Last night, a few episodes ahead of where I’m at in the podcast A More Civilized Age, I finished Season 2 of Star Wars: Rebels. At this point, I’ve finally caught up to the latest episode of AMCA and will now need to slow down my watching speed to match the podcast’s pace. Which is incredibly tough given where Season 2 ends and how badly I want to immediately stop writing this blog post so I can watch another few episodes at least. Maybe a whole season. Wouldn’t be the first time I sat down to dip my toe into something and wound up watching the whole season instead. I can’t really afford to do that, in terms of my need for sleep and mental, emotional, and physical rest, so it’s probably a good thing that I have something preventing me from diving into season 3. Even though I really want to just turn the show on and keep watching until I’m out of seasons to watch. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stay strong and pace myself alongside AMCA like I originally planned to. I haven’t been this invested in a show in ages, not with the same level of emotional investment and burning curiosity, anyway. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of anime over the last couple years by sitting down each week to watch the newest episodes as each of them was released, but I was mostly just enjoying the ride. This time, with Star Wars: Rebels, I’m dying to know what happens next. Waiting is a genuine struggle and that’s saying something because I rarely struggle with impatience.
Continue readingDiving Into Dragon Age: Origins After At Least A Decade
As I’ve previously mentioned, my book club will be playing through the Dragon Age video game franchise as we collectively prepare for the release of Veilguard (I refuse to call it The Veilguard). Since I’ll be away from my computer for a week, I decided to set aside my Switch and Unicorn Overlord for a weekend and dive into Dragon Age: Origins. It took a while longer than I thought it would to settle back into the game, since I’d forgotten what most of the stats did and what my preferred builds were, but I mostly got that out of the way in the first day by reading build guides and remembering what parts I used to enjoy about the game. I’m still settling in after about fifteen hours of game run time (an unknown amount of which is me getting restless, walking away from my PC to fold laundry, do dishes, make food, and so on), but I’m mostly comfortable with the game again. Despite how much I played it on my old Xbox 360, coming back to it has me feeling out-of-synch with the way the game works. Maybe it’s because of the almost two hundred hours I put into Inquisition, which has a very distinct and different feel to it. Maybe it’s because it has been over a decade since I last played it. Maybe both. Regardless, trying to get back into this game has me feeling like I found an old beloved shirt that I’m trying to get to sit comfortably on my frame despite how different my frame is even from when I was in college (my shoulders are the broadest they’ve ever been). It’s fine, mostly, but it just feels a little weird and the comfort I remember is largely gone.
Continue readingToday’s Focus Is On Infrared Isolation!
I’ve put a lot of work into what is currently thirty chapters of an entire novel and while I haven’t had the time or energy to work on it since I chose to stop updating with new chapters every Saturday (or as close to every Saturday as I could get) due to WordPress dot com deciding to sell the work of its users to a company making plagiarism machines, I’m still proud of the work I’ve done. Maybe someday, when I’m more confident in my ability to protect my work as a citizen of the United States of America, I’ll go back to posting it, but until something gets done at the federal level about all these junky, shitty, and downright artless plagiarism machines, I’m disinclined to provide them with new material to scrape off the internet. But, it’s too late for these thirty chapters and I’ll continue working on the novel someday. At which point I will at least post them behind a wall of some kind (to keep out the bots) so people can continue reading and I can feel like I’ve finished something for once in my life. Someday.
Today’s Focus Is On The Voice Of The Author!
It has been a while since I’ve posted any new poetry, but I got in the habit of recording myself reading it after talking to my friend (and editor) about how different it feels to read a poem and to hear the author speak it. After all, the author can lend a cadence and tone to the poem that the words alone might not. Formatting is fun and you can usually suggest a lot of that stuff with the right formatting, but it is ultimately up to the reader to determine if they’ll follow the conventions of the author’s home accent and primary language or if they’ll tread off the beaten path and hear the line breaks or commas in their own unique way. Since I had a bunch of recording equipment and a little bit of experience doing rough sound editing (both from my theater facilities job in college and from recording an online D&D campaign I ran for a couple years so I wouldn’t have to take notes by hand), I decided I might as well record myself reading my poetry. Plus, reading it aloud and hearing it read back to me was a great way to find lines that weren’t working. Anyway, I hope you at least mildly enjoy the sound of my voice and some decent poetry along with it.
Today’s Focus Is On Podcasts!
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.
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