contrarianarchon | Entries tagged with self-involved rambling?

I think I've fucked up my discord usage somewhere. It's becoming more and more the social media thing of just being an attention-sink, hundreds of people and conversations to track and track and track and not at all like, something I can participate in. I don't really know what to do about that. Probably the answer is "Acknowledge I can't follow all these goings-ons and drop out of a some communities where my presence is only tenuous entirely" but I do so hate that.

... I feel in general like I've gotten bad at having good conversations in the past months. Maybe since during norway? Not sure. Still, socializing feels like a lot of obligation and grind to many different people rather than like, doing cool things with the people I like best. I'm reminded of that one SCC post about finding your tribe and the advantages of that over friendship by just finding the ten coolest people and trying to be friends with them but I feel pulled between a dozen tribes and don't like any of them as tribes, rather than as places where cool people I consider friends are. IDK. I don't really know what to do. Try and talk to people, I guess. I think these are issues I've always had but I've felt unrewarded WRT them lately. Maybe it's an illusion of some form, and interesting things are still happening to me but the shape of my thoughts it wrong for me to see it. Still, there feels like a problem, and that needs a solution. Ideas/Insights welcome.

Current Mood: melancholy

I've been reading some

play articles because of an offhand mention by

brin_bellway. It's interesting, really. I don't think the author prizes "engaging core loop" at all - there's this sense that that stuff is just what you do between tactical decisions (I mean, I this might just be really strong engagement with that second-layer loop, since he does seem to like the "accelerated" features that reduce space between challenges. ). It's an interesting mindset, but this is something I've been thinking about for a while, is the low-level experience of game-play and user interfaces. There have been several games that I notionally would find quite interesting but which I will not play because the user interface is sticky and hard to make do the interesting things. On the other hand, MTGarena has a wonderful UI (in actual games) and also MMO-adjacent levels of cheap rewards. I've been enjoying playing that a lot - I've stuck with it much more enduringly than I would have imagined I would, much more than I do nearly any video games. And yet it has no trading features. I'm annoyed about that. It's honestly incredibly antisocial in many facets, really. But I've gotten decently good - I think I win more than I lose in draft matches, for one thing. I don't think I actually like playing a video game that much, it feels like a time-sink in a way that reading or chatting doesn't (always) feel. ... or maybe that's just this game? Maybe a more social game might feel otherwise? I don't know, beyond the vague guilty sensation that I might like to play a MMO at some point. Not that I have the time for it, with life and all my other internet-hobbies being what they are.

People are talking about lack of content on dreamwidth and also trying to lower the barrier to "This might be interesting" so let me tell you a story about ... arguably how I got into fandom?

Okay, so teen-me didn't really get fandom or know it's existence. This is because I follow trains of media and recommendation mostly rather than trying to find my own stuff. I'm always open to recommendations for stuff people like, and I find that ones friends and internet-blogs and tv-tropes crawls generate plenty of recommendations for cool things to read without needing to, like, actually search for media. (I'm working on developing that skill, but it's *hard*. How do people do it?). I still mostly work this way, but I have friends in fandom now (and also friends in fandoms, which is kinda not the same thing?), so I get fanfic recs as well as other stuff.

SO yeah! Back, maybe ~3 years ago, I was recommended To The Stars. This, for people who don't know, is a high-scifi story set in the distant future of the PMMM universe. I knew exactly two things about Madoka at that point - that it was dark, and that the fluffy familiar could not be trusted. This recommendation also came with the advice that everyone except the blue-haired girl was gay. (and she was bisexual). This was not helpful, because To The Stars assumes you know what the characters look like. I did not. Nonetheless! It was a good fic! I enjoyed reading it greatly. It's a very compelling mystery story when you have no idea who this "Homura" person is or what their thing is. (Or any of the other character backstories or motivations).

This continued, and in combination with who I get recs from, I now am in a weird state of being in near-total disjunction between "Works I really like" and "Works that I read fanfic for". (Worm is in the latter case - I read lots of wormfic, am even considering writing some, but would never touch the original myself. Ditto with RWBY)

To be fair, I'd read fanfic for my favorite stuff if it existed. But there are like three fics on Ao3 each for PGTE and TGAB, so what am I going to do? (SV has a couple for each as well, which I do read, but they're mostly Worm crossovers.)

