The Self-Interviews

What It Is

Sometimes when I watch or listen to one of these shows, I imagine how I might answer the interviewer’s questions.
— me

I’m embarking on a new series in which I answer the questions that some of the great interviewers of our time typically put to their guests.  If you’re interested to know why I’ve decided to do this, feel free to read “The Motivation” down at the bottom.  But it’s not required.

Here’s a list of of what I’m planning to do; I’ll update these so they’re links to the posts once I write them.  Note that I’ve actually already written one of them: it I have a post from nearly 5 years ago that fits right into this theme, so I’m retroactively declaring it to be part of the series.

I may add more later, as they come up.

The List

• Variation on the Pivot Questionnaire (James Lipton, Inside the Actor’s Studio)
• The Colbert Questionert (Stephen Colbert, The Late Show)
• One Question (Chris Hardwick, Talking with Chris Hardwick)
• Rapid Fire (Mayim Bialik, Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown)

The Motivation

So, it’s occurred to me that my blog is a bit like a diary.  My kids absolutely don’t read it now, but perhaps some day they will.  Now, I don’t know if any of you other readers much care what my answers to any of the questions posed by famous interviewers are, but I think that my children may find those answers interesting, one day ... maybe after I’m gone.  Not that I expect to be gone any time soon, but I do fully expect to be gone before my children ever get around to reading any of this stuff.

It’s a weird thing that we often want to try to connect with people after it’s too late to do that in person, instead of doing it while they’re right there next to us.  I’m sure there’s some aspect of human nature that explains this, but I have no clue what it is.  I just want my children to know that I did the same thing when I was younger—hell, I’m still doing it, though I’m finally old enough to realize I need to do better—so, you know ... don’t feel bad about it or anything.

Hopefully these posts give some insight into what I thought and felt, about life and living and all that jazz.

Caveats

I’m sure most of these questions are designed to be answered with brief responses.  I don’t do brief.

Also, there will be cursing.  Because, of course there will.

The Qyxling: A new familiar for your 5e warlock

You may recall that I mentioned last week that my youngest had started a new D&D campaign.  And, if you’ve been reading for a very long time, you may recall that I mentioned, upon the occasion of said youngest child’s first real D&D game (a little over two years ago), that she had actually joined us for a game a few years before that, when she was 5 or 6.  I was playing a Pact of the Chain warlock (in 5e slang, we call that a “chainlock”), and the Pact of the Chain grants your character a “improved familiar”—that is, more than just your standard cat or raven or toad.  One option is an imp, which is a type of devil, and one option is a quasit, which is a type of demon.  The other two options are more fey-oriented: a sprite, and a type of small dragon called a pseudodragon.  Now, warlocks have patrons, and you can have different types of patrons as well.  Your patron might be a fiend, in which case a demon or devil is an appropriate familiar; or your patron might be an archfey, in which case a small fey creature is an excellent choice.  Or, your patron might be a Great Old One (a legacy of D&D’s very early days, when stealing from the Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos was quite common).  In that case, there aren’t any great options ... at least not among those default options in the Player’s Handbook.  There have been a few more added in the years since 5e first came out, but of course the awesome thing about D&D is that, if you don’t like any of the options, you can just make one up.

So, for this game 4 or 5 years ago, when I chose a warlock who had made a pact with a Great Old One, I just took some of the bits of the imp, some of the bits of the quasit, gave it a bit of a tentacle-face, and tweaked a few things for flavor.  I named the resulting creature Anjeliss, and decided she was a cheeky, indpendent creature who was my companion more than my servant.  So, when my little girl wanted to join us, too young to really understand the rules, and not focussed enough to do much with the mechanics, I said to my other two kids, no problem: she can just be Anjeliss.  She didn’t actually do much, of course (I actually made all the decisions about what actions to take), but she provided a little extra personality: basically, she was just roleplaying.  Which is kind of the perfect way to start.

