Gothic Gaming

This weekend we’re going to try finish up the many-times-postponed birthday game of D&D that my eldest prepared for my middle child.  And, yes, it’s nearly a month late, but ... well, shit happens.  After getting postponed due to sickness, unpreparedness, and all around general grumpiness, I ended up having to postpone due to fallout from my big work project, which I finally pushed to production on Monday.  So we started on Friday, but we started late, and now we’re finishing today, so, TL;DR: you get no proper post again this week.

But, in order to have something to put up, I thought perhaps I’d tell you about some of characters for this game.  We’re doing a sort of Gothic horror game, though it seems so far like it’s less Ravenloft and more Castle Amber (if you speak D&D, you’ll get what I mean).  My middle child opted for a flesh golem moster hunter barbarian—think Frankenstein’s monster, one of the intelligent but reticent versions, weilding a combination sword-shotgun (I, Frankenstein might work, or any number of videogame characters).  I can’t give you too many more details than that, because I wasn’t responsible for helping build that character.

My youngest, on the other hand, came to play with a creepy-as-fuck concept.  Silvin is a young man with no eyes (he wears bandages over where they should be) who wears dark, baggy, nondescript clothes ... including gloves, which cover the fact that he has eyeballs in his palms.  So he has to take his gloves off if he wants to see, but on the other hand he can move through the world just fine as a blind person.  He can’t speak, but he can communicate telepathically.  He is a bard of the college of whispers, which gives him access to powers like Psychic Blades, Words of Terror, and Mantle of Whispers.  As if that weren’t enough, he’s a feat machine, having taken Telepathic, Telekinetic, Shadow-Touched, and Gift of the Gem Dragon, which latter is just more ways to push people around with your mind.  Aside from Words of Terror, he can cast cause fear, fear, danse macabre, dissonant whispers, phantasmal force, and phantasmal killer, which is a hell of a lot of ways to be a scary dude; when it comes to “look into my eyes” type shit, there’s the aforementioned Mantle of Whispers, plus even more spells: enthrall, confusion, unearthly chorus, Tasha’s hideous laughter, mental prison, crown of stars, and synaptic static.  And I haven’t even listed all the spells he knows ... did I mention we’re 14th level for this one-shot?  It’s crazy.

For myself, I resurrected an old character of mine that I had for a previous one-shot (also Gothic horror, and possible also for a birhday game).  She was only 7th level, but it was easy enough to bring her up to 14th.  She’s a rogue inquisitive and also a warlock of the Raven Queen (pact of the blade).  I built her to be a mystery-solver who can also hold her own in a fight.  She’s a lavender-skinned tiefling; I found this image on the Internet drawn by Bright Bird Art:

So she looks pretty much like that, except that her staff is actually illusory, so she can stab you with it (she summons her pact weapon, a scimitar, so that it’s inside the illusion of the staff), and she has a raven on her shoulder which doesn’t look quite real.  In terms of feats, she is Perceptive and Mobile; in terms of eldritch invocations, she wears her Armor of Shadows, and can summon a Cloak of Flies when she needs to be really scary; in terms of spells, she can also mess with your mind too: via puppet, ego whip, or Raulothim’s psychic lance.  Her expertises are in acrobatics, stealth, investigation, and perception; in battle she likes to cast spiritual weapon in the form of a person-sized raven and then either eldritch blast from afar, or get into the mix using Mobile, her improved pact weapon, and sneak attack.  In social situations, she’s pretty darn good at persuasion and deception, but she’s not afraid to break out that cloak of flies, which can do poison damage if you stand too close, and, if you don’t, there’s always infestation to send those little buggers out up to 30 feet away.

So that’s our primary party (my eldest’s partner is playing a helpful druid, but he’s really closer to an NPC), and we’re exploring a vampire’s castle and seeking out and destroying various loose, undead organs.  We got the stomach and the liver so far, but I’ve a feeling there’s a lot more to go.  Wish us luck!

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.

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.

Character noodling

It’s been a busy weekend, and I did a long post last week, so I think I’ll leave you with little other than the promise of something more substantial next week.

But, just for fun, my youngest and I have been working on a new D&D character: he’s a young (~13 years old) dinosaur person related to the Jurassic-Park-style dilophosaurus.  We decided his name should be Oxý Sálio (Οξύ Σάλιο).  (You’ll have to use Google Translate to work out what that’s based on, but it’ll be obvious in retrospect.)  We’ve still got more work to do, but it seems like a cool basic concept.  We’ll see what develops.

