#FishDavidson

[fishrpg]

Coming this June on FishRPG...

The random table of genres has chosen cyberpunk as the theme for June. One of the writing projects that has been kicking around in my head for a few years ago is a novel based in a cyberpunk city, but I've been putting it off because the specific premise required a detailed understanding of the city's infrastructure and construction before I could actually write the story (which, funnily enough, came to me in a very vivid dream). So I'm using June as an excuse to finally put some details to this fictional city. I'm still trying to figure out how I'll structure the posts this month, but I'm looking forward to having a series of posts I can look back for my writing.

Hope you enjoy reading about capitalism killing the world!

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Image credit is a piece of concept art for the original Blade Runner by Syd Mead

[fishdreams]

Dream Journal 2024-01-04: A New Cereal Appears!

This one is short and to the point: Kellogg's made a new spinoff cereal for Corn Flakes. It was just regular corn flakes that were crushed into a powder and then baked until they turned brown.

And Kellogg's called it Corn Dirt.

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Image credit is Kellogg's because of their product art, but I'm not linking to their website because I'm a heathen who likes the cheaper store brands.

[fishdavidson]

2023 State of the Mackerel

Hello fine internet people! The blog portion of my main account has been dormant for quite some time, and I've been wanting to put something here to give the few people who are following me an update. I've also wanted to change a few things on here, so with the end of the year upon us, I wanted to put forward something to help provide some clarity about the blog's past, present, and future.

The Past: Noteworthy Life Events

Since my last official post on here on August of 2021, obviously at least a few notable things have happened in the intervening two years. Here is a quick rundown of the highlights, presented as fake headlines:

Fish Davidson gets over by a minivan and yells swear words

"Guess I'll go back to school," says local internet weirdo

Studies indicate minor promotion at work leads to corresponding minor improvements in life satisfaction

Combining a bunch of words, Fish Davidson writes a book

Yep, tabletop gaming is a thing and it's not going away

Fish Davidson learns to make two sounds at once

Okay, so now that I've hopefully piqued your interest, here's a little bit more detail about each of those items. In November of 2021, I was walking across the street at a crosswalk and was hit by a minivan. The driver wasn't going very fast, but it was enough to break three bones (including my tailbone) and put me on crutches for a while and I needed special orthopedic pillows for my butt for about 18 months. I'm mostly back to normal now, but it was a long road.

The next big thing was that I went back to grad school in an online program. I've been a student for about a year now, and I'm about halfway through the program. Whatever intermittent dreams I would have and wanted to write about have been shoved aside to make time for the seemingly endless papers of graduate work. It's stressful, but I'm glad to be back in school.

Part of the reason for going back to school is because I got a minor promotion at work. Predictably, it came with more responsibilities, but it also came with a little bit more money. I'm going back to school to learn more about things that are related to my job, but also to leverage it into another potential pay raise.

Now we get to the personal creative pursuits of the recent past. I wrote a novel called Power Frank about a superhero whose only power is that he can open any jar. And he has to leverage that power to both overcome family dysfunction and save his desert hometown from being destroyed by malevolent hogs. I'm starting the querying process for agents and hope to have it published eventually!

I also finished up my multi-year Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Shits and Giggles that ran from level 1 to level 20. Several smaller (much smaller) campaigns happened after that. Then Wizards of the Coast did some stupid stuff with their Open Gaming License, and now I've redirected the bulk of my gaming money to provide support for smaller independent creators and lesser known systems. I've really gotten into several OSR systems like Shadowdark, Basic Fantasy, and (if you count these as OSR) Cairn and Knave. Other non-fantasy systems that I'm currently really digging into are Orbital Blues and Mothership. Granted, I don't currently run those games for people yet, but I do like reading the books and seeing different approaches to solving certain mechanical problems. I've also been creating a bunch of random tables for things.

The last important creative pursuit is that of Tuvan throat singing. Tuva is a region in the geographic center of Asia that is known for a style of singing that allows the singer to produce multiple notes simultaneously. I've been fascinated by it for decades and tried off and on to learn it, but this summer I finally made progress and am finally learning how to do it. It takes a lot of practice and making weird sounds, much to the chagrin of my (very patient and supportive) wife.

