I have continued to put a ridiculous number of hours into Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game this intensely and consistently. I mean, I typically don’t play games that require a great deal of focus and personal investment on work nights, since I know they tend to make me ignore the passage of time, but I’ve not only started doing that, I’ve been doing it consistently enough to go from staying up until the wee hours of the morning to stopping at a reasonable time. Turns out two straight weeks of obscenely little sleep thanks to a combination of Baldur’s Gate 3 and stress will shake me out of my worst sleep habits. I’ve managed to stop playing between eleven and twelve at night for four nights in a row as of writing this, and only once squeaked in under that deadline solely due to the game crashing as I started “one more thing”ing myself into what might have wound up being the wee hours. Still! I’m counting this as a win, if only because I’m still enjoying myself and am now clear-headed during my work days (even if I’m still recovering from a severe sleep deficit and struggling to stay away right after I eat lunch). Baldur’s Gate 3 really has a lot going for it and I really don’t have much of anything negative to say about my play experience in the one hundred played hours I’ve accrued on my save file.
Continue readingI Feel So Relieved Already
Just one week later, not even seven full days getting my mole removed, and I’m already wondering what I was worried about. Sure, I’m still in the active wound-care stage of things, but I’m notably less self-conscious of the bandage stuck to my face than I ever was of my mole, and that’s even with the bandage feeling way more noticeable than the mole ever was. It just bothers me so much less. Honestly, the only gripe I’ve got about this whole process is how I have to shave every single day. I learned the hard way that more than a day’s worth of facial hair growth makes the bandages fall off much more quickly. Most of the other gripes I’ve had (such as how bad the wound looked) either faded away in the first few days or I’ve learned how to counter them. For instance, I might still be unable to bite into large things (like an apple), but I’ve gone back to drinking as usual and gotten the hang of eating various more easily bitten foods without making a mess or accidentally putting pressure on my wound. It has all become fairly routine at this point and while I’m definitely eager to get to the point where I don’t have something stuck to my face twenty-four hours a day, I’m honestly just happy to not have the mole anymore.
Continue readingTaking a Birthday Break To Rest Up
This is the weekend after my birthday and, complex feelings about the day itself aside, I am absolutely going to use that as an excuse to rest. We’ve got a holiday in the US (Labor Day, which feels more and more important with every passing year) and I’m just taking some time off. I’m just going to have a quiet, guilt-free day of relaxation and video games on Monday, since I’ve got Baldur’s Gate 3 to finish and then Armored Core 6 or Sea of Stars to play. Plus all the other games I’ve started and left unfinished because something else came along (I’m looking at you, Cassette Beasts). And a new playthrough of Chained Echoes, inspired by the blog post that went up yesterday. I’ve got a lot of fun games to play, books to read, puzzles to do, and I’m just gonna set everything aside for now so I can just enjoy my three-day-weekend. It’ll be a couple months before I get another work holiday and it’s not like I’ve got much vacation time left after how much I was out in the first half of the year, so I’m doing what I can to maximize my relaxation right now.
There will be another Chapter of Infrared Isolation next week (I was almost finished writing the chapter when I wrote this post, so it should be done and edited and I’ll even be partway through the next chapter by the time this post goes up) and my normal blog posts will resume on the 5th of September. Have a great weekend!
The Purpose of Themes and Subgenre Tropes in Chained Echoes
This post will contain spoilers for the game Chained Echoes beginning in paragraph five (the very first sentence of the paragraph is a themaic spoiler and they only get more specific from there).
The older I get, the more I’m aware that everything is about something. Intentionally, unintentionally, and sometimes widely varying based on who is interpreting it. Sure, I learned this truth a long time ago, but it only ever seems to get more and more true as time goes on. I mean, I studied English Literature, always enjoyed reading comprehension tests or assignments in grade school, and though it took me a while to really grasp this idea in high school, I have been leaning into it ever since. This is not a new idea to me or even most people (I hope, though the state of the world makes me question how many people are capable of grasping nuance). I compleely set aside the idea that we aren’t constantly, and frequently unintentionally, showing whatever is on our minds through what we created the time I realized that the story I was writing in high school was about me and the horrible family life I had. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. Even when I redid the story in my last year of college and tried to be more intentional about what the story was about, I still found myself uncovered interpretations and metaphors I hadn’t intentionally written into it. This is why I tend to rewrite rather than revise these days, since it helps me figure out if the underlying issue is actually a part of the story or just something that was weighing heavily on my mind while I was writing. I don’t mind this stuff showing up in my writing, though, since I’m a firm believer in needing to write things out so I can learn what I’m thinking, but I generally try to be aware of it.
Continue readingToday’s A Pretty Normal Thursday
Today is my birthday. I have no plans for today other than maybe watching an episode of Jujutsu Kaisen. I might go grocery shopping and pick up a cake, but I might do that a different day [I did that yesterday, so I could keep tonight clear in case my Thursday D&D game actually happens] since I’m planning to gather with some friends this weekend and will probably need to go at a better time of day for grocery shopping than seven or eight in the evening. Sure, there’s fewer people present and I can usually move through the store more quickly, but the selection is also worse. Most of the restocking happens overnight, so I usually need to get in during the morning or early afternoon if I want to avoid being greeted by an empty shelf instead of one or more of the items I want. Other than that, I have no plans. It’s a Thursday, after all, and it’s not like I’m taking time off of work. Next week is already going to be a lower income week as it is, thanks to the holiday and my unwillingness to force myself to work the longer days I’d need to make up for it (I can do ten hour days with too much of a problem, but if I go over that more than a couple minutes, it immediately throws me off and I start to rapidly get exhausted and burned out). My financial position isn’t super dire or anything, but it’s kinda dire what with my federal loan payments returning in October. That’s another pile of cash that’ll just vanish down the deep, dark hole that is debt repayment every month. Too bad my parents outright lied to me about student loans and how paying them off would go back when I was still naive enough to believe them.
