Some notes about things and things that have happened at some point.

  • Twitter is exhausting. All I want is a place where I can see technical people get excited about their projects and tabletop nerds talk about their ideas for how agriculture is different in a world with magic. In an attempt to do that I’ve carefully curated who I want to follow and muted dosens of seemingly innoculous words. Words like “trickle down”, “Dominic”, and “mask”. That list is forever growing though and now twitter just throws in tweets from people you don’t follow so it’s feeling more stressful than it’s worth. Earlier today I saw someone start their tweet, in all seriousness, with “trigger warning: non-vegan food”.
  • I actually did try running a mastodon server for a while, but the maintenance grew to be too much. Rather than feeling like a federated social network it felt like a foot into the darkweb which was oftentimes too creepy.

  • I wanted to play Thousand Year Old Vampire again but was curious what it would be like to play with someone else. On a whim, I dropped the suggestion into the family Facebook chat and one of my sisters was up for playing. I was eager for my mom to play with us too, but she said, “I’m not sure I have the imagination for that!” But I corralled her in.

    TYOV is a solo storywriting game, where you generate the memories of a vampire. You roll some dice, which tells you which prompt to move onto, and you go from there. Each time I’ve played the story has gone into a wildly different direction.

    It was the most fun I’ve had in a while. I put an hour time limit on the activity, in case they really didn’t like it, but we ended up playing for three hours. My mom was wonderful, despite her initial feelings. It was a bit clear she struggled with freeform imagination though: “but all the vampires I’ve read about burn up in the sun!” “Not these one’s, mom!” “So… we can do anything?” And it snowballed into something awesome from there.

    We currently have a vigulante group, the Cabal of Cleaners, who are zealously “making the world in God’s image” and killing those who deserve to be killed. Right now, it’s the year 1,100 AD so I’m very interested to find out if the cult lasts. We needed to generate the name of a new character - the leader of the cult - and my sister, remembering the name of a church in our home town, said “Bartholomew?” I loved the idea that whoever this saint was was actually still around, mercing bad guys, so we went with it.

    A fun part of TYOV is doing some research, so I quickly googled what ole Bart did to get glorified and it turns out he was one of the twelve apostles. Which is amazing. I just thought we had a guy that helped get rid of a few snakes or something, but this guy actually hung out with Jesus. So… is he a vampire too? AMAZING. My sister and I got very excited whilst my mom was in moral turmoil. “I can’t believe you’re writing that down!” said the athetist woman, full of glee.

    It was a ridiculous amount of fun.

  • My partner and I have been enjoying Fortnite together. We have very different playing styles, which is contentious sometimes. He prefers to hide til we’re the last players and then spray-and-pray for a victory. Whilst I like to, you know, play the damn game. It’s very nice.

    There’s a mode where building is disabled, which makes it a much more accessible game.

  • I’m also playing V Rising after a glowing recommendation on The Besties. I’m quite enjoying it. You’re a vampire, building up your castle again after hundreds of years of sleep. I’ve hit a wall though: I need iron ingots, but you need to be level 36ish for that, and I’m level 28 with no obvious way to improve my items.

  • No Homers, a vegan deli that opened in my town at the start of the year has had to close down due to recession reasons. I’m heartbroken about it, because it’s very freeing having a place to eat where I don’t need to worry about what’s in it. I had breakfast there a few days a week.

    The vegans have turned out in their hundreds to buy meats since the announcement of the closing was made. I understand it’s a difficult time to be going into the centre of Nottingham with any frequency, but if these people had supported the shop more regularly, it wouldn’t be closing.

    If you’re privileged enough to avoid the brunt of the on-coming recession, please go spend some money at the indie stores you love. They will go away if you do not.

  • It turns out that even if you make shitty art, it still feels good. I picked up a cheap set of oil pastels from The Range the other day and I’ve loved doodling with them. I’ve not yet done anything recognisably Earth-like, but it’s nice to be doing something different. I strongly recommend it. It’s also a delightful couple’s activity - busy hands yet still free to talk.

  • I have all the text written for my latest D&D project, which means I can get back into zine layout. I’m pretty excited about that.

  • I’ve lost all enthusiasm for Wordle, whilst the Family Chat remains insistant it’s done.