The Present and Future: Lumped Together For Expediency

I want to write a dream journal and that's what this blog was primarily conceived for. Unfortunately, my dream output has been incredibly fickle and the other demands on my time (professional and academic) make it difficult to report or even remember dreams. Does that mean I'm closing up this blog? Nope! I'm still on tumblr almost every day. But if I'm not able to reliably post dreams on here, what should happen to this blog?

That's the question I've been wrestling with for the past few months. What should I do? Since fishdavidson is my primary blog and I can't easily swap over to a new primary blog to archive my content, I've decided to pivot a little bit. Even outside of tumblr, I use Fish Davidson as my basically my brand (obligatory shoutout to the 1-800 contacts commercial).

So it makes sense to keep using Fish Davidson for personal promotion and creative pursuits. I'm not going to be deleting or moving any of my old posts, but new posts will be relatively rare and limited to mostly things that I create.

However, tumblr lets me create a bajillion different sideblogs for my various interests. I've got several different blogs, all geared toward different interests. Future dream journal entries, if and when they happen, will be published to fishdreams instead of here. Other posts and reblogs will be spread across my various sideblogs. So without further ado, here are

My Various Sideblogs and What They're For

fishdreams - dream journal stuff

fishcrap - various reblogs and anything that I find interesting but outside of the scope of my various side blogs

fishability - for disability awareness stuff

fishrpg - this will be where I post a lot of tabletop RPG stuff. I'm planning on participating in Hexplore24, which is a tiny daily challenge for RPG creation that starts in January.

tuvafish - stuff about throat singing (and maybe even some of my practice sessions) will go here as I find stuff to post (currently empty)

brownstonarmy - probably won't be updated, but if you want to read a novel-length account of the entire Shits and Giggles campaign, here you go!

Thank you all for being such cool people on tumblr, have a great holiday season and new year, and I hope we stay friends on here.

-Fish

[hobbiesovercoffee]

Get to know me tag game

tagged by @horrorgirlreads ( tysm <3 )

Last song played:

Nose To The Grindstone - Tyler Childers

Fave colour:

lavender

Fave dish:

pozole or tacos

Current fave characters:

The entire Rogue One cast lol They are my forever and always fav's I just finished The Righteous Gemstones and that trash family has a place in my heart right now

Currently watching:

just finished The Righteous Gemstones and have not started anything else yet. I am on a break at work and watching the latest CreepCast upload, does that count?

Last movie:

The Wild Robot with the fam. Sobbed my eyes out fuck you dreamworks

Current Obsession:

ohhh..this is hard i think my ipad mini, i've been reading ebooks instead of physical books a lot lately and been obssessed with just highlightling passages and copy and pasting to my storygraph lol does this count?

Last thing I googled:

miss rachel toys. my neices birthday is coming up lol

i tag @florxdexcerezos @fishdavidson @themissingmarvel @fght-ff-yr-dmns @bucky-is-my-precious @luvmesumsherlock

[godbroccoli]

Tag people you want to know better!

Agh thank you @viksalos for tagging me u are like a minor deity I swear. Did not get to it until now as I saw it in a feverish haze.

Last song: uhhh...Chakra pt 4 - Emerald Green by Joel Andrews... it's instrumental harp

Last Show Movie: oh God...my boyfriend made me watch the guardians of the galaxy Christmas special it was truly awful

Currently Watching: um...Fundie Fridays YouTube videos? I'm not a TV guy

Currently Reading: A Column of Fire by Ken Follet. Historical fiction. Not the best, not the worst. Just too hetero for my tastes...

Current Obsession: Um...casseroles.

I'm gonna tag some ppl I already know pretty well and some I don't so.... @gutterpunktrash @fishdavidson @carameld-light @cockwrangler @esquizoanalise @sacrificialroses @thoreau-ly

[godbroccoli]

@carameld-light @fishdavidson

This came across my Facebook feed, felt I’d share it.

[brownstonearmy]

Infernal General Summoning Cards

Gifted to the party by the Lord of the Nine Hells himself, each of these cards allows a single Infernal General to be summoned to aid the party. Each card bears a different image, indicating who it will summon.

