Two Years Have Passed
I feel the need to write a gaming related blogpost, as the 12th of July, 2020, has been a bittersweet day, and I need to record that to share it with the greatest number of people easily. Once I could get logged into WordPress, I had to dig around a bit to learn that my last blogpost was two years ago. I could go on at length about my life in general, but I am going to focus on today, and it being the culmination of many years.
If you’re a long time reader and you are actually still subbed to this blog, I applaud you for sticking with it since my big blog fade. You will remember, Long Time Reader, that one of the games I have focused on for so many years was “D&D for Kids.” I don’t remember how the FLGS owner roped me into it (with satin ropes), but I’m sure it was one day when I had dragged my godchildren into her store and played something with them, and she was impressed with my ability with the kids that made her say “Hey, we want to have someone teach kids D&D! Would you be interested?” And probably my impulsive nature said “Yes!” before I considered the consequences. Long time readers might remember some posts here about those games (especially the one in which I dealt with 14 kids!), but eventually the posts faded away, like the kids. I got frustrated with players not showing up, parents not responding to emails, and people moving away without letting me know, so I eventually stopped running the game as a store event. The kids’ game dwindled to four kids: my godchildren, and children from another family, the P.s (names redacted for security).
(Now, I have to let you know that I jumped in with both feet about a year ago to run a “D&D Day Camp” at the same FLGS about a year ago, but that’s a subject for a different blog post.)
One of the two kids from the P.s has graduated high school this year, as has my godson. But the P. girl’s graduation is more impactful, as she’s leaving town to go to college on the Right Coast. So, today was her big going-away game. This was the continuing Starfinder game I’d been running since around the time of my last blogpost two years ago. I’d continued to run two games in “parallel,” or as close to said as possible, with the kids meeting once a month and an adults game meeting weekly.
Of course, COVID-19 has changed things: Both games have gone online, and the kids started meeting more regularly. Both families of kids are far more active that I ever was in school; both P.s are involved in drama, and my godkids are in band and color guard. Because of those activities, both families were frequently busy on the weekends, which is why we stuck with monthly games for so long. But COVID-19 actually helped us in that regard, as we could play more frequently. Mind you, I’m not saying COVID-19 is a good thing at all, but it has had a positive impact on our gaming frequency. So, I could accelerate the kids’ game. Today was the culmination of that.
And I must tell you, today, I ran the longest game I’ve run in a long time. We started just after 1PM, and closed up the game around 8:30PM. I’ve gotten used four hours tops. But I’ve also gotten used to running big set encounters with one big monster and a horde of minion-style monsters to act as speed bumps. That’s what this one was. My godson pulled his one of his regular stunts of throwing a monkey wrench into things in the middle of the game (I love the kid! He’s regularly able to throw something into my game, some wild thought, that derails all my plans. I do sincerely love what he adds to the mix.), and the game had many of the characters on the ropes. But in the end, someone else had the idea to complete the maguffin that I had thrown into the game and beat the bad guy, so that I could switch to narrative play and bring the game, and the kids’s plotline, to a close.
Yes, I’ve ended the kids’ game for a while. It needed to happen. A.P. leaves soon, and with only three other kids, I’m feeling the game is going to have a lot of difficulty continuing with so few players if I continue using Starfinder. So I need to do something else. As things ended, the three players who are still in town (my godkids and J.P., A.P.’s brother) are now on the quest to find A.P.’s character, who was lost in their transition to another dimension (the Fantasy Space universe I’ve been working on for so long).
I could spend a lot of time on this next idea, but part of this change is because I’ve learned to hate Starfinder. The garbage space combat rules, the disorganization of the rules, the quirkiness of the systems, and worst, my own inability to get the feel for encounter building have significantly soured me on the game. Two years in, and I’m ready to move on.
But the end of A.P.’s journey with us is the bittersweet part, and the end of the game just punctuates that. She’s a good kid. I have fond memories of her being there, from her start (as she told me tonight) as a seventh-grader through the past six years. I remember traveling with the god-family and stumbling across her in one of the outlying towns. She and a school group were also traveling, and she introduced me to some of her friends as “my Dungeon Master.” (Which, looking back on it, could be taken in a very bad, dark, strange way…) I will miss her presence at my table.
But she moves on with her life, and I hope to see her on my TV someday, sing her heart out on the stage as she goes for a Tony Award. I’ll be happy to be able to say, “I knew her when…”
It just got dusty in here, and it’s late. I need to hit the hay. The last few sessions of my Thursday game need to be plotted out, so I can wrap that one up, too, and get out of Starfinder.
