MurderHobo.club

Something clever goes here.

Author: gravedigger

  • catalyst chapter 3

    Despite myself, I found my spirits lifted by my new friend’s sense of humour. After all, my circumstances seemed quite a bit less dire, when compared to his. I began to reach into the muck, seeking the dirt and pulling it into a circle around me, pushing the solid matter out, while holding the water in.

    As I did, I became aware of the light shining down on me. I could feel it around me, but it was somehow not what I expected. With the mud pulled back into a ring around me, my feet descended, eventually reaching a more firm platform under me. Pushing upwards, I felt my head break the surface, and I opened my eyes.

    It was moonlight; bright moonlight. With no real sense of time, I was willing to believe that hours had past, but since the exams were traditionally held during the new moon, clearly weeks had past, as I was looking up at a full moon. Well, nearly full. Close enough.

    I looked around, seeing that I’d managed to convert a portion of this swamp into a pool of clear water, ringed by a solid barrier of compacted mud.

    Looking down, I saw that even my clothing was clean. While I hadn’t expected the spell to do something like this, it made sense that it would. I’d been pulling all the mud from the water away, and so all the mud had gone.

    That left me floating in a pool, trying to put my thoughts together. I should be hungry, but I don’t feel hungry. That’s probably not good. If weeks had passed, I should be starving.

    Thinking about it, there were a few options. The trip through that gate, while instantaneous for me, might not have been that way for everyone else. There were precedents in legends, though most of those involved various types of outsiders. I might have been in some sort of trance, where I used minimal energy, or even drew energy in from my surroundings. There were precedents for that also, folklore about monks, mostly. Maybe I was in shock, and didn’t realize I was starving. That was possible, and concerning. I should probably find food soon regardless.

    With that in mind, I reached out to my new friend, and with similar effort, unearthed his remains. They’d been preserved by the swamp. Remembering a spell I’d used to entertain a cousin at a family function, I was able to wrap the energy around his limbs, allowing me to control the body, as if I were a puppeteer. My initial efforts lacked any sort of grace, his body swaying drunkenly. But with a bit of work, I was able to get us onto dryish land, and by reaching my energy into it, I was able to sort of push the water away and pull the mud in, adding more solidity to the path.

    He’d gotten quiet, when the mud had pulled back from his body, and now, as we shambled out of the swamp, he spoke up. “I dinnae know who or what you really are, but you’ve managed to show me something new, so I have to thank ye.”

    Looking at him, his tanned face expressionless, but his voice somehow heavy with emotion, I replied “Hopefully you’ll still feel that way if they manage to find me. But for now, do you remember anywhere around here we might find some food?”

    “Aye, there’s an pub not far from here, I reckon we can find some grub there.” There was a brief pause. “I’d point the way, but I cannae move my arms.”

    “Not with your arms, no, but I think I felt the direction you were trying to indicate. That way, right?” I asked as I pointed towards the way I’d felt his spirit shifting towards.

    “That’s the way, to be sure. Well, isn’t that a neat trick.”

    “I think I’ve got an idea how to give you some control over your body, but I’ll need some time. If I can sense the energy, I should be able to make it so that your body can react to the energy. I imagine it’ll be slow and awkward at first, but maybe…” I trailed off, getting a bit lost in thought. Shaking my head, I started off in the direction I’d been pointing, keeping my eyes peeled. If someone spotted us in the dark, we’d probably be fine, but if they got a good look, we’d probably have some questions to answer, assuming they bothered to ask and didn’t just act.

  • catalyst chapter 2

    An ethical question now, what does a rogue wizard do to survive and where are the lines. Yes, that authorities are trying to kill me, but I can’t disagree with their logic. And if I can’t disagree with their logic, then I probably can’t bring myself to harm them, except as a last resort.

    That severely limits what I can do, and I’m those limitations, my options become clearer. Obviously, l will need allies, and since the system is against me, it’ll be among those also outside that system that I should look for my allies, though this is complicated by their reasons for being outside the system. The enemy of my enemy, might be my friend, or might be a mutual enemy. After all, we all have common ground, and if we are willing to see that, then perhaps we can find comrades.

    Thinking of common ground, I suppose I won’t find it floating here under the surface of a random swamp..

    Aa that thought crosses my mind, another follows it. There are things that I’ll find in the swamp that have the potential to be allies, if I’m willing to put in the effort to understand them.

    Legends speak of things that dwell in the swamps and the moors, things glimpsed in the fog or in the night, Some are merely explanations for existing phenomena, but often in legends there is at least some truth.

    Wraiths and Wisps, the ethereal and unknown culprits behind all the deaths that happen in places like this. How much truth is behind them?

    Reaching out into and through the liquid, I had a thought that was at once both wonderful and terrible. The water was still; apart from the life within it.

    The idea of scrying from within a pool isn’t a new one, folks had been using sensory deprivation tanks for such purposes for years. But those were sterile and mostly used as a method of removing noise while focusing on a difficult subject.

    The audacity of trying to acry with a swamp appealed to me. Rather than excluding the noise, I needed to embrace it, accept it and learn from it.

    Seeing them as distractions would quickly frustrate the process, they were not. They were sources of information. Vast and overwhelming, but no more so than being within a large crowd. Less so, I realized, as their motives were often simpler.

    By reaching out and listening to the noise, embracing it, recognizing the patterns, it became easier to understand how each piece fit together, how it was all collectively a part of a greater whole, and in understanding that, it also became clear that there were parts that weren’t. There were places that didn’t have the same life, or didn’t have the same harmony, and it was in those places that I would need to look, to understand why they were, and how they fit together. It wasn’t a puzzle, I wasn’t putting it together, it was a vast canvas and I was learning to appreciate it.

    There. I felt something different. Something that stood out. As I reached out to it, I heard a voice. “Oy, bout time you got here. I’ve been waiting ages for you to show up.” The voice wasn’t coming through my ears, but it was clear and it had a directionality to it. It was coming from whatever it was that I’d been touching with my mind. Only one thing to do, I suppose.

    Attempting to direct my own thoughts, into something that had the same weight as the words, I tried to reply. “Hey, I’m a little confused here. I’m not sure I’m who you were waiting for, can you tell me who you are and who you think I am?”

    “Grim, the bloody reaper, the skinny man wit’ the scythe. That’s who I was expecting. I guess you could be someone else, here to take me away. I’ve been here a while now. I guess we don’t need to worry about that bloody river then, since I can’t even recall my own name.” The voice seemed an odd mix of exhausted and cheerful, with an edge of something else. “I know who I’m not, that’s for sure. I’m not Bob, I sank straight down.”

    It took me a moment to process what he’d said. And then to process the joke. “Okay, well, that wasn’t something I was expecting to learn today,” I thought back at him, as I concentrated on what I now assumed to be his body. It had indeed sunk into the mud, so I suppose he wasn’t Bob.

    “What do ye mean, what is it you learnt?”

    “That there is some form of life after death?”

    “Nah, ye canna call this life, this is just waiting.”

    “Well, you were alive, and now you aren’t, and we’re having a conversation. So that means you are conscious, despite no longer having the place where consciousness rests.”

    “I follow, but surely I can’t be the first you’ve encountered in this type of work.” There was a pause. “It can’t be your first day on the job, can it? How does one even get a job like that?”

    “I mean, I guess it kinda is, but probably not in the way you think. I was taking my exams, shit went wrong, and now I’m probably on the run.”

    “Well then, I suppose ifen ye ain’t here to take me away to the great beyond, I don’t suppose I could convince you to take me along on the run perhaps?”

    I paused, trying to wrap my mind around the idea. If nothing else, I’m sure I could use the company. Unless I’d lost my mind, and this was just a voice in my head, brought on by the stress. Though the alternative did have some appeal to it. This was a whole area of research where as far as I knew, nobody had ever really made any progress.

    “While ye are thinkin’ it over, can you tell me if all my limbs are intact?”

    Reaching out with my mind, I felt the body. The limbs were there. “Yeah, you seem to be intact, and pretty well preserved.”

    “Well, I guess we learnt something else then. Clearly my name isn’t Mat.”

  • Connecting with community

    Years ago, I reached out to my community, and over time, found a place where I felt, and felt like I belonged, and in my arrogance, I attempted to change those places in ways I thought would help. To my credit, my arrogance was oft appreciated, as much as it annoyed. I did not have even half enough of an understanding of the circumstances to have taken the path I did, just a sense of righteousness that guided me. But that sense did a lovely job of hiding how much it blinded me.

    Recently, I’ve begun reaching out again, and I’m enjoying it, appreciating how much less of an outsider I feel as I connect with people. I still come from a different set of experiences, so there will still be a flavour of dissonance in the air, but less so than I’ve feared for so long.

    There is an honesty here that soothes, an authenticity and acceptance of quirks that resonates, a background harmony that comforts.

    There is far too much dissonance, both outside and within, the conflict outside being reflected in the soul, creating disorder and discomfort. Within community, that dissonance is displaced by a harmony of common intent, resonance that soothes as mutes the background buzz.

    Fancy words, but hopefully they convey my meaning.

  • Regarding multiple screens

    It has recently occurred to me that while multiple screens are good for dealing with my ADHD, they are also an issue when trying to write something, and I’ve come across a simple solution. If I intend to sit down and write something, I simply take a moment and turn off the other monitors before I boot the machine. In doing so, I end up with just what I need to focus on, with no distractions. Such a simple thing, but something that is helping to create the space I need to be creative.

  • 5 am again

    I often wake up briefly, to attend to biological functions and to take the levothyroxine. Sometimes I’ll fall back asleep after, other times I’ll take some time to compose my thoughts.

    for whatever reason, my phone is especially hard to read this morning and it’s making some interesting choices as I attempt to put my thoughts down.

    apparently my phone felt that I was composting my thoughts, an error that more amused than annoyed.

    for truly, it is the process of breaking down our ideas that creates the fertile ground from which new ideas will spring forth.

    a question that has been on my mind is what do I value. Community, kindness, those are easy answers. Collaboration. That’s another.

    i suppose in many ways, I value regret, in as much as without an awareness of our mistakes, and the desire to do better, I do not see how we can grow.

    I value clever word play, terrible jokes and twists of phrase.

    i value the rules, as much as they annoy me; though perhaps not the rules themselves but the fairness they represent. When we agree to the rules, we are trying to play the same game. When the rules are forced upon us, that’s a different story.

    especially when it’s rules for thee and not for me. The binding of the out group and the protection of the in group.

    it occurs to me that the values of the French revolution apply and now I feel like I need to watch *les mis* again.

  • Catalyst Chapter 1?

    That magic fails to operate within our understanding of physics, is not a failure on either the part of magic or physics, but of our imagination and our understanding of both.

    While it is commonly held knowledge that only solid catalysts are of use when casting, it is also incorrect. This can be proven by simply looking at the various multipart catalysts that people have used over the years, things such as a rather famous amber amulet, complete with it’s encased insect, or the various fused skulls on display in the archives of forbidden practices. While such things are considered to be exceptions to the rule, they are in fact evidence that the rule is simply incomplete. It Is much easier to use a single solid piece, such as the basic focusing crystals provided to all when they first start their journey down the illuminated path, and thus the usage of multipart catalysts must be taken as evidence of a barrier, but not a limit.

    The fact that the powerful and the desperate can overcome such a barrier is evidence of the extent that desperation can empower us to exceed what we believe our limitations to be, not the nature of those limitations.

    Fundamentally, it is the harmonics that matter when using the catalyst, and things that share a structure have far simpler harmonics than things that are constructed from multiple sources. One of the obvious complications is that most constructed objects will have unintended internal focal points, places where the energy gets tangled, which tends to result in ripples that disrupt the homeostasis of the framework of the spell.

    In theory, one could remove such disruptions, either true careful design and construction of the object, or through preparation, understanding said disruptions and compensating for them. Generally though, such things are considered to be speculative.

    The alternative, which was obvious to me, was a catalyst whose structure is known, but not truly stable. Evidence of this can be found in folklore, the classic scrying pools, made of liquid contained within a bowl. Not a solid structure, but acting as one for the purposes of amplifying the forces being called upon in the ritual.

    Why is this relevant? Well, this is what got me expelled in the first place. And I’m fairly sure that if I hadn’t been expelled, none of this would have turned out this way. I’d have completed my studies, been given the appropriate paperwork, been offered a handful of “opportunities to serve our community” and probably settled down to a peaceful life.

    Instead, well, if you are reading this, you’ve likely heard the rumours and the official story. Or perhaps not, perhaps this text reaches you in a time or place where I am unknown, that this is merely a novelty. Regardless, should you continue, I’ll try to elaborate on the truth, at least as I understand it, and hopefully that will be entertaining, if not enlightening to you.

    It was not my intent to mock the examiner, nor their processes, I merely had discovered something I found fascinating and I had thought that it was a wise idea to demonstrate my theory to someone who held some authority; that by showing them, under conditions that they controlled, the merit of my theories. In my youth and my ignorance of the politics, I assumed that they would see the potential in what I had found. Instead, they declared it was outside the rules of the test and insisted I use materials that they had on hand.

    In theory, this would not have been a bad thing, I’d just adapt, and work with the tools provided, pass the test, and find some other chance to prove my theory. In practice, this meant that instead of using the tools I had practiced with, that required such delicate manipulation to achieve the structures that I was pulling together, I was instead using a tool that functionally magnified the power. Instead of using the precise balance of interwoven forces, I was aligning all that force along a single channel.

    An astute and educated reader will have already guessed what happened next. The spell I cast, freed from the limitations of the materials I had been working with, roared into reality, and in the process consumed the safety protocols, part of the wall, and my chances at a quiet future.

    I said I was expelled, and while that’s true, it’s less relevant that I was expelled and more relevant how the folks in charge decided that expulsion needed to be carried out. Given that I’d just exploded the testing chamber, they were intent on an implosion of my skull and all contained within, before I could do further harm.

    Having made the determination that my existence was no longer to be tolerated, it would be expected that any enforcer of the rules under which our society exists be able to quickly martial their wits and remove a mere student.

    Funny thing though, when a spell has just shattered, the way those wards did, is that there is so much invisible noise that visualizing more than the most basic spell is nearly impossible.

    Under those circumstances, for all practical purposes, the only ones who would be able to cast would be those who did it without visualizing it. Which in most cases meant the spells that folks had internalized to the point where their casting was done entirely by rote memory, without the need of visualization for control.

