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[annoinferno]

Uh Trip (19.4.24)

I was gonna write a trip update for y'all but I'm drunk from expensive drinks at a nice restaurant.

As said before, trip going well. I've purchased books. Oops. I'll purchase more. Oh well! Apart from getting up early two days in a row it's been very nice. I've had plenty of downtime and seen lots of cool places the never been before.

Often I don't blog at all during trips and I'm learning why. It's hard! I just want to crash at the end of a busy day in a place I don't live. Once I'm in Salt Lake that will probably be the case every night.

As is I'm not even gonna try tonight. I'm enjoying myself. You should too. Go eat some flowers.

[annoinferno]

Inexcusable (18.4.24)

My vacation is going well, I may write an update tomorrow night.

The United States just vetoed Palestine's request to become a full member of the UN.

I hope in a day, a year, and a decade from now this is seen as the most shameful and hateful act second only to the active performance of genocide it aides.

[annoinferno]

Odd Repeat (16.4.24)

Made it to Seattle. Yet again crashing into an unused "guest room" with little more than a day bed in it. Last time was at my uncle's place when I had heat exhaustion last year. This is my sister's place. It's not bad. That time at my uncle's was a reprieve from hell even if I spent most of it in deep fatigue and light fever. This time I'm doing better, but still need to pass out.

[annoinferno]

Hay (a fiction) (15.4.24)

She had been there three days and made the adjustment well. She could hear the difference between rain falling on the raised part of the sheet metal porch covering and rain falling in the lower channels where it splished into the draining runoff. It was always raining this time of late evening, every sunset buried in soaked greys. It was warm inside, though, and even on the porch the residual heat of the afternoon left the air humid and comfortable. She was from a dry, cool region, but could barely remember it. This was her first time settling in somewhere in more than a decade.

But something bothered her. The smoke. The couple in charge of things were always smoking, the field hand was always smoking, and the other refugee had taken it up. The food was smoked, the kitchen was smoky, the dining room was poorly ventilated because of the rain clogging the vents so it was always smoky too. There was no escape from it.

She was struggling to breathe. No one else was on the porch, but the humidity clung to her chest and throat. She couldn't stop thinking about the smoke, the food that tasted like smoke, and the single red vision of her home village, going up in smoke, bodies in the streets, babies crying, women grim faced with knives in their skirts waiting behind doors for the soldiers, men already dead where they had been standing at the barricades or fled into the woods.

No air. The smoke. Mommy, daddy. She needed air. She tore at her clothes and began punching at the rough with her pick to let air in. She went to the tobacco store and lit it on fire, and the others all began screaming at her but she couldn't hear them. Then a woman with pink hair and a strange headband walked through the wall and clocked her, right cross to the chin, boot to the gut, and then the woman was gone.

She lay there, gasping, clear headed with pain. She was safe, they were letting her live and work here, she could leave when she wanted. She gripped her knife under her pillow tighter that night, but still slept better than she could remember.

[inspired by seeing someone play the new Rimworld DLC and saying they punched a pawn for having a break and wrecking stuff instead of arresting them because it's usually faster. Yes, this is just a shitpost basically.]

[annoinferno]

Flip (14.4.24)

I recently bought a Squiddy B plastic balisong trainer from Squid Industries.

I bought it on sort of a whim because it seemed like a good fidget toy and I've always liked balisong/butterfly knives, though have been far too scared to try using a live blade. I was actually looking for a balisong multitool as a joke when I saw this and realized such things exist and got very excited and bought one. Then I watched some videos on how to do some basic tricks. I'm very bad at it, though it has only been a day so that seems like I should expect it.

I thought I'd teach you what little terminology I've learned.

To play with a balisong, sometimes called a bali, is to flip. Someone who does this is a flipper. A trainer is a bladeless mimic of the real deal, and one with an actual edge is called a live blade.

