Trismegistus

Friday of course being Samhain/Halloween, I did my traditional daily bakes in the afternoon before heading down the street to the neighborhood's annual block party--one of the oldest and most well-established in the city. Several streets are closed to traffic (and several more de facto closed to traffic just by the number of pedestrians on them). Although a bit scaled back since covid (no bouncy castles or the like this year), there were still a ton of trick-or-treaters, and pretty much everyone of any age was in costume. Last year, the GC and I were Over The Garden Wall's Sara and Wirt, and we had such fun making those costumes that we reprised them this year.

As two of the GeekBBQ regulars now live on one of the main streets, we spent the majority of the evening handing out candy outside their place, then went in after the onslaught had wrapped up and watched:

What We Do In The Shadows an annual Halloween watch for us until it got popular enough that Kanopy lost the license to streaming services. Luckily, the GeekBBQers own a copy, so we were able to watch again. The whole movie is great, but I ride or die for the werewolves (not swearwolves! ...Seriously, I didn't think anything could ever top Adventure Time's Whywolves, but these guys absolutely do). This one is a forever classic.

The Craft I grew up with Fairuza Balk in The Worst Witch and was newly smitten with her in the melodramatic made-for-TV movie Shame a few years later, and so was very stoked when I learned that she and Melody from Hey Dude were going to be in The Craft. Then I saw The Craft. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now( Read more... ) Or rather, I like the first half of the movie a great deal, and the rest? Hard no thank you.

Dark Shadows It's a fine movie, but not one I was every particularly into, so I "watched" it during lulls in the conversation.

Music: Saturday was PorchFest. I don't know if it was because people were out late the night before, but the first two hours of the thing were dead; almost no one on the streets anywhere. It was so stark we started wondering if the thing had been postponed and we somehow had just not got the message? But there were bands playing, so that couldn't have been right. Then, at 4:00 pm a cloud of people emerged from metro like a horde of lanternflies just as we'd decided decamp for our afternoon walk; it felt like walking against the entire tide of humanity. Walk completed, we returned to find that things had picked up somewhat, although even with the new injection of humanity there were way fewer people than I've ever seen at any previous PorchFest. (I think it was a combination of Halloween being the night before, the many Halloween parties later that night, the city being under crypto-martial law, and the furlough.)

We watched a few "solo woman with an acoustic guitar" performances, a husband-and-wife duo (both veterans; the "likening everything to soldiers/combat/honor/patriotism" lyrical lens did not resonate with us personally, but they were still very, very good), and several very good punk and blues bands, and the neighborhood cover band that has played as long as I've been going to PorchFest.

Podcasts: Episodes 9 and 10 of the Grimfrost podcast, with academics Neil Price and Anders Kaliff, both fascinating guests. I enjoyed the conversation with Price a little bit more because it felt slightly more grounded in fact than academic speculation, but the speculation in the latter episode was presented as such and also very interesting.

Television: As ever, the current Last Week Tonight episode (the main segment of which was unfortunately not as nuanced as one would have hoped), and some halfhearted poking at AEW Collision and AEW Dynamite.

However, on Sunday, the GeekBBQ crew reconvened to watch episodes 2 and 3 of Dimension 20: Titan Takedown, which brings together three of my longstanding loves: Greek mythology, D&D, and pro-wrestling. Gawd, what a great freaking campaign. I love The New Day. I love Bayley. (Chelsea Green came after I'd all but stopped watching WWE but holy crap, she may just get me back into it.) When I was first trying to get the GC to dip a toe into wrestling, I plugged it as "a D&D superhero campaign with live acrobatics", and it is. Which is why this campaign in particular just works so well. Because, while some of the party members are new to D&D, they have definitely roleplayed fantasy characters with ideals, bonds, flaws, and defining personality traits in a longform improv storyline. It's incredibly funny, it's dramatic, it's more emotionally rewarding than it has any right to be, and I am very much looking forward to the final episode.

Video Games: I am very much into comfort food gaming as I wrap up my fourth week of being forced to work full time for free. And so it was that I got my hands on Suikoden I&II Remastered...

...and began a replay of Ultima IV, having ceded the console to the GC, who has never played any of the Suikodens before. ("Do you think I'd like them?" he asked. "As long as you realize going in that they are not BG, let alone BG3, yeah," I told him. And by and large, he has enjoyed them albeit with some--warranted--groaning at the most Extremely Retro elements. For my part, I have enjoyed watching him react to the game in real time, and yeah, these games still hold up.)