Hug your kids. They grow up too damned fast.
Later.
Correcting the Course of My Life
In a few days, it will be the one year anniversary of Mom’s death, as covered in the previous post. I’ve felt the need to do an update for a while, but I’m finally getting around to it tonight. Partially because I’ve been reading up on organizing and procrastinating, and partially just because I feel I have some things I want to put here, rather than on Facebook, mainly due to length.
Over the past 51-ish weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out where things go from here, now that I’m no longer putting my life aside to help take care of Mom. That’s pretty much stating the obvious. While I’ve been wrestling with that, other things happened:
- In August, I picked up Starfinder, Paizo’s space fantasy. I enjoy the most of the system, the setting not so much. I don’t care for space combat, but I’m working on a solution.
- In August, I finished running Numenera, and came to the conclusion I won’t be running that game again, and in fact, earlier this year, I put all my books up for sale at the FLGS, Crazy Squirrel. The GM Intrusion is an intrusion on my storytelling to the point that I feel I can’t properly run a game.
- Nothing really special happened in September. My sister and I made it through our first birthdays without Mom’s presence without falling apart, which is good. (My sister was born the day before my 9th birthday.)
- Late October, shit started hitting the fan for me. I had lots of car problems, starting with my tires going bad just after their warranty had expired, followed by leaks in my car, which turned out to be the oil filter flange and a coolant system leak, which required a couple of replacements, and culminating in…
- Mid-November, when my car was broken into at CSGS, in which all my laptop (in it’s bag) and my EDC were stolen. That stretch cost me about $3,000, which I had only because I had Mom’s death benefits. Fortunately in a couple of cases, I ended up with better items (like the replacement laptop) than the items I lost.
- Thanksgiving went okay without Mom as well, as did Christmas and New Year’s. We all still miss her, and sometimes things set us off (like the Fallout 4 usage of Country Roads, the John Denver song, which our family has a special affinity for as Mom’s family is from West Virginia).
- In January, I started running two Starfinder campaigns, in a modified version of the Post-Gap Golarion universe. One was the Kids’ game, and the other is my Thursday night game at CSGS. I didn’t care for the plot of the first Adventure Path, but the first book is pretty decent, hitting a number of different systems (like ship combat and Zero-G), so I ran it for both groups, but decided to put both games in the same universe. I’ll discuss this more after I’m done recapping the year.
- In March, my sister got to talking with a former co-worker who is now a realtor, and we started talking about selling the house. While there were logical reasons to do it, there were a lot of reasons not to, and eventually those won. We finally stopped looking in mid-May, when the reality of the process caught up with us.
- Which brings us to June, our first Mom’s birthday without Mom. For her birthday, my brother took us to see Brian Regan, a comedian who we had listened to on tape on a previous Mom’s birthday while driving up to Yosemite. We all had a good time. And now, both my sister and I realizing we need to make changes in our lives, bigger changes that we thought in August of last year.
And that’s pretty much been the past year.
I had two things I wanted to expand on from above, and I’ll start with the lighter of the two, gaming.
As I mentioned, I started running two games in the same universe. As I didn’t care for the setting they included, I had the players in both groups create planets with some sort of adventure I could put on them. In a couple of cases, players from each group independently came up with the same idea. I stitched that together with parts of the Future Golarian I liked and we went from there.
The adults in the Thursday night game have completed the first adventure path and dealt with some backlash. I significantly changed the end, making their trip through the adventure an elaborate recreation of the adventure the kids are working their way through. That the adults are moving faster (because we meet weekly), I’ve had to guess at things the kids will do and how it will impact the adults’ game, and vice versa.
I’ve started watching the second campaign of Critical Role, which is up to Episode 24 on a weekly series. I’ve learned a good deal from Matt Mercer about how to handle NPCs and narrating the effects of combat, and I’ve been trying to incorporate those new lessons into the game as we play. I’m having a better time GMing that I have in quite a while, even with Titansgrave a couple of years ago. I’ve felt more creative than I have in a long time.
On to the important stuff, real life…
Once Mom died, I started thinking about my commitment to my job, as well as my direction in life. The job is just an income, and is slowly turning into nothing but a source of stress. The free time has kinda worked for me, but my own lack of organization and discipline means I’m not getting anything significant done. I need to change these things.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a Facebook post that referenced a movie in which the main character makes a deal with the Devil to get his heart’s desire, and of course, that doesn’t work out well. The poster went on to say that the lead character didn’t want to work for the things he wished for. It kind of hit me as my own situation for quite a while now: I have things I want, but I haven’t wanted to work for them for quite a while, probably since about 2012, when I last submitted to Wizards before 4e was cancelled. I’ve been coasting.