The parts of the knife are simple. The parts you hold are handles, the blade is the blade. The handle with the rubber band is called the "bite handle" (here the rubberband represents which side the absent blade would fold into) and the other handle is the "safe handle." The points where the handles connect to the knife are the pivots, and that's where all the fun is.

A trick is a trick, if it opens the knife that's an open, if it closes the knife that's a close. Multiple tricks in a row is a combo. All pretty simple. If the grip positions the blade going up and away from you that's standard, and if it positions the blade down and towards you that's icepick. Specific tricks and opens have names, but I don't think explaining those in text would be very easy.

I have spent all day, and I really mean all day, flipping. It is an incredible fidget toy, but also my arms are both tired from it and my fingers have been whacked by plastic enough to be sore. I'll be buying a metal trainer at some expense to myself as soon as I'm back from my trip. A plastic trainer that doesn't resemble a blade at all can go on flights easily

Oh right, there are kinds of parts for the knives, such as whether they are channeled or sandwiched, zen pins or other, whether there's a latch, etc. but you don't care about that and these days it seems like a lot of the options are gone in favor of consensus on channels, bushings, no latch, at least for the knives I've seen people flipping with.

This shit is so fun.

[annoinferno]

Load Off (12.4.24)

My Cyberpunk: RED players finally got to do a heist that we have been building up to for months. It went unusually smoothly in some regards, a little rough in others, and probably deserves at least one post over on my tabletopping blog, and it isn't what tonight's post is about.

Tonight's post is about how I feel this lead weight off my shoulders now. I can feel how much happier I am having it out of the way. I can feel how much easier it will be to run the game from here on, even building up to large events will be simpler. A lot of this campaign has been learning how to do the job as I do it, and while it has wracked my nerves and made me incredibly anxious with responsibility, it has also been good to go through. There's confidence I've gained from it, but also experience and knowledge of how stories work for people, about how to be a better player at the table, about how to handle difficult choices in ways that satisfy differing needs, and about layout design.

What was that last one? Oh, the CPR book is laid out horribly. I don't care if Maximum Mike himself finds me saying this with my 0 published games under my belt, even my little experience lets me spot the issues. And there's a typo on the "Composition" skill. Embarrassing.

I had meant to write this earlier, like I've been saying, but the night got away from me (I was watching anime) so goodnight, and good luck!

When I was a kid playing Star Fox 64 I thought the game said "Gridlock!" instead of "Good luck!" before missions.

[annoinferno]

Pushing It (9.4.24)

Sorry for the brief absence. I'm not actually sure how many days it's been since I posted, whenever I miss a day it feels like I've missed a week. I'm currently using voice to text because I'm laying down in bed, and earlier my right arm was shaking from muscle exhaustion, and now my left arm is extremely sore and tired because I've been overusing it, which is using it a normal amount but it had surgery so it is still kind of suck.

I missed a day or two because I had insane sleep schedule stuff to make it to the eclipse but also my usual obligations, and I haven't been giving the blog the attention I should. I really need to start writing my posts earlier in the day. This is actually pretty early in my day comparatively, but I can't do anything else but lay in bed right now.

Apart from sleep schedule stuff, things have been pretty tame here. Nothing exciting is really going on, I just have a bunch of stuff coming up, mainly my trip to visit my sister and then mentos. I'll be gone for about 3 weeks, I guess I'll try and post throughout that as best I can. But I'll be stuck on my phone and I don't really like writing on my phone.

I found out recently that a YouTuber I watch who makes hour-long videos writes her scripts on her phone. Seriously unhinged behavior. Who the fuck does that.

[annoinferno]

Streaming and Chill (7.4.24)

I've been streaming a lot more TV and movies to people lately. Probably a little too much as I've been putting off other things like laundry and writing, but it's been fun and a nice break after feeling so much stress lately.

