The End Of Friends At The Table Season 8: Palisade – Making Good On An Old Threat

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Spoiler Warning for the mid-season peak of Friends at the Table Season 8: Palisade.

After an incredibly long time (not that I’m complaining about the length, of course: I love a long podcast), the eighth season of Friends at the Table, Palisade, has come to an end. Even the post-mortem has finished up. By the time you’re seeing this, the audio version of the post mortem stream should be up on the main podcast feed and you’ll have probably either settled in to listen all the way through it, have already listened to it, or have made plans to listen to its five-star runtime over the weekend (the stream was just over five hours long, so I’m sure the audio will be a similar length). If one of those three things does NOT apply to you, then there will be nothing for you in this post (or there was a in the podcast episode going up which, you know, happens). If you’re uncertain about committing to Friends at the Table but like a good audio story or enjoy a good tabletop gaming podcast, you should absolutely start listening to it (it’s also available in any podcatcher you might use, on Spotify, and, of course, iTunes). It’s got thousands of hours of entertainment, amazing science fiction and fantasy work, and a great general vibe that shifts from relaxed and fun storytelling between friends to tense and emotional storytelling between friends. I have easily listened to more hours of Friends at the Table than any other podcast and I would not be surprised to learn that I’ve listened to more Friends at the Table than all my other podcasts put together. It’s really good stuff, there’s so much of it out there, and now I’m going to need to fill my idle audio hours with something else while they take a break following the monumental undertaking that was this latest season.

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Failing To Adjust To A New Mattress

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I’ve fallen a bit behind on my blog post buffer. I’ve regained some ground thanks to a bit of a herculean effort on my part, but I’m still writing posts only a few days ahead of posting them right now and I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to start gaining enough ground to stay ahead. The problem isn’t a lack of post ideas or time to write but a lack of adequate rest. I have plenty of ideas, I just don’t have the energy, focus, or mental fortitude to write more than one blog post in a day and sometimes struggle to even do one. Best I’ve managed was two on last Friday and I barely managed that. Turns out that two weeks of terrible sleep following months of uneven sleep will really wear you down. I wrote about it a little bit for a post that went up last week, but things haven’t improved as much as I’d like in the two weeks I’ve been sleeping on my new mattress. I’m reasonably certain (intellectually, anyway) that this is just the pain of adjusting to a new, good mattress after years on a bad mattress that was starting to cause back problems, all slowed down because a medication I’m taking has negatively impact the ability for my muscles to rest, recover, and strengthen themselves. I’ve done enough research and figured a few things out (given that this experience is similar to ones I’ve had sleeping on other mattresses in the past) to know what is probably going on. Emotionally, though, I can’t really grasp that likelihood. I’m so exhausted from interrupted and poor sleep over these past two weeks that it’s all I can do to keep myself functioning at all. I almost had a minor breakdown over the weekend because of how tired I was due to how little I’d slept and how the various interruptions in my weekend meant that I couldn’t take a nap to make up for any lost sleep. It’s difficult to emotionally process things and to keep my emotions in check so I can handle them in a healthy and constructive matter when I’m this tired, but I’ve managed to hold on by a ragged finger this long and I THINK things are finally hitting a point where they’re starting to improve.

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Automated Water-Saving Faucets In The Bathrooms

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In an all-too frequent turn of events, I wound up spending a couple minutes trying to scrub soap off my hands. The automated soap dispenser in the bathroom at work, which usually dispenses too little soap, dumped more than twice as much soap as usual on my hands. After scrubbing them clean and going to rinse them off in the sink, I had to move my hands away from the spigot, wait a couple seconds, and move them back under the spigot a total of four times in order to get all the soap off my hands. You see, for whatever reason, the company I work for decided that THESE bathrooms, in this part of the building built specifically for said company, would have water-saving automatic faucets that not only turned themselves off if there wasn’t enough of your hands DIRECTLY in front of the sensor, but would also turn off if the water was running for ten consecutive seconds AND then refrain from turning on until you moved your hands away, waited a couple seconds, and moved them back in front of the sensor. You have to let the sensor deactivate and only then can you reactive it. Ostensibly, this is a water saving measure that works to compliment the low-volume faucet (that mixes in a bunch of air to make the little bit of water you’re getting look more voluminous than it is) so that it either doesn’t get stuck on or encourages people to not keep the water running when they’re not actively rinsing their hands. However, as an owner of a large pair of hands with a very clear conception of what it takes to actually clean your hands after using the bathroom, I find it incredibly frustrating to be in need of more water so often.

