Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Thanks were given

We’ve survived another Thanksgiving, and we’re all pretty much still thankful for the same things: family, friends, job, health, fuzzy children and videogames and having enough disposable income to spend on the things we enjoy doing.  If you happen to celebrate this holiday, we hope you had a lovely one, and, if you live in a country that doesn’t celebrate it, or celebrates it on a different day, or if you just believe that people shouldn’t celebrate taking advantage of our indigenous population, we hope you had a lovely week in any event.  Till next time.









Sunday, November 5, 2023

Post-Halloween recap

Another Halloween put to bed, another birthday weekend upcoming.  Nothing overly exciting to report so far: the smallies went out for what is likely their last trick-or-treating ever, while I stayed home to pass out candy to any children who knocked on our door, of which, it turns out, there were exactly zero.  Then we all met back at the television for our annual viewing of Trick ‘r Treat, which is surely the greatest Halloween movie of all time (even counting the actual Halloween).  Our youngest managed to stay awake until the last 5 minutes of the movie, then we all went to bed and, presumably, had lovely dreams.

Until next year!









Sunday, June 18, 2023

Dinner and a Show

Today was Father’s Day, and we took the whole family out for a teppan yaki lupper.  If you don’t know what “lupper” is, it’s a meal about halfway between lunch and supper, in the same way that “brunch” is halfway between breakfast and lunch.  Of course, according to the terminology I was raised with, “lupper” is still dinner, despite the odd timing, because “dinner” means “the biggest meal of the day, no matter what time you eat it.” But that’s a technicality.

If you don’t know what “teppan yaki” is, it’s the Japanese cuisine where they cook on the table (which is apparently called a “teppan,” although most of us Americans just say “hibachi”).  Where I’m from (the DC-VA-NC East Coast corridor), we typically just called it ”Benihana,” because that was the only such place there was.  Well, at least that’s the way it was when I was growing up, which admittedly was a long time ago.

But, here in Southern California (and/or here in the aftertimes), we had a whole bunch of options, of which Benihana was only one (and not even the best one, apparently).  We went with a place called Musashi, which, going by their website, used to have 3 locations, but is now down to just one (the pandemic was not kind to most restaurants, but for teppanyaki restaurants in particular—where more than half the point is the showmanship of the meal preparation, so take-out isn’t as enticing—I’m guessing it was devastating).  Anyway, Musashi has been around since 1981, which is one of those years that seems ancient to my children but doesn’t seem that long ago to me.  But, it was 42 years ago, which is at least long ago enough that it seems like these folks know what they’re doing.  So, I don’t really want to tell you how much it cost us, but the food was excellent, and the kids seemed to enjoy the show (and, honestly, that was the main reason I wanted to go).  So I call it a success.

Next time, a longer post, assuming all goes well.









Sunday, June 4, 2023

Puzzle Progress

Well, I finally kicked off my baby girl’s birthday campaign, and I think it started off pretty well.  She (and my eldest’s partner) seemed to enjoy it at any rate.  The other two kids ... well, let’s just say that they more of the “I don’t have patience with anything I can’t kill” school of D&D.  Still, they’re contributing, and I think they may come around.  And, if they don’t ... welll, it isn’t their birthday game.

Longer post next time, most likely.









Sunday, May 21, 2023

How Doth Fare Thee, M'Lord?

Today we took a trip to the Renn Faire (or the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, as it’s more properly known).  Our youngest had never been, and the pandemic is totally over (right?), and our eldest is back in town (with their partner), so it seemed like a good year to do it.  I have to say, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I have in the past.  But perhaps I’m just too old for this shit, as Danny Glover is wont to say.  Here are my observations:

  • It’s very dusty, and very hot.  I’m sure this was true in past years as well, but I was definitely in better shape back in those days.
  • There are way more vendors.  I wondered if maybe I was just misremembering how many there used to be, but Christy agreed with me that this was far more than last time (which was, to be fair, probably around 10 years ago, if not more).  Essentially, we had to hunt for non-stores in between all the stores—it was crazy.  There were 3 shows, 1 one which was terrible, and the joust, which was so packed we had no hope of getting in.  And a few games (archery, throwing axes, that sort of thing).  Other than that, just rows and rows (and rows) of shops, overpriced food stalls, and sellers of of $7 water bottles.
  • Our middle child (that would be the one with the heart condition) really does not handle heat well.  I think they might be done with Renn Faires and amusement parks and that sort of thing.
  • I could be wrong, but I swear I walked right past Amy Dallen (late of Geek & Sundry, currently at D&D Beyond).  I would have stopped to say “hey,” but people were moving along so fast, I barely registered it was her before she was out of sight.  Perhaps not a major celebrity sighting, but still worth sharing.
  • Other than food and drinks and parking, we bought some fancy honey, and the youngest got a pretty nicely carved wand for only $20.  Other than that, everything was just too pricey for us.
  • The youngest claims to have enjoyed herself, so I suppose it was all worthwhile in the end.
So, I’m not sorry we went, but man am I exhausted.  Until next week.









