The trailer for Dorohedoro’s second season dropped a few days ago (as of writing this) and I’m getting pretty excited for it. It looks to have the same strange energy that the first season had, but with more going on? More order to find amidst the chaos? That or the trailer just took every bit of available “order” from the show and slapped it together in some kind of classic mislead that tends to crop up in trailers where they hint at something that doesn’t actually exist in the movie by showing you all of whatever it is in the trailer. I don’t think they’d do that with Dorohedoro Season 2, but anything can be made terribly, even things six years in the making (especially because it probably wasn’t being worked on for six years, but I don’t really know much about that), so I’m trying to avoid getting my hopes up too much. Which feels odd to say because, while I definitely enjoyed it while I was watching it, I thought I was much more neutral-trending-positive about it. Now, as I look back on it, I find that I feel more warmly about it and more actively engaged with it, maybe because my mind has had time to work through everything I saw, whereas I didn’t really give myself that when I first watched it? I mean, I binged the whole thing is a single go, more or less, so it stands to reason that I’d feel differently about it once I had time to let it settle, but this is maybe the first time I’ve liked something more as a result of that. Usually I either like it less or just appreciate some of the details more, which isn’t the same thing as liking it better.
Continue readingStorytelling
Sifting Through The Ashes: Now It’s Official
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 readingSifting Through The Ashes: Starting A TTRPG Campaign Development Log
As I get more and more rest and gradually recover from my extreme burnout (and probably wind up back at just “bad” burnout instead of “extreme”), the idea I had for a TTRPG campaign just won’t leave me alone, so I’m going to start working on development (well, I already have been, to be completely honest). It might yet go nowhere, it might go somewhere fun, or it might follow the course of all of my campaigns by starting out with promise that slowly dwindles as I burn out and my less-than-engaged players stop putting in any effort. I don’t know. I’m definitely not getting my hopes up about being able to play out the idea I had in its entirety. I just… I WANT to be doing this again. I cut out so much of my day to day life and the one thing I miss the most, that still fires me up the most, that I only ever think of along the lines of “I wish I hadn’t had to end this,” is running games. I want to get back in the storyteller’s chair. I have such an interesting idea that I’ve been letting cook for a while and I really want to do something with it. I mean, I could write a story about it, but I really miss collaborative storytelling. I really miss looking at friends as I run a game and roleplay through whatever situations we wind up in. Dipping my toes back into D&D as a player has also whet my appetite for this kind of storytelling, so it’s all kind of coming together. I’ve got an interesting story, the world is practically building itself, and I think I’ve got four people who would be just as committed to playing this game (and doing their homework for it) as I am.
Continue readingCentaurworld Season 2 Did Not Let Me Down
Spoilers for Centaurworld Seasons 1 and 2! You should watch it if you’re gonna because I need to talk about it’s whole deal now that I’ve finished it. It’s worth your time, though maybe don’t get a Netflix subscription JUST to watch Centaurworld alone. Though, tbh, I wouldn’t regret spending my money to do just that. It’s up to you.
Continue readingThe Disparity Is There For A Reason
It has been a long time coming, so long that I don’t know when or why I added it to My List on Netflix, but I finally started watching Centaurworld. I do remember that it got a bit of buzz when it first released, with people saying how unexpectedly good it was and how the visuals from the clips being shared didn’t really represent the show as a whole, but the furor subsided, I stopped watching things regularly, and now it’s 2026. I’m finally trying to get through the whole show before my Netflix subscription ends a few days after I’m writing this and it’s been surprisingly engaging. I mean, I expected to enjoy myself, given how much convincing I need before I’ll actually save a show on a streaming platform’s list thingy, but I didn’t expect to find such a neat little story wrapped up in the bright colors and over-the-top-but-not-quite-absurd silliness. I wasn’t entirely sure what I expected, to be honest. I mean, I thought there’d be some kind of framing narrative wrapped around the show to set up what I knew about it–a horse gets stuck in a magical world of centuars–but I didn’t expect the framing narrative to become the narrative. I expected some goofiness, but I didn’t expect songs ranging from second-hand-embarrassment-makes-this-difficult-to-watch to beautiful but uncanny forewarnings of something so dire and evil that it seems like it surely couldn’t exist in this chipper little show. I expected noodle-limbed, physics defying characters, but found myself in a world with a strong and coherent set of underlying rules that guided the way its denizens moved through it even if it was different from what I’d expected from a “standard” world. It really was an exepectedly interesting show for the first whole season and while I’m only a couple episodes into season 2, my hopes for it remain high.