Prolly not all it's cracked up to be

Welcome to 2023.  Please keep your hands and arms inside the new year at all times.  Side effects may include drowsiness and upset stomach.  Not recommended for children under 5 years old.  Risk of electrical shock: only qualified personnel should service this year.  Max load capacity 300 pounds.  If ingested, do not induce vomiting.  Read and understand operator’s manual and all safety instructions before using this year.  Authorized personnel only beyond this point.  Avoid direct exposure to year.  In case of damage or leakage, please notify the CDC.  Please mind the gap, and supervise children at all times.  Not intended for highway use.  Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your stay here in 2023.

Season's Greetings

After over a decade of researching the various holidays that exist at this time of year, I feel uniquely qualified to offer you the most diverse set of season’s greetings you’re likely to receive this year.  Here they are, in roughly chronological order of the establishment of the holiday.  Please believe that I sincerely extend unto you each sentiment, as serious or silly as each might be.  To you and yours, I wish you all:

Merry meet! (more about Solstice)

Shalom Aleichem! (more about Hanukkah)

Yazdaan Panaah Baad (more about Zartosht No-Diso)

Merry Christmas! (more about Christmas)

Greetings on Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (more about Sol Invictus)

Habari gani? (more about Kwanzaa)

Enjoy the Mystery Days

Jai Ganapati! (more about Pancha Ganapati)

Happy Festivus! (more on Festivus)

Merry Christmahannukwanzaakah!

Happy Candlenights! (more about Candlenights)

May you all know joy in all that comes your way.

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.

Push Poetry (an addendum)

Some time back, in the beforetimes prior to the pandemic, I wrote about my ”push poetry.” You should review that post to see what it is and how it came to be.  As that was over 3 years ago now, you can imagine that I’ve pushed a few more times since then, and generated a bit more “poetry.” I thought I’d just take this opportunity to share a few more bits and bobs I’ve slapped together in the meantime.

Last time, I shared my most prized example, this cento:

once upon a time, when it lived in the woods,
and be was finale of seem,
the push machine past, the push machine future,
and the dreaming moment between.
tenders of paradox, tenders of measure,
tenders of shadows that fall,
black seas of infinity, most merciful thing,
my god, full of stars, all.

(For a full provenance, see the original post.)

Here are some others that I’ve put together in the past few years, and where they come from.

the sky was darkened, and a low rumbling sound was heard in the air.  there was a rushing of many wings, a great chattering and laughing, and the sun came out of the dark sky to show a crowd of monkeys, each with a pair of immense and powerful wings on his shoulders.  then, with a great deal of chattering and noise, the winged monkeys flew to the place where the push machine and its tender bots were working.

some of the monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the machine and wound many coils about its chassis and control panel and caterpillar treads, until it was unable to roll or rotate or move in any way.

others of the monkeys caught the machine, and with their long fingers pulled all of the wires and hoses out of its logic circuits. they made its valve caps and control dials and gauges into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.

the remaining monkeys seized the machine and carried it through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks.  here they dropped the poor push machine, which fell a great distance to the rocks, where it lay so battered and dented that it could neither extend its control arms nor generate any steam.

then all the winged monkeys, with much laughing and chattering and noise, flew into the air and were soon out of sight.

Obviously, this one is from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the book, not the movie).

the figure turns half round, and the light falls upon the face.  it is perfectly white—perfectly bloodless. the eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. 

with a sudden rush that could not be foreseen—with a strange howling cry that was enough to awaken terror in the breast of every tender bot, the figure seized the exposed tubes and wires of the push machine, and twining them round his bony hands he held it to the riverbank. electronic whine followed the scream of grinding metal in rapid succession. the glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that mettalic form with a hideous satisfaction—horrible profanation. with a plunge he seizes the primary coolant hose in his fang-like teeth—a gush of fluid, and a hideous sucking noise follows. the push machine has fallen still, and the attacker is at his hideous repast!

I loved researching this one.  This is from Varney the Vampire, often considered to be the first modern vampire story (preceding Dracula by nearly fifty years).

life is short
and pleasures few
and holed the ship
and drowned the crew
but o! but o!
how very blue
the sea is.

i dreamt a limitless machine, a machine unbound,
its gears scattered in fantastic abundance,
on every tooth there was a new horizon drawn.
new heavens supposed;
new states, new souls.

i dreamed i spoke in the push’s language,
i dreamed i lived in the push’s skin;
i dreamed i was my own tender bot,
i dreamed i was a tiger’s kin.

here is a list of terrible things:
the jaws of sharks, a vultures wings,
the rabid bite of the bots of war,
the voice of one who went before,
but most of all the push’s gaze,
which counts us out our numbered days.

o push machine,
my little one,
come with me,
your life is done.

forget the future,
forget the past.
life is over:
belch out your last.

a machine lies in wait in me,
a stew of wounds and misery,
but fiercer still in life and limb,
the push that lies in wait for him.

life is short
and labor steep
rusted the bots
and ruined the keep
but o! but o!
how very deep
the river is.