Sunday, April 2, 2023

Infinite Birthday Season

This weekend, my youngest is having her birthday weekend.  She almost made it to the end before the curse of the Holiday Sickness came for her as well.  So we may very well be doing more make-up time next weekend, just as we had to do for the middle child—this is starting to turn into the never-ending month of birthday celebrations, and it’s already next month.  But we shall see if everyone recovers and is satisfied with their birthday experiences.  Hopefully it’ll all work out.









Sunday, March 12, 2023

The joint is out of time

You know, when I said I should be able to get back to a normal schedule this week, I didn’t consider that it was the beginning of the March birthday season.  Even still, I might have been able to slap something together, except that another stomach virus—which germs seem to be attracted to birthdays and other holidays in our house—descended upon us and kept me home from work a few days whilst taking care of sick kids.  In point of fact, our middle child, whose birthday weekend this was supposed to be, eventually had to give up and take a rain check.  So there’s a distinct possibility that I might fail at making a blog post next week too.  But I’ll do my best to put something together ahead of time for a change.









Sunday, December 4, 2022

Progeny Rebound

This weekend, my eldest child has come back home to live with us again, along with their partner.  As you can imagine, it’s been a hectic week with all the preparations.  So there’s not much to say here.  Hopefully more interestingness next week.









Sunday, November 13, 2022

Ossiferous Anomaly

Well, my “long post/short post” schedule has gotten a bit screwed up lately, what with the medium-sized “short” post on All Hallow’s Eve Eve followed by the complete skip “long” post on my birth-Boxing-day.  So technically this should be a short post week even though last week was a very short post, but mainly I’m making excuses because there’s just no way I could manage a long post this week.

But, to compensate, I shall expend a few words explaining why I can’t make that happen, which could be of interest if you happen to know me personally (say, you were redirected here from a social media post), or if you just dig medical anomalies.  This is not a story about me, but rather about The Mother (who, recall, is not my mother, but rather the mother of my children).

So The Mother was out in our back yard, cleaning up dog poop, and she twisted her foot a bit.  At first thinking nothing of it, she kept on walking for a bit, but she quickly realized it was more serious than she’d thought at first.  So she came in and woke me up (I have a tendency to sleep late on days that end in “Y”) and had me examine it.  Now, I am not a medical professional by any stretch.  However, my mother is a nurse (she was a nurse in our local hospital for many years, and then did in-home care after that), and I’ve had a CPR certification since my teen years, and even briefly held an EMT cert.  So I know just enough to be dangerous—but, more seriously, usually enough to know whether wait-and-see is a reasonable option, or if, no, you really need to get your ass to urgent care.  So I palpated her foot to look for swelling and perhaps detect signs of crepitus (that’s the “noise”—more typically felt as a vibration—of bones grinding together, which can indicate a fracture).  When you do this, you always paplate both sides at once.  Remember: everybody’s body is different, so feeling something that feels unusual because it doesn’t feel like that on you means nothing.  However, most people’s bodies are at least symmetrical, so feeling something on one foot (or hand, or hip, or what-have-you) that isn’t on the other can mean something’s up.  Not always, but it’s often enough to say “okay, this is beyond me: time to talk to a real medical person.”

So I immediatley hit a very obvious protrusion on her lateral metatarsal (i.e. the outside-most foot bone).  She tells me, “no, tha’s nothing; just a bone spur.  Ignore that.” I raised an eyebrow, but said okay.  But there was obvious swelling below that, and I could faintly detect some disturbing sensations: maybe not quite crepitus, but enough for me to say, “nope, I think this is serious, we should try to get you into urgent care ... not the ER, but let’s not wait for a doctor’s appointment either.” I did ask her for more info about the bone spur (which, for whatever reason, I’d never heard about before), and she said that, two or three doctors ago, she’d asked about it, and was told “oh, that’s most likely a bone spur, and there’s nothing you can really do about it other than some pretty serious surgery, so, as long as it’s not immediately bothering you, don’t worry about it.” Since then, each successive doctor would say “oh, what’s this?” and she would pass on the bone spur explanation, and they would all nod and say, “yep, that sounds about right.”