Current Mood: Impulsive
Current Music: Sun God - Jonah Knight

Classes go back, time to drag my sleep schedule forward four hours and hate everything.

Also in This Semester:
-A group project formation system which combines the worst of choosing a group and having one randomly assigned to you.
-Multi-hour lectures
-academic pressure
-our university apparently getting ripped off by national instruments?

(I'm sleep-deprived and pessimistic right now, so please stand by for more optimistic opinions when that stops.)

(I'm sure that will be any year now)

Current Mood: sleepy

I just got two follows in rapid succession on bandcamp. I was not, I must say, aware that this was a thing that could happen. I wonder why?

(TBH still mildly in shock that there are people who are willing to read my blog here, let alone people who are willing to follow me for my ... good taste in music? What?)

On an unrelated note, I figured out to make good teriyaki! The secret is that the sauce is literally 1 cup of soy sauce and one cup of brown sugar and garlic!

Current Music: The silence of a empty university campus. Not music, actually that.

Hmm. Thinking about the last couple of RPG sessions I've run, and I think I can def see my skill as a gm improving. At my club, my gimmick is that I'm the "Improv" GM; the person who can throw together something that will be fun in five minutes and teach new systems as I go. So I end up doing that a lot. Combined with laziness, my ability to prep in advance has suffered. That's not the end of the world, since, well, I can improv, but it makes longer games much harder to run. This combo's with the club-nature of membership constantly in flux, so games rarely last anyway. This kinda behavior informs a lot of what I do.

The two markers I can see which I think are indicating that I'm becoming a better gm is that I'm much better at getting engagement; I'm a pretty open gm, I talk about assumptions, ask a lot of questions and generally don't keep that many secrets, except in as much as many games have lack of perfect tactical and strategic information as a core element. I can be bombastic and kinda pressing at times, I think, but I'm getting much better at making rants entertaining and inviting people to participate and have thoughts and contributions. This is esp needed to prevent the "Single person who has force of personality and a goal drives the whole plot" thing which many of these games suffer from. The other thing I'm getting much better at is answering the question "What happens next" on a session to session level as well as a moment to moment one. This really good for preventing games from dying after one session if one is flying by the seat of one's pants. I think it helps that both of the games I'm running now have pretty episodic natures; one, I have been describing literally in the terms of a television show at points.

What do I still need to work on:
Prep and plot is still a big deal; I could make scenes hang together, now I can make sessions, next I need to make proper plots do so. I also need to prep more stuff for the games I know I'm going to be running, so I'm not writing worldbuilding literally as the players explore
I need to work on getting more RP into these RPGs; currently they run very much like games, with characters existing as tools for interacting with the world and achieving campaign-defined goals first and as people who talk and feel second. This I think is in part due to a general discomfort speaking in character (as opposed to describing the content and gist of a conversation), which, having identified it literally just then I can maybe work on that.

Overall: My players are having fun and I'm not working myself to the bone doing it, so all is basically well. Still, I can always do better.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Leslie Fish - Bashing The Balrog

Well, first day of classes this year! Only two lectures, and comfortably in the afternoon (unlike tommorow). Nonetheless, it'll be interesting to get into the swing of things (and hard to resist the peer-reinforced temptation to just give up on attending)

Wish me luck!

Current Mood: Anticipatory

Okay, so I got to thinking, and one of things I love about music is seeing recurring themes. These ideas which, I blow up in mind; these recurring themes. And I know I'm probably making more of this than it really is, but it's part of the mythos of following a musician to me, what lyrics and themes the grapple with again and again. It's just so cool.

The one which prompted me to write this is seeing the new single by Dessa - Grade School Games, which I am listening to on loop as I write this. I heard the title of it, and well, it fitted? She's been grappling with that metaphor for a while now; the the way you're raised and how it influences your life, and the metaphor of childhood games being the ratrace of our adult lives (And several other things in that general ballpark). It's a fascinating theme and it's really neat to see different explorations of that angle in her music.

