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The weekend was very nice, but exhausting. I woke up early and baked an apple pie on Saturday morning! It took quite a bit longer than anticipated, but I'm happy with the result at least. It took me a little while to find my groove peeling the apples but I developed a good system by the time they were all done. I'm pretty happy with the cutting I did too; nice uniform pieces of even thickness and everything!
It looked great, but I was a little disappointed with the taste once we cut into it. The pie was for a friend's birthday party, and it got good marks from the partygoers so that's the best I can hope for. Next time I really want to make my own crust! That'll take a bit more time but if I can manage to pull it off I'll be really happy.
The Antlerfox's D&D campaign on Saturday afternoon was surprisingly intense. He started with a disclaimer reminding us all that this is just a game and even though this might be a little rough it's all to have a good time. That set the tone early; we were all so worried that we'd suffer a TPK while the enemy insulted us the entire time, but it wasn't that bad.
Quick summary of where the campaign is so far: the realm of Firstdawn is a patchwork reality of floating islands at the end of time. Most of the gods are dead, but the cosmology is still quite active. In a time like this when everything is getting broken down to its base parts before the end, it feels like the remaining gods all have A Thousand Faces, changing depending on who views them. On some islands, the God of Death is Malphis, the Raven Queen; on others, it might be the Black Rabbit of Inle.
Our party has been looking for sensitive religious artefacts that were stolen from their secure locations before the campaign. For Liyonil, the jackalope eldritch archer, he must find his missing brother Lendrix and the statue of the Black Rabbit of Inle before calamity befalls them. Only, I guess it's too late.
The island we were on was broken apart by a powerful magical ritual that Lendrix helped to bring about. This was the session we learned that he was in on the whole thing, motivated by intense jealousy of being the firstborn son of the noble Brightbriar house but overlooked in favor of the magical golden child (me). So, there was that reckoning.
The turn reinvigorated my interest in the campaign, and gave Liyonil a much-needed shot in the arm. Liyonil told Lendrix how much he admired him growing up, how much he wanted to be him, and how he ultimately never really knew his brother at all if he's the kind of rabbitfolk who would break the world to get one over on family.
I'm really stoked for the next session, which won't be for another month. We learned a LOT about what's happening behind the scenes of the world, like all of the PCs being of interest because they have "inked blood". We don't know what that means yet, but I get the feeling that it gives us power over our stories most others don't have. Very intriguing!
This week my goal is to practice mindfulness as often as possible. There are others, of course -- I'd like to have laundry cleaned and folded by the end of the week; the rope lights for the computer desk installed; and for the home office to be a little more organized. There's still a lot of stuff from the old computer desk that doesn't have a new home yet, and there's still some e-waste to take down to Goodwill.
I'm still re-learning how to have goals and achieve them, so I wanted to start relatively small. Laundry is a great "top goal" because it's one of those things that will require sustained effort over multiple days; if I keep pushing off the laundry to the weekend or something, it'll mean a lot more work crunched into a much tighter time-frame and who wants that?
There's also this week's Unlicensed Adventures game. The crew is out of the Leonin Embassy, but it went about as bad as it could go while still being counted as a win. Still, they saved the hostages (most importantly, Hesper) and got some presumably actionable information out of the deal. The next session, I think, will be a LOT of interrogation, information-gathering and contextualizing, and -- eventually -- learning how the community of Unity will react to this unprecedented event.
Behind the scenes, I have a lot of worldbuilding to do. I have a fairly solid skeleton, but the players are close enough to make out details that I should have in mind already. I'll make sure that I have most of what I need for the next session ready by the week's end; hopefully, that will allow me to build out the world from there.
One final thing I'd like to be conscious of this week is how long it takes to do things. There's only 24 hours in the day, and if I want to do everything I need to do I'm going to have to be more efficient. That means taking less than 90 minutes to make dinner, less than 45 minutes to shower, etc. At least for now, the theory is that I take so long to do basic shit because I'm not really *present* when I'm doing them. I'm off thinking about the song stuck in my head or whatever I'm doing later. Being conscious of how long something is taking helps me inquire a bit more deeply about various processes. Why do I shower like that? Do I have to be so thorough about the dishes? What makes me so nervous about my knife skills that I have to go slow chopping and dicing things?
