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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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#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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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NSFW – Bad tattoo idea
“Dude, I don’t think getting a prayer tattooed on above your bladder will …”
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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