Bric a brac and rando

Rando is an app to share photos with a random stranger, worldwide. I shared the picture of the bric-a-brac french press with someone from South Korea, and received a picture of a bar code from France in exchange. It's a fun app.

I do have to limit myself, in the bric-a-brac department though. If I ever catch myself with more than one piece of bric-a-brac at once I have to drop them all.

Caleb's head

When I was 10, my brother was 2. We went to the store together, he and I and my dad, who drove. He rode around in the shopping cart mostly, but then I wanted to hold him. Dad let me, so I picked him up, I was holding him from the legs, and he did a baby-dive backwards, I tried to hold onto his legs as tight as I could, but only managed to make sure he dove into the ceramic tiled floor of the Safeway head first. He cried loud enough that the manager of the store came over to see if he was okay, and offered a frozen bag of peas, carrots, and lima beans to put on his head. My dad didn't punish me physically, but he scolded me for being careless and went over the ways that I had embarrassed him. I was crying, and I was ashamed. I was terrified of holding him for years after that, and would only do so if I was sitting down.

I've hurt him, or seen him hurt, a couple of times. I've hit him on the head with a stick as we were "quarterstaff fighting," he about 8, I about 16. I had no idea how to handle something that much smaller than myself. I was this huge, clumsy monster with no idea what to do with my body. I watched him roll a walker down the stairs to the basement because I wasn't fast enough to catch him.

Sometimes he would hyperventilate when crying, breathe out and out and out until his face went blue and his body went limp. I had no idea what to do, and neither did my mom, crying and screaming and slapping his face to wake up. I felt helpless, but secure that Adults know how to save the world. When am I going to get that "maturity" package? Probably never.

5:00 am

Here I am at 5:00 am again, this had better not become a trend. I chose to game without end, we missed our last bus and waited for a kind girlfriend to drive us home at 3am. She dropped me at my door, I went inside to shower, and now I'm on my computer still, unable to shake the fantasy from my mind. I like it, it's fun, but I want to sleep now, so I can spend time with people tomorrow.

Avui mon amis

Writing samples

So I think I might not be the best judge of writing samples. I write something I think is actually pretty good, and then I read it with a critical eye and decide, you know, maybe the entire thing taking place inside a brothel might be a turn-off for some readers? Or maybe the fact that Act 2 is all about trying to stop a lynching, and 5 out of 6 possible results involve him dying, might come off as me being a bit defeatist and morbid, possibly not good qualities in an employee.

But, you know, I'm writing what I think will be good, and if I write something I don't think will be good, or if I censor myself too heavily, I will not produce my best work. This will lead to a bad end, regardless of other positives. So I suppose I will continue on with my current way of doing this, even if it's not the best possible, because it's the best I know how to.

See you in the aftermath! Peace! but... not really...

TL;DR: Why am I still awake for the second 5:00am in a row?

Milestones

It's always hard for me to accept moving. I still sometimes think of "home" as the green rental house beside the Presbyterian church at 726 Park Street. When I lived in Seattle I would autopilot back to the Purple Door for a full quarter after I left there. It's especially hard when I know that I'm approaching milestones, and I'm forced a few moments of retrospection.

I've written 100 blog posts. It's been over a hundred days since I started. What have I accomplished in this time? My savings have dropped by 3/4, I've essentially been a mooch off my girlfriend, and I have managed to spend a lot of my time playing Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons. I sat inside this apartment for longer than I should have, and I exhausted my faith in online applications. I've had interviews, made connections, and still managed not to land anything close to lucrative.

I think I'm ready to sell out, to give up, to do some soulless job and get my satisfaction in life elsewhere. Get satisfaction through escapism and an imagined audience for my blog, get satisfaction from pretending to be smarter and more suave and wiser than I am. I can ignore my glaring character flaws and the fact that I'm going nowhere with my life, and just enjoy going along with it. It's more likely than you think, I've done it before, and for years.

So I keep trying now, because God knows when I'm done, I am done for a while. I'd take a baking job or a grocery bagging job, let my bank account raise to the level where I can stop worrying about now and maybe buy something nice every once in a while. Maybe pay back my grandparents for taking care of my car insurance, maybe take my girlfriend out to the nicest, most extravagant vegetarian restaurant I can find. Maybe I'll have something awesome for my best friend's wedding, and maybe 40 years from now I'll still be financially unstable. That's been my tacit assumption before, why would it change?