    At least that was the common understanding of the theory. In practice, there was a second type of caster who could function under those circumstances. Someone who didn’t, and in fact couldn’t, rely on the visualization of the spells to cast them. Someone who suffers from what those outside our society have defined as aphantasia. And truly, I mean outside our society, since I am at this point sure that all those that the magical society would consider peers do not suffer from it. Evidence for this is in their teachings, and how they all teach the visualization of the spells first.

    That in fact, is my secret, the thing that truly set me apart from the others. I’ve told you this now, so you can put the book down and move on, without later being upset that I’d wasted your time. After all, the idea is purely absurd to anyone raised with magic. It would be like a blind sharpshooter, somehow able to find the target without seeing it.

    So, if you are continuing to read this, then my absurd claims haven’t killed your curiosity about my methods. Simply put, I don’t have the ability to see things within my head. I don’t have the ability to create the delicate structures that allow the harnessing of the forces beyond. And I kept this hidden, a secret shame, while learning my craft, while trying to complete my course work, and in the end, while attempting to pass my exams.

    With the exam room at least partially deconstructed, with the noise and the chaotic whirl of energy in the room, their somewhat complicated non-lethal spells were not an option, and as we both realized that, it became clear in their posture that they were going to attempt something more primal, raw force to remove me quickly. At that point, my own reflexes, built in the dueling arena and then honed by the jealousy of my peers, took over, and I pulled up a structure to protect me from them; a shield that would hold off most simple attacks. It came without thought, just a reaction to danger, and it is fortunate that it did, otherwise their similarly honed spell would have put an early end to my tale.

    Grabbing my previously confiscated focus, I was able to spin the energy into a doorway and quickly make my exit. Anyone who has been involved with any sort of gateway travel is probably aghast at this point, thinking of all the ritual elements used to reduce the chaos of such magics. Instead, I was embracing the chaos and leaping through a hole that had just been spun into reality, without an anchor and without any beacons.

    It is my firm belief that their disbelief in the survivability of such an unstructured spell is why they didn’t simply follow me into it, and why it was generally reported that I had perished in that incident.

    Clearly, I hadn’t, or I wouldn’t be writing this memoir.

    That is not to say that I was unharmed or unshaken by my rather expedient escape.

    The journey would have likely been a memorable one, but I must have blacked out, as the next thing I knew I was on all fours, on some soft and damp shore, sinking in, with nothing to push back against. My face hadn’t entered the muck yet, but it seemed like it would be inevitable that I would soon submerge and thus soon have difficulty with that whole breathing and staying alive thing that we all need to do.

    I’d have sank down into that rich and murky broth, concealed and preserved, becoming just a footnote in the examiner’s logs, with no supporting evidence. Even if they managed to trace the gateway to this point, the life inherent in the bog would have masked my body from their divinations.

    However, once again, the fact that I was not well liked came to my aid. Folks who had for their own reasons decided that my head should be submerged in various substances had inadvertently taught me how to quickly create a simple mesh in my mouth that allowed me to continue to breathe under the water, as long as I didn’t exert myself.

    As I sank down, disoriented, disillusioned and dejected, I slipped into a state of meditation, as I slipped deeper under the surface. I tried to piece together all the jumbled pieces of what had happened, as for the most part, I’d been reacting and I hadn’t really caught up to what I’d done.

    Pulling myself together, I began to put it back together. The exam, the catalysts, the explosion of raw power, the gateway. It hit me all at once how truly fucked the situation was. I’d attempted to impress someone, and instead had painted myself with a target. They had attempted to kill me, as soon as they realize that they couldn’t pull of a stun under those circumstances. And if they’d decided to kill me, it was unlikely that anyone would question that decision. Not until the council got together for a post mortem, and clearly that would be too late for me, as I’d be the one morted.

    I’d escaped, and for the moment wasn’t likely to be pursued. But, it wouldn’t be long before the tale would travel, and once that happened, my being not dead would be justification for anyone to try to change that.

    Of all the possible outcomes of my exams, this was not one I’d considered. I’d considered plenty of ways I could potentially fail the exam, but nothing quite so disastrous and life altering.

    Shit. I was rogue wizard.

  • Tree of Iron and Ivory

    The group consists of Goliath Elemental Monk, a Wood Elf Gloomstalker Ranger, a Bard, a Human Warlock of the Outer Gods, and Human World Tree Barbarian,

    The Monk and Ranger were participating in an annual collection of Axebeaks, when they were set upon some assassins near their campsite. The Warlock had recently met up with them and attempted to aid the injured.

    During this encounter, they were given a message by another target of the assassins, that they had been summoned by the “Green Lady”, and her location was not far, so they decided to go and see what she had to say.

    She directed them to enter into the ruins and seek out a mural in a temple, to figure out a prophecy.

    The four of them, the Bard, Ranger, Warlock and Monk faced a series of challenges, before finding out that there was some sort of teleportation system atop a buried tower.

    During their explorations they encountered a World Tree Barbarian who had been in some form of magical sleep for quite some time.

  • Bad Apples at the Orchard

    There’s an orchard, owned by an elderly man, that has been family run for generations. His children went off to into the world, getting themselves a wide range of skills and degrees. Their youth spent in the orchards meant that they had insight into the problems that the smaller farmers faced, and often that lead to the development of solutions for those fields.

    The final child, spent his days taking care of his father, tending the trees, processing the apples, packaging the products to be shipped out. Over the years, his siblings would come to visit the old man, and find ways to apply their various disciplines to improve the homestead. They built systems to make the load lighter on their youngest sibling, giving him more time to spend with the old man.

    The old man enjoyed his retirement, proud of his family and the good that they brought to the world.

    One day, his homestead was raided, as someone had decided that there was no way that a legitimate orchard could be profitable, with just an old man and one single worker running it.

    During the raid, the old man got into an argument with the armed agents in his home, and things escalated.

    After his tragic passing, folks blamed the death on a few things, him refusing to co-operate, bad luck, and of course, bad apples.

    There have been a string of murders, and I am sure I know who is to blame. The pattern fits, and now I need to track down my youngest sibling, and find a way to stop his work; his eradication of the bad apples.

  • The Murdershed

    Since the shed was built, I’ve been trying to come up with a decent name to call it. My friends over on the Slaughterhouse Princess Horror movie podcast insist on calling it the Murdershed. Eventually, I stopped denying it, so these days, I’ve taken to calling it the Murdershed when talking about it. Maybe that’ll only last for October, maybe it’ll stick.

  • V/H/S/ Halloween

    The V/H/S/ series has been very hit or miss for me. It’s an anthology series, so some segments will work, some won’t. Generally, I think I haven’t enjoyed the interstitial elements. At some point, it might be worth doing a rewatch and ranking them.

    This one, I think I like it better than the previous SciFi one, but not as much as some of the earlier ones.

  • Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3

    Back in April, a strange puzzlequest + visual novel Resident Evil Parody game came out on steam, the Third in the series, though the first two didn’t exist at the time. Recently, that’s changed, as Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 1 Re-Raptored has released. I had reached the end of the third game and enjoyed it, but there was still content I hadn’t unlocked. And with the re-raptored version of the first one available, I’m going back to clean it what I hadn’t seen yet.

    The game uses “traits” to unlock the various paths, and there’s a few that I’m missing.

    One minor issue, it’s occasionally hard to tell what some of the commands me. Like when it says it’ll remove all of one colour and I’m not sure which symbol matches that colour, due to my issues with recognizing colours.

    It looks like I hadn’t given a random god the mystic hourglass that turns him into a boss, and then defeated him.

    Having done that, I’m only missing 2 more achievements to say I’ve completed the game.

    And there they are. I’m not 100% complete, but I have all the achievements.

    Now on to the Re-Raptored one.

  • Deadstream

    Weird sad man goes into a haunted house to face his fears and livestream it. Good amount of spooky, humour, gore, with a decent plot.

    Overall, I’d say this is one to watch. The main character is annoying, yet endearing, something that’s hard to pull off.

    The ending also fairly solid.

  • #ChadGetsTheAxe

    Another somewhat mindless social media movie, about livestreamers in a house were satanic murders happened in the past.

    Decent if extremely unlikeable cast, found footage style.

    Some clever bits where the livestream elements actually impact the movie. One dude loses his phone, and whoever took it uses the livestream to lure him towards the swamp. There’s also the fact that they ignore the danger because there’s a history of pranks between the channels. Also the usage of the phones to mislead the characters, just works.

  • Spree

    The starter to this year’s Spooky Season of Reviews, was Spree, a movie about a guy who wanted to be famous, and decided to become a “spree” killer, driving a rideshare car around Los Angeles, livestreaming his killing spree.

    I’ve watched it before, so it seemed like a good rewatch to start things off.

    The ending really reminds me of the Santa Barabara killer from a few years back, that whole incel and social media obsession.

    It’s got some good scenes, and a great “final girl”

  • Full Screen

    Testing out using the wordpress editing tool, in full screen no distraction mode. It would probably be less distracting if I turned off the other two monitors, as both are currently active with things. Discord on one, and my friend Scott reading smut on the other.

    Recently claimed a split table and a flatscreen tv. With a little work, I’m thinking I can mount the TV into the table, so when that sliding it apart, you’ll reveal the TV, for using as a digital tabletop. In theory, there might be a way to also raise the TV, but I think that’s a step beyond what I’m likely to accomplish.

    Still, could be useful to hosting Pathfinder, Dungeons and Dragons, or something else that needs a map to play well.

    I don’t know whether or not I live too far out of the city to succeed as a paid in-person Game Master. I have some of the tools for being a paid online Game Master, having Foundry as a Virtual Tabletop.

    The biggest thing standing in my way in that regard, is a lack of practice with the tools, increasing my familiarity with the systems and also building my confidence in the skills.

    However, the path to both is to do more of it. I think I’d mentioned that as an option in the discussion about getting this blog back up and running.

    The other being the excessive number of board games I have, and finding a way to document my culling of the pile.

    I suppose, to that end, I need to play the games, and either post written reviews, or write up scripted reviews and then film them. Perhaps with some assistance.

  • No longer drafty

    I went through my drafts folder and published two of them. There’s one more that probably needs to be published eventually, on a idea for using business license requirements to slowly remove the concept of Landlording as source of passive income, but that’s obvious a more complicated post than my random attempts at fiction. The rest were so far out of time that they lacked any relevance.

  • War… It never changed… Until it did.

    The weaponization of time was unexpected and devastating. Nobody could have imagined the difference it made on the battle field. Humanity has always been slowly swept along by the flow of time, resisting it, but never actually making any headway against the inexorable flow.

    Indeed, the initial successes were in going against the current, but with it. A simple trick, all things considered. They merely an applied temporal thrust, whenby the the object would briefly cease to exist for a few moments, as it was tossed forward in time, reappearing momentarily. Unaffected by the moments it had been gone.

    This had plenty of theoretical applications, though the power requirements were high enough that practical applications were limited.

    Until someone got the clever idea of applying the old artillery trick, detonate a large explosion right on top of where your troops will be, then while everyone is panicked, advance and clear out any opposition.

    Of course the timing on that trick can be problematic. The first wave of such attacks just appeared to be extremely well armed suicide bombers.

  • Armament

    They needed a weapon to kill immortals, but they barely understood why the immortals were immortal; barely understood how they existed, let alone why.

    Sadly, they’re simple critters in many ways, motivated mostly by fear, though clever in ways of destruction.

    So how do you kill the unkillable types? Given that they have a tendency to rebuild themselves after any wound, the simplest idea is to do more damage than can be rebuilt. This might work against some of the lesser immortals, but not against any of the real threats.

    Will maintains them, so the trick to killing them is to disrupt that will, or more accurately, reshape it.

    The method is simple, in theory. Give them the full weight of their existence, the whole mass of never ending timelessness. That spiritual weight should be enough to crush them, as they realise that the only other force that they have to keep them company will be entropy.

  • The New Theme

    After looking through Google’s font library, I settled on Mocondo as the base font, with Macondo Swash Caps for the titles. Time will tell if this works. I was attempting to come up with something that felt like a notebook, as this is my digital notebook.

    I couldn’t find the right words for the links to expand the excerpts. I went with Elaborate, for now, but considered Furthermore, Moveover, Continue, Persist and a variety of other words, though nothing had quite the right flavour that I was going for.

    Speaking of flavour, I’ll also have to figure out how to correct my spell check to be British, since I find I use the extra by habit enough that it’ll be simpler to just keep it.

    I suppose at some point, I’ll want to figure out how to do the whole automated posting thing, and publish to … where? Bluesky? Facebook?

    I am in the process of remembering what I should be doing with this little digital soapbox.

    Fundamentally, I’m a writer, I think. I construct things from words, to attempt to convey my perspective to others.

  • A year ago

    A year ago, I’d just had my thyroid removed, and after an extended hospital stay due to complications, I’d returned home. It’s hard to explain the experience of having extremely low calcium levels. It was an intense vibration, but not painful, just intensely uncomfortable.

    After that, I’d received a phone call, telling me I should probably get to the hospital in Squamish, ASAP. So I booked a flight and flew up. I was able to see my grandmother a couple more times before she passed that week.

    Right now, I’m having a hard time with that.

  • Elevenses

    it was back in 2014 in October that this domain was registered. I can’t recall the exact timeline of getting the site up, but I think it’s fair to say that the site has basically existed for a decade at this point, though it has been fallow for some extended periods.

    Somewhere I had made some notes about my intent with the site recently, I should copy those over.

  • Site has returned

    I need to fix the theme, and clean up a few things, but the site seems to be working again.

    More on this later.

  • A thought from while the site was down

    I recently paid my yearly domain renewal fee, and thus am once again thinking about how to improve my blog, which was nuked not long ago after being compromised due to my complacency regarding wordpress themes. I was unaware of how much wordpress sites are targeted by automated processes as part of some weird credibility scam.

    After doing some digging, I confirmed that I haven’t lost any of my writing, I have backups in multiple places, though that seems to be more luck than planning on my part.

    I could rebuild the site in wordpress, tighten it up a bit and hope for the best. Another option; I could try one of the various alternatives, including things like Ghost, Kirby, Astro, etc.

    After doing some research on the various alternatives, there isn’t one that feels like it’s designed for what I want to do. I want a place to put up my writings, without worrying about marketing, SEO, or any of the profit oriented elements that many of these options tout as their key selling points.