[dailyadventureprompts]

This is less of a direct adventure request, but do you have any advice about running mass combat (like >100 monsters) for high level players while still balancing speedy actions and keeping the tension on the players?

Alright, not to sound glib but... don’t?

I understand the desire to have battles against overwhelming numbers of foes, but the baseline d&d combat is already grindy as hell and unless you’re at the top of your DM game its hard to run large numbers of enemies without turning it into a complete slogfest. I’ve had experience with this on both sides of the screen and let me tell you nothing puts you off “mass combat” like the DM deciding that 200 zombies are actually a really good idea for an encounter and the party then sitting down for 4+ hours of slow erosion against foes that are literally interchangeable. 

The best encounters are ones that have interesting mechanics that the party explores as the rounds progress, and ones that are tied in with foes the party has some relationship with. 

If you DO want to beef up the numbers of enemies in a regular encounter without slowing down the game: 

Create mobs by using level appropriate stats for opponents, making them take up more space and give them a swarm attack to simulate getting ganged up on by a bunch of mooks. That way in the battle with the goblin king, you can simulate the fighter getting dogpiled by 20 goblins without having to add 20 more steps to the initiative order. 

Be sure to intersperse these mob opponents with normal, sttated out baddies, as chopping through mobs gets boring sometimes and people like to choose targets tactfully. 

If epic, LOTR style battles are what you’re after:

Try searching for mass battle rules online until you find something you like. 

Matt Coville has some well thought out ideas on the subject,  

As do the folks at legendary games

Worse comes to worse, find a simple army skirmish game and run that as a warfare minigame in your own campaign. 

If you want my quick and dirty solution to playing out warfare: 

Have the uints on the battlefield represented by the stats of one NPC, so a group of knights is represented by a single knight, a group of scouts by a single ranger, etc. Make the battlemap a larger scale than you normally would. ( 50ft rather than 5ft) and just run combat like you normally would, but with these simplified characters. 

Hell, if you really wanted to make it a campaign subsystem, represent better supplying and equipping your troops by “ leveling up” your npcs, and give your party knowledge of just what their mustered forces are like.  

[littleladymab]

@fishdavidson replied to your post: Hey, repost with how obscure your music taste is...

Holy crap, I got an obscurity rating of 100% and a score of 91. MUSIC SNOB STATUS CONFIRMED.

holy SHIT my dude asdflkj congrats CONFIRMED HIPSTER

[godbroccoli]

@lithyena @gutterpunktrash @fishdavidson

some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.

[dungeonsandkobolds]

Hey, fellow DM here who wanted to elaborate on the post a few days ago where another DM asked for advice about giving out goofy magic items. This is something that I do for my campaign and my players really like it. I've made a wild magic surge table with several hundred potential effects and triggers, then I roll a few random minor items (usually common ones from XGE) and give the item the extra effect. One player has a rod of angling that spawns hammer pants when used, and the party loves it.

This sounds absolutely awesome (and efficient wow some of y’all are real organised)!!!!!

Posting for inspiration and future reference for myself lmao

[fishrpg]

2024-11-23: Vacuum Ray Colony (Rim 5)

A single blob-like structure almost 4km in size seems to undulate and ripple as it moves through the void. The blob is a massive colony made up of tiny creatures known as vacuum rays. A haze of gas and very small particulate matter covers the colony and lightly obscures the colony within. This area is well-patrolled for research purposes, and access to this area is restricted. Each time the party enters this hex, roll 1d6 to determine what sort of traffic is encountered.

Vehicular Traffic (1d6)

Open channel comms overhear a law enforcement vessel issuing a citation with a hefty fine to an unauthorized vessel in the area.

Several (1d6+3) research vessels are arranged a safe distance away from the colony and conducting an experiment about variable gravitational readings.

A vessel reprimanded for entering the restricted area is now leaving the secured perimeter, and the vessel’s captain will advise anyone who will listen to not repeat the same mistake.

Two enforcement vessels are pursuing an intruder, structuring their paths in such a way to leave a wide berth around the vacuum ray colony.

One of the research vessels chastises an enforcement ship for patrolling too close to the colony and potentially impacting the sustainability of the colony.

