I haven’t written about many podcasts (something I’m sure to rectify in the future, given that I was positive I’d written about more than four of them), but I’m incredibly fond of the ones I HAVE written about, enough so that you should go read about them right now! There’s not a lot there and it won’t take you long, but that’s okay! That’ll leave you more time to listen to two of my favorite podcasts, A More Civilized Age and Friends At The Table! There’s plenty of both for you to listen to, so you better get started!
Today’s Focus Is On Grief!
I’ll be completely honest: it feels weird to put an exclamation point at the end of that title, but I think some of my best blog writing and poetry has been about grief in the myriad shapes and forms I’ve experienced it over the last five or so years. It is a very relatable emotion since everyone loses someone eventually and while I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest I’ve tread new ground in my reflections on grief, I would suggest that this expansive emotional experience is the one I’ve developed the most healthy relationship with. While I’m recommending pretty much everything under the tag if you’re up for some writing about the various forms of grief and how we process it, often through the lens of my experiences, I’d recommend one post in particular: Grief And Personal Revisionist History. I wrote this post on the day of the previous monarch of England passed away (and, coincidentally, exactly one year to the day before I’d be attending my grandmother’s funeral) and is probably the best thing I’ve written about grief in general and how an unhealthy relationship to it and loss can warp our views of the people who have passed.
The past decade has been full of grief for a lot of people, as we’ve seen drastic changes in our country–often to the detriment of people who are already treated as less-than–as we’ve lost (and continue to lose) millions of people to a pandemic that capitalist society has deemed the acceptable price of continuing to do business, as I’ve lost the one person that made putting up with my biological family worth the effort, as I’ve grappled with my decision to separate myself from all but two members of my biological family, and as we’ve all struggled to grapple with the trauma of the last four years specifically. There’s so much to process, so much to grieve… It’s no wonder that this tag includes some of my most-read posts. If you wind up reading, I hope it brings you some solace, comfort, or food for thought.
Today’s Focus Is Creative Non-Fiction!
To start off the time that I’ll be fully away from home (rather than just preparing to leave it), I thought I’d recommend my Creative Non-Fiction category. This link also include a a sub-category I call “descriptive,” which are just bits of writing focused on describing something rather than telling a story. The descriptive bits often include stories, but not always. Sometimes I just had an experience I wanted to share or a moment I wanted to capture and the main vehicle for me doing that is via the written word. There’s plenty of 2018 and 2017 stuff that I did not look at very closely because it pains me to spend too much time contemplating my old writing, so I can’t say how good any of that is. The rest is decent, though, so I hope you enjoy yourself!
Recommending My Own Writing While I’m Away On Vacation
Today is the first day of my much anticipated vacation! I’m busy running errands, packing up my car, and getting ready to go on this trip, so I don’t have a proper blog post today (those will resume in a little over a week, on July 1st). What I do have is a bit of information about what you’ll see over the next week!
Continue readingMy Entire Career Contained Within An Hour Of Me Being Unfortunately Correct
One of the most frustrating experiences I have far too often at work is that I am ultimately proven right about something. It happens often enough that I stopped keeping track, but apparently not often enough that anyone remembers how frequently it happens. That or they’re just ignoring it because I haven’t gone and rubbed anyone’s nose in it. As much as you might think otherwise, given my propensity for predicting bad outcomes and the frequency with which my warnings are proven out, I don’t enjoy telling people that I told them so. There is little joy in those moments for me since I don’t particularly appreciate seeing other people struggle or suffer, and I get little satisfaction from having been correct that something bad would happen when that bad thing has happened. Usually, there’s lots of work to do and my life has suddenly become more difficult as I either have to lend a hand to clean up whatever mess (literal or metaphorical) has been made or have to find a way to still do my work in what has become a shortened timeline. I don’t have the time to bask in being right and everyone is usually better served if I don’t point out how wrong they were, how right I was, and how they should listen to me in the future. People’s feelings get hurt by things like that and it usually makes people less likely to listen in the future, not more likely. That said, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I should be making a point of it more often than I do.