This can also be really small; I've noticed in a few songs that Thousand Foot Krutch have this lyric "If Words can be weapons" and (let me be clear this is almost certainly me reading too much into a lyric that got used in a couple of songs, and that I have no knowledge of what the artist was actually thinking here, I haven't even looked and I'm not seriously into that artist), but it's a big part of my image of that artist; that theme, that feeling of surprise that words can change things, that they *matter*. I love it.

I think part of it is that music is the medium which conveys emote and themes best to me. I tend to read very literally and I'm often actively unwilling to dissect the content. RPGs and video games are for fun, so recurrence is about aesthetic and story, more than deep emotion and meaningful themes (Plus, have you ever tried to get half a dozen people on board on the same emotion and themes and direction without serious direction and rehersal? It takes far more than I have to give at my current level of skill. Well, I guess I'll have to get better. But I digress). When I look at visual mediums, I just look, I just see, I don't emote so much? And I don't really do video when I can avoid it. So when I want to emote deeply, when I want to express a feeling or a mood or a theme, then music is where I go (Well, I find someone's music. I'm about as unmusical as they come, when it comes to creating the stuff, and the price of that is speaking a language someone else wrote. But then, I'm not a genius, and my heart, sadly, does not encompass the world, so I will probably be the better for that. Purity of the note is sacrificed for the ability to dance more than once dance. If I could dance.) Take that entire above paragraph with a pinch of salt or two, it's most exaggerations and oversimplifications to try and pick apart a thought.

Wow, I got off topic. I also used up all my positive intensifiers. Well, maybe. I could probably come with some other ones. Oh! Awesome! It's also *Awesome* to pattern-match these recurring ideas and themes and lyric fragments in the longer view of an artists work.

Current Mood: enthralled
Current Music: Dessa - Grade School Games (Duh)

questionoftheday asks: Apart from the internet/social media, what do you do in your free time?

My answer:

Well, ignoring the bland answer of "Read", my main hobby is Role-Playing Games. Y'know, like D&D? But not. Mainly WoD since that's what my IRL club likes, but I'm a big fan of Exalted (My Heart Burns for a 3e game right now), and Jenna Moran Games. A few D&D/Pathfinder games here and there. A couple other things.

... Y'know if I sit down and do the maths, I'm putting like 20 hours a week into this. Eh, I'm sure it's fine.

Current life goals: Get tab-count down to less than 200 tabs. This seems viable; the last 2 days of cleaning my browser have taken me from 320 to 254. I think there's enough low-hanging fruit that I can cut another 50 without too much trouble. (Identified low-hanging fruit: 20 or so tumblr tabs remain, 15 or so tabs of recipes I want to read, 20 tabs of youtube music I need to totally legitimately obtain, 20 tabs of RPG books I can convert into a shopping list, which is mildly tedious but not hard).

Current Mood: Ambitious
Current Music: The Mountain Goats "Younger"

Huh, actually had sleep paralysis last night. A novel experience. I was lying on my side, faceing the wall, and wanted to roll over to check what time it was, and I kept, like, sending the signal to roll over, and then feeling the sensation of movement, and then checking my sense-data and getting a "nope, still facing the wall". That looped like six to eight times before I snapped out of it. No hallucinations or senses of being watched or anything, for which I am eternally grateful.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Nobody Will Escape by Elsiane

... I really want to go get pho from somewhere, but we're in the middle of a mid-summer heatwave, so large bowl of hot soup does not seem like wise food. So annoying...

Current Mood: annoyed

This is the last of a series of really nice down-time days for me, between the end of my exams and the holiday season. No more time off (where time off is aggressively defined as "A day I can sit around reading in, without any commitment more strenuous than light housework or cooking") until after Christmas, between my club and Christmas. Not that all that won't be fun, it'll just also be tiring and involved. Also, I think I'm supposed to attend a online movie-night which starts at 5:30 in the morning next Saturday, so that'll be ... interesting, I guess.

Still, once Christmas is over, I'll have more time off. A whole summer holiday, in fact. So I shouldn't complain about having to spend a few days with the relatives. It's not even like it'll be unpleasant. Just tiring.

(Also, could anyone link me some good rationalist solstice songs on YouTube? I'd like to have a playlist to annoy/inspire my club with this Friday night.)