tricksters and villains apply within

cw: illness One of the things we never really think about when we're sick is how nice it is to be at home, surrounded by our own stuff and the comforting environment we're used to. Early last year, I had a really stark reminder of that when I had a really bad case of Pancreatitis that led to a several day stint in the hospital and having my gallbladder removed. There was nothing quite like being at home once I was well enough. I was surrounded by all my own stuff and the peace and quiet of familiar comforts for the days I needed to fully recover.  Of course being ill in the hospital is a little different. There, you have doctors and nurses looking after you and the minor annoyances of their frequent interruptions are for your own benefit. They give you medicine and see to your dietary needs or restrictions. You're looked after in a way that you can't get at home, despite the lack of familiar. This weekend, my grandsons were over so their mother could get in...

Last night's show at the Lied Center was a pretty amazing hour of poems. I'm so happy I went. The stories that Andrea puts between the poems are maybe the best reason to go. I've heard or read most of these poems before, but the lead-up or the explanations that go after... they give them further context in a way that makes them maybe not more meaningful (although sometimes that too) but more powerful. When you're used to seeing artists on YouTube: dancers, musicians, poets -- sometimes it's difficult to understand exactly how they'll be in person. For example, there's a bellydance I LOVE to watch perform, but when I show people her videos online it's almost impossible for anyone to get a sense of exactly why I like her so much. Sure, she has the technical stuff down, but it conveys nothing of the tension she puts into her dance. I feel like as touching as Andrea's poems can be when read, or heard on YouTube, being present for a reading of them, t...

If you were a young reader, like me. Or a faithful PBS kid, like me. You'll be familiar with the charm and whimsy of Reading Rainbow. It was one of my absolute favorite shows growing up. I was an avid and annoying reader, I spent long hours at the library when I could and always brought home at bag full of books from every trip. Nearly thirty years later and I can still sing the whole theme song, because that's the kind of memory trap our tiny brains create with music. Reading Rainbow has seen a bit of a revival on the internet in the past few years thanks to LeVar's efforts and the generosity of people on KickStarter. Although as adults, simplicity outweighs much of it's charm. Though I find the books read by LeVar and the children each episode to still be quite a lovely experience. Enter, then, LeVar's more recent foray into the world of stories and reading with his own titular podcast: LeVar Burton Reads. Each week, LeVar hand picks a short story to read al...

Miriam Black is a foul-mouthed young woman with a peculiar ability. She can see can see how you're going to die. The Miriam Black series is a series of novels about Miriam's many exploits. In the beginning, Miriam uses her ability to follow people she knows are about to die so she can steal their stuff. Pretty good racket it if you can get it. Problem is, something in the universe has it out for Miriam. And of course you can only steal from the dead for so long. Eventually someone's going to see you, someone's going to figure it out. Or... if you've got even a hint of a conscious, eventually, you're going to see someone die and try to actually do something about it. Yesterday, the fifth book in the series, The Raptor & the Wren, was released. And I aim to finish it pretty quickly. The Miriam Black series is quite possibly my favorite series on planet Earth. There's something about this extreme anti-hero doing her best to refuse both her abilities...

I mentioned the other day when I was talking about the new Fall Out Boy album and the song, "Champion", a poet, Andrea Gibson. Specifically I wrote about a line from their poem "I Sing the Body Electric (Especially When My Power's Out)". I can't even remember the first time I heard this poem but it was many years ago now, and the video of it I'm pasting below came out after I'd seen a live recording of them reciting the poem at some school. So I'm guessing eight-ish years ago or so. I included a picture in that other post of the tattoo I have of a line from this specific poem. I'm not the only one to have had that line tattooed on themself either, but I think it speaks differently to different people. A few years back I was finally able to see Andrea live at a bar about 45 minutes from my house. To say the experience was meaningful to me would be a severe understatement. See, what I didn't know when I fell in love with this poem w...

The Geek & Sundry network, now famous for things like Tabletop and Sagas of Sundry and of course, Critical Role, has a wide variety of shows on it's joint project with the Nerdist, Project Alpha or just Alpha  for short. If you're only watching Critical Role on YouTube, you'll have noticed that it's delayed a week reaching there, despite being livestreamed on Twitch weekly. At the same time it's on Twitch, it's also live on Alpha. In fact many of their Twitch shows are on Alpha. I'm not here to sell you on Alpha (specifically) but I do want to tell you about one of my favorite shows they've done, singular to Alpha (not Twitch) and wholly unique. Thrashtopia is a weekly talk show with host, Whitney Moore, that takes place in a post-apocalyptic dystopian bunker. Whitney, with the help of her best pal, Bunker Bot (played by Jason Charles Miller of many a G&S, project as well as lead singer of Godhead) host guests each week in the bunker to talk ab...