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“Just Another Wave In The Ocean… Destined To Disappear”

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Much like the post that talks about the video game I’m quoting in this post’s title, today’s post is about grief. After all, today (writing, not posting) is the day that Cohost has announced that it will be closing down at the end of the month. As of the announcement, the active users on Cohost had three weeks (now two) to make our peace, to publicly grieve, to figure out how to stay connected, and to figure out what to do now that our home on the internet is going away. So far, there’s been a mix of starting webrings (collections of personal blogs and websites), people migrating to other social media sites and finding each other with established hashtags, handing out discord usernames so people can still keep some form of contact, and even some people simply deciding that they’re done with social media in its entirety. There’s been so many posts (many of them tagged into the “global feed” which is incredibly rough on the website and something the staff running that site have asked people not to do too much) that the website is failing to load about half the time (this lasted for about eight hours and still struck occasionally after that). It’s a mix of mourning, the aforementioned planning of where people will go next, and shitposting as people swear they’ll keep playing music until the ship sinks. As for myself, I’m following the people I care about, exchanging contact info with the people I’d like to keep talking to, and mourning the end of the one place on the internet that I felt comfortable calling my home.

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The End Of An Era: I’ve Sworn Off National Novel Writing Month

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You ever have one of those mornings where you wake up, casually decide to blast your eyeballs with some blue light courtesy of your phone in order to wake up more quickly, and then immediately regret every decision you’ve made in the short time you’ve been conscious because the first thing your brain comprehends in the day is some completely unexpected and emotionally destructive news? That was me on Labor Day, when I woke up and learned that the organization behind National Novel Writing Month had not only decided to officially allow LLMs and “AI writing tools” to be legitimate sources of text for their various month-long writing events but also tried to get ahead of anyone calling them on this bullshit by saying in the same statement that not allowing LLMs and these “writing aids” is both classist and ableist. Which is also bullshit. The whole thing is complete and utter bullshit. How the hell does an organization built around the idea of encouraging people to write not only allow text that wasn’t written (no LLM writes text, it generates a complex version of autocomplete) but allows it using tools built off of stolen writing? And, to top it all off, it turns out that a likely reason they’re taking this stance is that one of their major sponsors for the year is one of those now-allowed “AI writing aid” tools! One of the tolls built from ChatGPT and an ever-increasing amount of stolen work! It’s absolutely staggering.

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Reflections After A Failed Attempt To Rest

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I was born early in the morning on the last day of August and I’ve had mixed feelings about it ever since. I mean, I’ve had mixed feelings about being born on and off throughout my life, but I’ve had mixed feelings about August and being born at its end pretty much constantly for my entire life. Most of that is due to the unfortunate coincidence that a lot of the most traumatic events of my childhood were concentrated towards the end of the summer every year, but a much more immediate and relevant part of that is due to my birthday frequently being overshadowed by people’s Labor Day plans. Sure, the trauma stuff hangs around and occasionally rears its head, but I can go to therapy about that and grow more capable of dealing with it. Being overshadowed by everyone’s favorite end-of-summer holiday is a yearly struggle that I’ve been unable to work around despite my thirty-three years of life. Hell, even on the years when my birthday isn’t connected to the weekend that includes Labor Day, I still struggle because that means I have to celebrate before my birthday rather than after it. I almost never manage to make plans in the years when it’s actually on Labor Day weekend because, no matter how far ahead I try to make my plans, everyone else winds up being busy. It’s a popular weekend! People are camping, grilling out, visiting relatives, or otherwise trying to enjoy the last gasps of summer before fall arrives in the Midwest. Even when I try to settle for having ANY kind of plans that weekend, for my birthday or otherwise, it rarely works out for any number of reasons. At this point in my life, after a decade and a half of trying, I’m mostly given up. There’s only so many time you can put up with people canceling on you or being unavailable despite your attempts to plan things super early. My bar has lowered enough that all I can really hope for is that people will remember to wish me a happy birthday.