Lack of desire to work doesn’t interact well with ADHD, at least, not if you want to change things in your life. So, over the past few weeks, while I’m not working, looking for a job that I care about enough to actually put in the effort to apply for, and doing some gaming stuff, I’ve been looking at methods to try to regiment my time better. I’ve pretty much decided to try some variation of bullet journalling. In that research, I stumbled across this page: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.html. This post, and a couple of connected ones, are very much a description of my life. And hopefully a pointer to a way I can get some motivation to get out of my current, going-nowhere situation.
That’s all I’m going to post this time around. It seems incomplete, but I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on this post, and I’d like to move on to something else. There are so many other things I could write about, but if I wracked my brain and remembered all of them,and then wrote about all of them, I’d never complete this post. If I restart posting here consistently, it will mean I’ve actually got something other than how my life is going to post about.
Later.
Independence Day
I’m not sure how to start this post. It’s basically going to be a eulogy, along with some of my own stuff.
Mom’s Obituary
Nada Evelyn Brown, “Mom”, passed away on July 4th, 2017, age 77, due to complications of diabetes. Her final days came quickly. On June 29th, the hospital was going to send her home. On July 2nd, she was on a bi-PAP for breathing problems. July 4th, she was put into hospice care at noon, and she passed away at 4:17PM.
Everyone liked Mom. Before she lost her hearing and she could still interact with folks, she came across as Mrs. Claus. A sweet little butterball of a woman, Mom made friends easily. But she was also somewhat stoic. We rarely saw her cry for any reason. She’d complain only a little about her aches and pains, but not when she felt really bad. “Oh, never mind,” was something we heard a lot, instead of “I really don’t feel good.”
That was what made her request to go to the hospital that last time so surprising. Usually she would have just suffered through and my sister and I would have to make the call. Not this time. Mom was desperate, not something I’d seen before.
She seemed to get better the first few days. But on July 1st, they couldn’t give Mom a full dialysis without her blood pressure crashing. July 2nd, the hospital called to tell us that her death was eminent. My brother made it down from Sacramento in record time. The doctors had a little hope one more attempt to give Mom dialysis might help, but that failed, too. So after meeting again with the palliative team, we made the decision to start hospice.
The weeks following Mom’s death were a mess. She was to be cremated, but the crematorium had just gotten a new oven and it broke down, so I had to leave work early to sign off on moving her body to a different crematorium (a majority of the survivors have to sign-off on such things). The cemetery has a limited number of places for cremated remains (I hate the portmanteau the industry uses, and I’ll not repeat it here), and between hunger and an assault of numerical information, we had some difficulty dealing with getting a plot for her. We had to make a couple of trips to the marker makers to get her a marker (because the first lady helping us didn’t know the program well). There were some issues with the photos we were using for the service. But, when the day finally came, everything went well. Having three weeks between her death and her memorial service, as well as six months of her out of the house, helped us in expressing our emotions, so the service was relatively tear-free. We had a picnic after as a reception, with fried chicken, as Mom would have enjoyed.
Three weeks have passed since the service, which is a total of six weeks (seven tomorrow) since Mom’s death. We think about her a lot, and there are plenty of old habits that die hard. Just last night, I wondered to myself if my sister had made a plate for Mom, and then remembered that Mom doesn’t need a plate any more.
On the other hand, “Independence Day” has a second meaning for us. It will no doubt sound heartless to say that not only was my mother freed from her failing body, we were also freed from all of the chores and burdens associated with caring for her. My sister the most, as she had manipulated her work schedule most and had the doctor appointment duty. Our time is now our own. My sister has taken more advantage of it than I have, having a couple of trips under her belt. No trips for me, but I’m working more hours, now that I’m free to work every day, rather than the Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule I had been working for the past year and a half.
Both of us are now looking for new jobs. Mom’s income was a fair chunk of the household income. My sister is having more success than I am, but that’s not stopping me. We need more income, and we now have freer schedules, we’re now open to new things, and available for more hours a day.
Some quick gaming updates–
I’ve continued running Numenera on Thursdays. I like that I can edit the piss-poor scenario I’m running on the fly. I can look at an opponent, assess their imbalance, and do the correcting math in about two minutes (assuming a lot of abilities that need to be adjusted). I don’t know that I’ll continue running it past the couple of published adventures I have available to me, but it’s good to know the system is so flexible.
