The Psychic Sandbox

To my great relief, I'm feeling much better. As quickly as it came on, it seems to be retreating just as suddenly. Thank goodness for a strong immune system, I guess. I'm not yet at 100%, but I'm noticeably improved over yesterday. I'll likely work tomorrow (albeit from home, if only out of an overabundance of caution). And I should be good to continue with my long weekend plans.

I do have another at-home rapid COVID test, which I'll take tonight before bed, if only to be EXTRA sure. I'm not looking forward to it. It's unpleasant, sticking the swab as far as I can up my nose. It doesn't hurt, but the inside of my nasal passages feel super-sensitive, and swabbing them continuously for 10 seconds or so is not fun.

So Gus the Big Mean Bunny's mother is dying. Even though I haven't been legally connected to the family since Gus died over twenty years ago, I still call them all my in-laws. I was contacted by my SIL (Gus' sister) Saturday night, saying MIL was not well, the doctors are "leaning towards" thyroid cancer, and that FIL admitted that MIL has been displaying signs of delirium/dementia for several days.

I had just returned to TO from KW, but I went right back Sunday morning after confirming that a visit from me would be welcome.

The ILs are incredibly proud and would drown themselves in a bathtub before asking for help.

I helped as much as I could anyway. I brought them food. I walked their dog. I took SIL to a support group meeting. I spoke with MIL about what was going on.

It's bad. I'm not going to detail it all out here, but I'll be surprised if she's still with us on our birthday.

Yes, we share a birthday.

I met her when I was eighteen. I started dating her son when I was nineteen. She's been my "first alternate" mother figure ever since. We see each other three or four times a year. I often call her on Mother's Day.

I am not ready to say goodbye.

I've kind of fallen out of the habit of posting, and I don't want to, so hi.

So I've had a rough couple of weeks. I was sick (just a cold, but it's two weeks later and I still have a lingering cough), I had a mammogram (not bad, but not exactly fun), a colonoscopy (horrible), and then a good friend of 12 years died of cancer.

Adam was a player in my boys' game. He was a great guy, with a deeply sardonic sense of humour that spoke to my soul. He made me laugh every single game, I loved challenging his assumptions about D&D, and he loved challenging my assumptions about it, too. He was only 54.

We knew, of course, that he had cancer. We knew he wasn't exactly well. But he'd been "not well" for a while and I guess we figured he would just continue being "not well." We had a game scheduled for next week. We fully expected to see him again. So it was a surprise, but it wasn't a shock, if that makes sense.

To give you an idea of the kind of guy he was: he was an ER doctor. He was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive kidney cancer six years ago. He worked the entire pandemic -- the overburdened ER, the incredible amount of PPE, the long hours, the intense measures he took to protect his family from it, the whole thing -- while undergoing cancer treatments himself.

And he survived that.

Only to finally succumb to the cancer last week. It's just so hideously unfair.

It's hitting me harder than I expected. I started calling the game "the boys' game" because for the longest time (about 10 years) it was just me and five guys. I didn't use it in a derogatory way - the same way people say "a girls' night out." It was just my boys' game, and those guys became my boys. Not like my children, but my crew. My posse. My gang.

And losing one of them is hard as fuck and hurts like hell.

His funeral was Monday, and I went. I attended the burial as well. I helped shovel dirt on his grave (everyone who wanted to did). It was kind of surreal.

I suggested to the rest of the group that we keep November 22 on our calendars, and we're going to meet, but not to play. Instead, we're going to talk about Adam and our shared loss. We're also going to talk about what to do about the game we're currently playing. Will people want to end it? Continue it? Put it on hiatus for a few months and revisit later?

Everyone deals with grief and loss differently. Some people want to throw themselves into gaming as a distraction. Some people can't focus on a game if they're too upset.

