As part of my on-going quest to listen to all of A More Civilized Age, I finally started watching Star Wars Rebels and I gotta say that I’m hooked. I’ve actually been watching episodes of the show to unwind in the evenings rather than just to keep ahead of where I’m at in the podcast. I’ve still got my problems with the show, sure, but it currently sounds a lot more fun to me than more endlessly working through repetitive open-world stuff in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which isn’t saying much because that stuff is so boring that I fell asleep five minutes into trying to play through the open-world portions of the ninth chapter and haven’t been able to convince myself to go back since then. I know my runway is just about to disappear since AMCA only made it through the first season before they shifted to playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic so they would stay compliant with the various union rules about struck productions, companies, and media from last year. I’ve got the three-part season finale left to watch and I’m probably going to watch it tonight since I’m way too tired to force myself to work through more boring desert-y open world junk in Rebirth. I’d just immediately fall asleep if I tried that and I need to make it until at least ten or eleven tonight before I give up on staying awake.
Continue readingSolo: A Star Wars Story Was A Fine Romp
After a few years of avoiding it because I heard it wasn’t very good, I finally saw Solo: A Star Wars Story. To be completely honest, part of me was avoiding it because I didn’t care for the name of the movie and I was worried that seeing Donald Glover in it would impact my feelings about Community. I set all of that aside, though, because good old A More Civilized Age watched it between wrapping up the Post-Season 6 But Pre-Season 7 Clone Wars material and starting Star Wars Rebels and I wanted to be able to follow their massive episode. Plus, it’s not like I’d heard Solo was bad, just that it wasn’t actually good. So I watched and listened to AMCA talk about it and, you know, I think it was actually pretty alright. It might be the fact that I watched it between watching Dune Part 1 and Dune Part 2, so almost anything would seem good in comparison to those two movies, but I did genuinely enjoy my time watching it. It was a fun romp, even if it lasted way longer than it should have and maybe had a little too much going on, so much so that I got an hour in and just kept checking the time remaining after that because I had literally no sense of how far along the movie was, in terms of time or plot. Still, all of those too-many parts were at least a little fun and while there’s definitely some problems with the movie, none of them were bad enough to really take me out of it.
Continue readingBringing An Old D&D Character Back For A New Shot At Life
It will be at least another week yet before I start playing in a new (to me) Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign. I thought we might start last week (the day I wrote this), but one of the players wound up being busy and the fact that this game is specifically a campaign wrap-up means that we really can’t play without someone. I mean, they could probably play without me since my character is being introduced pretty late into the campaign (as part of the game’s revival and conclusion), but I don’t think they will. Not after inviting me to join them and everything. Luckily, thanks to an early pandemic game that didn’t last very long, I had a character who already existed in the game’s world so I could just level him up, kit him out, and then work with the Dungeon Master to figure out where he existed in this world a little bit further down the timeline. It even works out thematically because the campaign in which this character first appeared was about slaying a dragon that had its own cult and this campaign wrap-up is about a campaign of dragon slayers who accidentally let part of the soul of an evil undead dragon escape from the magic crystal they’d been trying to protect. As it turned out, not all natural twenties are good things, especially when it comes to the targeted application of a Dispel Magic spell. A natural twenty on that could do a lot more than you intended.
Continue readingLooking Back On Three Years Of Eye Problems
It has now been two years since my eye problems were largely solved and over three since they began. I’ve mentioned it once or twice, but the original problem was mostly in the early stages of maintenance once my blog was up and running, even though it kept coming back a few weeks or couple of months after I finished treatment, despite my best efforts. For the last two years though, I’ve been taking a daily pill and putting in a sorta daily eye drop as the specialist I saw was completely unable to actually diagnose what had happened but did prescribe me the eyecare he determined I would need to care for the symptoms with the note that things would probably clear up on their own eventually, so long as I didn’t ignore the symptoms. Given that ignoring the symptoms could result in blindness (partial or full), I have been pretty motivated to keep up my routine over the years. After all, daily-ish eyedrops and an actually daily pill are a small price to pay to keep myself from going blind in one or more eyes, even if I still absolutely hate putting anything in my eyes despite the over three years of exposure I’ve had to the process. I’d rather confront that fear and discomfort every day than lose my vision.