As does Ultima, once I'd gotten into the grove of replaying it. It still is one of the OGs of computer RPGing, and I have a renewed appreciation for how cleverly it's written given all the development constraints--graphics, sound, memory, distribution--in play when it came out. This is a game without a world map, let alone fast travel. I spawned as a mage and spent an exasperating three days grinding just to get off the island where mages spawn and to Castle Britannia so that I could get the gear, reagents, and party members necessary to get going on the actual Avatar quest. But I am well on my way now, although irritatingly grinding again along the coastline, waiting for a pirate ship to spawn so I can commandeer it and get to the other islands I need to visit. (There were a billion pirate ships when it was just me, with no spells, armor, or ranged weapon, and thus no hope of surviving an encounter with them. And now...nada. Go figure.)

これで以上です。

...makes a post!

Job stuff! February found me commuting to a new worksite that requires 2+ hours in the car each day, which has significantly cut down on the leisure time things I'm able to do in a day. That said, the work is awesome, and I'm having a blast doing it while I'm onsite.

Concerts! This time, Falling in Reverse and Disturbed.

I knew more about the drama surrounding Falling in Reverse (even predating the Paige/Suraya connection) than I did their music, which turned out to be...fine. It wasn't bad in a concert venue setting but also wasn't anything distinguished enough that I'd seek it out again on my own. What did distinguish the band was the lead singer publicly berating a member of his stage crew, at length and by name, after something apparently went wrong toward the end of the show. Like, dude, you have just generated a lot of sympathy from me for someone, and it isn't you. Super gross and unnecessary, particularly when it became clear the lead singer wasn't even capable of generating entry-level stage patter to fill the silence after he'd finished dropping f-bombs on the stage hand.

Disturbed, on the other hand, was excellent as ever. We'd seen them live last summer (with Jinjer and Breaking Benjamin), so the stage set and much of the set list were pretty familiar, but man they put on a good show. Just a ton of energy and excitement, which is exactly what I wanted from the experience. The audience energy was great: people were as into it as we were.

Side note: the Baltimore concert tee bootleggers' game is fabulous. Por ejemplo: they didn't even bother to photoshop out the vendor "low tix" warning icons out of screencap they used for the dates on their Disturbed bootleg tee. These guys dngaf and it's great.

Bonus beer: We had dinner at The Brewer's Art, whose Resurrection abbey brown ale I'm a big fan of. The food was great and so were the other beers, particularly their GPT green peppercorn trippel and Daytrip to Yorkshire English old ale.

Building Bullshit! Has been so egregious and frequent I've stopped posting about it as it happens. Suffice to say that the building was on fire three times in February, the upstairs tenants flooded our kitchen and closet again when they got high and failed to turn off the faucet in their kitchen again, and our bathroom flooded again after the management company failed to fix the crumbling pipes in our again. We called maintenance at 3:00 in the afternoon when we came home and discovered the problem, but wouldn't you know? The maintenance number listed on the building website and provided to the concierge and answering service was wrong—as has been the case since January when the building manager was first notified of the issue.

But wait! There's more!

On top of that, the management company erroneously sent out notices informing tenants that we hadn't paid rent and that the management company was going to initiate eviction proceedings, again. (Seriously, this is the third time this has happened in the last six months, and the notices to go pretty much everyone in the building, including people like us who religiously pay rent on the 1st of each month.)

This is especially ironic given that the management company didn't think to position the cameras they finally agreed to install in the lobby in such a way as to cover the rent drop box, which was robbed. (Following the robbery, the management company helpfully sent letters to tenants saying that we were responsible for making sure management company received our rent on time, would need to submit payment again if our payments were among those stolen from the rent drop box, and that tenants were responsible for assuming any costs associated with cancelling checks that had been stolen from the rent drop box, which management suggested that we do.

TL;DR—you would think that after this, the management company would reposition the cameras to cover the rent drop box.

WELL. THEY DID NOT.

And it was robbed again. Rinse, repeat. Following this, the management company informed tenants that they were doing away with the rent drop box and that everyone would have to submit payments electronically in the future. This is fine for us, but not for other folks in the building, for specific reasons. Following intervention from the Tenants' Association and city authorities, the management company has informed us that they will be installing a new rent drop box behind the concierge desk. Hopefully they don't put it in a camera blindspot this time.

