The multi-game campaign I’m calling “Sifting Through The Ashes (Working Title)” has officially begun. We had our first meeting, the first conversations about what we’re doing have been started, we’ve observed our first lengthening silence in response to a question I asked, and I’ve even made a discord for the group. Heck, the day this posts, we’ll be getting together to start playing our very first game: The Quiet Year. I’m excited to introduce more people to that, and to get this whole campaign thing a-rolling. Of course, it would help if I wasn’t still struggling to get enough sleep and feel rested, but that’s just kind of life these days. Never enough sleep. But that’s okay. It’s only a three hour session playing a game I’m familiar with and need to just lead, not adjudicate. After all, it’s a GMless game and while I’ll still be wearing my GM hat, it will be just to facilitate the game and help get everyone’s creativity flowing rather than because rules need interpretation or a difficult situation needs arbitration. As long as work doesn’t kick my ass the whole week leading up to the session or give me extra hard on the day of the session itself, I should have enough juice in the tank to handle whatever that might bring [work has kicked my ass the whole week up to the session]. I still need to make sure my players are reading up on all the stuff I posted in the discord, continue reviewing the rules of Armour Astir: Advent, and make the roll20 game we’re going to use for maps and stuff, but most of that is pretty easily handled when I’ve got a bit more time and energy than I do right now.
Continue readingDiscord
The 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 readingBuilding Friendships in Minecraft in 2023
In the continuing adventures of my time back in Minecraft, I wound up spending a bunch of last weekend building a mountain to conceal the beginnings of a tower I had painstakingly created; helped a friend create a small lake/large pond; spent hours farming materials for and then building the central portion of the canopy of a massive tree (which is likely going to be scrapped, it sounds like); and then invesitgated a series of underground caverns that were full of resources, eerily silent creepers, and way too much lava for my personal comfort. I dabbled in magic, killed a lot of spiders, engaged in amicable trade, and did my best to save the lives of a bunch of fellow players who kept falling off things (my efforts were largely in vain, unfortunately). All-in-all, it was a busy but fun weekend of construction projects and trying to push myself through the boring but necessary parts of getting the enthusaistic reaction I desire when I eventually unveil my secret project to the rest of the server.
Continue readingOverwatch? More like Watch Over, AmIRight?
Recently, during the brief moments I’ve had time to spare, I’ve been hanging out in a new Discord server. By which I mean it’s an old Discord server that I’ve been a part of for several months, but it is new that I’m hanging out in it. The people there are pretty nice and they all think I’m cool (or at least they’re always happy to hear from me when I show up), but they’re all trying (gently, in a friendly and only mildly pressuring way) to get me to play Overwatch with them. They’ve been unsuccessful so far because they make just as many points about why I should stay away as they do about why I should redownload the game, but what managed to break the mighty temptation I felt watching them last night was the fact that Overwatch 2 requires you to add your phone number to your account if you want to play the game.
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