Continue readingThe Dune Movies Would Be Better If They Were Shorter
I do not normally consider time wasted so long as it didn’t have a negative impact on my life. Sure, doing my taxes isn’t fun and is usually very stressful because I get a clear picture of how much debt I still have, but it’s not a waste of my time. Cleaning my apartment isn’t a waste of my time. Commuting isn’t a waste of my time. Writing detailed notes to myself about things I’ll definitely remember isn’t even a waste of my time. The two Dune movies, though, are definitely a waste of my time. I didn’t dislike them so much that I consider all five and a half hours I’ve spent watching them both a full waste of my time, but it’s difficult to feel like they were anything but that when each of them was at least an hour too long. I think they could have trimmed at least that much out and wound up with a pair of movies that would have been better for it. I mean, there were definitely some enjoyable bits in both of those movies (way more than in the books, my review of which is going to take a while longer to write since I don’t feel particularly motivated to write more about it than I already have even if I feel like it would do me some good to get the thoughts out of my head and written down somewhere) but as I only slightly jokingly told a coworker today, Zendaya can’t carry a movie that big all on her own.
Continue readingThe Struggling Lower-Middle Class Artist As Seen Through Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands
Between everything else I’ve had going on (include falling behind on Animorphs books because I’m too tired to stay awake reading most nights), I read a book recommended to me on Cohost called Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant fame). The user who wrote the post held it up as part of an example of the great talks Beaton gives since she doesn’t just discuss the book at hand. In the talk that user shared, Beaton took the themes of the book as the starting point and talked further, focusing on the way that class impacts the arts and how a person’s conception of a place doesn’t necessarily reflect the place so much as it reflects the person. Even a person’s experience of a place can sometimes reflect them more than the place they’re at because if someone excepts a ruin, they will find a ruin. If they expect a garbage dumb, they’ll find a garbage dump. The Cohost user brought in some examples from their own life, mainly focusing on how they dislike the common depiction of gas station attendants as vapid wastrels with no prospects who are sometimes even depicted as being a waste of space. Those jobs need to be done and a lot of people doing them are more than just their job. There’s a lot more to people than their situation or the brief context in which you see them, for good or for ill, and one of the things that Beaton’s autobiographical graphic novel does is examine that idea through her experience working off her student debt via jobs in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.
Continue readingThe Descent Into The Rotting Heart Ends With A Slow Fade
Last night, after several months, many delays, and little bit of ad hoc scheduling, my remaining two players and I wrapped up our campaign of Heart: The City Beneath. Both remaining players hit their zeniths, we wrapped up the last trailing bits of story, and then did a post mortem since the player whose character had died/zenithed-out last session was around and available. It was a long night for all of us since we moved back our planned start time an hour, used up the the entire hour and a half of game time we’d set aside, and then wound up talking through the end of the game and what we’re going to do next for another hour. I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of all that and still am a full day later. Still, I’m glad we got to do it and I’m looking forward to a relatively quiet weekend without needing to run any games (though I will be playing in one, most likely, and doing some preparations to play in yet another game). I could use a bit of a break this weekend, after the last few weeks I’ve had, especially because I’ve got a new game to start preparing.
Continue readingWarm Feelings And Even Warmer Weather
I’m doing better this week. I’m still depressed, exhausted, and burned out, but I’m feeling a bit better about it right now than I have in a while. Work is still busy as hell and I’m still struggling to get enough sleep most nights, but it all feels so much more manageable, even during a week when I did a bit too much over the weekend and didn’t end it feeling much more rested than the week prior. As I’ve gone through a very busy and exhausting day at work that has nevertheless felt much less emotionally taxing than previous similar days, I’ve been thinking about why that might be. Not that much has changed, after all. I’m still not getting as much sunlight as I’d like and maybe less than ever since the warm, almost-summery weather we’ve been having means I can’t take my midday walks at all and the time that the UV level has finally dropped enough that I can safely take my walks has progressed passed 5pm. Sure, I’ve had my tabletop games more regularly than usual, but that can also be exhausting. I haven’t had the time to figure out a solution for my desire to continue blogging without supporting a company that would sell my work to a plagiarism machine. I haven’t even gotten to the point of being able to fall asleep at a better time most nights since the rise in ambient temperature has made it more difficult for my apartment to feel comfortable and cool at night (and I refuse to turn the AC on when temperatures are dropping into the 50s overnight. It just feels too wasteful). So, if nothing has changed, why do I feel better about all of it?
Continue readingLasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory
One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
Continue readingStarting To Party With The Party In The Magical Millennium
After two skipped sessions, we finally returned to playing The Magical Millennium. When last we left our beleaguered students, it was their first day of magical classes and they’d survived a harrowing encounter in the lunchroom. They’d breezed through their first day of classes–aside from that one disastrous lunch period–even earning a commendation from the teacher of their Adventuring Class for a stellar performance, and then went their separate ways at the end of the day, united by their experiences, the assignment that they perform as a party, and the single group chat one of them put together. It took three sessions, but we’d finally finished the first day of school!
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