D&D! Season Three of Oldest D&D Group's homebrew campaign reconvened. The party continues to be as ineptfective as ever. Por ejemplo: across two sessions, we somehow ended up guarding a caravan, ambushed the brigands who were trying to ambush us and defeated them by, among other things, conjuring octopi to drop on their heads, lost half the caravan to hobgoblin raiders, and then ended up with twice as many wagons after we raided the raiders, in a process that happened to involve polymorphing various party members into horses and setting a lot of things on fire.

Second Oldest D&D Group's Saltmarsh campaign reconvened, with a marathon seven-hour battle session that honestly was a bit of a slog, at least for me. (I'm the only player in the group who doesn't use my phone during sessions. In a bid to get the others to pay attention, the DM gave them four additional units to control. This did not lead to less phone usage but resulted in my having one attack per the other players' three to nine, each turn. Ugh.) Things picked up in the following sessions, however, once the DM rebalanced the play mechanics. Subsequent sessions have featured a lot of great combats against some pretty tough critters, as well as the chance use do outside-the-box tactics to defeat them.

D&D Pt. II! We randomly ran into two of the players from Third Oldest D&D Group while out preparing for Geek BBQ Mardi Gras (for which, see below). This group's campaign has been on hiatus since last summer, but will be starting back up again. That was welcome news. Furthermore, as it's an online campaign, I hadn't actually seen these guys in the flesh since the Beforetimes, so it was delightful to have run into them.

D&D Pt. III! Boy, I was not in the headspace to handle BG3 last summer. Last month, I jettisoned my previous games and started fresh. I am definitely in the headspace for it now. I'm really enjoying the tie-ins to Escape from Avernus, and wondering whether any of the Shar/Selûne stuff that's being hinted at ties back in any way to Shar/Selûne developments in BG/BG2 EE. Also, holy crap, this is a great game.

Deadpool 3 Trailer Release Party! Which also apparently involved some sort of major sporting event? IDEK. 😛 At any rate, the food and company were fabulous. I brought a ginger carrot miso dip that people seemed to really like, and people really liked the Aslin sour—Durango Doug—we brought.

Bonus beer: I also picked up a four-pack of Aslin's Orchid imperial stout + vanilla that may be one of my favorite things they've done since Padrino.)

Gaelg! The mid-February holiday meant I was actually able to join in to an online speaking thing. It was exceptionally fun, especially because this is one of the nichest of my niche interests. (Prior to a few years ago, I figured this was a language I would never actually get to, you know, speak to anyone with.) It's weirdly one of the languages I find most intuitive, and I was able to make some decently complex sentences. I got complements on my accent, too. And again, it's just a bunch of fun to be actively using it.

Geek BBQ! Following on the heels of Geek BBQ Friendsgiving, Geek BBQ whiskey white elephant, and Geek BBQ dessert potluck, Geek BBQ put together a Mardi Gras potluck. The music was excellent, the decorations were excellent, and I probably ate my body weight in homemade jambalaya and gumbo. Very good stuff with a very good group of people.

Ice Skating 2.No! Geek BBQ friend called out of the blue one morning to invite us to a free skate at the ice complex. We were skeptical we'd be able to make it in time but were ultimately won over by friend's enthusiasm. Fast forward a hectic 40 minutes later when friend called back to say that they + friend 3 weren't going after all. Luckily, we had not actually paid for the skate yet. We had, however, jettisoned our lazy day in to trek out to the suburbs. What to do? We ended up having brunch at a favorite old venue, which happened to be showing a Scotland vs. Wales rugby match to a probable majority of the area's very enthusiastic fans. It was great energy and a lot of fun.

Karaoke! We decided to eat dinner at a newly opened Thai place before going to Geek BBQ. The food was excellent. We were the only people in the place aside from the server and the manager, who coincidentally happened to be there. Which was amazingly fortuitous and cool, because they invited us into the basement, which they had converted into a karaoke bar, and we got to sing. For free. Whatever and for as long as we wanted. I knocked out a significant portion of Roxette's back catalogue and it was spectacular.

LNY! We went out for dim sum with second oldest D&D group. Our intended destination was a bust (pro tip: do not try to go eat somewhere in a busy shopping center during a major holiday where the parking lot has been converted into stages, seating, and booths). Luckily, we knew of a second dim sum place nearby with really great food, went there, and ate ourselves silly.

What's my language progress look like?

This month I primarily blew through the supplementary hangeul lessons. These are surprisingly useful because I learned Korean directly through hangeul, which means that I never actually learned how to romanize it.

