For the first time in what feels like YEARS (and is definitely at least “years” if not “YEARS”), I started running an actual dungeon in one of my Dungeons and Dragons games. For a long while now, as I’ve tried to explore more expansive storytelling and dealt with groups more interested in narrative than mechanics, I’ve avoided putting my players in what one might consider a stereotypical dungeon. I’ve had some dungeons, sure! I had my players run through a dungeon-esque wizard’s tower that was actually a testing site for traps and puzzles to be used in other dungeons. I trapped my players in a nightmare realm where they had an “ever-renewing” eighteen hour period to solve the puzzle of this time-and-space-locked demiplane. I’ve even made proper dungeons that wound up not getting explored by my players because they chose a different route forward. I think the last time I had a proper dungeon was back in 2019 or 2020, the last time I had a “classic” Dungeons and Dragons group with a “classic” mix of characters played by players who were interested in what it meant to be a D&D Party and to play their classes, specifically. Which is a bit funny to admit because, once upon a time, I loved nothing more than a good dungeon. I was scattering those things every which way. You’d think that would have still happened even in my more expansive play style now, if it was something I cared about, right?
Continue readingCoping With The Specter Of Human Fragility
I mentioned in last week’s “welcome” post about the stress I was dealing with as I was forced to confront the fact that the products I work on and test are zero steps removed from the potential to cause significant structural damage, debilitating injury, or even death if things go wrong enough or are used deliberately incorrectly. It was all for a presentation that didn’t REALLY go the way I’d hoped it would–either completely silent as everyone grappled with the fact that the Specter of Human Fragility loomed large over all the work I do or vocal recognition of the same–but I have also been thinking about it pretty much ever since. Not constantly, mind you. I’d be pulling my hair out if I was constantly thinking about it. I can put the thoughts away for a time now that the presentation is over and I don’t have my usual anxiety constantly bringing it to the front of my mind. Which has made me wonder why the presentation made me anxious enough to think about the potential for harm inherent in my work while the potential for harm inherent in my work doesn’t seem to register nearly as much. I’ve also been polling my coworkers about how they think about it, if they think about it all, and how they handle the thought all the while. Most of them seem to handle it much like I do (just not thinking about it/working to ignore it) and the few deviations aren’t particularly remarkable in their deviation. None of us are immune to the thought. None of us are uncaring. We all live with it in our minds as we each work through our parts in making sure something horrible never happens, but it doesn’t seem to weigh on any of us particularly heavily.
Continue readingFrom A Dry Well
I like to think that most of my serious metaphors are pretty apt, but I don’t think I’ve tripped and fallen into one so completely apt as this one. It is rare when life’s metaphors line up so perfectly with life, but I’ve never been the sort to let a moment like that go by unremarked. I wrote this after almost six months without writing any poetry, which is a long time for me to go without writing at least SOMETHING, regardless of whether or not it might see the light of day, so I think you can see why it might have struck a chord with me as one of the first things I wanted share when I finally moved my blog to a home where the host isn’t going to sell my data to some “AI” company…
Continue readingFamilial Separation Around The Holidays
This is my fifth holiday season since I separated myself from my biological family. It is also the first one where it has started to feel like my two siblings and I have started to build some kind of tradition around our celebrations. Things haven’t changed much, between the family holidays of years gone with our larger biological family and how we celebrate them these days: we gather at someone’s residence, bring food to share, cook a bunch of food for the event, and then eventually separate. There’s usually more stuff in there that we’re still kind of working out, though. We try to gather for longer periods of time, spending at least one night wherever we’re celebrating, so we can spend time with each other outside of the harried cooking, eating, and then cleaning of the larger holiday meal. We also try to find other little things we enjoy to include, like watching movies or TV shows (which is our primary form of social contact for most of the year: gathering on discord to watch a movie or some episodes of a TV show), or bring forward other traditions from our mutual past that we want to be able to still enjoy, like taking the time to build Lego sets on Thanksgiving morning or eating sugary cereals on Christmas morning. We’re still very much figuring out those kinds of particulars, but we’ve hit the point where we’ve at least settled into a couple options at most and are, as far as I can tell, just waiting to see what sticks.
Continue readingSaying Farewell To Old Electronics
I really dislike electronic waste. I work for a company that produces electronics (coming up on my eight-year anniversary in about a month, actually) and I’ve never much cared for how much stuff gets thrown out. I have a cell phone that is over six years old because it still works alright and I don’t want to add it to the collection of useless old devices I’m holding onto because they’re all too old or too broken to be donated to any charities or to be given to anyone but I don’t want to just toss them out. I am still using a TV that is about a decade old and wasn’t even a very good TV at that, back when I got it, because it still works just fine and I don’t want to add it to my growing collection of TVs that sit in various rooms of my apartment should I ever, for whatever reason, want a TV in that room. I gave my old Switch away to a friend rather than sell it because it was old, heavily used, and I didn’t know how much more life it had in it. I still have all my old iPods. I still have all my old CD players and stereos. I don’t throw electronics out because I don’t want them to be added to the ever-growing piles of electronic waste, but I’m rapidly reaching the point where this kind of behavior isn’t sustainable anymore. So, when I built my new computer in July, I had no where to put my old computer, no desire to continue using it for anything, and I didn’t want to just throw it out.