Continue readingDorohedoro Is The Weirdest Anime I’ve Ever Watched And Enjoyed
Lately, I’ve been making an effort to get into watching more stuff. Mostly because I bought a month of Netflix a few weeks back to watch Frieren with my siblings when they came to visit, but also because I need more variety in my life and watching something while doing a bunch of mindless crafting in Final Fantasy 14 makes the time pass better. It’s also kind of nice to not eat all my meals at my desk and instead eat some of them sitting on my couch, outside of my office, in a much more relaxed manner. Most of my meals at my desk are quickly consumed in order to get things out of the way so I can focus more completely on FF14, so being able to eat relatively laconicly while watching a TV show or something on my nice, 4K TV is refreshing. I haven’t had a Netflix subscription in a few months and I spent most of last year in a weird mood about watching things by myself, so I’ve been building up quite a list of things to watch on Netflix (a much larger list than I’d accumulate in a few months on account of not feeling like watching stuff for more than a year at this point). It took a bit to pick something since part of me wanted to dive back into the old familiar stuff, but I was brave (this is a joke) and pushed myself to watch something new, which is how I got started on the only (currently, at the time of writing this) available season of Dorohedoro. It’s a bit of an odd show, overall, and that weirdness starts with the show’s title card on Netflix. It claims to be about a guy trying to find the person who turned his head into a lizard’s head, and while that’s weird, it’s a pretty normal kind of weird. Once you start the show, though, it immediately ramps the weirdness up.
Continue readingI’ve Had A Lot Of Time To Think Lately
I don’t normally have a bunch of time where I’m not actively engaged in doing something. That’s an active choice I’m making, generally speaking. I’ve spent my whole life managing my anxiety and depression by keeping myself constantly busy with one thing or another so there’s no room in my mind for them to occupy. Music or podcasts while I drive, cook, and do chores. Books or TV while I eat. Video games when I’m free. Endlessly scrolling social media when I need a minute to myself at work. I’m always doing something. It’s not like I’m afraid to spend time thinking. That’s kind of what this blog post is, and my daily journaling haiku habit, but even that isn’t letting my mind be at rest. It’s an active form of thinking, a directed mode of thought. I rarely leave myself the space for my mind to wander wherever it wants since even the usual “wandering” is directed by whatever activity I’m doing. While driving, though, there’s not much else to do. Watching the road, being aware of drivers, and so on takes some of my attention, but when you’re driving a thousand miles in sixteen hours, almost all of it on one long interstate route, you have a lot of time where there’s no cars or trucks near you where you can’t afford to let your eyes wander but your mind is free to stroll about as it pleases. I rarely come out of a long drive with much in the way of clarity so much as ideas to pick at some other time, but this time I woke up the morning after my drive with a thought nestled in my head that had bubbled to the surface as a result of the time I’d spent and coversations I’d had with my friends over the days preceeding the drive.
Continue readingYet Another Ending, But This One Feels More Final For Some Reason
It is done. After quite a while of trying to make this one every-other-week game stick around, I have brought it to an end. The campaign/group that included both The Demigods of Daelen and The Magical Millennium has concluded. Between my time off this past summer, general scheduling woes, and the slow withdrawal of half the players I’d tried to include in the campaign, there just wasn’t much left to keep alive. Especially considering how much we were probably going to struggle with getting the remaining folks together to play, a thing we wouldn’t be able to do if even one of them was missing. With only three players and the GM left, any single person missing makes it impossible to continue. We talked it over this past weekend, ironically with one of the remaining players arriving very late, and conluded that this was for the best right now. We might get the group back together in the future, when everyone’s schedule is more dependable and we’ve got more players to join us, but for now we are bringing it to an end. I’ll still have my The Rotten Labyrinth game on its every-other-weekend schedule, but now I am without one of my staple campaigns for the time being. We might yet get together for one-shots or to play games or hang out or whatever, but it won’t be on the structured, three-to-seven-Sunday-afternoon schedule we’ve been trying to maintain up to this point. It’ll be more ad hoc. Impulsive, even. Less regular. Which feels silly to say given how little this group has met. We couldn’t even get more than two people together on our play-Stardew-Valley-instead-of-D&D days.
Continue readingBreathing Life Back Into My Tabletop Games
As part of getting my life back together following the dual function of working antidepressants and some rest, finally, I’ve begun the slow, laborious process of getting my two tabletop campaigns up and running again. One has met already, to talk through things, and the other failed to achieve sufficient player availability, so we’re going to try again in a couple weeks. It’s been so long since I really thought about my two campaigns that I genuinely struggled to get back into the right headspace for them. I was able to do it, thanks to extensive preparation and a review of my notes, but I was still picking up the pieces of it all as we sat down to review what had been going on, refresh ourselves as to what the plan was, and ultimately decide how we wanted to proceed in and out of character. I plan to do something similar for the other one, but that campaign spun up in the middle of my worst brain fog and depression this past year, so trying to pick up those pieces feels a lot like groping around in the dark for something that might cut me if I’m not careful. I’m not worried about remembering something that would upset me or anything, but there’s a certain gingerness I feel when thinking back to that period of time because it’s one of only a few blurry periods in my memory and all the other ones are minefields of forgotten/potentially-repressed trauma. It’s difficult to fight the feelings of nervousness such periods of forgetfulness inspire in me while also trying to actually remember what was going on and what I was thinking at that time.
Continue readingFinal Thoughts On Hunter x Hunter: For Real This Time
I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.
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