• Chinese — 1/5 through Unit 5; legendary through Unit 2
• Dutch — 4/5 through Unit 3; legendary through Unit 1
• Gaelic — 4/5 through Unit 6; legendary through Unit 3
• Hindi — 1/2 through Unit 2; backburnered until I wrap up a physical textbook
• Indonesian — 1/5 through Unit 11; legendary through Unit 6
• Japanese — 1/5 through Unit 21; legendary through Unit 16
• Korean — 1/2 through Unit 8; legendary through Unit 5
• Latin — 4/5 through Unit 2; legendary through Unit 1
• Welsh — 1/2 through Unit 1; backburnered in favor of a physical textbook

これで以上です。

Challenge #8

Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying)

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Writing: I've written several thousand words in response to the various prompts I received for Challenge #3. (Thank you again, all!) Next to edit them into something postable and get started on the other prompts.

Minis: The various D&D and tabletop campaigns I play in have come out of hiatus with the start of 2024. And that means it's time to start painting new character minis!


This cast of characters includes my dryad swarm master druid (for a homebrew campaign), two tiefling arcane trickster rogues (for a second homebrew campaign and BG3, respectively), a human *mumblemumble* warlock (for the Second Homebrew Campaign offshoot), a couple bonus Gloomhaven minis, and a few campaignless minis that just seemed like they'd be fun projects.

I am not an organized, systematic, or technically knowledgeable mini painter. I buy paint colors that I like (hence the preponderance of greens, reddish purples, and metallics), and don't know anything about how to do washes or shadowing. (I know there are good yt tutorials and stuff about this, I just...haven't ever got around to watching them.)


That said, I'm pretty happy with how the backs of these minis came out, particularly the red cloaks, the stippling on the dryad's leaves, the cleric's hair, and the detailing on the back of the Gloomhaven mini, which was a bear to paint.

Once I finish painting the minis proper, I'll start adding the gravel, moss, grass, and so forth to the bases.


これで以上です。

Challenge #9

In your own space, list your Fandom Wrap categories. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

( I kinda went to town on this one. )

これで以上です。

Today’s lovely overcast morning saw me out on the balcony, reading, when what I at first thought was a giant butterfly appeared out of nowhere. Only, it wasn’t a butterfly, it was a hummingbird, and it spent the next several moments trying without success to feed from the sparkly red print on my pants. This is perhaps my favorite urban wildlife encounter of the year.

A good part of this weekend has been eaten up by laboriously downloading my play music library onto my hard drive before google sunsets the service in favor of their new rent-to-never-own model scam. I then also deleted random youtube history I was surprised to find listed in my account, given that I make a point of not watching videos while logged in, to google or any other website that requires a username and password. I wonder what web trackers tracked it.

DnDoings

The third online campaign is a go! We’ll be playing Out of the Abyss. Our DM stipulated point buy for this campaign, which was new to me; we always rolled for my ‘90s and aughts games, and the DMs of our games here have previously had us go with standard array.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time yesterday creating my character. The DM is only allowing options out of the PHB and TftSC, which means some of my preferred paths are not available to me. But once I reconciled myself to that, I had a lot of fun gaming out all the different possibilities for my bard with the options available to me. Being in the Underdark also limits some choices I’d usually make, because I want my character to start with dark vision.

The GC and I have everything set up for the first virtual session tomorrow, and I am pretty excited about this character and her developing back story.

これで以上です。

My household reached ( peak coronavirus living. )

On the RPG front, our online homebrew campaign continues to exceed the heights of last month's epic three-hour in-game shopping extravaganza as the party accidentally seduces random NPCs with terrible saving throws and sets pretty much everything we encounter on fire. As a character whose fault is "makes jokes at inappropriate times," I am uniquely positioned to capitalize on this, and boy do I make hay.

I've also used the pandemic's reduction in diversions to catch up on AEW and oh man, it continues to be everything I love about wrestling: great storylines, great matches, and while I have mixed feelings about Jericho as a wrestler, as a commentator he is an absolute delight and I would tune in each week on the strength of that alone.

But then you combine Jericho with the puro resu shenanigans/awesomesauce that Kenny Omega et al. are bringing, and it's just that. Much. Better.

And on top of all that, ( Brodie Lee continues to kill it with his promos. )

これで以上です。

...featuring a mixture of virus and non-virus news.

It has been an eventful 4 weeks since I was last posting regularly. I had a birthday (fun!) and a serious knee injury (emphatically not fun!). The Baldur’s Gate 3 gameplay preview came out. The FFVII-R demo came out. Castlevania came out. The Night Country, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, Dagger and Spindle, and Mermaid Moon came out. A mysterious illness decimated my houseplants.

