As I can snatch a couple minutes here or there, I’ve been spending my spare time and brain power on gearing up for another Dungeons and dragons campaign. Apparently, that’s all anyone–aside from one of my players, anyway–wants to play these days and as much as I want to play different games, I’d rather play D&D than nothing. It’s not like I can’t enjoy this, after all. I’m here for the stories. I just wish I had the opportunity to tell different stories and to play with a group of people more interested in the broad range of stories I want to tell. I already need to keep this one a little more limited than I’d like, focused on story elements that aren’t analogous to problems we face in the real world since one of my players has specifically requested that, along with no more fighting the personification of abstract and awful concepts, like capitalism. Not because it didn’t work out the last time I did it, but because this friend doesn’t want to encounter a real-world problem we can’t actually fight in the real world. Which is a huge limitation since there’s tons of interesting story ideas that allow people in a D&D game to fight something we, in the real world, can’t fight. I get this player’s meaning, though, so I’ll do what I can to comply, but there will be some amount of real-world issues involved because I can’t imagine running a game for very long that DOESN’T have some kind of real-world analog.
Continue readingWorn Out By Workplace Whack-A-Mole
I was talking to a friend about how busy work has been, describing it as playing whack-a-mole with problems that keep popping up because the core issue causing all of them is the one mole that just won’t stay whacked. It was a bit of a humorous moment, given the odd phrasing, but the expression has stuck with me since then. I genuinely don’t think any other way of putting it would really capture the entirety of the situation. After all, it isn’t just that we keep finding new problems, dealing with them, and then immediately finding more problems, sometimes at a pace that we can’t keep up with, but that there’s an absurdly farcical quality to a lot of this work since we know that none of these problems will stay fixed until we figure out the issue at the core of them. It feels like playing whack-a-mole and then getting frustrated because the moles won’t stay whacked. We just don’t know how to fix the core problem, so all we can do is endlessly work through symptoms of it and hope that we eventually figure enough of them out that the game can end and we can move on to a different part of the project. It is a daunting and exhausting prospect to be working on, physically and mentally.
Continue readingParty Plot Twists In The Magical Millennium
After a month that felt so much longer than a month, we’re finally back to playing The Magical Millennium! I’ve missed this group a lot, even though I’ve managed to find ways to stay busy, so I’m glad we had enough people still available to meet. One player, a doctoral student in the middle of probably the busiest part of her doctoral program, hasn’t been able to make it for the last two sessions, but I mostly just feel bad that she’s so busy and swamped with her work that she doesn’t have the time to relax and do things like playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m sure she’ll free up eventually, but I definitely missed her presence during the last two games. We’ll have to figure out what her character was up to at the party while everyone else handled their first party of the year with what has mostly amounted to success. Sure, there were some flubbed rolls in there, but I’m always looking for ways to let my players fail forward and it was pretty easy to do here. This time, my players tried to sneakily follow some of their peers, jumped off a roof into a pool, made some friends, and even had a fun mix of inter-team conflict and bonding. It was a really great session, even setting aside how happy I was just to be back playing this game again.
Continue readingThe Longest D&D Campaign I’ve Ever Played In Has Ended
My occasional Thursday night Dungeons and Dragons game has finally come to an end. A weird end, if I’m being honest, but an end. Which feels pretty fitting, all things considered, given the basic premise of the campaign, the way we rarely had consistent players, and how quickly things devolved on the mechanical side of the game despite the Dungeons Master’s attempts to use a ruleset he’d found online to better balance out the way the game is built against the way we were playing it. Our campaign of battles ended not with a final climactic fight against some supreme foe but with a solved puzzle that ended a glorious battle that wound up being a bit of a pushover once we all committed to fighting it during the two hours of our three-hour session time since we solved the puzzle in the first half hour of actual play and decided just to do an “alternate ending” where we fought everything just to use up all the time we’d scheduled.
Continue readingCarrying My Doubt Filled Present Into Pride Month
It is incredibly easy for me to pass as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man. Other than being white, I’m none of those other things, but the only way to get anyone to see me as anything other than that is to actively force them to acknowledge my self-described identity. One of the reasons I’m not out at work, beyond the things that some of my coworkers have done or said that make me believe they might not be the most accepting people, is that I’m just not sure I’ve got the energy to constantly correct people. When I came out to my friends, the ones I’m still friends with didn’t take much work to correct. Most of them were in the practice of using pronouns other than he/she in their daily lives and while some of them slipped up (and some still do), they catch and correct themselves most of the time. As far as I can tell, none of my coworkers practice using a wider-range of pronouns and none of them self-correct themselves. One of my ex-coworkers (for whatever reason, probably my years of isolation within the company, default to thinking of the people on my team as my coworkers and everyone else as fellow employees) who transferred off my team back in early 2021 uses they/them pronouns like I do and I constantly have to correct my coworkers when they come up in conversation. I do not expect that my coworkers would be any better when it comes to me and my pronouns, especially because I look exactly like your average Midwestern Cis-Hetero White Guy.
