Day in the Life of an Idiot

 Egads, I've been terrible about keeping up here.

To be fair to me, I've been deep in RPG game planning as an antidote for the continual storm of terrible news from the Worst Timeline. As many of you know, I've recently taken the plunge, moving from player to game master. I still play in plenty of games! However, much like my move from reader to writer, I have discovered that if I want a certain type of game, I might just have to run it myself.  This keeps me occupied to the point of distraction, honestly.  I do have to watch my obsessive tendencies, a bit. Given my druthers I'd almost always rather play or plan an RPG than almost anything else.

Otherwise, I had a birthday on Monday.

Shawn typically takes the day off work for my birthday, so we were able to go together to enjoy some daytime shopping, which was nice. Specifically, I wanted to go to Barnes & Noble to windowshop the manga section there and then head off for what is becoming an annual birthday event, shopping for fabric at S. R. Harris.  It doesn't make sense to catalogue the fabrics I got. Just imagine a nice pile of things that appealed to me--bright and cheery solids and interesting and unusual patterns. To be fair, the big excitment of going to S. R. Harris the dizzying array of choices and the fact that they removed biggest barrier to enjoying fabric shopping for me: waiting in line for your fabric to be cut.  You are allowed to cut your own up to four yards. This always makes me feel like a rogue, a ciminal... like I'm getting AWAY with something.

But, since today is "What Are You Reading Wednesday?" I will go ahead and bore you with the details of that shopping trip to B&N.

I only bought a couple of manga from artists that I really want to make sure to support. First, I bought the official fourth volume four of The Summer Hikaru Died.   The way I introduced this series to the readers of my manga review site was, "The Summer Hikaru Died is a poignant, deeply sublimated, barely acknowledged (but definitely queer) love story between a boy and… the monster that returned in the body of his dead friend. A new genre, perhaps? Horror Romance or Romance Horror?" It's not Chuck Tingle and company's "monster f*ckers." This is love mixed with horror--kind of a perfect coming out queer metaphor, perhaps. It's so, so good. If you want to read my spoiler-heavy review of the first volume, you can find it here: https://mangakast.wordpress.com/2024/03/06/hikaru-ga-shinda-natsu-the-summer-hikaru-died-by-mokumoku-rei/

I also picked up I Think Our Son is Gay, volume 5. I described this one to a friend as "I Think Our Son is Gay is, as you might imagine from the title, a manga about a mother coming to terms (sort of side-by-side with the son who is coming out to himself) that her kid is gay. What I love about this manga is that it reads very true to life. There are moments when the son is clearly experiencing his own homophobia and backing away from his own truth and mom is sometimes ahead of him in this area, and visa versa. Though unlike the kid, mom has a part time job in a bakery and has a friendly adult gay man as a colleague who she sometimes works up the nerve to ask questions.  Dad is sort of set up as the antagonist, but he's also literally only around every so often as he has a job that keeps him away from home for months at a time. Dad doesn't mean to not get it, but he's there to represent the usual attitudes towards gay stuff, if you know what I mean?"  Again, if you're interested in my review of the first volume, it's here: https://mangakast.wordpress.com/tag/uchi-no-musuko-wa-tabun-gay/

Otherwise, Shawn got me a couple of blank notebooks (technically "dot-lined") from one of my favorite notebook makers, Congative Surplus. IF I HAD ANY BIRTHDAY MONEY LEFT, I would totally pick-up one or two of their new "Dark Analysis" notebooks that have black paper and these insanely cool covers: https://cognitive-surplus.com/collections/dark-analysis.  Holy crap, these are cool!

Anyway. I also always request that Shawn make my absolutely favorite cake, which is a cranberry upside down cake. The only trauma with this particular recipe is that for some reason Shawn's success rate with it is 50/50. I am happy to reort that this year it was a complete success. In fact, after I finish writing this to you all, I'm going to go have one of the last pieces left for an afternoon snack!