Continue readingI’ve Accidentally Gotten On The Hype Train For Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Despite a years-long (nearly decade-long, actually, given that it started in the year or two following the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition) effort to avoid getting swept up in the hype for a new video game or movie, I’ve fallen victim to the excitement around the latest entry in the Dragon Age series: “The Veilguard.” I missed the initial announcement, so I was a little late to last week’s party, but I apparently follow enough Dragon Age fans on Bluesky that I couldn’t help but run into people talking about it. Since it initially seemed like not a whole lot of information, I decided to take a peek. From there, I’ve slowly slid from my place of peace and balance to my current position in the deep end of the Hype Pool as people keep talking about it, as my book club and I turn toward playing through the Dragon Age franchise, as the Dragon Age social media accounts post more and more about it, and as I’ve slowly given up on trying to keep my cool. After all, I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age games since one of my friends in college got super excited about the second one and introduced me to the series as a result (for which I will forever remember her, even if we’ve fallen out of contact at this point). I have plenty of other series that I’ve enjoyed more and franchises that will always get me to buy the next game, but there’s nothing quite like the release of a new Dragon Age game to get me excited about video games. An excitement that, unfortunately, doesn’t always last past the start of playing the game, but which is still fun to indulge all the same.
Continue readingMissing Fire Emblem? Give Unicorn Overlord A Try
I’d heard a lot of alright reviews of Unicorn Overlord. There were plenty of bits that people seemed to love, some that seemed like they were inserting their preferred headcanon and some that was just people sharing the bits of the game they loved most. For example, there’s an exchange between two women in one of the early encounters that is easily read as incredibly gay. It isn’t a stretch at all and while I’m skeptical of actual lesbian representation in this game, I would be surprised to find out that this relationship isn’t canonical. Needless to say, short videos and screenshots of this exchange made their rounds on the internet in the weeks following the game’s release, which is how the game caught my attention. There’s some later interaction that lend to this kind of read as well, but still nothing that actually outright says it or demonstrates it. Shortly after those images and gifs went around, the absolutely delicious food you can get at taverns in the game–as part of the relationship building mechanics of the game–started showing up in screenshots and helped tip my opinion in favor of trying the game out. It all looks so delicious! Not quite like food in a Ghibli film, but close enough that the comparison is deserving. What really hooked me, though, was learning that it was basically a Fire Emblem type game but with different battle mechanics and a better gaming experience than Fire Emblem: Engage provided in early 2023. Which is a low bar to clear, in my opinion, but an important bar given how much I love those kinds of strategy games and how disappointed I was by Engage.
Continue readingIntroducing A Prologue Into My New Dungeons & Dragons Game
As I promised last week, I’ve now run Session 0 for my new Sunday Dungeons and Dragons campaign (which I do not have a name for, yet). The group has talked through a little bit of what we’re interested in doing and while I still got the same caveats I had last week, the things I expected to fly under the radar have flown under the radar. It’s not that I’m hiding that the whole world of this game is a metaphor for climate change and any stories that take place within it must necessarily grapple with that world-defining thing, I just didn’t explicitly say it. I did talk a bit about the state of the world and how things will likely go in it, but I forgot to mention that this world isn’t really something that can be fixed as many high fantasy D&D games might expect. There’s no going back, only forward. The players might improve things for a lot of people or find a way to prevent things from getting too much worse, but the tipping point has been passed and all that remains to be see is how long it takes for the rubble to settle and who gets taken down with it. And to continue living, connecting, and building community all the while.
Continue readingThe Harmful Continued Cultural Relevance of Dune
I don’t like Frank Herbert’s Dune. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about the movies or my previous post about disliking Dune, you know this already. In fact, if you just want my general thoughts about the book, you should read my post about my dislike for Herbert’s first novel and leave it at that. This post is a much more specific discussion of what I disliked, why I disliked it, and why I think Dune should be left to collect dust in the period of history in which it was first published.
Continue readingMy Impending Vacation
In a week from tomorrow, I’ll be going on vacation. I’ll have some errands to run in the morning, including getting a blood test and doing some grocery shopping, but then I’ll be loading myself up for a trek northward to spend some time in a cabin in the woods with two of my siblings and one of their partners who’ll actually only be there for part of the trip. It’ll mostly be my siblings and I. I’ve also got additional time off of work after that, for post-trip recovery, resting up in my place of ultimate comfort (such that it is), and probably trying to get through my massive backlog of books, movies, and video games. A week of escapism, in as many ways as possible, followed by a week of rest and reordering of my life in whatever ways I can think of while also playing a bunch of video games, reading whatever books I’ve got left from the first part of the trip, and probably watching Delicious in Dungeon since I should be all caught up on A More Civilized Age by then. The possibilities are not exactly endless, but they’re pretty enormous, considering most of my two-week vacations over the past decade have been in the winter, around the holidays, and have suffered from the emotional angst that goes with them. This time, it’s all summer and all freedom to rest or do whatever. Maybe I’ll even stream! There’s so much I could be doing.
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