When my husband died, I did decide to continue the LARP we'd started, but only because I knew how important it was to him that it finish. He'd never finished a campaign before, and we'd designed the LARP to have a 5-year arc -- a beginning, a middle, and an ending. (And yes, he based that on the original Star Trek plan. He was nothing if not an unapologetic geek.) Dave died in year 4. There was one more year to go in the LARP, and I felt I had to finish it for him.

I'm not feeling that strongly about this campaign. I could continue or abandon it, whatever the group decides.

I fell out of the habit of these! Trying to get back into it...

What did you just finish reading?
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle. I really enjoyed it -- the main character was both different from me and relatable at the same time, and the plot unfolded really, really well. It's a tight, well-put-together story whose villains are at once both unbelievable and heartbreakingly believable. There isn't an ounce of fat on this book - every word pushes things forward, which is kind of amazing.

What are you reading now?
A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher. I know very little about this one going into it, but I've yet to pick up a T. Kingfisher book that I didn't at least like a lot (if not LOVE LIKE WOAH), so I'm not worried. I know it's a modern story, I know it's a horror, and I know it's Kingfisher, so that's enough for me.

What will you read next?
I'm not sure. I'm reading two horror books in a row right now, so maybe I will go back to lighter fare. Or, on the other side of the coin, I might pick up the first in a series. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine is one Kim has strongly recommended to me, so maybe that one. I also might just pick up a fluffy romance. I'll wait to see what my mood is like when it's time for a new book.

So a while back, my mother alerted me to the fact that there was a litter of Labrador puppies up on the Lab Rescue site, so I put in an application. I think this was back in early February. I didn't hear anything at all from them, so I just chalked it up to "volunteer-run org" and thought it was a good thing because it was still winter and I felt it was still a bit early to adopt a pup.

But then I got a call from them last week, because there was another litter of golden retriever mix pups almost ready to go, and they did a phone screening with me. However, I didn't hear anything else from them, and one of the puppies was posted on their site. I emailed them, reiterating my interest, and have heard crickets back. Now the pup has an "adoption pending" note on her bio. So I'm guessing that's not for me.

I was sad enough about it that I realized I should start looking in earnest. So now I'm in full-blown puppy-hunting mode.

I'm currently emailing with a Paws Above Rescue adoption manager about Harley, a 4-month-old boy dog that looks like he's got some Rhodesian Ridgeback in him. He's 4 months already, but he's being fostered with cats.

We'll see how this goes.

What have I just finished reading?

A Promise of Fire by Amanda Bouchet. A fantasy romance. It was competently written, when you look at the technical aspects of writing (pacing, description, dialoge, etc.). But I just couldn't get into the romance aspect (the whole point of the book) because I couldn't swallow the premise that a captured, enslaved woman could/would/should fall in love with her captor without some sort of apology from him or even basic recognition/admission of his wrongdoing.

The worldbuilding also felt... incomplete. Aspects of it were interesting, but I was left with FAR too many questions and the main character's powers seemed to have no rules and no consistency at all.

That's the mostly spoiler-free review. Here's the very very spoilery review: ( I get kind of ranty )

What are you reading now?
I'm actually writing this before I started anything new; I finished the last book yesterday and I work for a living, so I haven't picked up a new book yet.

What will you read next?
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I would still like to read a book on my Wednesday commutes, and I'm not carrying a hardcover book on the TTC with me, so I have cued up Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade on my ebook reader for Wednesdays.

I've always loved the idea that something humble can stand against something epic.

It's one of the reasons why I love Lord of the Rings so much, because the Hobbits, being so small and unremarkable, are actually what makes so much of the story work. The story is massive, huge, overwhelming for those living through it, and it has personalities and characters who are larger-than-life in it (Gandalf, Sauron, Treebeard, Aragorn, etc.). But it's Frodo who carries the ring to Mordor and is the hero of the story, and he wouldn't have been able to do it without Samwise. And they were overlooked by enemies multiple times because they were too small, too unremarkable, too powerless. Unthreatening.

And I fucking love that.