Continue readingGoing Off The Rails After Adding Trains
I genuinely did not think that I’d ever look at a game of The Ground Itself that I’m using as a means of doing collaborative worldbuilding for a different game and think “this has clearly gone off the rails,” but that’s what I’ve found myself doing as I review the notes from my Sunday group’s latest session. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just something that has gone far beyond all of my expectations about what we’d accomplish in a session or two (which will soon be three since we once again ran out of time without finishing our game). We’ve wound up more focused on individuals and their places in the area than the game is designed to be, but we’ve also gone from slowly developing an area over time to wildly inventing things. It’s honestly a great energy, even if I worry that we’ve lost the plot a bit. I’ll be able to weave it all into the world we’ve going to play in when we finally get to Heart: The City Beneath, but there’s just so much stuff happening and so many vague characters introduced that I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to include it all in any kind of interesting and meaningful way.
Continue readingA Faint Connection In The Isolating Distance That Is My Family
Ever since I separated myself from most of my biological family, I’ve only gotten news from two of my siblings. Which isn’t that different from before, since most of my family doesn’t really share news so much as need to have news dragged out of them. All they really share without extensive prompting is silence or gossip. I got all the silence I wanted by not talking to them and I have historically had zero interest in family gossip, so I never really got news about the extended family outside of holidays or the rare time something was important enough that my mother felt like she had to call people to tell them. Now, though, my siblings are my only sources and they can be unreliable about the family as a whole because one of them doesn’t really talk to the family either and the other just forgets to share stuff until I ask (which I almost never do as a rule) or until something major is happening. All of which is to say is that I learned that my grandmother had a health scare recently (that looked like it could be fatal when I got the initial news but turned out to be decidedly not even potentially fatal by the end of the following day) and that one of my aunts was homeless and in the process of falling out with most of the rest of the family for reasons that, as far as I’ve gathered, are entirely of her own making.
Continue readingA Feeling Of Relief 32 Years In The Making
After a lifetime of wanting it and a few weeks of dreading the impending appointment, I’ve finally gotten the mole removed from my face. As of writing this, I am sitting in my office, wondering how much my face is going to hurt once the acetaminophen wears off [turns out not at all, which is nice] as I try to carefully sip some water without stretching my upper lip too much or getting the bandage wet. As it turns out, I do not have a metal straw (despite definitely getting one with the bottle and straw brush set I bought last year), so I’ve had to practice at delicately pouring liquids into my mouth with little involvement from my upper lip. I don’t know if you think about it that much (I certainly didn’t prior to today), but being able to shift your lips around is a rather fundamental part of drinking things. Sure, since I have fairly full lips, I can press things to my mouth and use the pressure as a means of creating a liquid-proof seal, but that’s kind of painful at the best of times and does absolutely nothing for me right now because of where the bandage sits. To drink something without wetting my upper lip, I have to not only change the angle at which I normally hold my cup as I drink (a less horizontal angle than I’d normally like, which requires that I risk inhaling my beverage with every slurp), but I have to carefully wrap my lip over the rim so that I can only come into contact with my drink via the inside of my lip. Learning to do that was annoying, but I’ve gotten quite good at it now. Mostly thanks to repition. I drink a lot every day, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get a handle on things.
Continue readingThe Reasons I Love Playing Host
I finally had the opportunity to host people at my new apartment. One of my friends had put together a one-shot game of Pathfinder Second Edition, in hopes of giving me a way to experience the game with people who are more fun to play with than the group I’d first started with (who now haven’t met in almost six weeks, thanks to two sequential skips in our every-other-week schedule). Since we first discussed this, I wound up joining an every-other-week game this friend runs, but everyone was excited for the one-shot, so we proceeded with it anyway. I wasn’t going to suggest we cancel, after all, since I was excited to finally have people over for an event. I was planning to go all out, after all, with frozen pizzas, plenty of snacks, and a pitcher of my special, super-sour lemonade (the point of it being that you need to let it sit in your glass and melt the ice a bit to dilute it, which also means it is a great lemonade to drink slowly). I may have been a little behind schedule the day of the session, but it was still really fun to have people over since it has been so long since I’ve gotten a chance to play host for something like this.
Continue readingI Found My Own Holy Grail: A Great Queer Adaption of Arthurian Legend
Recently, while doing my usual internet browsing during the spare moments between the events of my day, I came across some book recommendations. I can’t, for the life of me, remember where I found them or who was providing them. All I remember is that the first book this person recommended was one I’d recently read and loved (though I can’t remember what this book was either), so I wound up browsing the rest of the recommendations and bought all of the ones that sounded interesting. In my own defense, I haven’t been sleeping well for a while now and my memory has been pretty spotty. I probably wouldn’t have remembered this book at all if I hadn’t ordered it immediately since I have absolutely no memory of placing this order. But I did order it and, as it turns out, all the other books that I chose were preorders for things releasing this fall, so I had just one new book to read. After sitting on my table for a while (I was in the middle of my Dresden Files reading binge when I ordered it), I finally cracked it open during the day I was restlessly pacing my apartment a couple weekends ago.
Continue reading