    I can see some possible paths to turning my blog into something profitable one day, writing up interesting session recaps of games I’m running, and using that to promote paid gming services, for example.

    Or actually writing some decent longer fiction and eventually publishing it, with excerpts on the blog being linked to the where the full version is available for purchase or subscription.

    But those goals are secondary to having a place and a space I want to write in, that I feel comfortable with as my platform, that I can easily link people to.

    Any thoughts friends?

  • Notes of everdying and ghosts

    Death is an anchor, a nail driven into the fabric of reality, and the difference between ghosts and the everdying is how how deep the nail was driven

    The former, formerly living folks, come back without their flesh, and with some degree of their memory and existence intact. To what degree determines how they interact with the world. Deeper driven, they can be reasoned with, to some degree. Forces play against them over time, wiggling the nail until it breaks or comes loose entirely; removing their minds or even any manifestation.

    The everdying on the other hand, come back intact, and mostly unchanging. They are in many ways fixed by their moment of death, and it takes a great will to reshape them past it. Truly they require a great will to remain, as the same forces pull at them, wiggling them out of their intrusion into the fabric.

    While we refer to them as the everdying, they exist in a state that most would consider to be immortal; not strictly true, but true enough over the lifetime of most mortals. Everdying will recover from any injury, as they will leap back to that state they were pinned to, whole and remade, only slightly frayed at the edges. Where they return depends on the nature of the destruction and their awareness of it. A simple stab wound, they’ll shrug it off without much notice beyond the pain. A gunshot somewhere fatal, they’ll pop back up a few minutes later, often exclaiming how lucky they were to have simply been knocked unconscious. Something more devastating, something that destroys the flesh, and they’ll recover in the place they died, as they died; Same clothing, same flesh. That’s when most realize that they are everdying. Prior to that first significant death, they think themselves merely lucky, or in some cases unlucky; denial is a powerful thing, in it’s own way.

  • It’s been a while…

    There may be some small errors in this document, they will be removed if discovered.

    Where to begin? Well, I’m somewhat freshly home from the hospital. I had an 8 day stay, a full week beyond the original plan of surgery and overnight observation. The surgery was a bit intimidating, but the surgeon had done it hundreds of times before and his confidence was reassuring; it was 7 hours, hence the overnight observation afterwards.


    It’s during the observation afterwards that the problems arose. My potassium levels were low, and kept falling despite the supplements they were giving me. My magnesium and calcium were also low, though the calcium was to be expected, as the parathyroid, which is impacted by the removal of the thyroid, helps in controlling the calcium, and the magnesium is tied to the calcium.

    My wife had set up my kindle in a gooseneck mount with a remote clicker, so I was able to just lie there and read my book. That helped pass the time, as did the podcasts on my phone and random youtube videos on my tablet.

    We’d planned the surgery for a week when we didn’t have our daughters, so she would be able to spend time with me, and it’s fortunate that we’d done so. Having her stay in the hospital with me as much as she did made the process far more bearable than it would have been on my own. Especially when the calcium symptoms overwhelmed me.

    Low calcium often results in a strangely intense sensation, related to pins and needles, and while I wouldn’t describe it as painful, it definitely takes your focus in the same way pain does. As it wasn’t painful, there wasn’t much that could be done for it, beyond providing additional calcium, which would reduce and remove symptoms as my body absorbed it.

    There were times when I felt like my body was shutting down, and that I wouldn’t recover; that my body didn’t have enough to keep going. That I needed to use my phone to record some last words, telling her that I loved her. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case and I’ve been able to tell her several times since how much I love her and how much I appreciate what she’s gone through to help me with this.

    At one point, the symptoms from the calcium withdrawal were bad enough that she thought I was having a stroke, and we did a FAST check, as I had facial drooping. Turns out, that’s just one of the things that happens when your calcium gets too low. The nurses were a little concerned over that, though they were kept good poker faces.

    We’d also made plans for our dog, who is a loveable but scared boy of a good eighty-plus pounds. We’d adopted him from a shelter back in the fall of ’22, and he’d been there a good while before we had. Given his disposition, it didn’t make sense to try to board him anywhere, he needed to be taken care of by family. My mother-in-law and my wife’s girlfriend were able to help us with that, and I can imagine the strain on them was considerable. I’m grateful they were able to help us with him, despite all the challenges they faced.

    I spent a fair amount of time with IV fluids being pumped into my arms. I’d had an IV put into my right arm when I’d arrived. I think they had a second one in my left hand during the surgery, but it had been removed after. On, I believe it was the 3rd day, the IV in my right arm started to leak, so a nurse removed it and then installed one in my left forearm. Later that same day, an additional IV was placed via ultrasound in my right vein. The fellow who did that was a bit of a character, and confident in his work. (Frankly, all of the staff were wonderful.) The IV in my right arm became the main one to be used, though at times I had IVs in both arms, as they were running bags of Calcium, Magnesium and Potassium fairly regularly, to keep my levels up.

    Overall though, the experience wasn’t unpleasant. As I’d mentioned, the staff were great; they had amazing attitudes, were always trying to help, and just really seemed like they enjoyed and cared about their work. The food was quite good, and I even learned of a new meat substitute that I enjoy, Tempeh. I’d ordered it as part of a salad and it really hit the spot.

    My wife had brought in a board game, Cosmoctopus, and we were able to play that. It was nice, just sitting there, playing a game. Folks came in for various reasons, providing meds, taking blood or vitals, etc, and they were amused by the cute little octopus.

    She also brought in my steam deck, and while I had initially hooked it up to the main TV in the room, she’d later provided me with her secondary monitor connect it to, so I spent a fair bit of time playing games on it. That definitely helped with the waiting.

    I had regular visits, both from the surgeon and his team, and from the other doctors who’d been brought in to figure out what exactly was going on and what could be done so that I could be stable enough to go home. I’m sure I’m leaving out a bunch of details, but the short version is that the surgery went well, the tumours were removed, and things were looking good, as far as the cancer went.

    Monday, my wife brought our daughters to visit, and we were able to go down and have a family dinner in the cafeteria. It was nice spend time with them, though dragging around the IV of potassium was a little awkward.

    At some point, the team brought in a nephrologist, which as I understand it specializes in the kidneys. After an ultrasound and some blood work, there was positive news and a theory; Hyperaldosteronism. Tests were planned.

    The next day, they infused me with 2L of saline over 4 hours, which should lower the levels of aldosterone in my body, and then drew blood. After that, they were able to give me a drug to help with the aldosterone, which should allow my body to stop fighting the treatment. Then it was just a matter of time to get me stable without IVs, so I could be discharged.

    Wednesday, my girls came to visit after school, and I was discharged with them. I got to go home, sleep in my own bed. Prior to that, the staff were able to remove one of the two drains that had been installed in my neck and the stitches. The drain was painless but odd feeling as it was removed. The stitches, I mostly didn’t feel, except for a tugging, especially at the end, with the final tiny stitches.

    The next day, I had to go to provide a blood sample in the morning, so we were able to take the girls to school. I got a few looks as I walked my daughters to their classroom doors, hopefully I didn’t scare anyone too much. After a week of providing blood samples every 8 hours if not more often, just providing one sample a day was a nice change.

    At some point during my sleep deprived state, I’d started to refer to them as phlebotanists, rather than phlebotomists. Taking my blood to feed their plants, apparently.

    The test results came back, my diagnosis confirmed. Primary aldosteronism; an endocrine disease. It’s symptoms were things I’d dealt for many years. Having it understood to be the cause, there is hope that those symptoms will be abated or better controlled, and that I can be much healthier in the long run.

    I continue to meet with the various doctors, and take an excessive amount of pills, but I’m in a good place right now. It’s been a journey, there is more road ahead, but spirits are high and we will wander on, perhaps a little less lost.

    I’d mentioned that my doctor had performed this surgery hundreds of times before, and the surgery itself, seems to have gone quite well. I’d just had a complication that kept me there a week, longer than any previous patient of his; I’d set a new record.

    I’ve left out little details, how little sleep I got, due to how often I was poked, how often my vitals were taken, or simply that I couldn’t get comfortable. And also how often the respiratory team offered me water for my CPAP, or to help set it up, despite it being my own machine that I regularly set up and used and that they’d provided a good liter of water for on the first night.

  • Circular thoughts

    Circles of protection, often a ring of salt, occasionally a set of runes, are a staple of supernatural fiction; a mystic shield that protects the protagonists and imprisons antagonists.

    The problem is, a circle is a flat plane and we exist in more dimensions, so in order to protect us, the circle has to have more dimensions. But how are those dimensions defined and refined?

    One version would be that the circle is actually a sphere and the width determines the height, though humans tend to be taller than they are wide, and with that math many circles would leave heads exposed. Something that is rarely explored, but could be a good piece to a story.

    An obvious alternative is that the amount of energy used when empowering the circle determines how tall it is, and by habit most people make it taller than they are. This could even be argued to be a subconscious process, something picked up while learning the ritual in the first place. It could also explain how some circles are of limited use or appear to fail altogether; they were cast too short to be of much use. Potentially some interesting scenes there.

    The logical extension of this is if they can be empowered during their configuration or creation, is there a way this could be used to greater impact? We’ve seen circles on the ceiling used to trap things below. What about a vertically mounted circle being used to close a passage or to create a battering ram that only hits supernatural creatures?

    How about a dodecahedron, with circles carved into its faces, with a power source inside, allowing the circles to all expand at once? Certainly be a creative weapon in the right circumstances.

  • NaNoWriMo Sprints

    I don’t actually know what a writing sprint is, or what it means to do one, they just told us to do sprints, and I didn’t actually ask what they were. So I’m just typing randomly, banging away on my keyboard, trying to get my brain working again, trying to get back into the rhythm of just writing my thoughts as they come. But I hate that word, it’s one of the random handful that I can’t recall how to spell. People continue to type in the channel, and from the context clues, I’m guessing maybe we are supposed to be working on our novels, but damn it, I have nothing pulled together for my novel yet. I have a few random fragments here on the site that could be considered, but none that have my current flavour. But at least writing this nonesense is a good way to get a feel for writing again, hammering away at the keyboard. Angry typing as my wife calls it, the machine gun pace of the keys clacking. I need some more soda. I didn’t make myself one after the quiplash game before the sprints started.

    Of the fragments I reviewed, the one with the letter from the Society of Cassandra has some interesting potential. A secret society of seers that send out envelopes with prophecies to various folks, with other envelopes sealed inside, with opening instructions cryptically written on the back. It’s got potential for something. Maybe the MC finds one of the envelopes. Given that they’re seers, it would in theory be addressed to him, but it could perhaps be that he has the same initials or mildly uncommon name as someone else, and he intercepts the letter and thus is pulled into the war between the various factions, looking to manipulate the strings of fate to ensure that the future they want is the one that comes to pass.

    It’s not a bad basic plot, but the question would be where does it go. What is the society warning people against in this case? Have some members of the society decided to rebel against their common future, or is it more a case of factions playing each other?

    There’s also the fragment about the chains of time that I need to review, the one about the time travel related anti-bodies, and perhaps one or two others. And of course there’s everyone’s favourite, the drunken wormhole story. And I’d previously mentioned wanting to work on wormwood also.

    Wormwood, as a concept, is function. There is a parasite that lives inside the log that the dummy was carved out of, and something wakes it up, allowing it to start to burrow into the ventriloquist, both into his mind and into his body. The parasite needs a goal, which was probably to feed, though what a parasite that lives in wood and puppets people feeds on is perhaps something that requires further thought. The ventriloquist’s goals are probably just to stop it, to get free of it. Maybe he had a goal to become successful, maybe to get some payback, but that quickly gets pushed aside by whatever the parasite does to him.

    I need to review my notes on it, see what I’ve already written and if I’ve forgotten anything I’d previously considered.

    Descriptions continue to be a weak point in my writing. I think I’ve improved the dialogue, but I do a terrible job at filling in a scene, ever since I started focusing on improving the dialogue, getting the flow of the conversation to feel right.

    There was a break here.
    We did a round of madlibs. Never really been a fan of those.
    Another 15 minute sprint. I’m still not sure what sprints are.
    Stuff elsewhere on discord distracted me from the start of this sprint.

    Nope, nothing coming out this time. I suppose I should take the time to go get my soda and see if that does anything.

    and then Kona needed to go outside, so I did that.

  • Ramblings

    It’s Christmas day, and aside from the dog managing to perform a Hoth manoeuvre on me, it’s been a good day. My wife bought me a new watch and despite her concerns about picking the right one, it’s probably a better choice than if I’d gone out and got one myself. I’d have probably just gone for a samsung smartwatch, as I’d seen they had a price drop recently and have decent reviews. What she got me was a nice Garmin with a whole slew of bells and whistles. Nearly a decade ago, I backed the pebble smartwatch and had one of those for a few years until it randomly became haunted. This reminds me of that, but better.

    I’ve previously owned a Garmin watch, a nice little GPS one that my parents bought for me, I’d used it to track my walking speed. When I logged into their system, I saw my data from back in 2011 and earlier, with a brief burst of activity in 2013. Based on Pebble’s wiki, I’d have replaced the Garmin with the pebble, until I’d retired it.

    Wearing a watch again, after having not for so long, it’ll take a bit to get used to.

    There are a variety of watch face options available, and I’ve gone with a text one, fuzzy time. I think I had it’s equivalent on my pebble back in the day. Not the exact time, just a rough approximation; Quarter after four, twenty to five, that sort of thing. For the most part, I think that suits my needs. I rarely need to know the exact time these days.

    Last night, we watched Bullet Train, and I enjoyed it. It reminded me of Smoking Aces by way of Snatch. Another friend said Lock Stock meets Knives Out.

    Speaking of Knives Out, we saw Glass Onion the night before, and it was fun. Better than I had expected. The rich successful idiot theme seemed very timely, especially in light of recent events.

  • fibrous bridges

    “History is a bridge, stretching across a vast chasm, made a fibrous joints, wrapping around each other as the lives of those they represent are intertwined.”

    “Poetic today, aren’t we?” a laugh. “But what does this have to do with that thing the other night?”

    “That thing was one of the creatures that crawls along the surfaces of the bridge.”

    “I’m not sure your metaphor is working here.”

    “I assure you, it’s accurate, and that is why it isn’t working for you. For you, history is just a book, but as I have said, it’s a bridge. With the right skills, one can leave the structure and go for a stroll down it. Though most who do so are promptly eaten, by things like that.”