For some reason, my brain has been circling around the concept of Old Magic lately. ("Do not quote the old magic to me, witch, for I was there when it was written.") I've always loved the mental image of an ordinary person -- not a powerful wizard, or fighter, or sorcerer or anything -- still able to face down a powerful enemy at their doorstep with nothing more than, say, a sprig of mistletoe. Relatedly, I've also always loved the lore that says vampires can't enter a home without invitation, which has always been fascinating to me. I've ALSO always loved old rituals and superstitions and taboos and things that are strong enough to guide and influence human behaviour. I don't know if anyone remembers the books, but in A Song of Ice and Fire, when the Starks arrived at the Freys, Caitlin Stark immediately asked for bread and salt. Because their world believed that if you provide your guests bread and salt, you COULD NOT harm them. It was a "law of hospitality." It wasn't that you physically couldn't harm them, or that it was some sort of magic protection spell, it was simply an extremely strong taboo that nobody would dare break. And Caitlin put her trust in that social contract.

Anyway, all of these concepts have started merging in my head.

I haven't gotten very far with it. But right now, what is starting to emerge is a deeply magical world, with big, epic, powerful things and people and spirits and gods in it and small, humble, unremarkable things and people and spirits and gods, too. And they can, and do, butt heads sometimes. And it's not at all predictable which will come out on top.

I intend to come up with a list of "old magic spells" that common, unremarkable, otherwise "powerless" people can cast or invoke. The only one I have so far is "if a resident of a home stands barefoot on their hearthstone, none may harm the home or enter it without permission."

I have a picture in my mind of a dark wood, and a lonely cabin, and something trying to get in. And a person -- a normal person -- they don't have a form yet, it could be a young boy, a teenage girl, an old woman, or a tired, middle-aged man, hearing something outside and hurriedly kicking off their boots and pulling off their socks and standing on the hearthstone and yelling "No, you cannot come in," and whatever it is outside trying to come in through the doors or the windows or the chimneys, but it can't. And it's not any inherent magic that makes it so, but it's the small forest spirits that hear the call and answer, that come swarming out to shield the cabin.

I do not know where this is going. But it's been in my head for the past few days.

It has occurred to me that I need to decide (not right now, but eventually) whether to get a puppy from a (reputable, responsible, well-researched) breeder or to rescue one. I cannot play both sides of the fence until I get a pup; if I go with a breeder, I'll need to get on waiting lists and pay deposits and make arrangements. If I go with a rescue, it will be "take what's available when it's available and move fast." One is arranged in advance; the other is very spontaneous. I cannot "order" a dog from a rescue. I have to wait and see if one becomes available and then move fast to adopt it.

These are incompatible methods. If I want to go to a breeder, I'll have to start MONTHS early. If I want to rescue, I have to wait until I'm ready to bring home a dog before I start looking, because things can move very fast.

( Cut for length; just more noodling about breeder vs rescue )

So I'm still torn. I don't have to make a decision just yet. I can probably wait until the winter at least. But I will have to make a decision at some point.

And it won't even cost me any vacation days from work.

I'm just going away for a (long) weekend. My place of employment has decided to close the offices (giving us all the day off, paid) the day before each long weekend in the summer (Victoria Day, Canada Day, August Civil Holiday, and Labour Day), so I get four 4-day weekends now, which is really cool.

And because valkryor's husband just went on his third vacation in a row and I literally cannot remember the last time SHE got to go anywhere (I think the last time I can remember is way back in 2012, when we were finishing up our first 4e campaign, and she and Fedoriarty came to stay at my house for one (1) night), I figured it was about time SHE got a vacation, too. So I'm taking her to North Bay, dropping her in the lap of her boyfriend (don't worry, they're polyam) and then retreating to a tiny cottage on the lake for a few days. I wanted an excuse to go sit on a beach with some books for a short while, and she wanted to get out of the house, and we both wanted to see our friends' (one of whom is her bf) new gaming store in North Bay. Wins all around.