Speaking of 50/50, it seems as though there is a possiblity this weekend's Star Trek game (where I am a player) might be cancelled. The GM, tallgeese is having cataract surgery (I think today!) and so isn't sure if he'll be fully recovered. First of all, I need to say that I hope his surgery goes off without a hitch and that he does feel up to it, and of course I am not so much of a monster that I won't understand if he's not feeling fully recovered. But I will admit that I'll be deeply bummed out if we end up having to cancel again. It's been awhile since we've played. So long, in fact, that I'm not entirely sure we have a December date picked out yet. I should be sure to offer to run my alternate game-- which is basically, "what if all our same characters were somehow all at Starfleet Academy the same year?" I would offer it is as an alternate relaty version of the same group of people (Think Chris Pine vs. Shatner 'verses), so no one has to roll a new character unless they really wanted to. 

Also, I should say that if you are someone who regularly gets postcards from me, I have not stopped doing those... I just got way off schedule due to All The Things. Also, I'll be honest? After the election I considered just sending everyone a black postcard with just "Help!" written on it, and then I said to myself, "Lyda. These postcards were started to cheer people up during the pandemic. No one wants a story where your time/space traveling heroine has been thrown into an abyss, never to return."  But so, when I was at the coffee shop yesterday, I spotted a local artist selling cute little greeting cards of their work and, though it is not a postcard, I will be sending those out this week just to let my postcard recievers know that I am alive and still planning to continue this project.  

I think that's everything? I hope you all are still keeping on keeping on.

Today we have drizzly rain here in Saint Paul. Of course, today is the day that NOT ONLY is everyone at work at the Energy place at the end of the block, but ALSO my glove compartment has decided to lose its ability to stay shut. It is currently (probably) being held together with the medical tape I was able to find in the first aid kit. I may be in danger of losing my butch credentials, because I failed to have duct tape in the trunk.

Image: finished rosettes, pecan tossies, and some not made by us pettifores.

Merry Christmas to those of your for whom this is not just a weirdly rainy Monday. I'm, of course, somewhere in between. My family celebrates Solstice as our holy day/seasonal holiday, but both Shawn and I grew up celebrating Christmas. (Her more than me, since my parents are secular humanist Unitarian Universalists and so I grew up weirdly not-Christian, despite two years of Catholic grade school and an extended family who were all Roman Catholic.) Plus, when Mason was little, we basically used the dominant culture's celebration to draw out gift giving. Solstice is our biggest day, but we also dribble out presents on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. We like the idea of Christmas morning stockings, so we do that, too. All of these things have become tradition, so we basically give presents from Solstice to Christmas morning.

One of the things you will not be surprised that I received as one of those presents was four RPGs from Mason, including the new Evil Hat Productions Girl by Moonlight. Evil Hat is the outfit that put out Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Girl by Moonlight is basically Sailor Moon-inspired Magical Girl role-playing. He also asked his game theory professor for recommendations for cyberpunk games, so I now I have three of those as well.

In other RPG news, Stay in Touch, the post-apocalyptic missive game is underway with a number of people.

I have one friend who decided to try email for the letters and so, technically, by chance, we're actually already finished. The official rules are that after players roll three doubles (you roll two dice so anytime you get the same number twice,), the game is over. We don't feel done and so have agreed to continue through another set of doubles. But, it's been interesting, because we've already hit a number of snags.

( no spoilers about Stay in Touch, outside of mechanical issues, but cut in case people don't want to read for any number of others reasons )

I'm glad I had this experience before the letters I know are on their way from other players have arrived, however.

Avelynnea didn't end up coming out as an adult at last night's session as we were mostly busy killing more owlbears, but perhaps there will be a moment in the next session when we confront the mushroom queen/forest hag.

The GM let slip that we're going to probably be leveling up again soon, so that means I ALSO get to level up all my other characters in the tree (which includes my barbarian, who will be taking a level in wizard, I think. I've been imagining that he might not use a spell book, but have his spells tattooed on his forearms because: barbarian first and foremost.) I've also entertaining giving Avelynnea a level in ranger or rogue.

( dumb little D&D adventure continues behind the veil )