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Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening And It’s Messed Up Little Guys

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I try to avoid swearing in my blog post titles, but this post was titled “DA:O-A and It’s Fucked Up Little Guys” while I was writing it. Which is to say that my overall impression of Awakening was that BioWare looked at the darkspawn they’d created and asked themselves “how can we absolutely fuck up these little guys?” They then went on to completely knock it out of the park, too. Sure, we’ve got our standard flavor Hurlocks and Genlocks (and their Alpha and Emissary subvariants), but we’ve also got some messy little guys who burst out of tubes, freaky little guys that are the messy little guys but with really long crab legs, some horrific little guys who are the freaky little guys but More, and then tons of flavors of normal Hurlock but with special paint and decorations so we know that this is one of the Darkspawn What Can Talk. All, of course, without mentioning the stars of this show, who are the most fucked up little guys of all: The Architect (who is a fusion of a Hurlock and a Normal Guy With Avant Garde Shades) and The Mother (who is what you’d get if an early 00s Manic Pixie Dream Girl replaced the “humanoid” half of a Broodmother). Absolutely wild choices that any big Triple-A game studio would be too much of a coward to make in a modern game. Video games as a whole are lesser for it.

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Dragon Age: Origins Was A Lot Longer Than I Remembered

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I finally finished Dragon Age: Origins. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy my time, it was just a much longer game than I remembered. On top of having a decent time playing a game I once loved enough to play all the way through at least six separate times, I got everything in this run to come out the way I wanted it to. I got the girl, became a queen, outlived an archdemon, and sent my bestie off with the child of my political husband (which is what you get out of a political marriage meant to secure yourself a crown). All in all, I had a great time. Except for playing it all on minimum graphics and needing to develop a compulsive quick save habit (which has begun to rear its head in other games I’m playing) so I wouldn’t lose too much when my game inevitably crashed. Because it always crashed. It even crashed as it tried to load the post-final-boss bit of the game where I’d get to have one last chat with my companions. Luckily, it had already autosaved, so I didn’t need to re-do the boss fight, but it was certainly annoying to need to launch the game again for that tiny bit of play time considering how late at night it was by the time I got there. It was annoying and it colored my entire playthrough, though especially so in the later parts of the game when there was a lot going on and my attempts to maintain the tension of the story ran aground every time the game crashed and I needed to repeat my game-launch ritual. Still, it was a decent use of my time and wasn’t so frustrating that I was desperate to move on to Dragon Age 2. If it had gone on much longer, I expect I would have been, but I got out just in time.

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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 29

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Another rough week, as you can tell from my recent rant about process, on top of my ever-growing exhaustion from a mixture of my ever-present burnout and what has become increasingly clear is poor quality sleep on a bad mattress, so I’m going to set aside everything else I could write about to talk about the Legend of Zelda once more (also, don’t try to figure the dates out, since my whole writing versus posting schedule is whacked out right now). Today, I bring before you the topic of Fishing in the Legend of Zelda franchise. My introduction to which began with one of those Bass Pro arcade games at my local pizza parlor, which made for a rough introduction to video game fishing in general. Their other arcade machines were down or occupied by other children (some of whom were my siblings), so I wound up giving it a try when I otherwise wouldn’t have. I didn’t care for it much and the generally unpleasant time I had with that game meant I dreaded any amount of fishing in any other video game for years to come. Not that there was much of it. I’m sure there was other video game fishing available on the N64, but my only exposure to it was through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I also eventually tried it in Link’s Awakening DX and bounced right off it. I technically didn’t really fish in Wind Waker, but I really enjoyed treasure hunting and I’d count that as a fishing minigame in retrospect even if I absolutely avoided having that thought at the time I played the game. I then avoided fishing so hard in Twilight Princess that I didn’t realize you can get rewards from it. I eventually came around a bit later in life, in my teenaged years, but that was only after I no longer had limited video game time and could actually take my time with things.

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