This one comes from gluing together some of Clive Barker’s poetry.  Though Barker is of course known for writing excellent horror stories (and is in fact one of my pentagram of literary idols), he does occasionally dabble in poetry, and he’s not too shoddy at it.  I believe all of these are from the Abarat series, though from different poems, probably in different volumes.

forward, the push machine!
and every tender bot unseen.
not though they all knew
someone had blundered.
theirs not to make reply,
theirs not to reason why,
theirs but to do and die.
into the valley of death
went the push machine unencumbered.

then from the bank it seem’d there came, but faint
as from beyond the limit of the world,
like the last echo born of a great cry,
sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
around a machine returning from its labours.

twilight and evening bell,
and after that the dark.
and may there be no sadness of farewell,
when the push machine embarks.

cannon to right of it,
cannon to left of it,
cannon in front of it
volleyed and thundered;
stormed at with shot and shell,
boldly it rolled, but fell
into the jaws of death,
into the mouth of hell
went the push machine, now encumbered.

thereat once more through the mud clomb the tender bots,
ev’n to the highest they could reach, and saw,
straining their sensors beneath the rolling door,
or thought they saw, the speck that bore the machine
down that long river opening on the deep
somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
from less to less and vanish into light.
and the sun set, bringing on the night.

These are all Tennyson poems.  The first and fourth stanzas are from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”; the second and fifth (final) stanzas are from “Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur”; and the centerpiece is from the classic “Crossing the Bar.”

twas a dark and stormy night
and the torrents fell like rain;
you may get there by candle-light:
the place where the push machine was slain.

no less liquid than their shadows
at night, the ice weasels come.
obsequious as darkness, under the gallows,
they came; consumed; now are gone.

as hollow and empty, in the bleak december,
as the spaces between the stars.
the ghost of each separate dying ember
illuminates the scars.

now the rain (like tears) is perfunctory;
i can assure you, there was exquisite pain—
fear is the mind-killer; blood is compulsory—
on the night the push machine was slain.

And here’s another cento; I really love writing these.

Stanza 1

• Lines 1 & 2: The classic opening line of the bad novel Paul Clifford, which inspired the awesome Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
• Line 3: I’ve reused line 4 from my original cento; it’s a traditional nursery rhyme, though I first became aware of it courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.
• Line 4: Original.

Stanza 2

• Line 1, line 3 (first half): “Cats,” by A.S.J. Tessimond, contains one of my all time favorite opening couplets, and I often reach for it in cento writing.
• Line 2: This is from a quote from Matt Groening’s Big Book of Hell.  Fun fact: I wove this exact line into a wedding speech I gave once.
• Line 3 (second half), line 4: I can’t quite remember where these came from, but at least some of it is original, I’m pretty sure.

Stanza 3

• Line 1 (first half), line 2: This is a line from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
• Line 1 (second half), line 3: From “The Raven,” by Edgar Allen Poe.
• Line 4: Original.

Stanza 4

• Line 2: A classic line from “The Forbidden,” Clive Barker’s short story that was the basis for Candyman (just slightly rearranged).
• Line 3 (first half): This is part of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear, from Dune.
• Line 3 (second half): The penultimate line from my favorite speech of Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
• Line 1, line 4: Original.

That’s all I got for ya this week.  Tune in next time for a more substantial post.

That's a big pile of ...

To say that the computer gods have shat on me would only be an accurate assessment if the pile of shit you’re imagining is the one from Jurassic Park.  There was a point last night when I was pretty sure my $work computer was complete toast and would have be reinstalled from scratch.  But I managed to find some advice on the Internet that helped me figure out how to fix it.

So now I’m mostly back to normal, but there’s still several lingering issues that I’m going to have to deal with over the next few days.  On the plus side, I jumped my operating system forward not one, but two fulll versions.  Which should eliminate several of the problems I’ve been experiencing lately (and, to be fair, will definitely introduce a few more).  It remains to be seen if, on balance, I come out ahead.  Given my history, it seems unlikely, but I remain ever optimistic.  Foolishly.

