Category: Uncategorized

Feeling pretty beat today; I managed to drain my social batteries quite thoroughly, as it happens, and spending time on the internet is just putting things in line of sight like people who do not understand how prisms or album art work and people who are mad that M&Ms aren’t sexy enough, or something.

So, a few Delightful Things to share:

• Anyone else besides me love miniature things? This is a rather charming collection of them; these come with little insights from their crafters.
• An earnest appreciation of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day. (No less relatable now than when it was written.)
• I laughed much harder than really seems plausible at this.
• Some 90s nostalgia with a side order of history. And geography, of course. I think I’d forgotten how many famous folk had cameos on this show… (Warning: contains catchy theme song.)

…for falling off the wagon over the last week or so, between going back to the office for the first time, starting a professional development course, and the sort of creepingly ubiquitously distracting awfulness of what is going on in Ukraine as I type.

I think I will try to keep conversation on that particular matter to a relative minimum here; there are many who can discuss such things with more insight than I have. It is heartbreaking and more than a little terrifying.

It is strange to me, though, that somehow the rest of life is…still going. That we finished up our watch of the Ring Cycle and, right on time, started a playthrough of Elden Ring over the weekend. That I made a meal plan and went to the grocery store and thought to boil some eggs and folded laundry and did…all of the other things, even though an amber alert late last week may have given me a momentary heart attack as it did many others. That I did homework and prepared for tonight’s session of this professional development course, as I always do.

I keep waking up not dead, I suppose. It’s a start.

And, should the very worst happen, I suppose at least it’ll be over with pretty quickly for me, so that’s a mercy.

For now, it’s pretty quiet, but it is a very, very weird feeling.

I wonder what will be next.

…of things I have caught myself daydreaming about doing over the last couple of weeks:

• Spending some time building maps in Dungeon Alchemist, once it is released in March, then using these as the basis to build a little module. Offer this as a freebie to friends of mine who are running campaigns where dungeon crawls might feasibly happen.
• Planning an elaborate dinner party that is based around the principles of the Great Work of alchemy – so, for example, the first amuse-bouche represents calcination, and so on. There are potentially a lot of phases, so it would have to be a “many small plates” kind of affair – or else you’d have to do a drink pairing for each that would represent a phase. Bonus points if I could arrange it such that the ingredients for each course had the right concordances.
• Playing Persona 4 Golden, to re-visit a world I enjoyed very much the first time.
• Attempting to put together a trip to Ireland themed entirely around folklore and ballads.
• Playing in a roleplaying campaign again. (I miss the one that would become my benchmark for all future campaigns; would love to reconnect with that energy for a while.)
• Going for dinner somewhere I’ve never been before, and then to the theatre for a show.

Once again, it is Friday, and once again, things are a little crazy today which makes it a little hard to carve out writing time. (Not to mention the vague writing-malaise of the week: it has been hard to come up with something to write about. From which I mainly glean that I need more shit going on in my life. Thanks, COVID!)

For now, here’s a little link roundup for the day.

• This art installation of a little house and gardens populated by dozens of figures doing an assortment of variously normal and ominous activities is called “The Cuckoo Clock,” and it is both fascinatingly detailed and quite creepy. I wonder very much what the artist was looking to convey.
• This gentleman took a Polaroid photo every day from 1979 right on up through the 90s, and the resulting vast collection of little moments are online for us to enjoy.
• FMV (full-motion video) adventures have been on the outs for a while, since their heyday back in the 90s – but Square is making one, and I have to admit I’m into it.
• Is the internet turning us all into cranks?
• An AI is drawing people’s dream jobs on Twitter, with surreal results. I wonder what it would make of mine? (Be sure to check out the original twitter, too!)

Who out there has an inner child?

I mean, everyone, in theory. All of us are, or were, one once.

But for some of us it’s more present than others, I think. I know people who seem to have been adults forever, with only a sort of shadow-memory of what it must have been like. I have known people whose inner child is very present in a sort of healthy way and people whose inner child seems to dominate.

I think my connection to mine is pretty strong, usually. I spend a lot of time in my imagination, more than maybe one might think for somebody who also typically has a longish to-do list and works in a Proper Grown-Up Job and everything. I find it easy to connect to a more playful energy and to honor the principle that the fear of childishness is one of those things one lets go of in adulthood.

Usually, anyway.

Lately I haven’t been feeling very much myself, and I think this is one of the big ways. I am finding that the balance between “Let’s pretend” and “oh god how is the pantry this disorganized AGAIN when are we going to fix that faucet got to remember to do…” is…not great.

For example:

I have been using my creative energies, but not for myself – I’ve been helping others execute on their ideas, and it’s taken so much energy that when I do have some time to just Do Whatever I feel too tired to do much at all. I don’t regret this (I love that I’ve been able to help out, and the act of working on the projects was fun even if the tightness of the schedule meant I have burned myself out a bit) but it’s a…well, not a red flag, exactly. An orange one, maybe.

I have been a little too keen to try to Improve Myself – trying to build better habits, reading a lot of various advice, and have noticed a certain…gravity of responsibility happening. Fixating on whether [insert activity here] is a “good” use of time. Wondering if I am doing enough (spoiler: I never am, in my own estimation) to move things in positive directions.