No radio chatter or patrolling vehicles seem to be in the area, though that is likely to change any moment.

About Vacuum Rays

Vacuum Rays are a type of colonial animal that is apparently endemic to the Tengri-IV system. The individual creatures/zooids that make up the colony resemble a flat olive-colored lichen about the size of a human fingernail. However, the body of each creature is incredibly thin, approximately the same width of a human hair. It is this pancake shape that gives the individual creatures its name, as they resemble the stingrays that used to swim in the waters of old Earth, though these creatures survive manage to survive in the cold vacuum of space. The underside of each tiny creature is covered with fine cilia that are believed to help with repositioning on its shared exoskeleton and distributing particles from its “atmosphere” to elsewhere in the organism.

As a colony, it appears to practice something resembling filter feeding, though still noticeably different. The individual rays exhibit a degree of telekinesis (or perhaps some sort of currently unexplained quantum movement), able to manipulate mass up to 1,000 times their individual (miniscule) body weight. Each member seems to be responsible for helping move its neighbors and exoskeleton forward so that it can collect any nearby matter into its atmosphere. The telekinetic abilities are what allows the collective organism to retain its atmosphere, as it does not otherwise have the gravitational mass to maintain it at the gas densities observed. It is believed that the individual rays grow through a process that is part photosynthesis and part direct incorporation of captured particles into its collective structure, though such growth takes an unimaginably long time (at least on human time scales).

[fishdreams]

Dream Journal 2024-01-26: New Concoctions By Fish Davidson!

It's been a long time since I had a dream-based invention, but before we get to the explanation of this thing, let's talk about the

Dream Fragments

I was eating nachos, but instead of jalapenos to go with my sour cream, cheese, and beans, there were tiny cats. Completely normal (and alive) cats, except each one was no larger than my thumbnail. I thought it was unusual to eat them, but those were the nachos I had at hand and I wasn't going to let them go to waste.

Main Dream: Behind The Scenes Of Nissan's New Commercial

Note: the videos in this post have flashing/strobing effects.

The entirety of this dream was basically an in-depth look at a commercial for a new car by Nissan. The car is not important, and I recall pretty much nothing about the car other than it being a sedan that looked like any other modern sedan, and I think it was red.

What is important is the practical effects the commercial employed for the vaguely sci-fi bits (because cars can't be cutting edge without being from The Future). There was a white room that textured with lines of filaments the thickness of uncooked spaghetti noodles, and inside this room was a pedestal with a circular holographic projector on top that broadcast the headshot view of some alien from outer space who looked like a cross between a dog and a stag.

Instead of using a guy in a costume for the alien, the commercial used a special zoetrope to provide the animation for the alien's speech. The original zoetrope used a sequence of still images arranged in a strip that in turn spun around a cylinder to give the illusion of movement. Here's a video that describes a newer variety of zoetrope (though there is a discussion and example of the original zoetrope at the 1-minute mark of the video).

The variety of zoetrope that the commercial creatives used was a step beyond the ones show in the prior video. Instead of using multiple rotations of the cylinder/platter to show a repeating animation, the commercial used multiple nested platters that could rotate independently of each other and could also rotate in different directions.

You can hopefully understand how the device is constructed by looking at my crudely-drawn diagram in the header image of this post. I drew a dog instead of an alien because it wouldn't look anything like it did in the dream, and most people can intuitively recognize a poorly-drawn dog.

Apparently I was one of the people who worked on the commercial, because I had a lot of access to the props and stuff on the set. I spent a long time playing with the zoetrope, too, which is how I was able to recall its construction.

Each platter contains variations of a different part of the alien's head. The outermost platter contains different positions for the alien's mouth, lips, and tongue. The middle platter contains a smaller number of positions that account for blinking and small movements of the upper/lower eyelid. On the smallest platter is the back part of the head and it controls small movements in the position of the ears.

Because each platter is controlled by motors that can rotate forward or backward, it can play play an animation of effectively unlimited duration as long as you can move the platters into position quickly (and precisely) enough. The "holographic projector" was really this special zoetrope, and it was controlled in such a way that the movement of each platter made it look like the alien was talking about wanting to purchase the car (though the actual dialog would presumably be added during post-production). It gave the alien a cool stop-motion look when the platters were spinning.