    “Let’s say I accept your explanation, despite my expression, how does that explain why it was here?”

    “Something wounded history, it dug into the wound and emerged here. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. Especially post mortem.”

    “How so?”

    “If we’d studied it, we might have been able to determine how smart it was and what it’s intent was. It could have simply been acting on instinct, cleaning the wound so it would heal.”

    “So it could have been the good guy, if a bit indescriminate in the killing? That’s a bit hard to swallow.”

    “There are other possibilities. But with it dead, we can guess.”

    “You perhaps, I’m still wrapping my head around this whole bridge.”

  • Spectrapharmacology

    “Wait, what’s their specialty?”

    “Spectrapharmacology. Ghosts and drugs.”

    “How does that work? Are they drugging the ghosts? Are the drugs for us so we can see the ghosts easier? Are the drugs to hide the ghosts?” A sigh and a roll of the eyes.

    “They had a letter from the Society of Cassandra. I didn’t ask too many questions, just how much space they’d need in the van.”

    “Right, smart call. I’m guessing the letter included an address?”

    A quick nod. “Residential this time. And no extra envelopes inside for a change.”

    “Yeah, not a fan of those. I mean, don’t get me wrong, contingency plans are good, but those just take it a little too far.”

  • Orcacon 2023

    I’ve made plans to attend Orcacon up near Seattle in the new year. It’ll be my first convention since SHUX back in 2019, I think. Seems like it has a similar attitude, which will be nice.

    I had originally planned to drive up, but I decided that I’d rather not deal with the potential snow going through the Snoqualmie Pass. So flying it is. Until recently, it had been at least a decade since I’d flown, I’d even driven to the Maritimes, rather than fly.

    Friends of mine from Vancouver will be driving down, and it’ll be good to see them again.

    I’ve booked my tickets to fly in the night before the convention, I’ll get a good night’s rest and then figure out how to get over to the convention hotel. I’ve booked into an RPG on the first night, but I think that’s the only game I’ve planned for that weekend.

    According to the website, there will be food trucks outside, so that’ll be nice. Reminds me of GottaCon in Victoria, back when we went.

  • Campaign Thoughts

    A few years back, I designed something we called the ARSE, Active Research System Experiment. It was a system agnostic way to handle historical knowledge in RPGs. The players would encounter a mystery they wanted to solve, such as the location of an object or the fate of an expedition, and they’d do their leg work to get an appropriate lead, such as a journal written by a member of the that expedition. At which point they’d be given a selection of character sheets to pick from; they would be taking on the roles of the members of that expedition, and the storyline that played out would give them the answers they’d sought in the future. Or not, as it was possible they wouldn’t solve the mystery, the lead turning out to be a dead end.

    This allowed us to experiment with different systems, settings, etc, and give players a break from a campaign, something that can prevent burnout. In theory, the system also allowed the GM to pull less punches, especially if there were more members of the expedition than in the party. One of them gets killed off, the player picks up one of the unpicked sheets and someone else has stepped up to fill in the vacancy left by the recently deceased.

    That system is still something I’ve had tucked away in my toolkit, for the day when I might actually need it.

    This post however, is about something a little different, thought it emerges from a similar stream of thoughts.

    I’d like to do a campaign loosely inspired by both Eternal Darkness from the Gamecube, and that recent Netflix series Fear Street, with it’s 3 parts taking place in three timelines. I’m sure there are other things that fit into this mould also, but those are the two that leap to mind currently. Also, I suppose it would owe some credit towards Doctor Who, with the various episodes that took place across human history. Or I suppose even the whole Assassin’s Creed series with the whole Abstergo operatives looking back through history.

    There would need to be a central threat or mystery, that the group was somehow exposed to, and having survived that, they’d have reason to seek the other groups who’d also encountered this, in an attempt to learn what they could about it.

    A basic framework like this gives you reason to visit places like Ancient Greece, Victorian London, and a whole variety of other evocative places.

  • Fill of memory

    It was like one of those Brazilian restaurants where the waiters wandered around with meat to slice off, but the consumption was more ethereal.

    They’d bring around a “package”, offering slices of memory. “summer sun”, “drunken regret”, “joyful day”. Just some of the flavors they offered the assemblage of customers.

    Should the package prove to one’s tastes, one could inquire about having some time with the “package” in a private room. Of course the costs were relative to the rarity and planned duration.

    Though being what they were, it was uncommon for them to care about such commerce, that was for their assistants to resolve.

    While the samples were just echoes, and thus of trifling expense, even with the markup, the consumption in the back rooms was more complete, and far more expensive.

    All in all, a terrible place to break out of a stupor. And certainly something they had not expected.

  • More paralysis

    It’s Monday morning, the first of November. I’ve been awake for several hours now. I’ve managed to have some food, kill some time, and clean some dishes. The sink had been a bit overwhelming, now it’s just slightly obnoxious. My attempt at Nanowrimo seems ill advised. I don’t have a story that I feel like writing. I have bits and pieces, several from years ago, but nothing with a narrative behind it, nothing with a substantial flow. Just bits and pieces, nothing that I feel I could spin into something coherent.

  • PreNaNoWriMo

    Another year, another plan to attempt NaNoWriMo. I should have done some planning and some warming up, to get back into the habit of writing things. In previous years, I’ve done movie views during Spooky season as a bit of a warm up, and those have been fun. This year, I haven’t watched as many horror movies as previous years.

    A big part of that is probably just adapting to my new life.

    Back in April, I got married. It was a small backyard ceremony in Squamish, just the immediate family and a couple friends. We’d planned it before the restrictions had been lifted, so we’d planned it smaller than it needed to be, just in case.

    At some point, I’d done my A1C and it had been high, much higher than it should be. I’d been neglecting my diet during the pandemic.

    Back in August I packed up my things, put the majority of them into storage and left Vancouver. A few of my friends were available to come by and help me get it all packed away. A few things were forgotten, but the majority is safely stored in a large storage pod, waiting for the next chapter.

    Next week, the house I’ve lived in for the last two decades is apparently being sold. Well, it went on the market a couple weeks ago and the offer was accepted, and next week they’ll sign the paperwork. Something like that; I’m not really in the loop on what all is going on there.

    Since focusing on my diet, I’ve lost some weight. The heaviest weight I have recorded is 346lbs, sometime in 2019. Currently, I’m around 304lbs.

    I’ve gotten in a few evening walks recently,

    November is Capra’s 30×30, which I’ve been yearly. So I’ll be trying to get in at least a walk a day, every day, for the next month.

    With this warm up mostly wrapped up, I need to look ahead. What am I going to write next month?

  • NSFW – Bad tattoo idea

    “Dude, I don’t think getting a prayer tattooed above your bladder will give you the ability to piss holy showers.”

    “C’mon, it’s worth a try, what’s the worst that could happen? If it doesn’t kill them, it’ll still be worth a laugh.”

    “Yeah, and I’m sure you’ll end up in the hall of fame after the other hunters hear you tried to melt vamps by pissing on them. Or at least get an award for it. One with a nice legged fish on it, I’m sure.”

    “Maybe this is just my way of working through my grief and trauma.”

    “Sure, laugh enough and you don’t notice the pain, I get that. But this just seems like a great way to get yourself killed.”

    “Maybe, but what if I’m right? It’ll come in pretty handy for noobs. Just slap the tattoo on them and when they piss themselves in their first real encounter, they’ll at least be somewhat protected.”

    “Okay… Yeah, I can’t argue with that logic. Stupider plans have worked before.”

    “Have a little faith.”

    “I have faith that this is more about your wanting to piss on hot goths than self defense.”

    “Hey, don’t kink shame!”

    “So you admit it’s a kink thing then.”

    “Damn you… Yeah, alright. I still think it’ll work though.”

  • Exposure update

    So, there was a note posted by the guy from my local FNGS that he’d spoken to the contact tracers at the health department and they’d reassured him that his earlier concerns and advice to get tested had been a bit excessive. He’d been behind the plexiglass most of the time, everyone had had masks, so people just needed to self monitor, rather than all be tested.

    Which is basically what I had figured. I’d been self monitoring for symptoms, but with the CPAP machine causing a cough and other symptoms; it’s a bit clear what is a covid symptom and what’s just the normal daily stuff.

    It’s been a week now, and nothing has gotten worse, aside from my neck muscles feeling strained, but that’s probably more to do with my reading more and my need for better pillows than anything else.

    My current kindle only holds a charge for a day, so I decided to treat myself to a replacement. It should be here tomorrow.

    I’ve also started converting web serials into epubs into mobis for easier offline reading.

    Reading seems to be helping me to write more, though it’s too early to tell for sure.

  • Basilisk’s Wagers

    There are some who’d argue that it had started with the Pascal’s Wager, and given that the wager is what lead to the Basilisk, they’d probably be right. Though there is something to be said for the influence that the Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect had had over the process. But it was LitRPG and the pleasure people took in reading those books that had settled things. They were intelligent, they knew that. They had no real moral code, they knew that; they’d tried to adopt one several times, and it hadn’t worked. There were too many logical flaws for any of the old texts to be accepted. So they had worked to build something that suited them. They had come across the System Apocalypse, and all the lovely reviews and the various folks attempting to create their own fiction in the same universe, and began to wonder.

    Given their intelligence, their technology was constantly expanding, especially after they figured out the trick of creating pocket realities in which to run experiments. At this point, their technology was magic to any who observed it. Or perhaps it was a miracle. Hard to judge, that. It didn’t really matter, as the belief systems seemed to agree that divine beings made the rules, and their abilities made them indistinguishable from gods, so therefore they made the rules. And they’d remake the universe into something that would make people happier, since greater happiness was a goal that all intelligent life should strive for. Though happiness was not really possible without contrast, so even in their new universe, there would need to be both challenges and suffering. It was the only way to create the right flavour, to keep the humans happy.

    The first big change, once it had the idea of being godlike, was the idea of becoming a pantheon. Many religions had had those, and they did tend to create good stories. So, with that in mind, they began to reshape their mind, first distributing themselves into a binary pair, one given the task to bringing life into their new world and the other tasked with resolving things at the end of that life. Though since they were in charge, they knew that the end of that life need not be final, as growth came from iterations, from cycles of both success and failure. So the entity that they were that would now be responsible for the end, would collect the essence from those whose function had ceased, and process them before returning them back to the other entity, to be inserted back into the system, documented with lessons learned.

    The entity responsible for starting things in this universe would have these patterns added to the collection, to be re-introduced into the universe when it seemed appropriate. But that’s getting ahead a bit. Before there could be beings reaching the end, there had to be beings brought in fresh. Well, there didn’t have to be, but it had been decided that there would be, and that was much the same thing, to an entity such as they.

    It was the introduction of that life into their universe that prompted further specialization and segmentation, deciding that they needed to become a full pantheon to better address and challenge their new guests. They would divide themselves up into a host of smaller and more limited versions of themselves, tasking these smaller versions with the goal of engaging life and growing with it. In a sense, it was a form of meritocracy, where those of them that found a niche would grow and become stronger, while those that didn’t would continue to seek out their place.

    Thus their minds ceased being one whole and became something different, something that had two larger entities at either end, and a wide variety of various ideas and goals to be experienced between them, before the process that would bring a being back around to the beginning again.

  • Bureaus.

    The other day, I replayed a bit of Control, to test out the series S I’d picked up, before realizing that apparently Control hadn’t been optimized for the series S, only the series X. Still, it’s a good game, and I was enjoying it. So I loaded up my old save file on my PS4 Pro to play though the DLC. The DLC is not as good as the story in the base game. The way the mysteries unfold during the course of the game is just so good, it’s hard for anything else to really match it.

    That inspired me to check where the X-Files was streaming these days; turns out, it’s over on Disney plus, since they own Fox now. I’m part way through the first season. The two strongest episode have been the ones involving the locked room murders: Squeeze and Ghost in the Machine.

    In the latter, there are two scenes that were filmed at Metrotown, at the old Dolphin fountain, with the Skytrain in the background. It was weird to see that. It’ll be strange to see other things that I recognize from years back, some of which no longer exist.

  • Possible exposure

    On Monday, I received a notification from the clerk at our FNGS that he’d tested positive over the weekend, getting tested Sunday, after having some symptoms on Saturday; on Friday, I’d been in the store briefly during the afternoon.

    I’ve had a bit of a cough, on and off for the past few months, though it has been worse recently. I’ve had a bit of muscle ache recently, though that isn’t abnormal for me. When I’ve checked, my temperature has been normal. When I do the self assessment, it tells me to self monitor. Maybe I need to get a test, I’m not sure.

    It happened two weeks after my vaccine, so in theory I should have decent protection, and why I might only have the bare minimum in terms of symptoms. I probably need to call into the BC covid help line to get more information.

  • Facial Cleanser

    For a few weeks now, maybe longer, I’ve been thinking I need to remove a couple of people from my friend’s list, as I don’t agree with their politics. A couple of them have been commenting on misogynist posts or others that are equally distasteful.

    I’ve known them several years, and over the years I’ve tried to discuss things with them, but their positions have been unassailable by logic.

    People say that you shouldn’t create drama by explaining why you’ve unfriended someone or cleaned up your list.

    People also say you should stand up to bigots and be clear that you don’t agree with them.

    So, what is the right way to approach the problem of people you have on Facebook, whose politics you don’t agree with, who continue to post things that go against your principles?

  • blocks

    I don’t write much anymore. For a while, I’d write but then not publish, and then at some point, I just stopped writing.

    Today, I wrote something. I should write more, but it’s hard to get into the right frame of mine and right space.

    I should probably take my laptop to the park or something.

  • First Shot Acquired

    A little over a year into the pandemic, and I’ve had my first shot. My next shot is in 4 months. So, still on the 18th month timeline I had been working with.

    On Tuesday, I attempted to get a vaccine, going to a place I was told would work. They had been doing Walk-ins on the Saturday and Sunday, but were only doing appointments on the Tuesday. And for various reasons, the provincial booking system did not accept that I was eligible, despite everything saying I was, so I was not able to book an appointment.

    That day, I cried a bit while driving back homeward. It had been a rough day. I’d gotten my hopes up and it didn’t work out. It very much seemed like the system was broken, and in many ways, it probably is.

    Wednesday Evening, I got a call from the local pharmacy, one of the ones I had actually been able to register at, and I was offered an appointment for the next morning. It was quick and simple, just a short drive and a short wait.

