In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game from here on out), things finally came to a head and then blew up. A bit literally. Turns out the “message” one of the players was supposed to deliver was a bit of a weird cursed energy bomb meant to disrupt the efforts of a capitalist extraction machine masquerading as a public benefits science corporation. They, unfortunately, went to deliver the message first and then went looking for other stuff, so they got a bit caught up in the blast as it went off. They survived, thankfully, one of them without even getting hurt in any way (my players roll their own stress and the result the delivery peron rolled was equal to the amount of protection they had, so they took no stress) and the other was only hurt in a way that made a great plot hook. This was, if you remember my last post, the Office crew, who were down their most capably violent member because the player couldn’t make it to the session and he had a beat that was going to take him out of the action anyway, so they’d just come out of a situation that should have gone very poorly for them but didn’t go TOO poorly. One of them picked up a bunch of fallouts, but they were all fairly minor things that should be fixable. I will definitely need to make sure they get more loot, though, since they did a lot less body-looting than I expected them to do.
Continue readingStill Having A Wild Time In Wildermyth
After most of a year away from the game, I’ve returned to playing Wildermyth. My return from this extended absence was prompted by the group of people that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with on Fridays suggesting we play Wildermyth as a fun activity we could all do together. We even had one pleasant but incredibly late session of it, though we’ve since struggled to get together to continue playing. I suspect this will be a bit easier than scheduling a D&D session, on account of it taking less time to play in general and Wildermyth’s ability to be easily shortened or stretched to fit into whatever time we’ve got. I don’t expect us to play it weekly, by any means, but hopefully we’ll be able to return to the game we started before a full month has passed. Also, while waiting, I can continue to play by myself. It’s tons of fun to play in multiplayer mode, but still almost as fun to play in single player mode, so I’m beginning to slip it into my regular gaming rotation again. I’m also, once again, discovering that it is incredibly addicting to play and that it is incredibly easy for me to lose track of time while I’m playing it. I’ve already had a couple nights where I stayed up way too dang late to play it and I’ve only been back to playing it for a week as of writing this post.
Continue readingBackup Your Backups
Lin tapped on the keyboard. She didn’t expect the melted computer to boot, but she felt obligated to try.
Continue readingReflections In Post-Holiday Silence
After just over three full days of hosting (about seventy-three hours), my siblings have left and I am alone in my apartment except for the occasional quiet cheeps of my bird, Fidget, who is both missing the noise and attention of the last few days but also relieved that there are far fewer humans wandering around in her view. Which is, in its own way, a little bit like how I feel. While I am much more relieved to have the silence than I am missing the noise and attention, I do miss it a little bit. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to have people around all the time. Incredibly exhausting, but nice. Nice to say good night to people as they went off to their beds and nice to know there would be people around when I woke up. Sure, the only time to myself I got during that whole three day period was either bathroom trips or when I’d tuck myself away in my writing closet to continue hacking away at my various writing projects once everyone had either left for the night (my sister’s partner and her friend were both staying at a nearby hotel) or otherwise gone to sleep, but it was also nice to have people to talk to. I’m definitely ready for a weekend to myself, though, especially knowing I’ve got some pre-planned social activities to help prevent me from getting too lonely and melancholic (both of which are tabletop games).
Continue readingConsenting To Being A Part Of A Digital System
I’ve been thinking about the various systems of the world around me, mostly digital, and my place in them. For instance, under a different name (a username), I’m one of Google’s top 10% of reviewers for pretty much every major category they track. I have achieved this mostly by writing clear, sensible, and informative reviews of three to five sentences that touch on all salient points of the business I visited. I fill out all the information I can, answer a question or two, and move on with my life. Sure, that seems like a lot, but when you consider how few places I actually go and how infrequently I actually go anywhere (unlike most of the US, I’m still actively aware that I’m living in a pandemic and avoiding any unnecessary risks in public, indoor spaces), I am writing maybe a dozen of these reviews a year. And that’s enough to get me into the top ten percent. In a completely different direction, I went back to a pizza place for the first time in many months and then got eight emails form the business (with no repeats) in the next twenty-four hours. I got more junk email from them than I got for Black Friday sales in the same time period. It was intense and unnerving. Made me want to never go back again because they seemed to sense my return and, rather than actually offering me things, keep trying to get me to spend money on them without providing any incentive beyond the exchange of money for pizza.
Continue readingThe End Of National Novel Writing Month 2023
Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.
Continue readingReflecting On Bug Hunter’s Discography
About two months ago, I wrote about a new album by an artist I’d first heard of long ago and then somehow lost track of for years (twice, even, thanks to the weird way the internet works). This past weekend, while I was cleaning in preparation for having guests over, I finally turned away from the new album and worked my way through the band’s entire discography. I played all but one of them on heavy repeat for two whole days. I listened to so many Bug Hunter songs that the band skyrocketed to the top of my “most listened to” on Tidal and I wound up even downloading the albums so I could listen to them on the app while running my errands and without spending my entire month’s budget of cell data. A lot of the songs resonated with me, some of them catching my attention even more than the latest album did (which joined the rotation on my second day of cleaning) because of the vivid imagery. As a result of all this heavy listening and spending so much time doing manual labor that did not require much mental effort, I’ve got a lot of thoughts to share about all of Bug Hunter’s music.
Continue readingThe Drudgery Of My Job Is A Metaphor For My Life
Yesterday (well, yesterday from the day I wrote this a bit over a week and a half ago because of holiday blog displacement and me trying to bank some writing before I’m hosting people), I spent two hours turning a hefty box full of various electrical components on and off. My calculations tell me that I did it approximately eight hundred times in those two hours, using a total of four different combinations of powering up and down steps. I was trying to get it to burn out since we’ve been getting reports of issues in the field with this particular box of electronics burning itself out when users are turning it on in the morning. While this did not make a lot of sense to us, given how hard we hit these things in the lab during the course of developing them and then testing them, we figured it was worth looking into. By which I mean the engineers and my manager figured it was worth looking into and the other testers figured it was worth me testing because, now that my urgent project is done, I don’t have anything that needs to be done yesterday while all the other testers are still working on that schedule.
Continue readingCrying At The Puppy Parade
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.
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