This is for my kid. I think I have finished Loop Hero. I realize there's a hidden frog king and level four, but still....I had to quit because I was bored. That's a lot of levels and max hp.
I learned that your Instagram network is your Instafam. That's really annoying. It makes me feel like one of those old dudes who doesn't want to learn new terminology because it feels so dumb. I blame Alia Bhatt because I learned it reading about her social media from isolation. I like Alia's movies. The fact that this picture of her on a bicycle exists from Dear Zindagi with Shah Rukh Khan has nothing to do with my interest in her [I first saw her in Gully Boy, a recommendation from a co-worker at my last work place].
This is less learned and more learned someone. I got half an M and M out of the house dispenser. My wife said she only got a half the previous day. I said that was my half. She asked what color my half was. I asked what color her half was. Mine was blue. Her half was yellow. I said, "See." She noted they were different colors and "see" made no sense. I explained to her that it was what happens when you split a green M and M.
I learned I'm not a fan of Grant Morrison. Just not my thing. But Toil and Trouble and LaGuardia were both excellent. Great books this month. Got them primarily off the NPR Concierge. I was amused at the bad reviews for The Only Good Indians listing the cadence of the language and the slang being issues to enjoying it. Aka...it was written by a Native American. I recommend the Youtube series Patrick Is a Navajo if you want a fun immersion in Native American culture and memes. I was surprised at what I had picked up from him [and his co host and guests] that made the book more enjoyable. Mexican Gothic was also a great book...definitely nailed the gothic part.
My wife came home and stuck her wrist in my face as I crawled off the bicycle and ordered, "Sniff this." A weird thing to do when you're dripping sweat all over the place. But I did and it was fine. Then she grabbed her shirt off the table - the outer layer, she wasn't shirtless this whole time - and told me to smell the sleeve. I pondered it and replied, "Smells like you spilled beer on yourself." She looked confused and then sniffed it herself and said, "I get that, it does now." I told her if she was trying to arouse me, a perfume that smelled like old IPA was probably a solid move, but it was going to arouse our neighbor as well.
I think I've been sleeping too much. I know, if you sleep, then it's probably not too much, but it's considerably more than pre-covid. Doom scrolling and other behaviors seem to have an impact on my hours of shut eye. I noticed the difference this week when I got up at my old commute time for several days and had several hours of pre-work time to myself to...well, work, and read, and watch some television, and walk...I definitely felt more productive.
This morning I overslept - imo - but I got to enjoy a weird dream on the tail end of those hours. In some run down factory that had been semi-gentrified, I was hosting a D and D game. But I'd lost all my notes from previous games and had fifteen players participating I couldn't remember a thing about. So I looked out the window, took note of all the broken brick and trash in the neighborhood where they/we were trying to repurpose an old factory, and decided I'd have to do a hack and slash that was challenging regardless of the number of players and/or their level. The result...a brick and garbage gollum the size of a factory that had fists, hands, mouth, but could also form tree sized pseudo appendages that would slam into a player, enveloping them, suffusing their lungs and stomach - unless they made their save - and possessing them as a gollum zombie under the gollum's control that would start to ooze and collect trash, ala the Japanese movie Tetsuo, the Iron Man. I remember thinking in my dream that it was clever to have a gollum, traditionally under control, be the one controlling. It's less clever when I'm awake because gollums don't work that way, so it was likely more of an elemental, or the zombie players were under the control of the gollum's owner.
I suspect all that is related to helping E with D and D lately, as well as playing it myself with my old crew. When E and I were talking I pointed out I have a few standard scenarios I pull out when I need to buy some time for future ideation, or want the party to enjoy a bit more hack and slash than usual. Crippled beholder with fewer stalks, weird spells, and a tribe off worshippers, like bullywugs or kobalds, plus associated pets [maybe the beholder has a tame spell it uses on behalf of it's worshippers, so anything is fair game]. I also like rando nemesis. Maybe you trespass, maybe you find a small abandoned temple and loot it, maybe you ruin something that seems innocuous like a nest or a colony of bugs, and the local wood demon/deity decides to make an example out of you and keeps upping the challenge until something "works".
Every once in a while I feel like getting back into not-reading posts. Bare with me. Hmm...I bet it's bear with me. Otherwise we're going to have to shed some clothes, right?
So what did I do for my birthday this year? Celebrated it a day early for one. We headed up to the cabin to see my folks and took a bunch of steak, porkchops, and potatoes with us. And some games. My wife and kid took crokinole. We learned to play it at a gaming day with friends last weekend and they loved it. Then discovered that the board I'd had forever because it was the same board I'd had as a kid in the old farmstead home when I farmed in the summers, was a crokinole board on the flip side. So there was a bunch of cribbage and crokinole pre-steak.
You can tell we're in heavy covid concern because of the masks. I literally used my mask between bites of dinner. I was pretty sure we were all safe, but my kid bags groceries, and we talked to the neighbor to get Luna - the dog - watched, and the meat store in Osseo was off the hook with people. Better safe than sick with all the hospital beds pretty much full.