The D&D 4e Kids game is almost done. They have one more battle (because I decided that there was one more battle I didn’t want to slog through, especially now that they have the macguffin weapon that is deadly to most of the creatures in the adventure). I put the bug in the kids’ ears that we can continue with a different game and a different world. We’ll see where they want to go in a couple of months.
My brain has been focused on the Superhero project. I’ve found the index card method really helps keep me from rewriting things, but not revising. But I haven’t gone revision crazy, so I’m staying focused. I’ve also decided that I may go ahead with gaming stats for the characters, but I’ll be using Fate Core and Venture City for my rules set. Why? Because numbers aren’t a big part of the system, but descriptives are, which are good for writing. John Rogers of The Librarians and Leverage fame uses the game for his own character development. So I think it can work for me. I can develop my characters without getting bogged down in mechanics.
That pretty much covers life for the past few weeks. But I’ve come to a conclusion. I’ve been quite happy not blogging for the past few weeks. The blog has really started to feel like a chore, even as I’ve kept altering my schedule to less and less regularity. For now, this blog is a burden I don’t need, so I’m going on indefinite hiatus where this blog is concerned. I’ll just be sticking, for now, to Facebook and Twitter and Google+ (and LiveJournal, but nobody uses LJ anymore).
Thanks for reading.
Later.
Taking Time Off
Most of my readers will have already gotten this information from my Facebook posts, but Mom has entered the end of her life. She’s a fighter, but soon she’ll lose this battle.
I’m going to need time to process this loss. I’m closer to Mom than I was to my dad, so I’m expecting a lot more hurt, even though I’ve been aware this was coming for a long time now. I’ve been mourning in stages from the time we went to the meeting at the dialysis center when they first told us Mom was on the road to dialysis. The loss of hearing, her loss of mobility, and her recent loss of “fire in the belly” to come home from rehabilitation have all kept me painfully aware that “the end was nigh.”
Anyway, I’m taking a couple of weeks away from this blog, as well as most other things. I’ve contacted my boss about work and my Thursday night group about taking time from the GM duties I’d just assumed. This post is your notice, Gentle Reader.
Later.
Pete and Repeat Went Up the Wall…
(Note: the first half of this post was started on June 9th, a few days after the last post. I thought I’d posted the draft and had simply not promoted it. Obviously I was wrong and I’m adding to the post now.)
After my last post, I sat down and re-examined the Google Docs file I’ve been using to write my thoughts about my superhero project. In so doing, I realized a problem with my creative flow: I cover the same ground multiple times. I noticed this with the StarSea as well. I continuously go over the same ideas.
So, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to change the way I work. I was looking to do that when I got my first iPad. That was why I was typing the five notepads I had filled when I started on the StarSea project. The idea was that eventually I would move the text files into some sort of database or wiki that would allow me to connect segments together. My distraction from that caused me to not learn this lesson.
Now I’m going to try something new. I was largely able to stay on track with the Adventurers! Rewrite by using index cards, numbered as chapters so I could follow them like an outline. So I’m going to try the card system with my superhero project and see how it works.
I’ve also got a Trello app for my mobile devices that I might try working with soon. I’m thinking about picking up OmniOutliner, too. It was included on one of my laptops as free software a few years ago, and I like using it, but that version doesn’t work like this new version, which works across devices through iCloud. While the app is relatively inexpensive for the Mac, it’s a bit more than I want to pay for the mobile version, even though I’ll be able to use it on both devices. I’ll be giving it more thought in the near future.
I really haven’t done much with this index card idea since I wrote the above. I mentioned the UTI issue last time. About the time I started this post, she was given Ativan to help her sleep. Unfortunately, sedatives like that linger in the diabetic’s body, especially in my mother’s case, as her liver also doesn’t function correctly. The liver and kidneys filter drugs out of the system, and when they don’t work, the filtering they should do obviously doesn’t happen. That’s part of the reason for dialysis. So from that point to now, Mom’s mind has been altered. It wasn’t frightening (at least what I experienced), and in fact, it was kind of amusing. But now it’s persisted.