Now, I never imagined that she got much out of that session.  She basically just sat in my lap and delivered a couple of lines here and there—maybe I let her roll a die every now and again—but nothing earth-shattering.  I didn’t even really think she’d remembered the whole experience.  But, when it came time to start this new campaign, she suggested that I play my same warlock character from that game, and she would use Anjeliss as her GMPC.  She couldn’t remember the name, but she remembered quite a few of the other details, so it was easy enough to resurrect that character ... at least for me.  (He was a dhampir named Nicto, and a bit of a crazy person—inspired by the Joker, or any given Malkavian character from Vampire: The Masquerade—but a skilled investigator, which is what the original one-shot campaign had called for.)  For Anjeliss, there wasn’t much to go on.  But now my girl wanted to play her again, so I felt inspired to create a little something more.

Now, my faux-Photoshop¹ skills aren’t amazing, by any stretch, but I get by.  So I found a quasit with wings similar to an imp’s (I believe it’s a Pathfinder quasit rather than a D&D quasit, actually), and I swapped out its head for the closest thing that matched the picture in my mind’s eye that I could come up with by doing a Google image search for “cute Cthulhu.” Then I color-corrected things as best I could to make the colors mostly match, and you can see the results at the top of this page.

I also did a monster write-up, including a standard 5e statblock,² threw in some background flavor, and finally tossed in another image of the creature surrounded by all its alternate forms.  I struggled for a long time with the naming of it: I wanted someting that started with a “Q,” since the quasit was its biggest inspiration; I wanted something that sounded Cthulhu-esque, since that was the vibe I was going for; and I needed something that wasn’t already used for some other monster in D&D (which is very hard to come by).  And, as we all know, the Cthulhu naming convention is basically to use too many “X"s and not enough vowels, so I eventually went with a prefix of “qyx” and I tacked on a suffix of “ling” to imply that it was a little guy.  The name isn’t set in stone, so it might change,³ but it’s what we’ve got for now.

So I took all that info, formatted it like a proper monster entry from the Monster Manual,⁴ and here it is in case you were interested in using it for your own games.

Enjoy.

__________

1 I actually use a Linux program called the GIMP.

2 For which most of the credit has to go to a fellow on the Internet named Tetracube, who has a mad-easy statblock generator that I use for all my monster statblocks.

3 And my daughter has already pointed out to me that it sounds an awful lot like “quicking” when pronounced out loud, which is an entirely different monster.

4 For which I used my pro subscription to GM Binder, the absolute best way to to D&D homebrew write-ups.

A slow week

It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and then Presidents’ Day the following Monday.  In the meantime, nothing much has changed.  Our littlest one is still working on learning how to ride a bicycle—she’s a bit old for training wheels, but she’s getting a late start, so we’re cutting her some slack.  We got our middle child back on neurofeedback (the cutover to new insurance caused an interrpution of a few weeks), and he seems much happier.  Plus we started a new D&D campaign, with Merrick in charge.  (For those interested, it’s based on this fun little subscription.)

Next week, I’ll come up with something more interesting.  Probably.

Isolation Report, Week #100

It’s been 100 weeks since the start of the pandemic for me.  It may be a bit more or a bit less for you, but it’s probably right around the same ballpark.  Perhaps some might argue that this isn’t the same pandemic—maybe they count each “wave” or new variant as a separate one, or perhaps there are even some people that think it’s basically over now.  I’m guessing those people are the minority though.  I can tell you that it’s been 100 weeks since I’ve seen a single one of my coworkers though ... and I think that qualifies my blog post title as less than hyperbolic.

There was a time late last year when some of the folks from my old office got together to work at one of those shared workspaces (WeWork, if you’re familiar).  At least one other person and I said perhaps we’d hold out a bit longer.  Then omicron hit, and even WeWork was off the table.

