This week I hope not to score an average workday of 10 hours. But I know the odds ain't good.

I would like to thank all the excellent people that have shared this place with me.

I love you all.

Hugs, buddy!

Sorry, all, I just died sometime in the last month and change. I didn't mean to make you worry, I've just been... completely and utterly drained. Even the things I'm doing as "entertainment" lately have just felt like killing time, like, "a am going to play a game now, and it just happens to be this game," rather than actually enjoying it. Same with the shows I've been re-watching and a fair amount of webcomics I've read in the interval.

As Barinellos said, I happened to get lucky and had no major losses through the freeze, though it was still understandably stressful as I kind of kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Apparently we will be getting a payment for the days our office was closed, though it does not apply for any days of PTO you already had off, which includes 2 days which I had originally blocked out to take my mom for eye surgery (she rescheduled), so

And I don't want to... I don't know, add to anyone else's frustrations, but I'm having very much the opposite problem as Huey right now, working too many 10-hour days in a row with no lunch breaks. I don't have any energy to do anything because I'm only home for like half an hour before the sun sets and I head off to bed in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, I won't wake up more spent than I am right then.

Of course, I sympathize with Raven's plights as well, and wish him (and anyone else who may be having issues) well. I have been blessed by whatever dark elder gods there are out there with many a kind and caring friend, even as I retreated into myself for several weeks, and I love each and every one of you.

How was everyone's week this week?
They finally reached out about the general manager job and it's looking like it's turned out about as ideally as we could have bet on.

Huzzah RE: General Manager job?

I think the year of quarantine is messing with my brain. I like to joke that I discovered my normal routine is called "Lockdown" to other people but between that and just getting older time has ceased to have its familiar meaning. I say "I'll do something in a couple of hours" and then a week later I realize "Right, there's that thing I could do". My weekly routine is keeping me grounded a little as at least I can tell a monday from a tue-fri from a sat/sun, and working on the ol' anime blog is at least something but... yeah. Time slippage. Time slippage everywhere.

BTW, Luna, I believe you were the one talking Ghost Stories earlier on the thread? I want to say "the other day" but logically it must have been multiple months ago now in part because I ended up watching it and... enjoying it well enough, I'd say? It reminded me a good deal of "The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-doo", which I watched as a kid.

We threw away like sixty pounds of paperwork this week since we had free reign to clean the office. Most of that, consequently, was used to bitch about managers that had worked here before and all the useless **** they've done and did.

It was cathartic.

But yeah... My days have gotten fuzzy. Well, not quite. It's more accurate to say my weeks have gotten fuzzy, which has lead to my months getting fuzzy.

The reduced time at work hasn't helped that, though it's taken a crippling amount of stress out of the job too.
But regardless, I feel you man. I get where you're coming from.

I'm plodding along with my studies. Doing my first research paper, so there's not the regular kind of structure that I've had in the past, and I honestly don't do great without structure, but I'm ok.

I had to drop out of the DnD campaign I was playing because they moved to a timeslot which didn't work for me, but then I found another game almost immediately which runs in the exact timeslot my old game used to be. So that's nice. I'll miss my celestial warlock, but my new character is fun too. He's a halfling druid.

I'm also a halfling druid in a new campaign, although mostly because everyone else wanted to hog the melee range so I had to adjust my ranger idea.

This is probably the busiest week of the semester for me in terms of grading, just with the confluence of papers coming due, but it's alright, all things considered. I'm really looking forward to Spring Break, though.


That happened to me a lot last summer. The class I was supposed to teach got cancelled for obvious reasons, so I had no work at all. Days just sort of blended into one another.


I grew up on the original show's reruns, and A Pup Named Scooby Doo, but I missed out on most or all of the other Scooby Doo incarnations.


Very cool. I like those moments when people can get their clutter out of their lives, both physical and mental.


We're starting in on research papers in my Comp classes now. What sort of paper is it, if you don't mind me asking?


Cool that you still get to play! What kind of druid are you playing?


Funny coincidence. How about you: what kind of druid? I've only played a druid briefly, for two sessions in a public game a little over a year ago when I had only first started playing. I like the class, but I haven't gotten back to it yet.

* * *

As for my D&D exploits, the campaign with my Tortle Fighter is on a hiatus right now because we accidentally forced the hand of the big bad much more quickly than the DM planned for, and we were able to beat him (I died in the process, but was brought back) so we're taking a break while the DM works out a new arc for the story. In the meantime, we're playing a Post-Apocalyptic D20 campaign. I'm playing a young street-gang/con artist woman who, because of a series of disastrous rolls very early in the campaign, has basically become a cyborg...

I can't do online tabletop, but gods I want to dm a d20 game. I have too many campaigns just sitting around. I build them because.... Well, just because.