Is there anything that you do that's normally relaxing for you but you also tend to do it... angrily? Back in the summer for a roleplaying board I run, I took back an old Pinterest account I had and started messing around with creating character boards. Many of our members were doing the same thing at the time and it was fun way to create plots and talk about stories and get ideas about characters in my head. Since then I've kept it up, moving on to not just my original characters or my favorite dragon age characters for the board I run, but also just... characters I enjoy from many fandoms. I've amassed quite the collection of boards for Critical Role characters and pairings, Dragon Age, Preacher, The Exorcist, and so on. It's one of those things I do to relax, to engage with a thing I'm really enjoying for just a little bit longer. Like I created boards for Wynonna Earp and Doc Holliday after I finished watching Season 2. I can't watch the new season yet a...

There are several new songs off the new Fall Out Boy album that I'm in love with, namely "Church" and "Heaven's Gate" which have themes I tend to really like it songs. They're also catchy as hell. However, those aren't the ones I want to share. Instead let me share with you a song for all the bad days that if you're like me, get a little bit better with a good song. Champion is a song about making it through. About coming out stronger on the other side of something. About knowing you can live through something tough. It reminds me a lot of my tattoo, which is a line from an Andrea Gibson poem, "I Sing the Dream Electric, but Only When My Power's Out". I have on my arm a portion of this line:  " I said to the sun, tell me about the Big Bang The sun said, ' It hurts to become . '" I like that line because it reminds me that we all go through tough times, but it's the moments we experienc...

Today while I was chatting with a friend/co-worker in the office and we were sort of both joking about doing just the most basic work because it was Friday, I kind of wondered why we feel like we have to pretend that it's a joke. Was it Friday? Yeah. Did that mean we were going to put less effort into our work? Not really. Maybe some people have jobs where that works for them, but I don't. What we do have the ability to do, is be a little more playful at work... but we only feel like that works on Fridays. Because it's the last day of the week. It's such an ephemeral thing, too. Like, yes we're about to stay home for two days. That doesn't mean Monday is going to be any different and honestly, Monday is when we should be having more fun. Monday is when we need fun at work the most. This is how they get us though. The ever-present "man" keeps us working for a weekend, so we shop and spend and try to forget that we've got to go back on Monday. ...

In the last several months, I've started to notice more and more how often people (the same people, not all people) will pass me in the hallway and ask how I'm doing as they pass me by . There's no intention to the question beyond a greeting, they definitely don't plan on or have interest in hearing the answer. Now, I feel like here in the States and especially in the Midwest where we're not necessarily kind but we're kindly responsive or perhaps performatively responsive by default, this is pretty common. It's not that we don't know these people, or really if there was an issue we wouldn't want to know about it. But we're conditioned to respond to this "hey how you doing?" or "hey how's things?" or just a simple "hey whats up?" as if it's a hello. We say, "good", "fine", "oh you know" in response as easily as we might just say a hello. This isn't uncommon, but I feel lik...

In what I'm sure will be a continuing series, I bring you a very pertinent questions my players are currently pondering. In today's edition I bring you a question from my Tal'Dorei game, currently taking place in a city heavily modified from an old 3.5 campaign. On learning that the city they're currently in has abnormal ghosts who function more or less as living citizens: "Do they poop?" To be fair, it wasn't the very first question they asked. It also didn't take very long for our group's Wizard to get to it either. But you know, as the DM, I appreciate that they're taking an interest in the great mysteries of the city. I'm sure as they continue to learn more, the questions will evolve-- No, let's be honest. Until they solve if and how these specific ghostly humanoids poop, they won't be happy. Every campaign has one. The Adventure Zone had tacos-- I have ghost poo? Look out level 20. In which our intrepid adventur...

I'm kind of a huge music nerd. Not a snob, because I like just about anything you put in front of my ears. I pride myself a little on having an ear for what's good or bad. In fact, when I was much younger and was buying tapes and later cds as they were released, I used to challenge myself to figure out which would be the next song released from the album for the radio. I feel like I did pretty well. Although my access to new music was more and more restricted as I grew up and my family got more and more into the church. By high school, I only kept up with as much new music as I could pack into every other weekend at my dad's, since my parents were separated. In recent years, I've really enjoyed having access to streaming services and YouTube. I signed up for a Google Music account pretty much as soon as it was possible. And I became a subscriber when that became an option. My Google Music subscription gives me YouTube Red access and whatever mess YouTube has going o...

Today I had a whole day off work without any scheduled plans. Save one, finally , spend some time with a distant friend who is on a completely opposite schedule from me. Used to be she and I could make time for a chat on Discord pretty regularly, but that hasn't happened in a long time. And since she works third shift even in the time we have off, finding more than an hour to actually chat is difficult. Both of us having the day free -- and a workday for most everyone else -- meant we could get together. Today, we picked up a game to play that we'd both been putting off so we could play it together. I bought Life is Strange: Before the Storm, the prequel game to 2015's Life is Strange by Square Enix and Dontnod Entertainment, during the Winter Steam Sale with a day just like today in mind. All three episodes of the game had been released, meaning if I wanted to spend a day on it, I could pick it up and finish it that same day. So I did, with a friend on the other end of...