We brought her home Thursday night, and put her directly to bed. Friday morning she was complaining of pain and acting very strange. She wasn’t very coherent, but she could answer questions, but mostly the answers were her repeating her complaints and then crying in pain. So we sent her back to the hospital, where they dialyzed her, as well as drawing a liter of fluid from her abdomen. It tested clean, so it seems it was just her body allowing fluid to pool. She came home last night, and complained enough that I was up attending to her three times this morning, shifting her position in the bed as best I could. All day today, she has been listless and lethargic. And since she’s been in bed again for a week, she again has no muscle tone or strength. Things are not going well. And tomorrow is her first dialysis after leaving the hospital, so we’re wondering if she’ll be able to transfer to a wheelchair for transport.
That’s all for now. Maybe I’ll remember to discuss FreeRPGDay at length. The short version is that I spent a lot of time prepping an adventure I ended up having to cancel. There is plenty more there, but I’m out of time for tonight.
Later.
Mother’s Day, Amikacin and You.
Last time, I mentioned how Mom’s prognosis was up and down. Over the past ten days, it’s been all over the place, exasperated by insurance issues. Last Friday (that is, before Mother’s Day), we were informed that Mom’s insurance would no longer cover her as a short term patient, as of this Thursday. So, our options are to bring her home unable to walk, but with therapists and nurses and such here at home, with all sorts of new devices to help us move her around, or we could put her in long term care, which would end any therapy for her and she would never come home.
We decided to bring her home.
But a week later, and she’s still at the convalescent home and we’re still without the equipment. The equipment is supposed to be here tomorrow, and so might Mom, but we have no real idea if we’re ready for her to be home. The next couple of weeks are going to be difficult no matter what.
Mom has realized that she didn’t do enough to help herself out of this situation, but we also realized that her health is so sensitive that her ability to consistently perform is hampered. She mentioned feeling shaky and not able to do her therapy many times during her stay, and only this past week or so did we realize that the shakiness was related to her infections. The most recent bout of shakiness was due to a UTI, which I know I’ve mentioned before is related to the lack of functionality of her kidneys.
When we learned about her impending discharge, we decided we’d put off doing anything for Mother’s Day until she came home. We did have the staff put Mom in her chair so we could take her out on the patio and have some peach pie my sister made the day before. I hear from folks a lot that I should enjoy these times more than I do, but I often feel like I’m spending time with a stranger. I know I’ve mentioned it before that Mom has lost her hearing. I used to spend a lot of time with her, discussing life and all that. Now, since the destruction of her hearing, it is so difficult trying to talk to her that I’ve basically given up on such complex subjects.
I say “destruction” because that’s basically the truth of the matter. Mom’s hearing was destroyed by Amikacin, and antibiotic used to treat MRSA, which Mom had contracted during one of her visits to the hospital. I posted about it on Facebook, and I wanted to repost my original post every year, but Facebook makes that basically impossible, so I’ll try to make this a regular thing here on the blog. So here’s my warning to you, gentle reader:
Amikacin is an antibiotic used in the treatment of MRSA, medically resistant staphylococcus aureus. It has a known side effect of burning out the cilia in the inner ear, destroying the patient’s ability to hear. You have been warned, friends: you will lose your hearing if you are prescribed amikacin.
Only a cochlear implant has any hope of restoring hearing, and implants are not advised for diabetics, due to healing issues related to the disease. So Mom will never clearly hear again, and I can’t really talk to her any more.
I could go on with other things, like John Wick, or my creative projects, but it’s late and I’m not really interested in writing more now.
Later.
W*rk is a Four-Letter Word
Last night, I wrote a lengthy piece on how work has been going lately. I’m in a better mood today, and I’ve decide it was too long and inappropriate to be posting in anything approaching a public forum. Suffice it to say, it has been very stressful lately.
Adding to the stress is Mom’s condition. One week, she seems on fire and is really working to come home. The next week, she seems completely unmotivated. She’s been out of the house since sometime in February, I think. We thought going to Yosemite for her birthday would motivate her, and it seemed to for about two weeks. My sister and I are getting tired of the delays, and they all seem centered on Mom.
I finished the Economix book. I really wasn’t too surprised by much in the final chapters. I’ve lived through them.
I still recommend the book to anyone interested in how our economy got as messed up as it is.
I otherwise haven’t done much of anything creative lately. I honestly couldn’t tell you what I’ve been doing with my evenings that aren’t Thursday through Saturday. Sometime in the last two weeks, I watched Arrival, which was a pretty amazing movie. I reread the Killraven comic book mini-series of a few years ago, written and illustrated by Alan Davis. There are some ideas within that series that have inspired some of my ideas in StarSea. That’s all I can remember right now, even looking at a calendar.
That’s pretty much it for this fortnight. Later.
Doc Ryder's Wyrd Science 