As Dean watched the puppy parade move across campus, he felt his eyes begin to well up with tears. He heaved a watery sigh as he pulled out a small packet of tissues and wiped at his eyes. As he tucked the rest away, he glanced around. Most attention was focused on the puppies, but there were a few people scanning the gawkers, clearly more interested in cute people than cute puppies.
Continue readingHuman Interaction With The Environment In Scavengers Reign
Spoiler Warning for Scavenger’s Reign. I’m going to be going into detail about the plot and major events of the show in most paragraphs except the one immediately after this one (to hopefully prevent you from accidentally seeing any spoilers before you can read this and can click away if you don’t want to read about what happens in the show). Also, before you read this post, you should probably check out the spoiler-free review from last week to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Also, Massive Post warning. This baby might take you half an hour to read.
Continue readingHappy Thanksgiving!
I’m taking the day off to spend time with my siblings and, aside from cooking a huge meal, take a break for a day. So, instead of a full post, I’ve got some suggestions for people looking to escape today. If you can only read stuff, I suggest checking out The Order of the Stick for some D&D themed fun and Erfworld (which has mostly shuttered for the time being, but the full comic is still up for viewing, which is where the link SHOULD take you) for some fantasy-themed fun that quickly turns into incredibly complex story telling with a great deal of heart and (intermittently, due to the main artist needing to focus on her family’s health rather than work) beautiful art. If you’ve got video and audio access, check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube! Every video is excellent! If you need to chew up more time, check out Drawfee for some friends making art together! Sort by popular or just scroll until one of them sounds interesting! You really can’t go wrong if you like seeing artists work (though, personally, I’d definitely recommend the Drawtectives series, my absolute favorite thing they’ve done). If you’ve only got audio, I suggest checking out Andrew Bird’s music for something cerebral and chill or Bug Hunter for something upbeat, fun, and sometimes emotionally difficult but still beautiful.
Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t forget, all colonialism is bad and genocide is even worse even though they’re almost always found walking hand-in-hand! Work to fight against their influence even today as we in the US celebrate a story we made up to attempt to make it seem like our entire country isn’t built on murder, pillaging, and the destruction of other cultures!
Riding The Coattails Of One Very Productive Day As NaNoWriMo Wraps Its Third Week
Well, it’s almost midnight the day before this post is due to go up and I’m only now writing it because I forgot, until this very moment, that I still needed to actually write something for tomorrow/today. Good thing I decided to do a little writing to end my very long, very busy, very social, and very fun day. I am exhausted and really considered just going to bed. I was certainly tired enough an hour an a half ago to consider doing it right then. Now, my kitchen is clean, my apartment is mostly clean, and I’m sitting tucked away in my closet-turned-office to do my daily writing because my siblings are bedding down for the night and I don’t want to keep them up with my light or my noise. Which, thanks to a really over-the-top day last Friday, I only have to do just over a thousand words to make my count. I’d really love to double down and insist that I only include words on my actual NaNoWriMo project, to keep the “Infrared Isolation Chapters” train rolling along, but I’m now twenty-two days into the month and I think maybe a fifth of my total word count for this month is for writing that isn’t going up on my blog. Which, on one hand, really just goes to show me how much writing I do most months. On the other hand, though, it really isn’t in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month.
Continue readingCorporate Takeovers And Vibe Shifts In My Game Of Heart: The City Beneath
In the latest session of Heart: The City Beneath that I ran with my every-other-Sunday group, they completed their first full delve (well, technically second, but the first one had training wheels on it and was more of a “learn to use the system” tutorial than a proper delve). Since they’d figured out the final puzzle at the end of the last session, they were able to do just a couple quick rolls to wrap it up. One of the players had a beat that required gathering resources in such a way that set the delve back and managed to roll the same number for both the stress they inflicted on the delve and the stress they added to the delve, which was hilarious to see. That note was immediately followed by a sour one (for the players) who emerged from their first delve to find out that the mysterious fallout one of the players had acquired in a previous session had caused the landmark they were heading towards to be transformed from what they were expecting into something they weren’t. Which, in our game, meant that they found an entire base of corporate goons where they were expecting only a handful hanging around the periphery of a thriving community of other delvers. This was fitting since the person who most wanted to avoid the employees of this corporation (called 3Q) was the one who got the landmark-transforming fallout, so it was a punishment for them specifically, but I managed to slip in a few things for my other players. All-in-all, it was a great moment to mark the start of the session.