So we set about trying to find an urgent care place.  We’ve changed insurance companies about 4 times in the past several years, so this was trickier than we first expected.  But we eventually found an orthopedic urgent care place fairly close by—lucky!—and, at 5pm (the earliest time they were accepting walk-ins), I drove her out to it.

And, of course, they actually X-rayed the thing.  And then they came back and did more X-rays (never a great sign).  And then they came and told her that that bump she’d had forever what not a bone spur at all.  It was actually a piece of her heel. It had broken off at some point, and apparently not hurt badly enough for her to get medical attention at the time, and the stray piece of bone just floated around inside her foot for a while, and eventually it settled into that position, on the proximal end of the lateral metatarsal, just below her ankle, and just fused with the metatarsal.  And there it stayed until this past Wednesday, when she twisted her foot just so, and it snapped off.

If you didn’t at least wince at that last part, you may want to get your empathy meter checked.

So you can imagine how painful that is, and how unpleasant just the thought of it is, and how it might make it difficult to get around.  The doc said that they’re going to immobilize it (primarily via the use of an orthopedic boot) and see if it will re-stabilize.  If so, perhaps we can get by without any further intervention ... although that seems pretty unlikely.  Worst case scenario, she’ll need surgery to have the stray bone removed.  But, honestly, the urgent care doc (orthopedic specialist though she was), admitted that she had never seen anything like this before, so I think the main reason for waiting a week is to get some availability with the podiatry specialist.  But we’ll see what that fellow has to say on Thursday.

So, I can’t really complain but so much—I mean, my foot isn’t hurting all the time, and I’m not the one wearing a giant boot that you have to pump up when you put it on and then you bump it into everything you try to walk past—but at the same time, it’s a little exhausting being father and mother.  In the past five days, I’ve probably left the house more than in the past five months: two urgent care runs, two doctor’s appointments for the smallies, a “teen drop-off” (and subsequent pick-up), and a trip to Costco.  Hopefully this will get better going forward, but, realistically, it may well get worse if surgery ends up being necessary.  We’ll have to wait and see.









Sunday, July 10, 2022

A productive week

This week I’ve made some serious progress on my $work project, so I’m pretty happy about that.  And I also completed my company performance evaluation, and that went pretty well too.  So, work-wise, I’m pretty set.  And the kids and I have gotten back to playing D&D on a semi-regular basis, so that’s nice too.  Overall, things are progressing fairly well.

Longer post next week.









Sunday, June 12, 2022

Home Alone (except not)

This week The Mother is off in Colorado along with our youngest, so I’m home alone with our middle child.  And the dogs.  And the cats.  And the plants, and the fish, and ... it’s a lot.  I won’t even get into the dogs’ recent digestive issues: trust me, you don’t want to know.  Suffice it to say it’s been a lot of work.  Hopefully I survive until we’re all back together again.

Next week ... actually, I’ll still be in the same situation, so I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything more then either.  We’ll just have to see how it goes.









Sunday, May 29, 2022

Television Quest

Today I was all set to get working on my blog post, but we ended up buying a new television instead.  The old one isn’t quite dead yet, but it’s certainly showing its age.  We bought it about 15 years ago, when we first moved to Southern California.  We’ve been threatening to buy a new one for a while now, but we just kept putting it off.  But, last night, I finally broke down and signed up for Apple TV+, only to discover that our Fire TV is supposedly “too old” to install the Apple TV app.  Personally, I feel like this is just a ploy by Amazon to force us to upgrade when we don’t really need to.

But, regardless of whether it’s valid or not, we don’t have a lot of choice in the matter.  So, either we buy a new Fire TV, or we buy a different type of streaming device (like a Roku), or ... we just buy a new TV.  Because pretty much all TVs these days are “smart” TVs (just like pretty much all phones these days are smartphones), so, as long as it’s a recent enough model, it’ll be able to handle everything we need for now.  And, once the “smart” part of it becomes obsolete, we’ll just upgrade to a new Fire TV or Roku or whatever then and stave off the next upgrade for a while.  So, as long as we needed a new TV anyway, now seemed like a good time to get it.