Real life things!
I held my birthday this year at my favorite brewery and around 30 people showed up despite its not being public transit accessible. This was way more than I was expecting and did an excellent job of cross-pollinating my various RPG, gaming, booknerd, music nerd, and beernerd friend groups.

Also, I received this for my birthday:

and am delighted with it.

The knee injury put the kibosh on pretty much everything—running, walking, yoga, kempo—that I do when I am not reading, eating, or sleeping. In the grand scheme of things, I am lucky as it didn't necessitate surgery, but oh, this lack of physical movement is an adjustment.

Media things!
Needless to say, I am super psyched about the Baldur’s Gate 3 gameplay preview; it really does look like it will mimic the creative, environment-driven problem solving of PnP games. I loved that Vincke had technical problems during the PAX preview, and that half of what he tried failed—it was a true preview of what gameplay will be like, versus a dog-and-pony show.

That said, I am a bit disappointed that I’ll have to play one of the pregen characters to get the most fleshed-out backstory and NPC interactions. I much prefer the original BG approach that fit whatever character the PC created—tiefling monk, human rogue, etc.—into the backstory than the direction Larian’s taking here. Character alignment was also conspicuously missing from the preview. Vincke ultimately addressed this in last week’s Reddit AMA, but I am still a bit ambivalent about this.

Still, these are minor qualms, and I am as won over as ever by Vincke’s infectious excitement (Look at this really cool thing I am showing you!) about the game they're putting together.

Currently, I am most excited about the following three books:

which publish in May, August, and September, respectively.

Castlevania is as awesome as I'd expected. Banzai, Warren Ellis.

Virus things.
In less pleasant news, city government decided last Friday to adopt a halfassed coronavirus response that didn’t shut bars or restaurants, but rather forbade bar seating, parties of seven or more at a table, and occupied tables within six feet of each other. Anyone who’s worked service will know that there’s no point in coming in to work when you may only have four tipping guests in 90 minutes of work, particularly if they don’t order drinks. It’s a de facto closure for many venues that shifts the blame from city hall to managers.

Relatedly, my work, in its own halfassed coronavirus response, decided that putting us back on thirds would be as effective a curve-flattening measure as idling us, so I will be returning, kicking and screaming, to hell schedule for the foreseeable future.

これで以上です。

On Giftmas eve, we stumbled upon a Little Free Library stuffed to the gills with Justin Bieber photo books. I suggested to ma soeur that it would be humorous to give one to the GC. She countered that it would be even more humorous to give all of them to the GC. I said I was willing to make this happen if I could a) have paper to wrap them with, and b) have her kinder give the first to the GC as though it were a present he'd picked out. Because while the GC would immediately identify a Justin Bieber photo book from me, no matter how carefully wrapped, as a gag, it would seem a completely plausible gift coming from a very young member of the family. And the GC is far too kind to not pretend to be thrilled by such a gift.

Which is exactly what happened when the first Justin Bieber book emerged from its gift wraping. With the second one some minutes later the GC was clearly thinking, This kid must really like Justin Bieber. By the third, which was presented about 40 minutes into gift-giving, the GC was bemused. And by the time the actual D&D campaign manual—of similar dimensions with the preceding six volumes of our Bieberganza and wrapped just as lovingly—was produced, you could tell the GC was trying very hard to maintain the appearance of enthusiasm. (The rest of us were trying, with various degrees of success, not to laugh and give the game away.)

Having served their purpose admirably, the books will be rehomed where we found them tomorrow. Let the naysayers say what they will, Little Free Libraries are good for all sorts of things.

これで以上です。

Some months ago, the GC, a mutual friend, and I were trying to find somewhere to have a few drinks. We tried four places, all of which were either far too crowded or closing for the evening. We walked into the fifth without much hope, but were able to get seats at the bar. The drinks were good. Then we overheard the bartender crack a D&D joke. We then proceeded to have a long conversation about the various campaigns we're playing, and the relative pros and cons of various character classes and editions. It was awesome and the place quickly become our neighborhood go-to.

Last night, we met up with the same mutual friend, this time at another location that is small, dark, filled with books, and features a cocktail menu specially created based on a book the bartender read that week. (This week featured an author we'd actually read.)

"Wouldn't it be funny," said the GC, "if we showed up and it turns out she plays D&D too?"

"Hah," I said. "It would, but it will never happen.( Read more... )

So all in all, a good conclusion to a very good weekend.

これで以上です。