So I'll be heading to KW after work on Thursday June 28, picking valkryor up on the morning of Friday June 29, driving up to North Bay, and coming home Monday August 1 in the morning.

It's going to be the perfect mix of social (road trip with my best friend!! Seeing friends' new shop after they moved away!) and alone-time (tiny cottage on a lake! Lots of books!).

And yes, it's a tiny cottage. It's pretty much a glorified shed. But it has electricity, a bed, a small kitchenette with a small seating area, a bathroom with shower, and a view of the lake. That's all I need.

I swear to god, I felt like I dreamed an actual romance novel the other night.

I wasn't me in the dream. I wasn't anything LIKE me in the dream. I am not this flirty or this forward. And I didn't know anyone else in the dream.

This is unusual for me -- often, my dreams are me and people I know in places I know. Nothing was familiar here.

The only thing that was familiar about this dream was that I had a gaming group. That's it, though. And I wasn't the DM! Just a player. There were about five or six of us, we were all great, close friends, and we loved playing together. The DM, a guy I found attractive who had a name I can't quite remember but it had a short form everyone used; it was like Rob/Robert, or Tim/Timothy, or something like that. I'll use Tom/Thomas, because that's what feels the closest to me, although it wasn't quite it.

Anyway, Tom was our DM and everyone always called him Tom. He and I had the kind of friendship that was jokingly adversarial. We'd tease and bug each other a lot. Whenever he annoyed me (fun annoyed, not real annoyed), I'd call him Thomas, and he'd know he was "in real trouble." He delighted in being in trouble with me. It was extremely flirty.

One night, after game, everyone else was gone and I was helping Tom clean up the space. It was like a meeting room in an office or something? Maybe we all worked together and played after work or something, I don't know. Anyway, I was helping clean up, and he said something like "you know, I hate the name Thomas, and I never let anyone call me that."

I (sincerely) apologized, (jokingly) berated him for not telling me sooner, and promised not to do so again.

He said no, it was okay, he actually found himself actively trying to goad me into calling him that, and he didn't know why. (We both knew why.)

So I went over to him, stood extremely close to him, and said, "You remember that scene in The Princess Bride, where Buttercup realizes that whenever Westley says 'as you wish,' he was really saying something else?"

He said he did.

I said, "Well, Buttercup, maybe you don't mind me calling you Thomas because you've realized that when I do, I'm really saying something else."

And then I woke up.

And that's the most forward and the most flirty I have ever been in my whole entire life, and holy crap was it FUN.

I do not believe I am capable of such a thing in real life, though.

Just some navel-gazing on the subject. I'm not sure why, but I felt the need to articulate this and jot it down somewhere. This is a good place for it. ( Read more... )

Every once in a while I think "I should post more," and then I remember that I'm a fundamentally boring person, that I never go anywhere or do anything, and nobody in their right mind would want to read about what I'm up to, because it's mostly a big pile of nothing new.

However, something has been going on that's kind of interesting. So I shall post about that.

A couple of people who I know through my boys' game put together an online group called The Amulet, and it's about gaming. Mostly TTRPGs, and mostly indie games, although some more "mainstream" games sneak in here and there. What happens is that someone wants to run a game, makes a proposal to the group, and people who want to play sign up for it.

I've so far run a game of The Dark Forest (a variation of A Quiet Year), and am kicking around the ideas of running either a game of Fiasco or Wanderhome. Also so far, I've played in a bunch of games which I'm finding really fun:

1. Back Again From the Broken Land, a short-form RPG about small folk returning from the Big Conflict, the stories they carried with them from home, and the new stories they now carry back. It's quiet, introspective, and emotional.



2. InSpectres, a fast and simple game that mixes horror and comedy in a world of start-up culture and supernatural frightfests. It's is loosely based on the Ghostbusters entertainment franchise, combined with popular reality television shows, in that you can make "asides" to the "camera" to elaborate on how your character is feeling and what they're thinking, and also to help control the narrative.