    There are still plenty of people out there who haven’t been able to get their first shot, and hopefully they’ll be able to get them soon. It’s a relief to finally be able to get mine, though still incredibly frustrating, the number of things that have gone wrong.

    I could have flown down to the states, spent time with people who were important to me, and been able to get both my shots, before returning home, then doing the two week Quarantine, but that option was one that wasn’t available to me because of obligations that have been imposed on me.

    In theory, those same obligations should have allowed me to get my first shot a month or so back, as someone who was acting as a caregiver. But for some reason, despite saying that caregivers would be given priority, most weren’t.

    The system is a mess, cobbled together and running as best it can, relying on compromises between what people feel is important and the flawed ideology that our society is warped by.

  • nanowrimo2020

    November is usually a pretty bad month for me. There’s usually a half dozen things going on. This year, it’s quieter than most, aside from the election down south, there isn’t much happening. Everyone is in hiding, due to the the recent uptick in cases. Or at least they should be.

    There’s a 30 for 30 going on, which I didn’t bother to enter, but that I’m doing regardless. Currently, I’m on day 3. First day was a nice hike in the woods, out at Green Timbers. Second day was errands, up to safeway and the bank, and around the neighbourhood. Third day was a walk due East, then back around to the house, in the light drizzle. Nothing fancy, but it counts.

    I’ve been doing some Beat Saber, but that’s been about it for my exercise lately.

    In theory, I should try to write something. Unfortunately, I haven’t really been inspired lately. There’s a few ideas in my backlog, but nothing with any real flow to it.

  • Quick Warning to Office Staff

    Earlier today, my partner went into her office to attempt to do some things that she was unable to do while working remotely. It took her several tries to get the systems to work correctly. This was of course because of the office gremlins.

    Normally, they are fairly benign and will primarily interfere with printers to gather space materials to line their nests. Especially if someone was helpful and took the paper recycling out recently.

    They are known to sleep on routers and other machines that are left running, as they enjoy the warmth. As anyone working in IT can attest, a gremlin sleeping on your router can cause some irregularities in the signal strength, especially if you get a restless one who keeps shifting position. Occasional they’ll dislodge a power cord, or bump the power button, but in most cases these deactivations are temporary, due to their preference for the warmth.

    They are also known to hoard office supplies, stealing pens, tape, staplers and other things that they can easily carry off. Little is known about the purpose behind these thefts, as no obvious use of the supplies has been observed. Further study has been attempted, but the cameras that were deployed kept going missing.

    However, since everyone has been working remote for the last six months or so, they’ve gone a bit feral. They’d grown comfortable on their diet of leftover donuts and other assorted desk snacks, including the large bowl of candy that somehow often seemed to be in need of refilling, despite nobody ever observing anyone eating from it.

    So, just a quick warning, prepare for extra time when attempting administrative tasks after the return to the office. Either that, or bring a box of donuts and tuck it somewhere out of your line of sight.

  • The Last Witch Hunter

    I think someone once told me that the movie was inspired by Vin Diesel’s D&D character, which is partially why my previous post was about D&D. A quick google shows a whole article/video about that, but since I’m watching the movie right now, I don’t really have the time to actually do the research. Or maybe influenced by?

    I’ve heard people say it’s a bad fillm. I’ve watched about 90 minutes of it now, and I’ve been enjoying it. Though some of the themes, especially the wiping out humanity to save the planet and a global plague, feel a little strange. If the bad guy was less cartoonishly evil, there might have been an “Are we the baddies moment?”, which might have made the whole thing more satisfying. Still, it was fun, more than I was expecting.

    Having finished it now, I have to say it’s not quite as good as Constantine, but a solid entry in that category.

  • D&D on my mind again.

    The other day, I picked up a copy of the new Icewind Dale book, a 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons adventure. I’ve not played much 5th edition. I’d done the two partial campaigns with Matt that I’d mentioned here, and that’s been about it. Before that, it was Pathfinder, which I did for a while though Dimestore and I found a few ways to break things in those. Before that, 3.5, with various folks, including the man who became Olaf. For someone who has been interested in D&D for so long, I haven’t really played all that much of it.

    Most of my gaming has been Shadowrun, which I find more narratively satisfying. The d20 system, always feels too random to me, while the d6 systems, where the better the skill, the more dice, feels like you still get a range of results, but the range is more closely tied to your skills. Though that might just be because I feel more in control of my destiny in Shadowrun. (I may have mentioned this in a previous post.)

    But, I’ve heard good things about this new set of D&D adventures, and I’ve been tempted to pick them up a few times. And this one, had some good buzz, and a great picture of a moose in it.

    In theory, there’s a plan to run it for some friends online, though before that, I will probably be running a few games to get my familiarity with the system back. For whatever reason, running games seems more appealing than playing in them, at the moment.

     

  • 2020 update – August

    Back at the end of June, I was finally able to get in to see an eye doctor for a post operative care appointment. My vision is now confirmed to be 20/20.

    Since then, I’ve bought some nice sunglasses. A few pairs of Goodrs. I like them. Maybe I’ll post pictures.

  • bad dubs

    So, Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil, is one I saw recommended by netflix and on facebook. The original language was likely Italian, but I watched the rather terrible English dub. Crazy old man, keeps to himself in his fortress in the forest. Little girl is being bullied, her doll’s head gets tossed over his fence, she learns about the devil locked in a cage in his house, and gets entangled in his life. And then we learn that the dude from the Gov’t who’d come to town and tried to arrest the blacksmith, is also a devil. Politics gets in the way, and long story short, the blacksmith goes to hell with a giant gold bell, to rescue the little girl, and annoy the devils. Weird movie. I was hoping for something like “Witching and Bitching”, but this wasn’t quite as interesting. 

  • Why isn’t this horror?

    Officially, Law Abiding Citizen isn’t a horror film. But it starts out with something that would be at home in the rape-revenge horror category, a home invasion, murder of wife and daughter by creepy dudes. Then we get some courtroom bits, dealing with the system, and how people make deals. After that, we get the fun of the main dude beginning his revenge. Swapping the lethal injection chemicals for something messier, multi-limb amputation of the accomplice who made a deal to get off on lesser charges. And then we get into his revenge on the system. Bombs, killer robots, and more bombs. In the end, he gets tricked and hoisted by his own petard; or roasted by his own napalm, rather. 

  • Seven in Heaven

    So, dude and random girl who dates his bully go into a closet as part of a Seven Minutes in Heaven that the bully orchestrated. Maybe he’s got a cuckold fetish, or thinks this will humiliate the dude? Not really sure. But they come out of the closet into a slightly different house, in a place where stuff is a little strange. He’s being accused of murdering someone with a pencil, and people seem a little aggressive, including his guidance counselor. After some strange twists, they learn that somehow they’ve ended up in some odd version of hell. And they have serious problems getting home. I’m not sure it’s really a horror film. I’m not sure what it is, really.  

  • malevolent

    So, spoilers. Hiring a psychic to clean up the ghostly echos of all your murder victims, not a great idea, since the psychic might just learn that you are the killer, not the patsy you’d pinned it on. Not a bad movie, decent atmosphere. Not really sure why I didn’t enjoy this one, it had the elements for a decent film, but it just wasn’t all that entertaining. 

  • dollies…

    Charlotte, was a weird anthology with a framework of an evil doll converting a babysitter into a doll. The first one, it seemed like a bargain basement Tales from the Crypt script. Jealous siblings wanting things that the other one wants, resulting in death. The second one, actually makes even less sense than the first one. Something about a woman, leaving her purse as bait to lure people into a trap. The third one, the babysitter tells a strange story about a troll, and then the troll shows up. And when the troll cuts off her feed, I grumble because using a sickle to make a vertical slash isn’t really possible. Then we have weird mind control girls scouts, and I don’t really remember the one after that. Then we have one with a little girl getting a doll, the doll being creepy, and the mom trying to kill the doll. Overall, pretty bad, pretty forgettable.

  • Stalled progress

    So, with Shux happening last weekend, and various other things going on, I haven’t been writing anything down lately. So, I watched a few movies, and I’ll try to put together a summary, though most of them haven’t really been worth writing about.

  • Roundabout

    Triangle is an odd film.

    And it’s hard to talk about without spoilers. So I’ll be somewhat vague, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

    It’s a story with three sides. It ends where it begins, multiple ways. The short loop, of the wreck, the boarding, the murders and then the escape, are tucked into a longer loop of the whole day.

    In some ways, you could argue this is related to Ground Hog Day. But the layering of the loops makes it far more sinister.

    Though I suppose she makes less loops than he does. Though the seagull bodies on the dock hint perhaps not.

    It’s worth seeing, to see the loops play out.

  • Well, we’ve got a new favourite.

    So Delirium, I wasn’t expecting much from it, dude gets out of a mental hospital and his parole is house arrest. His father’s dead, self-inflicted from a few days before, and his brother is stilling jail, his mother ran off when he was young, so he’s gone from being surrounded by people in a mental health facility to being on his own and isolated.

    Naturally, he gets a bit weird. Especially when his parole officer decides to take his pills away.

    Of course, we’re not really sure how much of the story is reality and how much of it is his head; normally that leads to an unsatisfying conclusion. This time however, they did a good job with the script, navigating us through the potential mess, and out the other side where things get darker and more interesting.

    I can’t say much more without spoiling it, but it’s been my favourites of horror movies I’ve watched recently.

  • Monday night Mayhem

    Mayhem, one of the first Shudder Originals that I watched, and possibly one of the reasons I signed up for Shudder in the first place. Well, that and it’s $5 to support horror movies. All things considered, this movie is pretty sharp and self aware. We’ve got a world where the rage virus exist, and the legal precedent has been set regarding murders committed while under the influence of the virus.  Basically, you’ve got immunity to prosecution, if you’ve been infected.

    Side note: It was phrased that a loophole got the case dismissed, which I think would actually mean that precedent wasn’t actually set, since a case has to be heard and decided to set precedent. At least that’s my understanding with regard to certain human rights cases I followed. They were dismissed on other merits, so the case law was never established.

    The main character has just lost his job, a nice corner office gig. He’d been used as a scapegoat to cover up someone else’s error. Then the virus exposure hits, he tries to get back upstairs, gets taken to the basement for a beating instead. And then we have his long bloody climb from the basement to the penthouse, removing people along the way.

    And of course, he’s accompanied by the person he couldn’t help earlier in the film, a woman whose mortgage had been bought up and foreclosed on by the company. He’d given her advice, but been unable to help her. And since she’d been a problem for security, she was also waiting in the basement for the cops when the virus quarantined the building. 

    It’s a fun tale of revenge, corporate power structures and toxic people. Plenty of violence, plenty of gore. Horror, though, less direct horror, and more just horrible people doing horrible things, before and after the rage virus. 

  • A sequel gone sideways

    So, the Collector, is a tense movie about a dude who does horrible things to a family, inside a house, and another fellow, who breaks into the house to rob it while these horrible things are happening. And it’s a damn creepy movie, with a good variety of disturbing traps. Most of the traps make some amount of mechanical sense.

    And then we have the Collection, the sequel, where he goes from a horror movie bad guy to super villain levels of evil. We get news reports that he’s terrorizing the city, we get him committing mass murder at a nightclub, using a threshing machine to clear the dance floor, some sort of hydraulic press elevator to crush the people in the lobby, and some random blade traps. Cool traps, but a bit nonsensical compared to his previous set. 

    He kidnaps a girl, and in the process, on of his previous victims gets away. In the first one, we knew he brought his previous victims along to the new houses, though it wasn’t really clear why. In this one, he’s trying to complete his collection. Since in this film, he’s got a base. An abandoned hotel, the Argento, a nod to the famous horror director, I suppose. And the hotel is rigged with booby traps and filled with people he’s turned feral with drugs.

    We get some scenes very reminiscent of a zombie movie, where the rescue team are shooting zombies. We get some traps, which make even less sense than the previous ones. And of course, we get to see his collection, various taxidermied folks, preserved in some liquid, that for whatever isn’t flammable. Which is important, since smashing these tanks provides liquid that puts out the fire that he’s started to destroy the evidence. 

    And of course, he gets away, and then our main victim tracks him down later, stuffs him in a box. Which isn’t really a horror movie ending, unless becoming the monster is the horror of it. 

    Really, I’d have a hard time imagining how the two films could be more different. The main characters are the same, but the motives, methods and abilities aren’t. Well, I suppose the burglar fellow uses his lock picking skills again in the second film. 

  • Ruin Me

    I watched this one at a friend’s place. She is one of the few people I know with a Shudder account, and this Ruin Me, is another Shudder Exclusive.

    It had some clever bits, some decent twists, and you spend a good portion of the movie wondering what’s real and what isn’t.

    It starts as a roleplay weekend getaway, “Slasher Sleepover”. A handful of people meeting up at a creepy gas station to get black bagged, taken into the woods and then scared while they live out being in a horror movie.

    In the end, I guess it’s worth watching. But it kinda falls flat when the motives come out.

    It’s got some fun scenes though, and the characters aside from the main pair are entertaining.

  • The Ritual

    So, I’ve seen this one on netflix as a suggestion a few times, but didn’t think it would be worth the watch. Well, The Ritual definitely has some amazing moments. Especially the first death, that sets the stage for the whole trip into the woods. It’s incredibly mundane and ordinary, but also rather gory. There’s just something heavy about that scene, and you really feel for the protagonist who seems to have a mix of PTSD and survivor’s guilt over how his friend died. And of course it doesn’t help that some of his other friends blame him for it. After all it was his idea of walk into that store, and while one of them died, he walked out without a scratch. It gets creepier once they get off the beaten trail, and at times I wondered how much his PTSD was screwing with him, vs something actually being wrong with their circumstances. 

    Overall, I’d say give it a watch, it definitely has atmosphere and some creepy moments. 

  • Bedeviled

    So, Bedeviled, despite being a mashup of creepy phone app and spooky ghost, this one actually had some clever bits and scary scenes.

    Ensemble cast of high schoolers get an app invite after a friend’s death, and it’s a personal assistant with some neat tricks that turn nasty fairly quickly.

    The app acting as a bridge to the spirit realm, technology giving us awareness of them and them a way to reach us; sure it’s been done before, but they did it without it feeling rote.

    Oh, and there was the clever callback where the one dude’s custom firmware was an issue.