A content warning , I suppose, is in order for this. At least if it were me, I'd want to know that I'm about to talk a whole lot about some specific [if nameless] shitty Christians. Also, a trigger warning for abuse of a minor (it's an extremely brief mention). I'm working on a story -- well, a novel, maybe -- and for that, I need to do a little bit of research. I want to build a framework around some old church sermons with a pretty specific theme. Thankfully (or not so much since there's a whole lot of things I'd rather have stuck in my head) I used to go to the kind of church that espoused the kind of ideologies and doctrines this story is going to feature. This means I know pretty easily the kind of people to look up who might have sermons online to listen to. Specifically, I found sermons from a travel ministry my old pastor taught around the country in the years long after he was the pastor. I listened to one tonight, just one, and I had to skip ahead...

Recently I picked up Wynonna Earp to watch on Netflix (Season 1 only at the moment). It's been on my list of things to watch for a while now, I've seen enough WayHaught gifs on my tumblr dash, to know there were good things waiting for me when I got into it. What I didn't know was how much I've craved an anti-hero like Wynonna. She's bad, she's crass and as Doc says, "She ain't nobody's but her own." If you haven't watched Wynonna Earp, it's about a woman named, Wynonna Earp who is the heir of the Earp curse. When the heir reaches 27 years of age all the people Wyatt Earp killed return to Earth, possessed by demons which can only be put down for good by the heir. Or something like that. Also, Doc Holliday (Wyatt's best and closest friend) is still alive, having been granted a long life by a witch. He works at Wynonna's side to put down the demons. What makes this show so great is how much Wynonna isn't the hero type. She...

Aside from Critical Role, The Adventure Zone is the one actual play D&D series I've been able to get into. Maybe I enjoyed it so much from the beginning because I was already a huge fan of the McElroys. I enjoy Griffin & Justin's work at Polygon and I've been listening to the three of them on MBMBAM for a long time now. They started sort of at the right place, right time for me. I'd been watching Tabletop on Geek & Sundry for a couple seasons, I'd started getting into Critical Role and looking into story-like podcasts that were something other than Welcome to Nightvale. And then the McEl-bros started The Adventure Zone. And as I mentioned in yesterday's post... they just sort of started.  There was no long lengthy introduction to their characters, there was no overly detailed explanation of anything. Griffin just started narrating and they just ran with it. As much as I love Critical Role (and that's a lot) something about the tight time ...

Maker bless these nerdy-ass voice actors. Season 2 is off to a fantastic start... well, after some technical difficulties that kept the Alpha stream down for a little bit. Although even before that, I thought that I might miss it given that the weather is bad here and we went without internet for a few different hours earlier in the evening. But, it came back on and stayed on for the entirety of the new episode. I switched back and forth between YouTube and twitch to watch a steady stream until the Alpha stream was back up. Alpha has people's names and character portraits and they were slowly being updated throughout the evening as we learned who was playing what. Here's the biggest thing I enjoyed about tonight. And it's one of the things I like about Matt's storytelling, about the way Critical Role began in general and one of the things I like most about new games I DM. There was no extended discussion at the forefront of who was playing what and which classes the...

A little while back I discovered the podcast, Good Christian Fun . According to their website: Good Christian Fun is a podcast delving into the strange upside-down world of Christian pop culture. Hosts Kevin T. Porter and Caroline Ely are your tour guides through the weird and hilarious world of faith-based entertainment. GCF is a show for skeptics and believers alike, all are welcome.  Don’t worry, we won’t make you go to church ;)  Let's have some good Christian fun! Typically, I tend to stay away from all things church-based, but I'm also a bit of a masochist, so I thought it might be worth a try, given their description. Plus, while I didn't listen to the Gilmore Guys podcast Kevin Porter previously hosted, I never heard anything but good things about it. Cue: Me laughing out loud at work, dying at the memories this podcast has dredged up that I would've previously been loathe to relive. Instead, Kevin and Caroline do hold up their end of the bargain. Wha...

Cleaning this place out and starting over. I've been feeling nostalgic for the old world of LiveJournal and while I've owned a permanent account over there for the better part of a decade, I feel more comfortable letting Google host my thoughts than I do god knows who in the RU. So here we are. This place used to be a host to all my old Sim legacy stories. Well, it took me about two seconds to hit delete on those, so we know they were super important to keep around after seven or eight years. Anyway. As I said, I'm feeling a little nostalgic for the old journaling platform, mostly in having a place to engage in a way that's not the reblog mentality of tumblr or even facebook. Or heaven forfend, the micro-interest of the twitter platform, which for me  at least, is just as bad in the reblog/repost weird timeline issues of the other two. I get it, it's a way to share info, but one of the things I miss about LJ and even the early days of tumblr is getting to know peo...