So we did.  The new one is 7 inches bigger and about 20 pounds lighter.  But it obviously took up more space, so we had to unplug everything and rearrange everything and reroute cords and ... it took a while.  So I ran out of time to do blog posts.  So now all you get is this story about my TV instead.  Sorry.

But, next week, for sure.  Probably.









Sunday, May 1, 2022

D&D Story #2: Birthday Bedlam

For a few blog posts now, I’ve been dropping hints about the special one-shot D&D adventure that I’d planned for my middle child’s 16th birthday.  Now it’s time for a full explanation.

First of all, understand that this kid (whom I used to refer to as the Smaller Animal, but now is taller than everyone else in the house) enjoys playing D&D, and really enjoys playing a fantasy character who can change shapes.  That’s just his thing.  In D&D (as you may recall from my story of his first ever D&D session), that typically means druid, so my kid has played a lot of druids.  Like, a lot.  A metric shit-ton, even.  And there’s certainly nothing wrong with playing the same class all the time, if that’s your jam, but it’s also good to step out of your comfort zone every once in a while.  So I (and my eldest child) have long been working on convincing the Smaller Animal to try other things.  And, while we’ve had a few minor successes here and there, he’s mostly stuck with the druids.

So, for this birthday, either The Mother or I (or maybe we did it together) had an idea to have a “D&D paty,” where his friends could come over (which they haven’t been able to do for the past two birthdays in a row) and we’d all sit around and play D&D all day.  Something self-contained, I thought: a one-shot adventure, designed to be completed in a single session.  And I hit upon the brilliant idea to invent a new ancestry (which D&D often refers to as “race,” which is not only a word charged with real-world baggage, but also just a terrible term for it—“species” would be closer) ... a society where everyone is a shapeshifter.  No need to be a druid, you see: you can just change your shape.  All the time.  To (mostly) whatever you like.

Now, no one’s ever done this in D&D before because it would be difficult to come up with an ancestry that’s (roughly) balanced1  against the core ones: human, halfling, elf, dwarf, etc.  But I had the advantage of being able to say: look, you’re all going to have this ancestry—it’s part of the conceit of the game.  So they were all on equal footing, so balance didn’t really matter.  Plus they could all choose to look like any crazy thing they wanted to.  (If you’re interested to see the stats I came up with, feel free to check them out.2)

And this seemed to work: given the freedom to be able to change shape whenever they liked, they seemed not to need to actually do it in the game—even my shapeshifting-obsessed child never changed into anything the entire session.  So I think I was successful.


Next, I needed a short, self-contained adventure which could be adapted for teenagers.3  I ended up picking a short adventure called Bedlam at the Benefit.  This adventure was short (and inexpensive), and it had a number of advantages:

  • It has a social interaction phase, an exploration phase, and a combat phase, thus giving equal weight to D&D’s “three pillars of play.”
  • How well you do on each phase has an actual impact: the social encounter determines monetary rewards, and “succeeding” on the exploration challenges makes the combat easier.
  • The vast majority of the bad guys are not human—not even remotely humanoid.  There’s no question about whether or not they need to be eliminated.
  • The device of a children’s hospital is going to engage the players immediately: you’ve got to be pretty stony-hearted to not want to help a children’s hospital succeed.
  • It’s very self-contained: you can present this is a mission the characters have been given, they go do the mission, and everything wraps up neatly at the end.

Still, the adventure isn’t perfect.  It had a number of things that I felt needed adjusting:

  • It’s too hard. You’ll notice that this was the one aspect the reviewer I linked to above dinged it for: while it’s ostensibly designed for 5 3rd level characters, it’s likely to wipe out such a party.  Given I was working with younger people, who were not inexperienced, but also not as fully tactical in combat as experienced adults might be, it was probably even more likely.  This one was simple to fix: I just doubled the levels and told everyone to make 6th level characters instead.  Besides, 6th level characters get a lot more cool features to play with than 3rd level characters do, and that’s important for a game where you’re not likely to play those characters again.
  • The monsters are too samey. Basically, other than the mad wizard, you’ve got neogi and gibbering mouthers.  Now, a gibbering mouther is an awesome monster, with a whole bevy of flavorful abilities, and I absolutely adore the neogi, just for the utter insanity of its existence: it’s a spider the size of a large dog with an eel for a head.  But I wanted more variety.  Plus this gave me the opportunity to make sure I could tweak the difficulty of the combat just so: having a bunch of monsters with different toughnesses makes it easier to dial in the exact level of menace you want to portray.
  • Innocent people get killed, by design. This adventure is designed to raise the stakes for you by starting to off the innocent bystanders.  Maybe that’s fine for a group of adult players, but it seemed unnecessarily grim for a group of kids.  This was easy enough to fix as well: I made it so the innocent bystanders would just disappear instead, and then they could all come back at the end (see? everyone’s okay after all).
  • Neogi in D&D are historically slavers. That is, a neogi has a power that it can use to take over someone’s mind and make them do things against their will.  They’re hardly the only D&D monsters that can do this—vampires have a “dominate” power, for instance—but neogi are specifically portrayed as going around enslaving other creatures and using them to boost their own status in their society.  Which is a bit ... icky.  But, above and beyond that, it’s absolutely no fun for your character to get taken over.  In some ways, it’s worse than dying.  And kids hate it even more than adults, I think.  So I took that off the table by reducing the number of neogi to one, and giving it a big creature that it had already dominated (which itself was a pretty horrible monster), so it had no need to try that on any of the characters.
  • Monetary rewards are fairly meaningless for a one-shot. That is, once the adventure is done, handing out a bunch of treasure doesn’t do your character any good, because you’ll (probably) never play that character again.  So essentially you get a bunch of gold you’ll never get to spend.  I handled this by just converting the monetary rewards to bonuses on future rolls, and handed them out right before the big combat at the end so everyone had a chance to use them.

Next, I wanted some cool shapeshifting music.  That just involved scouring YouTube for music inspired by shapeshifting creatures such as werewolves, rakshasas, kitsune, and selkies.  Then I had to arrange the songs into the proper order.4  Then I had a playlist, which you too can enjoy if you’re so inclined.

Next, I wanted some pictures to throw up on the screen to give everyone a the proper atmosphere.  Since this was a children’s hospital that had been converted out of a spooky sanitorium, and they would be arriving close to nightfall, I went with this pic I found on the Internet:

Next, the arrival of the mad warlock and his twisted minions.  For this one, I had to find a bunch of different pics and glue them together with the GIMP.5  My picture editing skills are not great, but I get by.  Here’s what I came up with:

Finally, I needed a map.  I don’t use maps and minis for all my D&D games, but this one was special, and I felt like it really needed that extra oomph.  I employed both the two younger kids to help me put it together—that was a bit spoilery for the birthday boy, but he loves building maps so much that I felt it was better to let him help design the thing than try to keep a surprise.  Here’s what we came up with, as seen in game with minis deployed:

You can see the mad warlock in the center, towards the back of the main entrance; cells with prisoners in them in the back; a few miscellaneous walls for cover; and various statues and other bits of flavor throughout.  Our heroes are towards the front (which is on the left in the picture), either waiting to come in, or already charged in for battle.

Next was trying to get everyone to come up with their characters.  This is a bit like pulling teeth at this age: between indecision and procrastination, it was close to impossible ... in fact, my ten-year-old was the only one who got done early.6  The birthday boy went with an artificer.  There are different flavors of artificer in D&D, but his was sort of a fantasy mad scientist, sporting a “boomstick” (magical version of a musket), a shrink ray, an invisibility suit, and a portal gun (reflavored spells).  My youngest was a college of spirits bard, who communed with ghosts for information and magic.  My eldest was an earth sorcerer/monk, calling upon the stones themselves to help out in combat.  My middle child’s two best friends were, respectively, an owlin (looking) warlock who wielded a giant pen like a spear, and a bard who appeared to look so much like an ordinary human man that it was unnerving.  And that’s pretty much all the prep.

For the session itself, they were given their mission, went undercover as adventurers who were being called upon to impress rich donors and convince them to give more money to the children’s hospital (still under construction, though mostly completed), and actually raised a bit of money for the director (for which I rewarded them with some bonus dice to be used later).  Then, in the midst of the fundraiser, the mad warlock appears on the lawn with his minions and kidnaps a bunch of the rich donors.  They managed to kill both the gibbering mouthers (which made the final fight easier), but the rest of the monsters got away with some captives, as they were designed to do.