I think I know what that is. It’s a sneaky new tactic for the worst impulses of my inner critic: a means to corrupt a legitimate interest in my own wellness without being obviously nasty. Becoming a taskmaster rather than a coach. And the playful parts of me see this and promptly nope the hell out to go hide in their bedroom, figuratively speaking, Can’t say as I blame them.

I have not been paying enough attention to the state of my inner landscape. Things have been too busy and too overwhelming and now we have the psychic equivalent of walking downstairs this morning and suddenly realizing that somehow there are pizza boxes and empty instant ramen packets and laundry everywhere and you’re not entirely sure how the heck that happened exactly.

There is a reconnection that needs to happen.

I can probably blame almost all of this on some combination of the pandemic and its forces – the isolation, the restrictions on where to go and what to do, the narrowing of the universe and the restriction on stimuli – and the overall creeping dread one is nearly overwhelmed by when contemplating…everything these days. None (or almost none) of any of that is within my control; I can acknowledge it and do the little I may, but I will not be able to address this by removing the cause(s).

The urge to try to Fix This, right now, is remarkably strong, but I fear if I give in to it right away that will just be perpetuating that second issue by turning this into another opportunity to be self-critical. Which will also not be helping.

So…okay. Let’s just try and sit with this a bit, at first, and then try to focus on that reconnection. Don’t “fix” it. Just spend some time thinking and doing and try to be careful not to turn everything into a referendum on something. Recognize the critical “why are you not FIXING THIS” impulses as they come up, set them aside, and keep trying.

That is going to be very hard.

I suppose I will see how it goes.

(Challenge, Day 7)

Like many folks in the last year and a half (or so), I’ve spent some time working on my bread game:

This loaf is just for sandwiches – unlike its fancier artisanal brethren there’s not much in the way of oven spring, and the crust is not particularly crackly, and it’s definitely not going to win any beauty contests.

But, on the other hand, I can mix this together just after breakfast, do a quick knead, and then let it rise – and at lunch I can have fresh bread to make sandwiches with, or serve alongside a soup.

And, what can I say, it’s fun, in that tactile, satisfying sort of way; a sticky, unappetizing mess of raw ingredients gradually becomes something that resembles dough, and then something with a structure and a shape that can be folded into a loaf, and grow into something that actually resembles bread. Then you bake it, and suddenly it’s got a lovely browned top and an actual crumb from all the little traceries of gluten inside.

(If you have salted butter on hand, I highly recommend brushing the top with it.)

Recipe found here.

These are some thoughts on the first act of indie video game Kentucky Route Zero, which just recently – after almost a decade – finally released its fifth and final act. With all of the story available, we can at last begin.

For the curious, here’s the trailer.

This is not the real Kentucky.

I have been to the real Kentucky, as a kid; back in the days when becoming a park ranger was one of my big dreams. Mammoth Cave is here, somewhere; there’s a road that bears its name, and somewhere in my childhood home is a battered caving helmet I returned with as a souvenir from my first wild caving trip.

But this isn’t that Kentucky.

In this Kentucky, trees that burn forever are just part of the landscape. A landmark, like a corner store or a little white clapboard church or one of those memorial plaques for someone whose name rings a bell, in a vague and distant sort of way. This is just where we turn left.

In this Kentucky, there are people playing a mysterious game (Dungeons and Dragons?) in the basement, in the dark, and being unable to see doesn’t seem to bother them. They don’t seem to see me either, even with the lights on. I’m not quite sure if that should bother me.

Ah, well. We roll with it.

—-

The first episode of Kentucky Route Zero is quiet, but not shy about announcing what it is. A man named Conway is making a delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive, and stops for directions at one of those kitschy retro service stations, the one you’ve seen in screenshots if you’re in the habit of following gaming publications: Equus Oils, with the huge and dramatic horse’s head. Immediately I wonder if the name is just a reference to the horse, or to the play – but happily our hero’s eyes are in the usual places, at least for now.

The power is off, because the power is always off in games; the owner seems oddly unconcerned about this, perfectly content to lounge in an antique chair and chat with whoever happens by. Maybe they don’t really sell gas here? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

He has some thoughts about how to get where we’re going, though. We have to take the Zero.

Nobody bats an eye at the impossible number. If that’s where we have to go, then that’s where we have to go. That’s all. We roll with it.

—-

Everything about this presentation seems calculated precisely to lull the player into a kind of meditative dream-state. Visuals are spare, with a careful calculation of angle and lighting and colour and perhaps especially darkness that is striking without taking you out of the moment. Music is quietly lovely – here a surprising little folk song, there a kind of eerie electronic thrumming.

Everywhere I am encouraged to take my time. The spiderweb of little side-roads on my map – none of them the Zero, but it must be there somewhere, unless it mustn’t – is peppered with encounters that have the feel of those tiny little dream-fragments one wakes up with when the alarm jangles in. But the alarm isn’t coming, not here, and when the fragment is over, here is the map once more, and I am no wiser about where I am than I was before. Though perhaps I have learned a little more about Conway.

In a way that seems to be the point, really. I can’t help but notice how the decisions we’re making have a lot more to do with what kind of person our hero is and what’s behind him than what’s before him. We’ve chosen to take this ride, and we’re going where it’s going; it is our own perceptions we change with our decision-making.

We roll with it.