#maybe it says something about my mental state that the weird murder happy goblin thing hypes my murder urges and i adore him for it

[nebulousfishgills]

Starting a new run on Baldur's Gate 3 was hard since, one, I love my first character so much and it's hard to follow up after her, and two, it took me like an hour staring at my computer fanagling with character creation options to convince myself to do the Resist Dark Urge option.

It's an interesting run and I've already had fun recruiting all the characters I didn't the first time around... but if I'm being totally honest, the primary reason it took me so long to finally sigh and hit start game was because if I resist my urge, I'm letting down my favorite NPC, poor Sceleritas Fel

You will never meet a bigger hype man, maybe it's an unpopular opinion but I really love this little dude. World's best little fiend butler... and I don't wanna make him sad 😭

To cope I tell myself that I'll maybe get to see him with Airetos again after patch 7 drops those new epilogues, and that in the meantime he's living his best life at her beck and call while she and Astarion bang in the Bhaal temple or in the palace of Astarion's.

But yeah no my current character is gonna disappoint the hell out of him. Sorry, buddy.

[shewpthewewp]

State of the Shewp

Haven’t done one of these for a while.  But I’m up late and feeling ramble-y, so here we go!  We’re gonna get weird. Maybe.  Depending on what you consider weird.

Starting off easy with some reading recs.

Oathbringer, the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive dropped earlier this month.  It’s the usual Sanderson experience, which means I loved every word of it.  I won’t talk too much about it because we’re already nearly 3,000 pages into the series BEFORE this book and it adds another ~1400, so I can’t really do it justice in a few paragraphs.  If you want to get into Brandon’s works (specifically, the books in the Cosmere setting) I would start with Warbreaker.  

The other thing I wanted to mention regarding Cosmere stuff is that reading this  has left me very hungry for a Cosmere-setting tabletop game.  I played in a Mistborn game in college and I’d be all over something set on Roshar (or Scadrial, or Sel, or... anywhere really).  Also really wanting to cosplay something Cosmere-related.  Anastasia suggested Vin & Elend, which I think we could pull off.  I’ll toss it into the ‘I will probably never do this because it would take effort’ pile, but you never know!

The sequel to WORM is out!  It’s titled WARD.  I haven’t started it yet because I am waiting for a larger backlog to be written (also Oathbringer devoured my reading time.  As a friend told me, she THICC).  I talked a bit about WORM in a previous post, so check that out if you want to know more.

I also discovered the genre of LitRPG recently.  It’s an umbrella term for any fiction that features RPG-like elements - i.e. classes, levels, etc.  It also frequently features isekai-like themes, like modern-world protagonists dropped into a fantasy setting.  Unfortunately, these things also mean that it has an overly-large share of garbage tropes like stupidly overpowered protagonists and blatant wish-fulfillment, but not to a significant degree more than most other types of fiction or fanfiction.  Three pieces of fiction in this genre that I enjoyed the most:

The Wandering Inn (summary from the website) -  An inn is a place to rest, a place to talk and share stories, or a place to find adventures, a starting ground for quests and legends.  In this world, at least. To Erin Solstice, an inn seems like a medieval relic from the past. But here she is, running from Goblins and trying to survive in a world full of monsters and magic. She’d be more excited about all of this if everything wasn’t trying to kill her.  But an inn is what she found, and so that’s what she becomes. An innkeeper who serves drinks to heroes and monsters – Actually, mostly monsters. But it’s a living, right?  This is the story of the Wandering Inn.

This story seems to have been written specifically to go against the grain of some of the negative tropes I mentioned before.  A world full of classes and levels, and our protagonist ends up as an Innkeeper. The first couple chapters are a bit rough, but I think the author finds their stride pretty quickly after that and things pick up across book 1.  Yes, book ONE.  There are two full-length, complete books in this series and a third is well underway.  Check it out!

Worth the Candle (summary from the website) -  From the age of nine, Juniper Smith began filling notebooks with his worlds, at first places of fantastical imagination, but later with each as an expression of some theme or idea that momentarily grabbed his interest. Over the course of eight years, he shared these worlds with his friends through twice-weekly sessions of tabletop gaming. Now at the age of seventeen, he finds himself in Aerb, a world that appears to be an amalgam of those many notebooks, stuck trying to find the answers to why he's there and what this world is trying to say. The most terrifying answer might be that this world is an expression of the person he was back on Earth.