Continue readingTwo Months Of Physical Therapy Later, I’m Mostly Sleeping Better
I’m about two and a half months into my physical therapy and sleep recovery efforts now. As I’m writing this (a while ago, actually, but I’ve done a more thorough editing pass to get it up-to-date), I’ve finally hit a point where I was able to sleep for seven consecutive hours. Which isn’t as much as I’d like, of course, but it’s nearly double what I was getting back in September and early October, when things were at their worst. Also, while I’m still waking up due to pain and soreness, I can now go do a few stretches and then go back to sleep for another two or three hours. Or least I could back when I was getting a maximum of six hours of sleep at a stretch. I’ll have spent the last few weekends trying (with mixed results) to get as much sleep as possible since the week before US Thanksgiving (the second-to-last week of November) was physically draining in a way I haven’t experienced in years, as was the week after US Thanksgiving, but that was very clearly due to work stress in a way that the aforementioned week wasn’t. I managed to get several nights of quality sleep while I was away from work, but I’ve still been dozing off at my desk every single day so it clearly wasn’t enough (or wasn’t of sufficient quality) to make me actually feel rested. As it turns out, since there is an unfortunate intermingling of issues I’m dealing with, I’ve hit the upper-limit on how much sleep I can get and the worsening of those intermingling issues has actually started to cut down on how much sleep I can get, thanks to the once-again-worsening back, shoulder, and now general joint pain I’ve got going on.
Continue readingWelcome To My New Home!
I really thought this would be a painless process, but between needing to figure out what features to add via community plugins, how to replicate my original blog as closely as possible, and trying to get my domain transferred, it was actually a constant source of stress and a giant pain in my ass for over a week. A week and a half, really. Turns out that getting domains transferred away from WordPress .com sucks because they’ll drag their feet about it, their listed support email doesn’t actually exist, their instructions are wrong, and their actual domain service website seems like a scam since it lacks anything even approaching the level of polish I’m used to seeing on the rest of the WordPress website. It was harrowing, but it is done now. Everything is cleaned up and put where it should be, or will be as soon as I find out that it is out of place. Turns out that it’s kind of hard to do that when you’re doing to be swapping domains around again after you’ve built your website. Especially when you’re writing the “everything is good now, welcome in!” post when the domain transfer has yet to actually go through and you’re still worried you might need to take down and put up your blog again for some reason when it finally does go through. This crap sucks. Thankfully, it’s all done by the time you’re reading this, so at least Present/Editing Me has that going for them, even if Past Me is struggling to feel cool about it.
Continue readingThe Only Constant In Life Is Change
This post is going up a little late and largely unedited because I ran into a few hiccups during my blog transfer process. Well, technically it is the Domain transfer that ran into issues, but I spent six hours on Saturday doing the whole blog transfer thing and there were plenty of hiccups in that process, so I’m comfortable generalizing. The thing is, since I own the domain broken-words.com, I want to continue using it at my new host, but that means transferring the domain between difference domain services. It’s a thing you can do, but the domain service that WordPress .com uses is incredible obtuse and difficult to use since there’s two places you can edit settings but each place only lets you edit certain settings. Which means that the transfer I attempted to do before leaving Wisconsin for Thanksgiving failed since the step-by-step guide I was following actually skipped a bunch of important steps. Turns out that the dirtbaggery of WordPress .com extends to trying to leave their service (who woulda thought?). So, while I have already gotten my blog set up at the new place, it’ll be undergoing some maintenance over the next few days, when the domain transfer finally goes through. I don’t want keep posting to a site that I’m going to have to potentially do a lot of work on, so I’m going to take a few more days off from posting (this next week), build up my buffer again (it shrank further because last week’s cleaning and then travel left me no spoons or even time for writing), and spend a little time making sure my new website is set up the way I want it to be.
Continue readingMy Website And I Are Both Travelling This Holiday Week
Well, I’m finally on the verge of getting four whole blog posts ahead [well, I was close… this week’s cleaning has crashed into my exhaustion, so I’ve done little beyond making my apartment nice and clean so far]. I’ve managed to slowly build up a three-post buffer (this post is maintaining that, not building on it, but I’ve got a topic and everything picked out for the next one and enough time to get it done today [this was incorrect]), but I’ve got a bit of a mix-up coming what with US Thanksgiving and visiting with my sister and our sibling. Which means this is the last post for this week since I’ll be taking tomorrow and Friday off to spend time with my family and not lose the buffer I’ve been painstakingly building these last few weeks. It’s been a real busy week, as I’m writing this, so I haven’t been able to make much progress on the goals I’ve set out for myself in last week’s post. I have spent some time doing research for where to host my blog and I expect that, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have most of that set up or at least figured out. I’ve only got a couple more weeks until my current plan on WordPress .com expires and I’m sticking by my decision to not given them any more of my money, even if my mind has been wavering. It’s not easy to go to self-hosting and I’m already so tired, so burned out, and so low on energy to do anything at all, so making the process of blogging any more difficult or complicated than it already is might just leave me unable to keep up with it’s demands. I mean, right now, I’m barely able to balance work and blogging on top of getting some amount of necessary rest in my evenings, so more steps aren’t going to make it any easier…
Continue readingPassing Time With TCG Card Shop Simulator
A week ago today (the day you’re reading this and six days after I’m writing this), I stopped resisting my desire to buy any kind of new game to help me get over Dragon Age: The Veilguard and bought a game I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks now. I’d thought to buy it last month, but I was busy with Dragon Age: Inquisition and couldn’t afford any distractions. I was already distracted enough, thanks to being neck-deep in Dragon Age stuff and Veilguard just around the corner, so I let it pass and figured that, by the time I thought of it again, I’d probably be over my incredibly surface-level interest. I mean, I’m not one for simulator games and TCG Card Shop Simulator is just another entry in a long line of incredibly similar-looking games, so why would this one hold my interest in a way that literally none of the others ever have? Other than, you know, being introduced to it by watching two members of Friends at the Table have a great time playing it and it being focused around not only something I have personal experience with (trading card games, which is what TCG stands for) but something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about (game shops). So, last Tuesday, while in a fit of malaise and depression, I bought the game and immediately lost three hours of my life.
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