Re: scooby
Everyone is perfectly entitled to their opinion, but the only genuinely good version of the show is Mystery Inc.
And I can hear keeper screaming somewhere just thinking about the emotional wringer it puts you through.

I had only ever played 5e before, so getting used to D20 was a bit strange at first. I think I like the skill system a bit better than 5e, though I think 5e has some significant improvements with things like advantage/disadvantage and the combat system. But in my group, we're kind of using a mix anyway, so it's all good.

Since I'm going to be a teacher, I'm studying the standardized tests in math for Swedish 6th graders, specifically looking at the errors they make, and if those errors are purely mathematical or if reading skill affects the results.

As for my DnD character, he's a Ghostwise Halfling (because they get a WIS bonus. Also, telepathy! They are basically Lorwyn kithkin!) Shepherd Druid. The concept started out as a joke, specifically "I want to play a shepherd druid who's an actual shepherd", but he's turning into an actual character. We're playing Descent Into Avernus, so we decided we were all guild members (and a city guard) who knew each other from the marketplace of Elturel (before it fell into hell, that is). So my literal shepherd druid is a cheesemaker who has now decided to use his skills for something greater than convincing the sheep to give better milk.

I'm waiting for the Root RPG books to arrive, after which I'm hoping to give a shot at running a game.


I haven't entirely ironed out the kinks yet, so I still don't have a solid grasp on how I want him to act. Rookie mistake, making a very complicated foundation and then being lost as to how to act.
But more or less he's dedicated to a god of harmony that I threw together, the tenets of which include being honest, exploring to world to gain a broader understanding of things, and get rid of parasitic relationships. He's also got a bit of a fetish for natural disasters though, which the balance I'm kind of struggling to find. For the most part though he serves as the guy who asks questions about everything and tries to understand the larger context so see if there's a way through things that don't involve rolling initiative.

Ooo, nice. On the complete opposite of the spectrum, next week I'll have to catch up with 2 and a half weeks of paperwork I've had to leave behind to focus on actual deliveries. Not looking forward to that.


Good man. One of the reasons I fell in love with the Bard - and in 5e they are stupid good.

Btw, I've learned of an incredibly system for an rpg - and it may even be Italian? Basically, you have an hexagon you partially fill with your character's qualities, abilities etc, then for each test the GM puts a number of their tokens equal to the difficulty in a bag, you put in one of your own for every relevant trait you have, then you choose how many token to blindly draw from the bag. Every token of yours you draw is a success or fortunate byproduct, every GM token is a negative consequence or a complication. There's one or two additional rules to handle characters' ailments and "scars" (negative experiences that make you stronger) but I find its simplicity very elegant. Players choose how much to commit to each test, and are encouraged to narrate their behavior according to their characters declared strengths.

I'd like to master such a game with my friends, but I tend to delve deep into the settings I want to handle, which requires time and energy. I'm considering making them play the story of the first Ravnica trilogy, but for all the love I have for the setting there's some aspects about everyday life and larger social dynamics that I'd have to examine first.

Still dead.

I'd elaborate, but, like... part of it is that even that feels like more effort than I have energy for, and part of it is that I don't want to burden you all with my problems.


Congrats!


I'm sure I must have said something about the difference between the sub and the dub back when I was working my way through the sub, before everything broke on me. I actually think I like the sub better.


I remember being really... unimpressed with Mystery, Inc. when I watched it way back when. I was just promised all the feels and it didn't live up to what I was expecting.

That and Angel Beats. Though I remember being genuinely angry at that show's gall.

Though I guess in fairness it's been like 10 years since I watched either, and if I were to watch them today might go softer on them.

Angel Beats is one of the more overhyped shows I've seen. I didn't hate it, but it certainly didn't deserve to show up on as many "best ever" sorts of lists as it did. AnoHana was a bigger letdown and then of course there's what teens around me when I was a teen thought of Elfen Lied versus the garbage it actually was.

Elfen Lied is bad civilization.
... Kinda curious about making a list of worst 'best' shows ever.

I like funky resolution mechanics, but without knowing the details it feels like asking people to make such a kind of abstract choice each time they want to take an action could easily bog down the game. Maybe you get a feel for it after a bit, I just imagine some guy frequently agonizing over pulling two or three tokens. (Plus the whole "putting tokens into a bag, scrambling them around, then drawing" also taking time.)

(online you can just randomly generate numbers between 1 and difficulty+traits and consider a success for every result above difficulty, which can be pretty fast. You lose the chance to rummage in a bag, however )

Well, it's all a matter of committing to an endeavor, how much are you willing to risk to get that sweet success - and maybe a specific second success to achieve something particularly cool. I feel like the people agonizing over the number of tokens to pull would agonize over something anyway, especially in games with consumables or intrinsic resources like Willpower in WoD or spell slots in D&D.