Continue readingSpider-Man: Miles Morales Is A Huge Improvement On A Great Game
Just a quick Spoiler Warning that there will be some details about the plot of Spider-Man: Miles Morales in the latter half of paragraph four, but I really just wanted to get a pet peeve off my chest. Plus, the game’s three years old, so I figured it would be okay, especially since Spider-Man 2 spoils even more than I did in its recap of the events of the first two games.
Continue readingThe Itch
Lennard lifted one carefully trimmed fingernail to his neck and dragged it across the skin. The scrape shuddered through his body, briefly offering reprieve from the drone of his coworker who had launched down another useless tangent. The relief was momentary, though, and the burning demand to act returned worse than ever. If he kept scratching, maybe he’d be able to put that moment off long enough for Zach to get tired of talking.
Continue readingCell Phone Thoughts
I used to wonder why I never saw my cell phone in my dreams, or why I never even thought about it while dreaming. Then I was grateful, since it meant I could escape it’s constant presence in my life. Now, I wonder if it’s been a part of my dreams all this time, just in a way I didn’t recognize because the parts of it that matter in the way that dreams matter seemed so similar to my own thoughts.
Continue readingLife, Survival, and A Strange New World In Scavengers Reign
Every so often, I find some new bit of media that feels so unlike everything else I’ve seen that it fills me with wonder. When I was a kid, it was Lord of the Rings and Narnia. The Legend of Zelda. Halo. Nowadays, now that I’ve read more and seen more, it happens less frequently. Since I studied literature and storytelling, it is very easy to draw lines between things, to find the parallels and the threads that bind it all together since even the most original works still draw their ideas from a well of experiences and past media exposure. Once you know how to look, it gets easy to see echoes of the past in the stories of the present. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you. All storytellers take the things they’ve seen, heard, or experienced and use them as fuel to power their creativity, taking it all and turning it into something new that still reverberates with their past influences. That is true of all stories, no matter what. Sometimes, though, the story being told brings in new things that inspire wonder if only because they’re just so different. Reading the first novel in The Stormlight Archive was one such experience like this. It was a fantasy world filled with creatures and basic worldbuilding conceits that were entirely unlike anything I’d seen before. An entire world that seemed to have developed from crustaceans’ and shelled creatures. Reading my first Discworld book had a similar effect, but for the method of storytelling rather than the worldbuilding. And now I’ve experienced it again, with the show Scavengers Reign.
Continue readingWe’re Halfway Through National Novel Writing Month
Well, now I’m two weeks into National Novel Writing Month and while my work days aren’t as incredibly hectic and busy as they were during the first week and a half of November, the rest of my life has picked up the slack. I’ve been preparing to host two of my siblings and two friends of one of those siblings, plus we’ve had a bunch of more solidly cold weather come through, so I spent all of last weekend doing some projects around my apartment to weather-proof my bedroom door so I can keep that space cold and warm up the rest of my apartment for my guests. I mean, I also enjoy a warm apartment, but my tolerance for the cold is much higher and my preferred apartment temperature is much lower than most people I’ve met. I just really enjoy being under blankets and I’m much too warm for that unless my environment is in the low sixties. Which, you know, is much lower than the upper-sixties and low seventies that I know most people prefer, at least in terms of the experience of the temperature. So I cut and put down some carpet remnants to insulate the floor and help protect my downstairs neighbors from the sound of extra feet (I walk incredibly quietly for someone my size, so I was putting this task off until I actually had other people around), put up some weather stripping around my bedroom door, and really just strained the muscles of my lower back. Apparently, I’ve gotten too old to be crawling around on the floor with reckless abandon like I was while cutting the carpet to fit around the support beam for my staircase and tightly to the door frame at my bedroom door (so it could fit under the door in order to block all the air that used to pass through that gap).
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