if it works out the way you want. The parallel is pretty apt, too, since I am a decent writer and am directing this blog post and my physical therapist seems to know what he’s doing, so he’s guiding my treatment in a direction that should help with what he believes to be nerve compression. It sounds pretty tame for what it is, to be honest. Or at least for what it feels like. From what I can gather (and I apparently only get to see my physical therapist on days I’m incredibly exhausted and barely coherent, so my understanding might be lacking), the short of it is that sleeping on my old, bad mattress trained my muscles a certain way and that muscle training means that I’m currently putting a bunch of pressure on the major nerves on the right side of my spine (since I went from sleeping in a bowl with a curve that stretched those muscles open to sleeping on a properly supportive surface that keeps my back level and “tightly” closes those muscles on my nerves for hours at a time). It’s sort of like constantly pressing on the nerve in your elbow–your funny bone–for hours until it becomes painful. I’ve been given some exercises to do to help strengthen and stretch my muscles while relieving the pressure they place on my nerves, which will hopefully be enough to eventually counteract the pressure I’m still putting on them.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 30
The past week has been incredibly rough. I’m actually writing this the Friday ahead of when it is supposed to be posted, because I’ve fallen super far behind on my blog post buffer and just barely managed to keep my streak of no unplanned skips twice in a row. Two nights in a row, I was struggling to stay awake as I wrote at my computer, giving up on any hope for restful activities in order to keep this blog going and my life in some kind of working condition. I managed it and have begun to slowly rebuild my buffer (I will have two posts ready to go at the end of the day), but I’m just barely keeping my feet under me between still struggling to get enough sleep, the physical therapy I’ve started to help with my back, the intense demands of work (which has gotten super busy again), and my desire to have something I can feel proud of (this unbroken blogging streak and this blog as a whole). As such, rather than prattle on even more about how I’m feeling on a day when I’m struggling to maintain even a neutral expression at work, I’m going to talk about The Legend of Zelda and one of my favorite peoples from the franchise: The Zora.
Continue reading