Continue readingClosing The Door On KotOR (For Now)
After what feels like a month and might have actually been a month (it took about 45 hours of gameplay, not counting time lost to reloading old saves to get around glitches and save file corruptions), I’ve finally finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The end of the game was mostly as I remembered it, except that it was so much easier this time around because I’d built a combat-functional character instead of one that relied on skills to be useful to the three-character team and a combination of mines, flight, and the one-medpac-per-turn-via-the-inventory-screen feature to win the final boss fight. Which was almost frustratingly easy this time around, as was pretty much every fight. I just loaded up on buffs and unloaded on ever enemy I came across. I rarely bothered to control my allies, even, since what actions they took largely didn’t matter since all I had to do was move from foe to foe, mowing them down with my dual-wielding powerhouse that slapped the final boss down in two rounds of attacks (since I didn’t bother using Critical Strike to potentially get that down to one turn). At least it wasn’t the nightmarish fight I remember from my youth, though I’ll say that there’s actually a lot of fun to be found in that kind of fear and suspense.
Continue readingThe Future Fallout Media Would Sell Us
I started watching the Fallout TV show and it has me thinking about the future the Fallout series envisions. Unlike a lot of other post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the Fallout media doesn’t take place until decades or even centuries after the disaster has occurred. The on-going danger of said disaster has fallen to reasonable levels and while things aren’t pleasant for anyone who lives in the world, it is tolerable. More in some places than others. Throughout it all, though, is the constant messaging of humanity being doomed to repeat its past mistakes via on-going abuses of what power remains, conspiracies to hoard resources and technology for those deemed “worthy,” and the constant strife of people struggling to survive when there’s only so much to go around. All of which is a bit farcical once your suspension of disbelief ends or you start thinking about the world and its stories outside of the context of the video games they were originally created for. I mean, I enjoyed the episode of the show I saw and I still plan to watch the rest of it when I’ve got the time (and access to a PrimeTV account), but thinking about the way the narratives shift to accommodate what we’d expect from a TV show has really highlighted the ways the series doesn’t really work for me on any kind of deeper level. At least in terms of post-apocalyptic ideation. I still enjoy playing the games and will probably enjoy this show.
Continue readingGrilling Is The Reason For The Season
One of my favorite parts of the warmer months is backyard cookouts. I grew up with a father who enjoyed grilling and would grill at least once a week throughout the warmer months of most of my childhood (a habit that faded as I got older) and the act of grilling out has become indelibly printed on what my idea of “summer” is to the degree that I just don’t feel like it’s actually summer unless I’ve gotten a chance to grill out at least once. Or to eat when someone else grills out, as is most-often the case because I’ve lived in apartments all of my adult life and only one of them has allowed grills. So I’ve done what I can to guarantee myself at least one grill-out per summer, to make sure I get my fix, but sometimes that doesn’t happen until the end of the year. It really depends on when my local home-owning friends are available and what they’re up to on major US holidays, birthdays, and random nice weekends during the summer. It takes a lot of stars-aligning for grill-outs to happen without extensive planning, but they’ve been known to happen. I know that when I get my own house and have a basement/garage freezer for storing all kinds of extra stuff in the longer-term, I’m absolutely going to be the Spontaneous Grill-out Person. Someday.
Continue readingPreparing To Rest On A Long Weekend
It always feels a little paradoxical to me that I have to put so much effort into my attempts to rest and recover. This weekend, as I prepare for four days away from work, I’ve planned out the cleaning I will do, the groceries I will need, what activities I’ll have each day of my break, what errands I’ll run and when, and what treats I will allow myself as I invariably don’t want the food that’s in my apartment. I have pretty much everything planned out other than what time I’ll go to bed. Frankly, it was way more work to prepare for this weekend than I expected and I’m genuinely a little worried that I’m not going to get as much out of this weekend as I’d like. After all, I’m more burned out than ever, I’ve started getting bad lower back pains every time I sleep for more four or five hours at a time, and my entire body hurts despite doing what I’m supposed to do to counteract the two medications I’m taking that cause body and, somehow additionally, joint pain. It’s exhausting and I’m not sure taking a weekend to rest will actually do anything but leave me feeling like I’ve wasted a bunch of time doing nothing or like I’ve somehow gained nothing for the time I’ve spent. The latter of which might happen regardless, given my record for disasters striking post-vacation [here I am, editing this post on my second post-vacation day at work during what was supposed to be a chill week and disaster has already struck twice…], so it’s difficult to relax.
Continue readingRevisiting Knights of the Old Republic Two Decades Later
I’ve once again reached a branch in the saga that is listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age. This time, I’ve begun playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on my PC, for the first time in years. KotOR, as I’ve mentioned years ago, was the game that made me fall in love with RPGs. It is also one of the few games I didn’t replay post-high school since it went “missing” at one point after my brother came home from college for a vacation and then, when I got it on Steam as part of a Star Wars bundle, I just couldn’t get into it again. I played it so much in high school that I’d basically memorized the entire game and I was pretty much the only person I knew who was really into Star Wars stuff so I had no one to talk to about it. There was nothing to keep me there. Which has all changed this year. Now, one of my closest friends is more into Star Wars than I am and my current podcast listening focus is a podcast all about Star Wars media that played through the game themselves! How could I not replay it? I mean, I could have tried to wait for whatever remake is going to happen (which, as of an interview in April of 2024, is still being worked on), but it has been several years since it was supposed to be done the first time and it spent most of the time since then looking like a dead project, so I’m not expecting that to ever bear fruit. Instead, I’m playing the old, kinda janky version of the game (with no mods so I can get the unadulterated experience) and having a blast most of the time.
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