Lastly, the final version of the commercial used Powerman 5000's song, "When Worlds Collide" as its soundtrack. My wife happened to have that song as her alarm when the dream was happening, but it was muffled by the bedsheets and didn't wake me up immediately. Instead, the song just crept seamlessly into the dream. Below is the official music video for that song, which I'm including because it's a good song and also because I forgot it had sci-fi and aliens in it.

Nissan, if you're reading this, I am willing to license this technology to you. Call me and let's talk.

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal 2021-08-18: Be Careful What You Wish For!

For three people in a dying town on a sweltering summer day, things are about to take a drastic turn. None of them have names that I can recall, though there were two men and a woman, and all appeared to be somewhere in their early twenties. The guy who kick starts the plot into gear is living in a house with a broken air conditioner and an overgrown driveway. His next door neighbor has an old limousine resting on cinderblocks in the yard, and the house across the street is little more than a pile of rotten rubble.

Anyway, this guy’s changing his car’s oil in his overgrown driveway when he wishes that he could leave this horrid town. This minor declaration of fantasy is enough to summon some sort of wish-granting entity into existence. Whatever the thing was, I’m not entirely certain: devil, genie, or fairy are all possibilities because I could never look directly at it because it was made of bright light.

One thing that I new for certain about this wish-giver was that it was risky to deal with. Sure, the wishes would come true, but there would always be a caveat. To offset this somewhat, the wish-giver offered four wishes instead of the usual three.

The first wish had a bunch of extra conditions on it so you could really only use it to determine that the wish-giver was actually capable of granting wishes. Our guy uses his preliminary wish to get his oil changed and BAM! Oil is magically changed and guy realizes he’s got an opportunity on his hands.

He does what I imagine nearly anyone else in his situation would do and call his two closest friends to come check out the situation and potentially share the wishable riches. The friends come over and they spend a wish or two on slightly more extravagant things. Exactly what they wished for isn’t important, but the three of them did learn about the need for careful wording lest you get unfavorable results.

Eventually the group decides on their final wish and it’s some long monstrosity of clauses that are very narrowly-defined to avoid obvious pitfalls. They want to live a lot longer and they define how exactly how strong they’ll be and how high they’ll jump and how much money they’ll have, among other things.

The wish gets granted and we get to see it play out... Including how it goes tragically, tragically wrong. Everything starts fine enough, though. The trio can now lift heavy things and jump several meters into the air. They become celebrity basketball players with fat contracts and leave the town on international tours.

Because such care was taken in specifying exactly how strong and wealthy the trio was, it seems like everything is good. But they neglected to include provisions that would keep them on top of the world’s stage. Soon the other athletes of the world began growing in strength and dexterity.

A few years after the last wish was finalized, everyone in the world is now stronger and can jump higher than these three. Plus there was a big round of hyperinflation, so those fat contracts weren’t worth much now. The dream ends with the trio being decades in the future but in the same metaphorical trap they found themselves in before the wishes were granted: stuck in a dying town, broke, and now everyone in the world is more athletic than they are.

Only this time, they don’t have any more wishes to fix their problem.

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“Deal With The Devil” artwork by Steven Rhodes

[theparadoxmachine]

fishdavidson replied to your post: Are you shitting me with this?

WHAT BULLSHIT HAS SEPTEMBER FOISTED UPON YOU

Ughhhh. It really sucks and I’m still processing it. 

My brother called tonight. I figured it was about my belated birthday plans, and yeah we talked about that, but his first words were “I have bad news.” 

My least favorite phrase.

Our uncle is in hospice with some serious health problems from which he is not expected to recover. Because of my own health issues and car trouble, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to visit easily. We aren’t terribly close but he’ll text and check in, which most of my other distant relatives don’t bother doing, and I don’t have much family to begin with. He’s not the most lively of people to hang around but I still care about him a lot. He’s had a lot of health problems before so I’m not shocked, but it’s still upsetting. 

[thejazzdesign]

fishdavidson replied to your post: @ponchohuman

I have a telescoping back scratcher thing that I use to scratch my wife’s back from my desk when we are watching Netflix in the office

That’s #wholesome. :3