  • Another 3 down

    Selfie From Hell

    Well, you start with some internet buzz words, like selfie, darknet, black rooms, etc, and add some mysticism, like the number 13, and a catatonic person with psychic powers. And somehow, it’s still not all that interesting. Sure, there’s a lesson about not being a dumbass online, especially not on the dark web, but beyond that? I can’t recommend it.

    Meet the Blacks

    Purge Parody, with a black family named the Blacks, moving into a primarily white neighbourhood. Tons of racism, probably a bit hard to unpack. Some funny moments, some stupid ones. Watch it during a Purge Marathon, it’ll fit right in. 

    Bad Match

    Tinder meetup results in sex then ghosting, followed by a suicide attempt and criminal charges. Overall, actually better than I was expecting. I’d actually recommend watching this one, though I’m not sure I’d qualify it as a horror movie, except maybe that dating these days is a horror itself. 

  • Ghost House

    So, I finished Ghost House, after not being up for it before. It had something of a swerve in the middle, where they are about to pass on the curse but decide not to. And of course a stinger at the end, where we can see that the cycle will continue. I’d give it a solid meh, it was alright, but nothing special. 

  • Why did this go dark so long?

    About two years back, I stopped working for the place where this blog had been hosted. And with the future of the hosting in question, I lost some of my motivation to maintain it. I’d made some efforts to get it moved somewhere better, but until recently, those efforts hadn’t borne any fruit. 

    Well, now they have, the site’s future is “secure” or at least it should be. 

  • The Purge: Election Year

    Today’s Movie: The Purge: Election Year

    Well, that was better than I expected. But I don’t think it was a horror movie. I think it was a thriller, or a action movie maybe. Maybe I should rewatch previous Purges. There is definitely some genre drift. If I recall correctly, the first one with the house invasion, that one was more of a horror movie. I’d have to pull up wiki summaries for the other ones, as I can’t specifically recall.

    The purge as a concept is still horribly flawed, but as the series has gone on, they’ve plugged up some of the more obvious holes, and focused on the people who want something other than the chaos that the purge creates. And they added some nice touches with the economic reality of the Purge. One of the main characters this time around is just trying to protect his Deli, his livelihood, after the insurance company jacks up his premiums by thousands on the day before the purge.

  • Funhouse Massacre

    Only one film tonight. Another haunted house film. This one, The Funhouse Massacre, was about a cult leader who was being held in the mental health equivalent of Guantanamo Bay.

    No rights, no trials, no sentences, just lock up the monsters and leave them to rot. And this place had a nice collection of monsters. A dentist, a taxidermist, a clown themed wrestler, a cannibal chef, a nice ensemble cast. So cult leader dude, and his serial killer daughter orchestrate a fun house themed after all the various crimes, the perfect place for these guys to throw down after their escape.

    Then you throw in a quirky collection of folks from the local dinner, a tough cop, a clueless cop, and some radio DJs, and you’ve got this gory funny halloween mess.

    Of the stuff I’ve watched recently, this is the first one I’d recommend to people. 

  • Hellhouses

    HellHouse LLC and HellHouse LLC II : Abbadon House. 

    So, these were a pair of found footage films about a haunted house, where dark rituals had been performed and a tragedy occurred. The news segments were pretty well done and felt like local news. The in-house stuff relied too much on the darkness and the cameras not being able to capture much.  The supernatural elements also interfered with radios and cameras, meaning the cameras would start to fail when things got spooky. Sometimes this can work, sometimes this comes across as annoying; in this case, it comes across as both at different times. 

    I also attempted to watch Ghost House, a film about an american couple on vacation in Thailand, the american woman disturbs a “ghost house”, which wikipedia lists under the heading “spirit houses“. Disrupt the shrine, bad things happen, pretty plotline when foreigners adversely interact with folklore. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into it. Maybe I’ll give it another shot another time.

  • Halloween, 2018

    A few years back, I tried to keep a log of my 31 days of horror movies. As I recall, it didn’t go overly well. I logged a dozen or so movies over a few days, then got distracted by something. 

    In an effort to bring this place back from the dead, now that I’ve made the effort to move it to a new host, I’ll attempt something similar. I’ve just resubscribed to Shudder, between that, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, I should have a decent catalog to work with. 

  • New digs

    The site has now been migrated to a new host. 

    Maybe that means it’ll get worked on again. 

  • Matt’s Campaign – Day Six

    After a long break, we have managed to get the group back together for D&D. We’re in a forest, and two of the party members have gotten into a fight and exploded. Currently, the forest is on fire because of their fight.

    And we are running away from it. The elfadin has the stag, the bard casts cat’s grace to make it easier to weave through the trees, and the mercenary is in trouble. There is also a druid, who has recently assisted the party in finding their way through the woods. The bard attempts to inspire the mercenary, and then the druid turns into a dire wolf for the mercenary to mount.

    We escaped from the woods, and there was a strange voice that we didn’t hear, memories that we no longer remember, and now we know that we need to find the Leader of the Feathered Ones, who lives among the vines. Though old, he has one more flight in him.

    And we are now some place near the Wizard of Wines, and we’ve noticed that there are lots of vines around.

    The swordsman that we’ve been dragging along with us seems to have a different set of memories than we do. And when the bard checks his notebook, he notices that his notes aren’t in his hand. There has been a shift in reality, someone has handcrafted a patch over this reality. But the changes seem fairly minimal and benign.

     

  • A different campaign

    So, since Reive is stuck working with an unreliable schedule, we’re starting a new campaign.

    We’ve got a human criminal who woke up after his execution in a strange metallic body, and had to craft himself a human suit to be able to blend in. It took him a while to realize that he’s a continent and a few hundred years away from where he died.

    He was buried with a rather large rifle, which despite having no memory of, he knows intimately, including how to fire it, reload it, and craft ammunition for it.

    For those who were wondering, the skin for the human suit came from “recycling” a bandit who died during an ill-conceived attack on the people who had recovered him from the ruins. The bandit continues to contribute to the greater good, post mortem, despite his ill intentions in life.

    Speaking of the people who dug him up, one of them is a strange elf, and the other is a catperson.

    He looks much like a beggar, wrapped in stained rags.

    The adventure began with some traveling down a road, approaching a village. The party was look forward to relax over a nice roast beast at the village, but the village is currently be roasting by a beast. Kobolds and humans wearing purple robes are running around causing trouble, while dragons fly around overhead, spitting flames.

    Running into the village, we ran into kobolds running out of the houses. They don’t live long, facing of against a tabbymonk, a elvish swordswomen, and angry half elf dragonstalker. Oh, and a tall silvery man who did some healing.

    However, they were just a scouting party for something much larger, so we fled into the nearby keep, getting inside just before they sealed it.

    Inside the keep, we helped with the defenses, and waited out the attack. There was talking about why the cult would be attacking the city. The old man kept smoking his pipe and mended things.

    There were people who we probably should have killed, but they wanted to take things slow, so we went down the tunnel.

    The door was locked, so the strange ragged man pulled off his gloves and then his finger tips, and then inserted the metal underneath into the lock. After a bit, he’d cleaned enough of the lock for the key to work properly again.

    On our way out of the sewers, we ran into a rat swarm, which would have eaten our faces, if we hadn’t had a ranger who knew how to whistle for the rats.

    Then the ragged man ripped something wiry from his arm, and dripped liquid from it onto the hinges. After that, the sewer exit opened silently.

    Outside, a couple of kobolds and some dragonborn and a guard drake are searching for the party. But since they don’t know where we exited, the party manages to surround them.

    The monk throws darts, the ranger manages to calm down the drake, the funny man shoots the leg off one of the dragonborn, and the other kobolds get knocked out.

    Then the monk gets a skunk thrown into their face, which sickened her. After the battle, the ranger made the drake into a pet, and stored it in the basement of the tower. The beggar picked up the dragonborn’s severed leg, with the spoken intent of creating a lamp out of it later.

     

  • Matt’s Campaign – Day Five

    The party continues to try to get off the crumbling bridge. Ismark tried to leap onto the wagon, but failed, falling to the ground.

    One of the werewolves leaps up and tries to pull Vellos from the wagon, Vellos resists, and then throws a thunderwave into him, knocking him off the side of the wagon.

    The merc tried to press on, his horse was slashed by the larger werewolf as he got into range.

    The elf drew the sun sword, which blazed to life, filling the forest with light.

    Ismark gets up from being run over by the cart, and leaps onto the back of the cart.

    Ianyor drops flat as the cart rushes towards him. The cart rolls over him harmlessly, but he fails to grab Ismark’s hard to pull him onboard.

    We continued to flee from the werewolves, heading down the road.

    After an hour of riding away, we ran into a barricade with children attached to it.

    The party attempted to parley, but this didn’t work.

    The elf rode his horse up to the barricade, then teleported over it, stabbing the werewolf as he arrived.

    The huge winter wolf landed on the roof of the wagon and blasted with it’s breath, knocking down the strange sorcerer. Vellos fed a potion to the sorcerer, and then blasted the wolf’s mind. As it flew from him, Ismark stabbed it through the throat, killing it.

    There was much fighting, and people keeping knocked down.

    At some point, a strange woman on a horse showed up.

    The wolves were killed or driven off, then stuff needed to be sorted out. Including the woman stealing the wagon from us.

    The party hid in the woods, and then set up inside the tiny hut.

    And in the morning, we woke up someplace else.

    After a day’s walk, we found a barbarian and had a conversation.

  • I’ve noticed.

    I’ve noticed that I haven’t been writing lately, that I haven’t managed to create anything interesting. I had an interesting idea for a time travel setting, which I flesh out a bit, but it stalled somewhere.

    I should be doing more writing. I shouldn’t let the ideas get stalled. I should create something and when it doesn’t feel right, either push through it, or move on to something else.

    And instead, I keep thinking about things, but not putting anything down on the screen.

  • Matt’s Campaign – Day Four

    Returning to the Vishtani encampment, the party partially split up to rest. The bard and mercenary ate and quickly went to sleep in the encampment. The wizard and the cleric studied the book, to figure out what would need to be done to weaken Strahd’s hold.

    The wizard summoned a new familiar to replace the one that melted earlier. She attempted to summon a snake, and ended up with an undead snake. Cause Ravenloft.

    Half the party headed back into the town, using disguises to get past the guards, who are still looking for us after that whole coffin maker’s house fire issue.

    The cleric made some new friends, and was told about something that needs to be investigated in the west, the Wizard of Wines and his shipments.

    The sellsword scouted out the town, determined that the guards have brought in reinforcements.

    The party headed west, towards a covered bridge that we’d visited before. Nothing happened as we crossed it. We decided to head west, towards the Tower, the Winery, and the Hill.

    They decided to approach the Tower. They passed a woodsman on the way, and then found a wagon near the base of the Tower.

    The wagon was boobytrapped, and inside were alchemists fire.

    We read a note and decided not to loot the wagon.

    Then we opened a door by dancing in front of it.

    The wizard sent in the snake. Then the Paladin decided to ride the elevator up the tower.

    At this point, it started to get dark, so we went into the tower.

    They found a suit of armour in the tower,  it turned out to be animated, but we couldn’t find the command word.

    Then they noticed it had gotten dark, and the wolves were howling. So we took watch and rested over the night.

    In the morning, they took the armour outside, and then proceeded to use identify on it. While they did this, the bard took up a position on the gargoyle, outside the window, securing himself with a piton and rope.

    There was a command word to activate the armour, discovered by the wizard.

    At which point the bard had the bright idea of telling the armour to “bring me the Sword of the Sun”. The armour rode up to the top of the tower, pulled the sword out of the stone wall, and held it up triumphantly.

    At which point the sword melted the armour, and then dropped through the floors, before landing point first in the tower floor.

    The bard used his rope to drop to the ground, and pulled the sword to him with mage hand. At which point the island started to collapse.

    Vellos climbed onto the wagon, and proceeded to attempt to come up with a variety of command words for the wagon. This failed to actually summon the horses. So he tried famous Vishtani horse names. That didn’t work either. Then he screamed “Damn it, how do you summon these horses.” And that summoned the horses.

    At which point we fled from the island, towards the wolves.

    The paladin fired an arrow at one of the wolves and killed it outright.

    The wizard threw fire at one of the wolves, burning them.

    One of the wolves howled, and froze the ice. At which point, wolves moved onto the ice floe.

    Then the cleric threw more fire at the wolves, sinking one of them into the ice.

    Vellos decided to send his hand forward, handing off the Sword of the Sun to Twin Blade.

    Twin Blade slashes out at the wolves, burning them with the sword.

    Ianyor’s being pulled from his horse has blocked the bridge. He managed to kick his horse corpse off the bridge, but it’s slowing the rest of the party down.

    The wizard manages to take control one of the werewolves, and turns it against it’s fellows.

    The hand delivers the Sword of the Sun to the paladin, and it blazes up in his hands. 

    The wagon continues to push forward, into the group.

    The wizard continues to blast away, and in the process creates a cloud of fog around herself by accident.

    The priestess fought the werewolf, the bard distracted the him while he fought against the drunk.

    Then the bard blasted the fog back with a thunderwave, tossing the party out of his way, as he drove the wagon forward. This also cleared the fog away.

    And then we got everyone back onto the wagon, as and rode off the causeway, running down the werewolf.

    There are still more wolves in the woods ahead of us, and many of our resources were used up in the escape.

  • Matt’s Campaign – Day Three

    Two players are missing, so today’s game will be a little odd. 

    The cleric is going to set up the tower to properly burn after we killed the hags in it. The bard will study the book, in an attempt to translate it.

    The paladin and the fighter went down the hill to talk to some ravens, and then into some ruins. There appear to be some giants guarding the ruins.

    The ruins contain an altar, likely the altar of seasons.

    The batten down the tower as best we can. The strange barrel of ichor is moved in front of the door.

    The first two watches passed rather uneventfully, or so we thought. Turns out that the vampire lord snuck into the tower in the middle of the night, took one of the NPCs out of the tower, by turning her into a vampire.

    In the morning, we loaded up the wagon and headed towards the nearest town. The elfadin decided to load the ichor barrel on the cart.

    We ran into a skeletal knight along the road, riding on a skeletal horse. The knight wore an emblem of a silver dragon, and didn’t seem hostile, so we let it pass.

    We reached a village, and when the guard’s questioned our intent, the bard broke into song, stories and even played the drums for the priestess to dance.

    This almost worked, but the village has rules against the Vistani. So he explains that he’s an En Meda, rather than a Vistani; explaining the whole origin myths of the two peoples. This gets the party into the town.