3. OSG D&D, which isn't actually really D&D at all, but a version of it based on the very, very, very early versions. (OSG - Old-School Gaming.) There is a bare-bones story, life is SUPER cheap (I've had two characters die already, before being able to level up), and everything -- and I mean EVERYTHING -- is randomized. The GM is no storyteller; they're just there to referee, roll dice, and look things up on charts. It's also explicitly mercenary and murderhobo-y, in that your XP is directly linked to how much treasure you manage to bring back. I'm actually surprised at how much I'm enjoying this one.



4. Kagematsu, a one-shot DM-less game that has a very specific theme and very specific requirements for the players, weirdly enough. It plays best with an all-male-except-one-woman group. The woman plays the title character, Kagematsu, a warrior with a quest. The rest of the group, all men ideally, play the women in a village Kagematsu passes through, and must convince him to stay and help them with a problem they have. I had my reservations about this one, mostly because I was playing with a few men I didn't know too well, but I knew the other men well enough to feel comfortable playing something that so deliberately played with gender roles, and I was super curious about how it would go.



5. Rust Hulks, about scrappy independent space truckers in a grimy science-fiction near-future. It has some deliberate mechanics around relationships that we had a little trouble wrapping our heads around -- the game tries its best to create both bonds and tension between characters which wound up making it feel a little forced to me. But I still had fun.



6. Raccoon Sky Pirates, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's narrative-driven, one-shot, and DM-less. Everyone plays raccoons. You live in a junk yard. You build a flying ship out of junk and go searching for better junk! It's hilarious and chaotic and madcap and I got to play an inventor-raccoon called Spicy Mayo. Shenanigans abound!



7. El Dorado: Dances at Midnight, a game invented by one of the members, this was his attempt at a narrative-driven system, and was really a test game. It had a very cinematic feel to it, and was fun, even if there was a small mismatch between his expectations and the players' actions. It's difficult sometimes to switch gears from GM-led games (which D&D is mostly) and narrative-driven games (which is closer to Dungeon World and other Powered by the Apocalypse games), but it had some really fun moments in it. Needs a bit of work, though.



8. Sorcerer, one of the more influential games that's been around for a little while, since 1996 (with an expanded, annotated version published in 2001). Basically, the only magic that exists is demonic magic, and you play sorcerers who bind and control demons. I've only just made a character (whom I love already), and have yet to actually play, but I'm liking it already. It's a deceptively simple system, but has a lot of potential for nuance.

So that's what I've been doing mostly. We chat on Discord, we have a Google Classroom for game-specific documents, and people generally just post "hey, I'm interested in running [X] game next week -- anyone wanna play?" It's pretty laid-back and low-pressure.

I think most everyone who reads this knows by now, but I find this journal a good record of my life, so I'll talk about it here, too.

( CW: pet death and grief )

Luna is doing... okay. She's gained weight and her energy and disposition are good, although I can tell her stamina is nothing like it used to be.

She's also still gagging, and she occasionally has what I'm calling "breathing episodes," where she has some difficulty and her breathing is hitched. It almost sounds like she's about to throw up, but she doesn't. It's definitely a lung thing, not a stomach thing. It only lasts a minute or two, but it's a screaming reminder that she's not okay.

Still NO idea how long she's got left with us. A month? Six months? A year? Although hope is good, sometimes it's hard not knowing.

Luna is actually doing super well right now. She's on prednisone, a steroid, and it's making her eat like a horse, which is great. She's actually gained weight these past two weeks, and she's feeling better. She got out a toy the other day to play with, which she hasn't done in ages.

I know it's not a cure, but anything that improves her life and maybe buys me a little more time with her is most welcome.

I'm doing okay, too. I don't know if it's that I've come to accept it, or just that I don't have the energy to sustain being an emotionally unstable hot mess long-term, but either way, I'm okay.