Well, I guess you can see the mood introspection puts me in. I am actually very optimistic about my current prospects. I have connections like I've never had before, in something that I'm excited about. They would like to see a sample of a game that I've written for fun, with the idea that I could do something like that as a job. It's a brilliant thought and I am so happy with the idea, that I can't let myself believe it's true for fear of being disappointed.

What a cheerful post. Happy 100-posts, William.

TL;DR: Someone needs to lighten up and let the good things happen to him.

On writing modules

So it's one thing to write a campaign for yourself. You can write in shorthand, use lots of abbreviations, give yourself notes like "Basically that one town from that episode of Firefly" and know exactly what you're talking about reading it two years later. That's great, I love that. It gets a little harder when you're trying to write a description of a town that you could include in a module, that could theoretically be run by someone who's not a notorious improviser, perhaps someone who doesn't have the obsessive mastery of the game rules that I do, one who would like to enjoy a creative break and so is inserting one or two days worth of my story into what is predominantly their story. That's great, and I'm happy to help (in fact, I would love nothing more than for someone to play something that I wrote, that's actually a life goal for me.)

But I'm not just having issues with the story parts, it's also building encounters good for normal characters. I don't actually know what normal characters are. Some players I've had were broken from session 1. The first time they got into combat, they fought things they should have had to flee from, blinded, dazed, stunned, and knocked them unconscious in one fell swoop, then went around and stabbed them to death with a spear. Yes, hello Ian, you know who you are. If I assume that every player is like that, then I will build extraordinarily hard encounters, designed to engage power-gamers and keep slow-track XP players leveling up every couple of sessions. It's great for monster hunter types.

Other parties have been more moderately endowed. They have competent players more likely to engage in subterfuge and diplomacy than blindly attack any group of likely-looking foreigners making scary gestures. I want to cater to them too. Reward them for their abilities to conquer xenophobia with additional quests and unique treasure and roleplay opportunities. In a campaign, I could cater to both or either more or less losslessly. The game is all about rolling with the players and enjoying what they do. A module is harder to do that in without making a fifty-page choose your own adventure story that has divergent storylines and becomes impossible to read or use. You're not writing for the player, you're writing for the DMs.

TL;DR: I am trying to write a module, this is hard. That's all of what I have to say.

Cart Life is the least fun of any game I've ever played

Cart Life is a realistic retail simulator, meaning that it's confusing, poorly organized, disorienting, and depressing. During the three hours I played I was subject to six random police inspections, asked for something I didn't have a hundred times, and told I was bad or my prices were bad easily 50 times. The gameplay mechanics are somewhere along the lines of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, but instead of encouragement it offers a poor old man starving as he struggles to sell newspapers written in a language he has trouble speaking in. Then his cat runs away, and I missed the way to get him back. Mr Glembovski was gone forever, and I was unable to sleep that night at all. I starved, I nearly passed out from exhaustion, and I meekly hid my feelings for the old bitch that let my cat escape. I am asked for coffee 15 times a day, but even after buying a coffee pot, filters, and coffee grounds, I still can't figure out how to actually put them for sale. The controls are obtuse and repetitive, and in order to eat enough food to not starve for the rest of the day you have to go through the same menu a dozen times, each time eating cold chili. There's no way to heat it up in my hotel room, and even after buying peanut butter and grape jam, the grocery store doesn't sell bread, just flour and yeast. Time passes so quickly that by the time you finish opening your stand in the morning it's already noon, and to top this all off--there is no pause button. Sometimes you are so swamped with inane customers asking the same god damned things four or five times a day that you can't even close in time to catch the last bus, and you have to walk home. I'm pretty sure I outran being mugged once.

This game had a more emotional response than any other I've played. It's not fun, but it's well-made, effective interactive literature. A half hour playing this game brought down the crushing weight of the worst parts of my years in retail, and I couldn't breathe. I needed someone to hold me, and let me know that I'm not worthless. But the protagonist doesn't have that. He works, he eats, and he sleeps. It seems that both he and Mr Glembovski are both inside cats now. I want to play more, to make sure it gets better, but I don't know if it will, and I don't think I have the emotional bandwidth for it.

TL;DR: Retail is depressing. This realistic retail simulator captures that stunningly.