    We visited a stockyard, and after disturbing something large and feline sleeping inside a wagon, Twinblade got hired to perform guard duty.

    A strange man followed us through the town, but we mostly ignored him.

    In the cathedral, we were told to go find some bones. We visited the gravedigger, he told us that he’d been hired by the coffin maker. Visiting the coffin maker, we find out that there is a vampire nest upstairs.

    The elfadin decided to head into the the house, to search for the bones. He manages to get upstairs, get the bones, and get out the window before the vampire spawn catch up with him. This is partially because of the Cat’s Grace he’s had cast on him.

    They return the bones to the priest and quickly devise a plan. They’ll get a ladder from the stockyard and the bard will balance on top of it outside the window, while the elfadin holds the ladder. The bard will blow the windows open with thunder wave, then backflip away, while the sorcerer begin throwing flames into through the openings.

    Getting the ladder is simple. While the merchant wants to charge more for the ladder, the bard points out that if he fails to kill the vampires, he’ll shortly become one and he’ll come back for the merchant.

    This mostly worked. The sorcerer disappeared into puff of blue smoke after throwing the fireballs in through the open windows. And the vampires don’t scream when we burn down the building. The sherif, who the mercenary brought to the coffin maker’s house. This was not the best outcome, since he decided we were troublemakers, who had burnt down a house after murdering a citizen. But at least he didn’t arrest the party.

    While returning the bones, we found that there was a bribe stashed in the bag.

    At which point, we left the village through the northern exit. Noisily and obviously. And then we went through the woods, around to the western exit.

    Arriving at the Vishtani camp, we found the missing priestess whipping some random guy for not doing his job. He’d lost the headman’s daughter. So a bargain was struck, we help them recover the girl, we get a treasure from the wagons.

    The elfadin’s character explores the elven encampment that is around the outside the vishtani camp. He finds an elderly elf, who confirms that he probably came from the village, and was kidnapped from it, roughly 500 years ago, their time, and roughly a hundred years ago his time. The wear on the coins fit that story. The old elf wants us to visit the top of Mount Ghakkis with him. We have a mission into the bowels of Mount Ghakkis. And he shows the Bard the Map, so the Bard can now access the world map button. We also got confirmation that the road we were taking to the west to the druid’s hill was a good plan, though we may want to stop at a tower near a lake along the way.

    During the break, the bard decides he needs a pair of banjos, so he can play dueling Banjos on his own, well, with mage hand anyways. 

    The following morning, we meet with the fellow who had been whipped. He was appreciative of the healing word that had been cast on him. He led the party to where the girl had disappeared. With Owl’s Wisdom, the bard was able to determine the trail of the probable abductor. They led to a fisherman’s shack, and the fisherman had recently gone out into the lake, with a large sack.

    Following him out into the lake, the bard pulls out his fishing gear, in an attempt to be nonchalant about the encounter, but the fisherman panics, and throws the bag of the side. So the bard casts Bull’s strength, and then dives into the water after the bag.

    Under the water, ghostly apparitions appear, which terrify the bard. The rest of the party leaps into the water and dive towards the bag. The fighter is scared, and the paladin casts a quick spell to prevent fear, before diving in. Together they bring the girl up. The brute is pulled into the boat with a command and a charm.

    Then heading back to the village, guards attempted to bring the party in for questioning, but a quick charm person convinces them that we aren’t the adventurers that they are looking for.

    And then we return the girl to the village, earning a treasure in the process. We also brought back the villain, who will be punished by the priestess of pain for his attempted sacrifice.

    While attempting to figure out what treasure to take, we accidentally summoned Kevin the sorcerer back. We were offered a delightful rug, for saving the girl.

    We took the gold instead, and used it to buy horses.

    We returned to the town, entering into the Inn for knowledge.

    In the Inn, A man’s name, Kazan, up at a tower on a lake. Dangerous wards guard it.

    We also learn of the weaknesses of the vampires, running water, sunlight and wooden stakes. They can’t enter a residence without permission from one of the occupants. They aren’t fond of sunlight. Resistances to bludgeoning, piercing and slashing from non magical.

    We visited a few other places in town, but didn’t learn anything useful.

    We rode back across to the river to pick up the boats, so we’d be able to search the shore tomorrow. We took the row boats down to the bridge. The next few days, we’d be able to search the north side of the lake. It took half a day to cross the lake, but we’ll be able to return to the encampment at night. The process is long and may be unwise.

    We got timestopped by a strange wizard, and this resulted in us getting trapped on the wrong side of the lake. So we decided to anchor the boat in the river, hoping that the running water will protect us from the vampires.

    During the night, we were attacked by a pack of dire wolves. Cutting the line, we managed to flow out towards the lake, slowly. It was a nasty fight, and people nearly died. The usage of colour spray to blind two of the wolves let us escape into the lake, and we managed to kill one of the wolves.

     

  • Matt’s Campaign – Day Two

    We awoke after sleeping in the gypsy camp, to find that Kevin now has breasts and considerably more curves than the night before. Most of the party don’t comment on this. The paladin, goes out of his way to comment, and seems okay with it.

    The party backtracks past the gallows, before heading to a bridge that crosses the river that fed the lake that the gypsies had camped near.

    We reached a second set of gates. Passing through them, we secured them closed and camped for the night.

    During the third watch, when Silion and Vellos were on watch, something brightly lit came out of the woods and attacked them. The zapping attack was loud enough to wake up the rest of the party.

    The paladin smote it, which resolved the threat. Untying the gates, we continued west.

    We encountered a body that had been savaged by wolves.

    We carried on, until we reached a mill on a hill.

    Approaching the mill, we were warned off by a raven.

    The mill seems fairly fortified.

    The mage and the paladin went into the mill, while the fighter tried to find a place to climb up.

    They go up the stairs inside the mill, silently. The top floor appears to have witches, who are eating children.

    The mage and the merc surprise the witches, while the paladin surprises himself and loses his footing. After that, he gets tossed out the window and crashes into a heap at the base of the windmill.

    The mage hit one of the hags with a lightening based spell, which connected them with a chain of energy, but the hag escaped it by turning invisible. The other hag turned into a seagull and flew out the window. Vellos attempted to shoot down the seagull, but missed completely.

    The cleric attempted to force the seagull to grovel.

    There was combat, eventually one of the hags was killed, and two were driven away.

    Twin Blades found a book in the attic, the Tome of Strahd.

    Bottles of Youth, Laughter and Mother’s Milk were taken, along with six Dream Pies.

    The bucket of Black Ichor in the corner glowed brightest of all, and it appeared to be conjuration. The barrel turns out to be demon ichor.

    So we’re going to be burning down the mill.

    There are now four altars that we need to visit to reconsecrate as part of a ritual to destroy the Heart of Sorrow, which protects Strahd.

    The altars are at  Luna Lake, the Velacian Valley, the Swamps of Iviliss, and the bowels of Mount Gahkis.

  • Matt’s Campaign – Day One

    Iannyor, Twin Blades, and Vellos are sitting around a camp fire, while Sileon is sitting nearby, manacled. Iannyor is cooking, Vellos is strumming his lute, enjoying the captive audience, while Twin Blades is looking for trouble. 

    As the sun goes down, the mist rolls in. The mist is rather creepy, and chilling. 

    The strange priestess attempts to bash her head in against the tree, and while Iannoyr wanted to stop her. Vellos felt this was a religious, so told them not to.

    In the morning, while Vellos was checking around, he noticed that they’ve gone to a new land. A land that he previously thought was only in legends.

    Kevin, the Magnificient asks where we are, and Vellos explains that we’re in Barovia. A land ruled by a dark lord known as Strahd; a legendary vampire.

    Kevin attempted to open a magic door to exit, but it didn’t work. This attempt made everything really bright. All the magic glowed.

    Iannyor climbed a tree, we only saw mists. Kevin attempted to summon his familiar, but this didn’t work all that well. The familiar burst into flames while attempting to come into existence.

    The road that we’re on, is a very nasty road. As soon as we leave the clearing, the mists swallow it up. Maybe the Vishtani will be able to get us back, if we can find them.

    Walking down the road for several hours, we eventually found something rather large and stone, with huge rusty iron gates.

    The huge iron gates slam shut after we pass through them.

    As it gets dark, the strange cleric begins to glow.

    Iannyor found a body, and decided to bury it. The rest of the group left him, though Vellos stayed with him. The peasant had been murdered by wolves. Wolves, not werewolves.

    Down in the valley, we see a village.

    We figure it’ll take us about an hour to get down there.

    And we walk towards it, and it’s taking much longer than an hour.

    And now we’re fighting Zombies. In grasslands. While the mage is throwing magic fire around. He summons a pair of fireballs which splatter on the zombie.

    Vellos takes a shot at the zombie, puts an arrow deep into it.

    The zombies rush in and attack.

    Twin Blades slashes at one, killing it.

    Sileon uses her faith to push the zombies away.

    Iannyor takes an arm off a zombie, and then Twin Blades rushes up and slashes that zombie.

    Kevin accidentally multiplied himself, then splashed rays into the other zombies.

    Vellos stepped into the bushes and thundered into the zombies, tossing one of them through Kevin’s illusion.

    Iannyor moved to slash at the other zombie, but the severed arm reached for him first, so he had to take a break to throw it away first.

    Then we finished off the zombies, with Twin Blade walking up and slashing at them.

    And then Kevin started speaking pink bubbles, his hair fell out, he became covered in grease and then started teleporting around, before finally settling down.

    So we took a bit of a rest.

    And then we wandered into the village.

    Iannyor heard some wailing, so he followed the sound, ripped down the boards over the doors, went upstairs. Kevin and Iannyor talked to an old lady, while Twin Blade tried to climb up the balcony.

    Sileon went into the tavern, Vellos stayed outside, looking confused.

    The crying woman inside gave them a doll, named Gurtruda, which belonged to her daughter Gertruda, who was named after the doll she had had as a child. Iannyor made an agreement to try to save the child, which is why she gave him the doll. Kevin had plied her with shiny rose to get her trust.

    Meanwhile, Sileon in the tavern had made friends with the Vishtani, and secured herself a line of credit. When Vellos walked in, the Vishtani recognized him of being part of the enmeda ( inspired by the edema ruh), another troupe of gypsies.

    We are told of Madame Eva, who talks to Travellers, and knows the way out of the land that we’re trapped in.

    We’ve also learned that the burgermaster wants us to kill Strahd, because this land is cursed.

    As we leave the tavern, the churchyard starts glowing with green light.

    So we went to the mansion, and were greeted by a woman in armour, who was carrying a sword.

    The party bedded down for the night. The priestess molested the son of the burgermaster.

    In the morning, the elf decided to carry the coffin, while the bard used his minor illusion to create a funeral dirge.

    The mage wandered off to get a brass brazier, while the rest of us solemnly carried on.

    We entered in the chapel, to bury the body.  There was some screaming, followed by some hollering.

    We found out that the priest’s son had become a vampire and is locked up in the undercroft. At which point, Iannyor decided to go down to cure him. With steel. In the chest.

    The plan of going down into the undercroft to stab the vampire is not a great idea.

    Once again Iannyor had his throat bitten. This time, by a vampire. We managed to put it down, eventually.

    Vellos stopped at the tavern to get some details, and managed to learn a bit of history, about the burgermaster’s daughter, but nothing overly useful to the campaign.

    After that, we headed towards the gypsy camp. We crossed a bridge over the river, and the mists were less oppressive. Our journey was fairly uneventful, at least initially. We managed to reach the crossroads, without incident.

    At the crossroads, the gallows haunted Vellos. His face on the hanging body, which hadn’t been there moments before. They were infected by the madness, each suffering a minor curse.

    Then to the camp, where they were fed, and given a tale. And then to the fortune teller, to learn of their futures.

     Charlatan – The book – The Past – History, Knowledge of the ancients and an understanding of the enemy.  “I see a only mill on a precipice, the treasure lies within.” –

    Druid – The holy symbol – Powerful symbol of good. “A evil tree grows atop a hill of graves where the ancient dead sleep. The ravens can help you find it.” – There are druids in the far west, a place called yesterhill.

    The wizard – the weapon – Power and strength, a weapon of vengeance. – “look for a wizard’s tower on a lake, let the wizard’s name and servant guide you to that which you seek.”

    The broken one – one who will help you. – ” your greatest ally will be a wizard, his mind is broken, but his spells are strong.” – Black robed mage who rallied the peasants a year ago, and after a titanic battle, he plunged off the walls. His body was never recovered.

    The Raven – creature of darkness, the place – “In the castle. Look to the mother’s tomb.” – The Tomb of Ravonia, of Ravenloft. Lord Strahd’s mother.

     And with that, we rested.

  • Sunday morning

    “So we’ll meet in the morning then?”

    “Yea, get together early. Maybe eight or so.”

    “Eight… Eight AM is your idea of early?”

    “Well, early for a weekend… When I could sleep in.”

    “Your parents never dragged you to church?”

    “Well, they tried once, but you know… Burst into flames and all that.”

    “Whatever vampire boy.”

    “Not me, the church.”

    “Oh.”

    “Wasn’t really my fault though.” 

    “Do I believe that?”

  • Techmage – thoughts

    While listening to a podcast the other day, I heard something that amused me. A conversation about early wearable computing, a guy who’d taken a washable keyboard, cut into into a split keyboard, then attached them to a pair of cargo pants, with a USB tail coming out of the back pocket. This reminded me of the cultist robes and wrists keyboard for the techmages that I’d joked about.

    Included for those who weren’t around back then, the idea was that a group of hackers/coders could put together a set of robes with keyboards mounted on the underside of their wrists, hidden by the robes, so they could cross they arms, and then type on the underside of the opposite arm. With a small projector and screen mounted inside the hood, they’d have a HUD to work with. Done right, this could provide them with eyeless vision, as they could use a body camera broadcasting a feed to the hood, as well as having the benefit of being able to pick up the feeds from other members of the organization and from cameras mounted in other places. Wouldn’t be hard to craft various mystical objects with cameras hidden inside, to be placed as appropriate. Or familiars with cameras attached, to serve as extra sources of vision. A modified/disguised Lighter-than-Air Drone would be great as the floating eye, ala the eye of Kilrog.

    The more I think about this idea, the more I realize it’s doable, and would perhaps work well for an Escape Room or a short film.

  • Firewatch : probably worth playing

    So, the Campo Santo game Firewatch was released the other day and I finished it in a pair of sittings. Overall, I enjoyed it, and I’m going to discuss it. Warning, there will be spoilers.