The light at the end of the tunnel (which is hopefully not an oncoming train)

This weekend I’ve been taking advantage of the lack of a long post and being mostly caught up on $work to finally make some headway on that computer issue I was bitching about ever so long ago.  I really don’t seem to be able to actually fix it, apparently, so I’ve been reduced to coming up with a workaround.  And even that is somewhat sticky, but I’ve been making progress, actually, which is more than I’ve been able to say over the past few months.  So that’s nice.  I’m not out of the woods yet, mind you, but moving forward is better than standing still, I think.  Progress, not perfection, as they say!

So I think I shall get back to my computer work and leave you, dear reader, until next week, when there will most likely be a much longer post than this meager fare.  Till then.

Staycation Again, Like We Did Last Summer

This week I began a bit of a staycation, which will extend into the middle of next week.  I’m trying to catch up on a bunch of computer stuff that has been stacking up, with mixed success.  Hopefully I make a bit more progress as it goes on.  But, either way, we should have a longer post next week.

A bit of a cliché, but true nonetheless

While I’m not in general fond of “man it sucks getting old” posts, I do have to say that, of late, I definitely have been feeling my age.  Nothing major in the health department, really ... just your standard quantity of aches and pains that inevitably come with the wearing out of joints and the brittleness of bones.  There’s nothing to be done about it, per se, but I’m not sure I really need to do anything about it.  Overall, I’m fairly lucky, so I feel a bit ungrateful whining about the advancing years.  As they say, it’s better than the alternative.  Still, ...

Getting old does kinda suck.  Sometimes.

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.

Cursed of the Gods

This week was another of those “the computer gods hate me” weeks.  I found a corrupted file, so I went to look at my backups, only to find that things aren’t really set up the way I thought they were.  So I have three recent versions (all of which were corrupted), and a version from January, and another from March.  So I restored it as best I could, sort of merging the newer parts that weren’t corrupted with the older parts that were outdated, but at least it gave me a full set of data.  Then I went trolling through scrollback buffers looking for any bits that I could use to update the old data to get it as close to what I had before as possible.

And, of course, after all that, I’m still going to have to fix my backups so they make this easier next time it happens.  I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to do that, but I can’t even deal with it right now.  You ever have one of those weeks where everything you try to do just leads you to another thing you have to do first?  Yeah, that.

Anyway, enough bitching.  Next week there should be a longer post.  Tune in then!

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.

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.

To be silent ...

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.
— Voltaire (maybe)

Way back in my first ”nothing to say” post, I used this quote, which is commonly attributed to Voltaire.  It applies again to today’s post, and I (again) made an attempt to source the quote, and once again I failed.  Wikiquote refuses to source it, and Quote Investigator hasn’t tackled it yet.  GoodReads says he said it, and they’re usually pretty reliable, but then again they also usually provide a source, which they don’t here.  AZ Quotes is usually not reliable, but at least they give a source: The Portable Voltaire, although I’m not sure if I can consider that an authoritative source.  Still, as I said last time:

But, you know, it can be true even without being famous.
— me (definitely)

And, it is true.  So I shall be silent.

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.

We live in apocalyptic times ...

Well, it’s currently my middle child’s birthday weekend, so I have not much time to devote to a post.  But I did have a thought tonight, while watching television with the kids.

We decided to go back to Sweet Tooth, after a long break.  It’s a good show; we had just gotten distracted by other things.  But, as we were watching, I was suddenly struck by just how many shows we’re watching nowadays that have post-apocalyptic themes.  So I went back to my big list of TV shows I’ve either started or finished since the pandemic, and found that all these are just flat out post-apocalyptic (even the ones that are for kids!):

• Station Eleven
• The Walking Dead
• Fear of the Walking Dead
• Walking Dead: The World Beyond
• Sweet Tooth
• The Last Ship
• The Stand
• American Horror Story: Apocalypse
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts
• Last Kids on Earth
• Oats Studio

These are not truly post-apocalyptic, but definitely portray a dystopian future:

• Westworld
• Altered Carbon
• Lost in Space
• Cowboy Bebop
• Alice in Borderland
• Nightflyers
• Avenue 5
• Arcane

These aren’t really either of those, but they do have at least references to apocalyptic events:

• The Magicians
• The Nevers
• Umbrella Academy
• Made for Love
• Star Trek: Discovery
• The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
• Witcher
• The Watch
• Legends of Tomorrow
• The Hollow
• Inside Job

Not sure if there’s exactly a point to all this musing, but I thought at the very least it was interesting.

Next week, a longer post.

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.