Things are better in some ways: don’t get me wrong.  I no longer have to wait in line to get into the grocery store, for instance.  Every food place in my city delivers now ... but of course that’s because all the ones that don’t have gone out of business.  Even for the places where you still have to physically go there (like Target), most of them will let you order online, they’ll bag it up in the store, and bring it out to your car.  I suppose that’s more convenient, in many ways.  I have way fewer meeting to attend at work, I suppose ... but now I’m floundering, trying to look for positives.

I was never a hugely social person.  I don’t particularly care for being alone, but I also don’t like strangers.  This is probably why I spent so many years living with roommates: there’s always someone else around, and it’s always someone you know, at least a little.  The idea of going out shopping and it being a fun thing has always seemed mildly insane to me.  I sort of dug amusement parks and ski vacations and beach trips, but really only if I could go with a group of friends or family.  And I find I don’t really miss them all that much now.

But I do worry that, lacking any reason to go out any more, perhaps I’ll just stay in my house for the rest of my life.  I mean, I go out to the grocery store (although it’s only biweekly instead of weekly now), and occasionally to the chiropractor if I’m feeling particularly inflexible, but that’s about it.  The last time I had to buy gas was December 20th; the last time I had to go to the ATM was November 13th.  There are many satisfying things about having more time to myself to do things, and certainly it’s great to have more time to spend with my kids, but ...

Of course, even if things were to get different, I don’t know how well I’d do.  I’ve gained so much weight at this point that I only have one pair of pants that even fit any more.  The thought of getting on a plane, or sleeping in a bed other than my own, seems ... unpleasant.  The less I’m around people, the less I want to be around people.

And seeing other people on television is definitely not helping.  I really can’t believe there are still people protesting wearing masks.  But also I can’t believe there are still no consequences for not wearing a mask.  To me it feels analogous to seatbelts: people protested wearing seatbelts for a long time too, but eventually they got fined enough that they shut the fuck up about it.  I’m personally in favor of letting all people that want to not get vaccinated and not wear a mask do whatever they like: they just have to sign a waiver that says that they won’t get any hospital treatment once they get COVID.  If that’s too harsh for you, I would also support an alternate plan where such people have separate hospitals—all the health care workers who don’t believe in vaccination could go work there.  See? it’s a free-market solution.

I’m also somewhat at a loss as to how to feel about our current political situation here in the US.  The Republicans seem to have given up entirely pretending that they care about democracy: they just blatantly say nowadays that they’re restricting voting rights so that they can win.  Our former President is back, saying insane things (as usual).  Personally, I think that when “people who did crimes with me” is a large enough demographic that it’s worth appealing to, that ought to indicate a flaw somewhere, but I think those days may be gone for good.  And as to why someone like Kyrsten Sinema would defend an obvious tool of racism like the modern filibuster ... I think I’m in good company in being completely in the dark on that one.  I’m not sure anyone knows—hell, I’m not sure she knows.  (In Joe Manchin’s case, I suspect the answer is just good, old-fashioned racism.)  It’s a whole lot of what-the-fuckery.

In our house, we were all fully vaccinated, for a hot minute.  Now, of course, you’re not considered fully vaccinated unless you’ve gotten a booster shot, so we have to start all over again.  Appointments have been made.  But, even then: I feel like there’s just going to be another booster required eventually, and then another, and then another.  I’m of half a mind to just wait around until I can get ’em all in one go.  There’s really no hurry as far as I’m concerned.  I hardly ever leave the house any more.  I’m not really much at risk at this point.

So, 100 weeks in, some stuff is different; many things are the same.  The future is ... not bright, surely; not hopeless, exactly; not really anything other than inevitable.  It shall be what it shall be.  I know many folks out there are happy to go back to eating at restaurants on a regular basis, or happy to go back to the movies on a regular basis—some have even done so already.  But I don’t think I’m ready for that, and I don’t know how much I miss it.  I miss eating out for lunch with my colleagues, and going to museums with my kids, and our annual Heroscape tourney.  But we’re doing okay.  And we’ll survive.  And, perhaps one day, we’ll get back to being around other people.

One day.