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).
Continue readingAppreciating Brevity In Media Via The Local Superhero, Spider-Man
I spent almost all of my free time last weekend playing Spider-Man: Remastered (originally for the PS4) and then Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I actually 100-percented SM:R (though there’s technically 3 trophies I’ve yet to collect since they were added as part of an update that added a New Game + mode that I’m going to do eventually, once I’ve had a break from the game), which makes it the first game I’ve ever gotten all of the achievements for. It makes a lot of sense, though, since most of the non-story achievements involve exploring, traversing the world, and taking the time to look around or find interesting places to perch. I’ve always been about that stuff, which I wrote about extensively in my review about three months ago, but going directly from Spider-Man: Remastered to Spider-Man: Miles Morales has really made me reflect on my experiences with these games as a whole.
Continue readingI Fell Into A Burnout String That’s Dire
I am writing this on the sixth day of November and I am already so incredibly burned out that I’m considering taking time away from work already. Well, not “already” since I haven’t had much time away from work in about a year that wasn’t set aside for a specific purpose. The holidays last winter, visiting a friend/interviewing for a job that I didn’t get, going to Spain, my friends’ wedding, my move, and then labor day weekend (which wound up being preparations for my grandmother’s passing)… All the time I’ve taken away from work has been specifically for an event of some kind or to deal with some kind of major life stress. I haven’t had a proper do-nothing, restful vacation since Thanksgiving of 2022 and that barely counts since I was preparing myself for family therapy with my sister and parents. The last time I took a vacation and didn’t have something horrible, stressful, or upsetting happen immediately afterwards was when I went to a cabin with my friends and siblings for most of a week in the summer of 2022. Which only counts because the stressful thing that happened after that was something I’d mostly gotten used to dealing with (my eye problems flaring up). I really need a proper rest and I really hope I can get one this Thanksgiving. Next week, as you’re reading this.
Continue readingSleep Paralysis
Robyn’s mind drifted to the surface of consciousness. Something heavy was draped over them. Unfortunately, since they slept on their side, they couldn’t see what it was. They couldn’t turn to look, either. They were paralyzed.
Trying to stay calm, they slowly worked through their insensate body. Knees wrapped around a pillow, left arm curled into the corner of the sheet, torso propped up by pillows, and head supported by more pillows. Only their right arm was unaccounted for.
Pushing against the numbness, Robyn tried to raise their right arm.When nothing happened, they pushed through the building fear and realized the arm wrapped in the sheets was holding them in place.
When they managed to shift their left arm enough, the blankets loosened and the numbness began to fade. Feeling began to return to their body.
Just as they were about to try moving their right arm again, Robyn felt a light, puffing wind on their neck. They froze, paralyzed by panic, as something warm and wet fell onto their neck.
Fear took over and they wrenched free of the blankets. They sat up and fumbled for their lamp. When the light clicked on, their room was empty. Their bedroom door was still closed and their oscillating fan gently puffed at their hair as they panted. There was nothing in the room.Nothing had been sitting on them. It was just the fan and their sweat.
They rifled a hand through their hair as they breathed a sigh of relief. A moment later, they realized they weren’t actually sweaty. They raised a hand to their neck and it came away wet, a few viscous drops of liquid clinging to it. As they stared at their hand, they felt the frame of their bed shift as something beneath it moved.
The First Descent Into The Rotting Heart
One of the things that got me through this past week of exhaustingly busy days at work was thinking about my game of Heart: The City Beneath. I admittedly did not have much time to let my mind sit idle or even concern itself with anything other than the project I’ve spent thirty-six of the last sixty hours working on, but what time I did have that included free conscious thought was directed toward that game and the fun place we left it after our last session. True to form, we spent a lot of time roleplaying and only a little time on an adventure. We did get some major fallout, though, since the one player who’d managed to avoid any kind of fallout the first time around wound up getting a wee bit stressed the instant the party started their adventure. It worked out pretty well, though, because I got to do something super fun for me AND the character who got the major fallout had an ability that allowed them to make progress in their delve despite the horrible failure that resulted in said fallout. Everybody won!
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