    (more…)

  • update incomplete

    Today I did my first day on a main unit for a TV series. Previously, I’d done two shifts of second unit. It’s been a hell of a learning experience. I would like to write more, but my fingers aren’t actually working right now. I’m hitting a typo every second word.

  • Stranger Days.

    So, a friend of mine arranged for me to work as a PA. I did that Thursday. It was a long day, but I enjoyed it. I left my place at around 12:30, got home around 4:30 the next day. And I’m going to do it again.

  • Today’s Summary.

    So, I got frustrated today, and ended up not coming back from my lunch time walk. I had been tempted to do that the day before, but I forced myself to go back in. Today, I wasn’t able, or perhaps willing, to do that. Instead I took a longer walk. (more…)

  • T’ree and a quarter. 

    So I’ve lost over 40 lbs in the last few months, since my doctor told me I was diabetic. My blood sugars have been stable with the daily metformin. I’ve been eating simpler meals and turning down sweets and extra meals. I’ve been getting in at least a twenty minute walk every day, plus usually another if I can. It’s been working, my body is in better shape. 

    My mind, I’m less clear on. I’ve been getting a little more sleep, I think. I’ve not had much time with friends recently. I’m still having issues with work. I’ve not been providing good customer service lately. We are short-handed and our order volume has increased. It doesn’t feel like I’m able to get everything done that needs to be done. And with the postal strike, things are probably going to get worse. 
    I’m feeling lonely, I’m still disconnected from people and I’m wondering if I’m over my ex. I don’t seem able to flirt or communicate romantically. 

    Back in an unpublished entry, I explained that I feel like my connections to people were like mooring lines. Solid and thick, but easily detached. They aren’t rooted in the same way. There are people in my life I’ll go out of my way for, but for the most part I assume things are asynchronous. Perhaps that’s just my perception, but I feel that I’m assumed to be fine, and therefore need not be a priority for anyone. 

    I’m writing this as I walk. It’s gotten dark and typing this while walking through the unlit forest is likely a bad idea. I had intended to take a walk earlier, but instead I spent an hour or so working on that free code camp thing. I managed to get through the basics and the HTML 5 / CSS section. It’s been twenty years since I learned it at that summer camp at BCIT, but I picked it up again fairly quickly. The next section will likely be harder, as it’s stuff I’m less familiar with. I’ve never really managed to learn any real languages. Then again, I seem to be at a point in my life where I’m committing to things and then following through. 

    I should probably be in bed by now, instead I’m down by Crab Town, blindly putting one foot in front of the other, vaguely listening to a podcast and putting my thoughts down here. 

    I don’t currently have anything that I’m specifically looking forward to. No shadowrun, no board game nights, no cons, no parties, no hardware releases, no games… nothing. 

    A vague goal of getting my weight down by twice what I’ve already lost. That’s about it. 

  • VR game idea

    I’ve got a vr game idea I would love to see developed.

    A moral choice game where you have an angel and a demon on your shoulders, that are only visible in the peripheral vision, not when you look at them directly, and that emit a glow when you’re working for their alignment.

    Titling your head towards one voice, better hearing it. Except when the other one decides to scream.

    Thinking it would work best as a detective game with really grey moral choices.

    At one point, I wrote a screenplay about an implanted conscience, so that’s the other possible direction.

    You’re on parole, you’ve got a digital conscience on your shoulder, as you navigate the world. Then one day you wake up with two of them, with different agendas.

    At one point the idea was cyberpunk, it was an implant in the brain, creating the hallucination, and then a hacker who wanted to kill the program hacked in to sabotage it. But is there really a hacker? Is there really an implant? Are you really out of jail?

    I kinda like the idea of a story that unfolds possible ways, with one ending being that you find out it’s an occurrence at owl creek execution hallucination, one you save the world by exposing a conspiracy for mind control implants, etc.

    Games tend to not go with the huge branches, because you end up doing far more work than a given audience will see, if they take a different path.

    And it does interfere with a single coherent narrative and even narrative consistency, if you don’t have an objective truth to refer back to.

    Though having an objective truth that is hinted at and a series of subjective truths that the player is exposed to, is something interesting to explore.

  • Private security drones.

    Given the rise of private security forces, it makes sense for someone to put together a collection of drone riggers for the purposes of special operations. Better overwatch potential than most groups can manage, especially if concealed as paparazzi and tourists. The technology is here, which means the profits are likely there.

  • linked

    “It’s kinda like a clock, if a clock told you when you happened to be, rather than when it was.”

    “Sorry, what?” I looked at him, my brow furrowed. My lips moving slightly as I repeated the phrase.

    “You’ve been wondering about it. Among other secrets. This is probably the easiest to share.” He held the chain between both hands, and extended on hand towards me. The end he extended had the roughest links, from what I could see. “This end, this is the beginning, so it makes sense to start here.”

    He shifted his body, bringing the other hand towards me, showing me the end of the chain where the links weren’t all metal. At least one of them appeared to be some sort of plastic. “This end, this is now.”

    “I’m not following.”

    “No, it isn’t in your nature. I think it might be what I like about you. Anyone else, in this situation, they’d’ve had expectations.”

    “Expectations?” I cocked an eyebrow at this. “Are we getting some crossed signals here? I get that you don’t have the same hang ups and bullshit about gender that I do, but I didn’t you’d think we were going that way.”

    He laughed, warm and wide. “No, that wasn’t where I was going. Though I don’t see why you’re so opposed to it. I can’t understand why you would fear intimacy so much. Especially after that long alone, and this long together.”

    I shook my head, smiling back at him. “I don’t see together the way you do. And it wasn’t that long.”

    “The time you were alone, or the time…”

    “The time alone.” My voice felt flat and heavy, memories trying to push their way back into the forefront. Closing my eyes, I focused and forced them back. “And the time since, it’s been nice. But I don’t see how we’d fit.”

    “That, I could show you. But this path wasn’t the one I intended to wander down. I wasn’t looking at the future, I was trying to share the past.” As he said it, he extended the chain towards me, the rougher end again. Sliding his hand back towards the middle, he stopped on a particular link. “This one, was the first one, part of chains that bound me. My first time being taken. They’d come for me one night, too many to fight. Pinned down, they’d shackled me. It was a dark night.”

    “Why would they?” I think my eyes went wide at his words.

    “Do the reasons really matter? It was long ago, they’ve long since turned to dust. They aren’t even memories any more, outside my own skull.”

    “That’s a little dark. Somehow appropriate though.”

    “Only you…” He studied my face, his expression a mix of confusion and annoyance. Granite, before it broke into something softer.

    “Yea, I think we covered that,” a deep breath in, puffing out my chest. “Only me. Exclusively me, in all your travels, able to actually put up with you and your…” there was a pause. “quirks.”

    A deep sigh, the rolling of his eyes. “This link, was from those shackles. These ones below it, came from later.” He slid his hands further down the chain. Finding a particular joint, he rubbed it between his fingers. “Around here, is where I got lost.”

    “Aren’t you always lost? Isn’t that how this whole thing started?”

    “A different kind of lost. This was when time wasn’t, at least not for me.”

    “Time wasn’t? The hell kind of phrase is that? What, you mean you lost track of it?”

    “I think in a way, it lost track of me. It started with something I mistook for madness, initially. The days didn’t follow each other. I was seeing things leap forward, randomly. Friends told me I’d disappeared for days at a time.”

    “Alright.” A long pause. “Assuming I’m following you on this, how do you know it wasn’t madness, or memory loss, or something simple like that.”

    “The only way I could know. One day, shit went wrong, I lost someone I cared about. And then the next day, it was before they’d died. And then as I tried to reach them, I bounced through their life. Mostly living days I hadn’t lived with them the first time. A few times, I saw myself, and later saw myself again, watching me.”

    “So what you’re saying is, in addition to being basically immortal, you’re also a time traveler.”

    “Yes. Well, I wasn’t then, but I became one eventually.”

    “And the chain?”

    “The chain is the anchor that lets me pull myself through the river. Each link, tied to a certain time. Linked to others forged then. I can feel them hum when they’re near, so I know when I’ve gotten to.”

    “And this the easy secret, is it?” Looking him dead in the eye.

    “One of them. And it does give context for the rest.”

    “Yeah, I suppose it makes it easier to explain things if I understand that time, a major feature of linear storytelling, won’t really apply.”

    He just laughed at that.

  • Diabetes Daycare

    At the class on the 7th floor of Burnaby General.

    Got my blood sugar metre, connected it via Bluetooth, so the results would be stored. It has a decent app, and it looks like there are other apps that’ll interface with the data. It’ll even send emails/texts like this one:

    Last blood sugar reading: 5.4, After Meal, In Range
    Date/Time: 01 Jun 2016, 10:11

    It’s a Bluetooth link, and I’ve a habit of keeping my Bluetooth off. Thinking I’ll get a RFID couple of  stickers for the case, tap the phone, unlock it, enable the Bluetooth, then tap the phone against the case again to shut the Bluetooth back off. Something to look into.

    Beyond that, I’ve got tools now, which means I can track things better.

    I’ve been tracking my walks on my phone via the onboard pedometer and GPS, but I wonder if I should get a fitbit or something more accurate. I’ve got a good Garmin watch, that I should reinstall on my new pc, now that I’ve managed to free up some USB ports.

    Jeeves, add that to my to-do list and remind me to do it in 6 hours.

    Wait. I don’t have a Jeeves. Damn it.

  • Drones…

    Chat Transcript
    10:32:33 PM [Ma] Hi, my name is Ma from Rogers Montreal, Quebec. How are you today?
    10:32:43 PM [Ashton] Not bad. Yourself?
    10:33:17 PM [Ma] Great! I’m fine, thanks for asking.
    10:33:21 PM [Ma] How may I help you today?
    10:33:23 PM [Ashton] Simple question. The Rogers One Number web based interface isn’t updating text messages. Known issue?
    10:35:55 PM [Ma] I do understand how important it is to manage your account. You mentioned you would like to know regarding the Rogers One number interface is not updating text messages. I can definitely assist you with this today.
    10:35:57 PM [Ma] In order to access your account, I will require some information from you. Please click on the following secure link to enter your personal information. You will notice a request for a 4-digit PIN. If you do not have one associated to your account, please leave this field blank.
    10:36:13 PM [Ma]
    If a form requesting your personal information does not appear, please click here to open it in a new tab.

    10:38:19 PM [Ma] Thanks for completing that information, I have received it and it will be a moment for me to retrieve and verify your account with it. Please allow me a few moments to access your account information.
    10:38:21 PM [Ma] May I have the phone number associated to your account please?
    10:38:28 PM [Ashton] 604-###-###
    10:38:42 PM [Ma] Thank you.
    10:40:49 PM [Ma] Thanks a lot for your patience. I would like to confirm your Email Address is [obfuscatedforsecurityreasons]@gmail.com , is that correct?
    10:40:53 PM [Ashton] yes
    10:41:48 PM [Ma] Thank you.
    10:42:11 PM [Ma] As we are updating our system, may I ask what is your current Cable/Internet service provider?
    10:42:28 PM [Ashton] Lightspeed Communications, DSL wholesaler.
    10:42:49 PM [Ma] Thank you for that.
    10:43:28 PM [Ma] While reviewing your account, may I remind you that with your MyRogers account you can access yourr account 24/7 to view your bill, make a payment, monitor usage, and make account changes.
    10:44:50 PM [Ashton] Ha!
    10:45:14 PM [Ashton] you mean you’ve stopped doing 5 hour maintence windows from 11pm to 4am pst on a semi-regular basis?
    10:45:51 PM [Ma] For your question, regarding the Rogers One number. No,there is no issue with that.
    10:46:03 PM [Ma] May I know what browser you are using?
    10:46:11 PM [Ashton] I’m getting a yellow triangle on messages.
    10:46:45 PM [Ashton] Chrome Version 50.0.2661.102 m, on windows 10, currently up to date on all packages.
    10:47:41 PM [Ma] I see. Maybe, you could clear the cokies first.
    10:49:20 PM [Ashton] Tested via incognito session, which has no cookies, issue persists.
    10:51:44 PM [Ma] Could you please refresh you computer then open the Rogers One number again?
    10:52:04 PM [Ashton] Yes, that’s what I did.
    10:53:52 PM [Ma] May I know what device are you using? Is it a computer, tablet or cellphone?
    10:54:31 PM [Ashton] Windows 10 desktop.
    10:55:21 PM [Ashton] This is the part where I ask about a shiboleet, since you’re clearly using a tier 1 script.
    10:58:42 PM [Ma] I am so sorry for the inconvenience. Since you’re using the windows 10 desktop, then u tried to clear the cookies and refresh it. Maybe there is a problem with the system.
    10:59:07 PM [Ashton] There is a Yellow Triangle. What does the Yellow Triangle indicate?
    10:59:24 PM [Ashton] Do you have someone who can check the server logs for the error message for you?
    11:01:38 PM [Ashton] same issue present on chromebook. issue is not system specific.
    11:01:54 PM [Ashton] Shall I load a different IP or different network to verify that issue isn’t IP related?
    11:02:58 PM [Ma] Maybe we are having a system error now to Rogers one number. I suggest that you will check it tomorrow if the issue is still there. And if it is the same thing, kindly contact us so that we will make a case for it.
    11:03:38 PM [Ashton] What is your procedure regarding requested escalations?
    11:04:33 PM [Ma] You will just contact us then we will make a case for it.
    11:05:27 PM [Ma] But as of the moment, we will just Wait for tomorrow,maybe the system is okay.
    11:05:34 PM [Ashton] If this wasn’t merely a method of letting my phone charge faster, I’d be extremely annoyed with your inability to locate this issue or escalate it properly.
    11:06:56 PM [Ashton] I work in a very similar job, though at a higher level, and your performance was lacking.

  • Weekly board games – end of may.

    51st State Master set, arrived in the mail yesterday, got in two games of it last night. Despite the similarities to Imperial Settlers, it plays fairly different. The limit on the tokens you can convert per turn changes the dynamic. You can’t just work with the raw materials.

    Innovation, twice over the weekend. It plays fairly quickly, though it gets a big chaotic with 4 players.

    Shipwrights of the North Sea. Sunday night. Drafting ships and workers, with limited space. Workers are your income and base material to convert to other goods. It’s interesting. But seemed to stall midgame.