And none of this feels like self-reprimanding, at least for the moment. It really does feel like a bit of a game, a way to train for improvement on all the things I'm doing anyway.
It looked great, but I was a little disappointed with the taste once we cut into it. The pie was for a friend's birthday party, and it got good marks from the partygoers so that's the best I can hope for. Next time I really want to make my own crust! That'll take a bit more time but if I can manage to pull it off I'll be really happy.
The Antlerfox's D&D campaign on Saturday afternoon was surprisingly intense. He started with a disclaimer reminding us all that this is just a game and even though this might be a little rough it's all to have a good time. That set the tone early; we were all so worried that we'd suffer a TPK while the enemy insulted us the entire time, but it wasn't that bad.
Quick summary of where the campaign is so far: the realm of Firstdawn is a patchwork reality of floating islands at the end of time. Most of the gods are dead, but the cosmology is still quite active. In a time like this when everything is getting broken down to its base parts before the end, it feels like the remaining gods all have A Thousand Faces, changing depending on who views them. On some islands, the God of Death is Malphis, the Raven Queen; on others, it might be the Black Rabbit of Inle.
Our party has been looking for sensitive religious artefacts that were stolen from their secure locations before the campaign. For Liyonil, the jackalope eldritch archer, he must find his missing brother Lendrix and the statue of the Black Rabbit of Inle before calamity befalls them. Only, I guess it's too late.
The island we were on was broken apart by a powerful magical ritual that Lendrix helped to bring about. This was the session we learned that he was in on the whole thing, motivated by intense jealousy of being the firstborn son of the noble Brightbriar house but overlooked in favor of the magical golden child (me). So, there was that reckoning.
The turn reinvigorated my interest in the campaign, and gave Liyonil a much-needed shot in the arm. Liyonil told Lendrix how much he admired him growing up, how much he wanted to be him, and how he ultimately never really knew his brother at all if he's the kind of rabbitfolk who would break the world to get one over on family.
I'm really stoked for the next session, which won't be for another month. We learned a LOT about what's happening behind the scenes of the world, like all of the PCs being of interest because they have "inked blood". We don't know what that means yet, but I get the feeling that it gives us power over our stories most others don't have. Very intriguing!
This week my goal is to practice mindfulness as often as possible. There are others, of course -- I'd like to have laundry cleaned and folded by the end of the week; the rope lights for the computer desk installed; and for the home office to be a little more organized. There's still a lot of stuff from the old computer desk that doesn't have a new home yet, and there's still some e-waste to take down to Goodwill.
I'm still re-learning how to have goals and achieve them, so I wanted to start relatively small. Laundry is a great "top goal" because it's one of those things that will require sustained effort over multiple days; if I keep pushing off the laundry to the weekend or something, it'll mean a lot more work crunched into a much tighter time-frame and who wants that?
There's also this week's Unlicensed Adventures game. The crew is out of the Leonin Embassy, but it went about as bad as it could go while still being counted as a win. Still, they saved the hostages (most importantly, Hesper) and got some presumably actionable information out of the deal. The next session, I think, will be a LOT of interrogation, information-gathering and contextualizing, and -- eventually -- learning how the community of Unity will react to this unprecedented event.
Behind the scenes, I have a lot of worldbuilding to do. I have a fairly solid skeleton, but the players are close enough to make out details that I should have in mind already. I'll make sure that I have most of what I need for the next session ready by the week's end; hopefully, that will allow me to build out the world from there.
One final thing I'd like to be conscious of this week is how long it takes to do things. There's only 24 hours in the day, and if I want to do everything I need to do I'm going to have to be more efficient. That means taking less than 90 minutes to make dinner, less than 45 minutes to shower, etc. At least for now, the theory is that I take so long to do basic shit because I'm not really *present* when I'm doing them. I'm off thinking about the song stuck in my head or whatever I'm doing later. Being conscious of how long something is taking helps me inquire a bit more deeply about various processes. Why do I shower like that? Do I have to be so thorough about the dishes? What makes me so nervous about my knife skills that I have to go slow chopping and dicing things?
And none of this feels like self-reprimanding, at least for the moment. It really does feel like a bit of a game, a way to train for improvement on all the things I'm doing anyway.