I have absolutely loved this so far.  The story is frequently intermixed with flashbacks to the protagonists tabletop sessions (where he GM’d) and it talks a lot about what makes a good character and how to run a game.  The only negative for me is that it’s incomplete and the author updates sporadically (but when they do update, they tend to post quite a bit).  It is broken up into several ‘books’ that are mostly completed plot arcs, but unlike the Wandering Inn I think this is still very, VERY early on in its overall length (if I had to guess).

Finally, I’m a Spider, So What? is a translated web serial or light novel (I’m honestly not 100% sure which).  It’s also slowly being converted into a manga, I think?  Either way, the premise is that a class of students gets murder-blasted into another dimension by an evil demon lord.  Most of the class ends up as humans with bright futures and mysterious powers, but one ends up as a spider in the depths of one of the most dangerous dungeons on the planet.  Funny and very engaging, though the translation threw me for a loop sometimes.  It’s also not fully translated and it seems like a bunch of different people are all translating it and are are different parts.  A less serious suggestion than my previous two, but enjoyable nonetheless.  

Moving on to slightly more personal stuff!  Ooooooo weird ooooooo!

Still engaged to Anastasia!  Current plan is to get married in Hell, Michigan in late 2018.  They have cute little invitations that say “A marriage that starts in Hell can only go up!” (or something like that).  It will be a very small event, I think - the ‘chapel’ there can hold maybe 15 people, counting us and the officiant, so that’s pretty much going to be only family.  We’re planning to have a larger reception/party afterwards instead.

Getting close to finishing the second RPG I am GM’ing.  It’s an original superhero setting run in the FATE system.  I lost steam for a while pretty close to the end and started it back up recently, and it’s a relief to do honestly. I missed the characters, the story, the players.  Overall I have really enjoyed my time GMing but I do find it much more stressful than playing.  I think part of the reason I got a bit burnt out at first was because I was trying to run two games and play in at least two others.  I think a good rule of thumb (for me at least) is that running one game takes about the same mental effort/time/etc. as playing in 2-3 others, but maybe it’s just because I’m still (relatively) inexperienced at it.

Still working at the same place (the lava factory).  I asked for a raise recently and was very embarrassed to find out that I had actually gotten a pretty good one a few months ago and never noticed.  In my defense, HR never told me either, but I still should have seen it on my bank statements... Also, starting in January I’ll get THREE WHOLE WEEKS of vacation.  Not sure what to do with that much!

Still seeing a therapist.  Not entirely sure it’s helping me, but I think being open about that is helpful not only to me personally but also just in general to help de-stigmatize therapy and mental health in general (something I’ve always kind of struggled with).

Got a vasectomy.  I kind of want to be a bit more open about it - it would be a big deal if Anastasia and I were going to have a kid and we’d be totally ok with sharing that, so making a permanent decision to NOT have kids should be just as important, right? - but on the other hand it feels like it’s not their business and I feel like most people probably don’t want to hear about my balls.  Not that I’m keeping it a secret or anything either.  Also, after being told many, MANY times that “I’ll change my mind and want kids some day” I kind of want to be able to shoot them down.  Fortunately that didn’t come up at all during Thanksgiving and I wouldn’t have actually been rude like that anyway, but the temptation is there...

Actually taking some decently strong painkillers right now (sorry if I’m  a bit incoherent), since I started getting super sore this evening (and it’s only kind of Anastasia’s fault ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)) .  All the external sutures have healed, but the internal stuff still has a way to go.  They cut, cauterize, tie-off and then stitch together the internal bits, so those will take longer to heal.  

If you’re a guy interested in permanent birth control or a lady who’s just plain curious, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you have!

Not much else going on.  I move from thing to thing and binge - FFXIV for a while, then DOOM, then Overwatch, currently WoW, maybe XCOM next, with books and writing and tabletop gaming sprinkled in between.

That’s all the important stuff for now, I think.  I’m honestly kind of boring.