Next, they had to explore the creepy basement and sub-basement of the new hospital, which had been sealed up and forgotten about.  It was full of vermin and ghosts, and they had to figure out how to learn as much information about their foe as possible.  This was a skill challenge where each character could pick whatever skill they liked, as long as they could think of a way to describe what they were doing.  So, you could say “persuasion,” and then describe how you talked a ghost into giving you info, or you could say “athletics” and describe how you kicked down a door or moved some rubble to find some clues, or you could say “religion” to recognize some of the mystic symbols scratched into the walls ... whatever you liked.  If you get a certain number of successes before you get half as many failures, you “win” the challenge and the bad guy’s powers are reduced (because his evil, Lovecraftian overlords are disappointed in him, I suppose).  His powers are also reduced if you don’t get all the successes, but you do get at least half of them.  So there’s actually four different versions of the warlock you can face.  Our party didn’t quite cross the finish line before hitting that last failure, but certainly enough to pass the halway mark, so they got a middling version of the warlock to fight.

Then it was time to run the final combat.  This drug out forever, partially because I had probably overestimated how many monsters they could handle, partially because it’s difficult to get kids to focus on the battle and keep things moving sometimes, and partially because I didn’t have the chance to review everyone’s character ahead of time and familiarize myself with exactly what people could and couldn’t do.  But we got through it in the end.  Here’s my battle highlights:
  • The winged pen-wielder did the most damage to the warlock directly, taking out over half his hit points.
  • The artificer killed most of the smaller monsters with a single shot each, and did the majority of the damage to the medium monsters.
  • A well-placed shatter spell from the disturbingly normal-looking bard did exactly enough damage to finish off the medium monsters.
  • The earth sorcerer/monk took on the biggest monster solo and took it down to 2 hit points before it fled and eventually got taken out by the artificer.
  • The ghost bard mainly concentrated on keeping everyone else alive, and ended up healing enough total hit points to constitute a whole ’nother party member.

In the end, almost all the monsters were destroyed outright, the warlock was killed, sending the few remaining monsters back to their other plane of existence, and releasing the trapped prisoners (even the ones who had disappeared).  The director thanked them all, the ancient evil was vanquished permanently, and the hospital was able to open in safety.

So I think everyone had a great time, despite us running close to twice as long as we originally planned, and I think they were satisfied with their characters and their success.  My two youngest (that is, the birthday boy and his little sister) are already talking about bringing their characters back for more stories, so I take that as a positive sign that it was a good time.  It was a bunch of work on my part, and it sucked up a lot of my time over the past few weeks, but I think it was all worthwhile to hear everyone cheer when the bad guys were defeated at last.

Hopefully we get to do it again sometime.



__________

1 Personally, I don’t believe things have to be precisely balanced in D&D.  Just not grossly unbalanced, if you see what I’m saying.

2 As always, credit for layout primarily goes to GM Binder.

3 Technically, my youngest is not a teenager yet, but she was probably the most mature child at the table, so I wasn’t worried about her.

4 See my series on music mixes for why I’m so obsessed with the order songs play in.

5 The GIMP—GNU Image Manipulation Program—is the open-source alternative to PhotoShop.

6 And possibly the only one who was truly and completely done with their character before we actually started playing.











Sunday, April 24, 2022

Birthday Delayed, Now Accomplished

Yesterday was my middle child’s special birthday celebration: a D&D one-shot where he, his siblings, and his two best friends all played shapeshifters on a mission to uncover a hidden evil lurking in a newly-renovated children’s hospital.  While it’s always difficult to wrangle teenagers (plus the one slightly younger and the one slightly older)—and as a result we ran long—it was still a success, and everyone seemed to enjoy it.  Hopefully next week I can post a longer recap.









Sunday, April 10, 2022

The Shape of Things to Come

This week I’ve been concentrating on my middle child’s much-delayed birthday celebration: a one-shot D&D campaign that celebrates his love of shapeshifting.  Since it’s a special occasion, I’ve been trying to get really prepared and make it very special.  Perhaps after it’s done I’ll report on how it went.  Stay tuned!









Sunday, March 20, 2022

Break for Mourning

Due to a death in the family, I’ll be skipping this week’s long post.  I’ll be back next week with something more substantial.









Sunday, February 27, 2022

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

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.









Sunday, February 20, 2022

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 Masqueradebut 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.





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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.











Sunday, February 13, 2022

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.









Sunday, February 6, 2022

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.