Tonight a secret advantage came up. If I stream stuff, others might too. So I get to see more things (and it's less work for me than streaming myself). Tonight Mentos streamed two animated shorts I'd never seen before, and someone else streamed one of Guillermo del Toro's Spanish language movies. I showed TerrorVision, a movie no one else really loved but which I adore. Also two of the Superman shorts, and some Tales from the Crypt which everyone has been enjoying lately.

After this summer is over I'll be in grad school and trying to socialize more offline, so this has been sort of a secret marathon effort on my part, just to watch a lot of stuff with a lot of people and take these nights easy. It's bittersweet because I'm moving towards a kind of life I'd rather have, but away from one I've found a lot of good things in.

Of course I won't be totally offline. I plan to still play or run tabletop games with my Internet friends, to run movie night assuming I still can, etc. Online friends are real friends and I love my online friends deeply, so I hope I have enough time to see them regularly. There have been times I wasn't very online, but they were rare and a lot of them were caused by depression making me asocial.

I'm probably just magnifying the level of change in my head. I know at first after the move and classes start that things will be hectic, but after that it'll probably settle down.

But still, I really love watching stuff with people and shooting the shit right now.

[annoinferno]

Animation Is Beautiful (6.5.24)

Tonight I watched some of the Max Fleischer 1941 Superman shorts with a friend, and they really have never drawn anything else that moves like that since then. After a few of those I showed him an episode of Cybersix because he's from Argentina and the creators of the original comic are too, even though it was initially published in Italy and the anime was drawn in Japan, with a Japanese scenario writer, and a Canadian scriptwriter for an American/Canadian voice cast and sound department. Yes, that's right, neither time a major Cybersix series was started was in Argentina or in Spanish, and arguably never in the writers' native language.

Anyway, both of these series move like nothing else. I was excited for every second of Cybersix even though I watched it not too long ago with RCC because it just looks so fucking good. The Fleischer shorts were groundbreaking when they come out, and set a bar that few have ever even come near since. ARGH!

I yell a lot when watching gorgeous animation. I love animation. I love watching animated pictures! It is the perfect intersection of two of the great qualities of art: the use of abstraction to reduce things to essential aspects and the use of illusion to create something otherwise impossible. Both are necessary steps of all art, but in animation both are embraced fully and counted on for the entire effect of the piece.

By animating a scene, abstraction is the starting point. Unlike live-action film where a lit scene can happen by accident, in animation you only ever have the blank page, cel, or screen. Every addition defines a portion of the space, and eventually it is filled. Animation rarely aims at the photoreal, and even when it does, the use of animation to get there reduces it back to something more concentrated, heightened by the minimization of extraneous detail. More often the style is cartoony, and cartoons really constrain things to a limited set of qualities.

By running a series of pictures together to create motion, you count on an illusion. Langer wrote about the creation of virtual spaces via the two-dimensional visual arts, and with animation we get virtual motion. Does involving more levels of virtualization make something better? Not automatically, but animation is an artform that meticulously manages the two forms of virtuality it works with at all moments.

Do I like animation because it is so emphatic in these two aspects of art? I don't know. I love that it does that, but my love of animation goes back well before I knew how to describe or even think about these things. But maybe in my pre-knowledgable state it was sensing these things deeply that made it so magical to me. I don't think that's too incredibly to suggest, you're never too dumb to have an aesthetic sense and sensitivity.

Gods I love animation. It's so beautiful.

[annoinferno]

Busy Lately (5.4.24)

Or sort of. So last Wednesday I got my hair done and got glutened. Then shortly after I also decided my hair wasn't as red as I wanted and told my stylist who scheduled me for a fix. Recovering from gluten was quicker than usual because I had very, very little contact and it had been a long time since I'd had any but it still sucked a lot.

The haircut itself is a big change for me. I have bangs for the first time in ages, though they are so long and angled that they rarely function as bangs and maybe don't really count. I love it though, will post a pic or two soon maybe.

The next day or the day after that I got into my top choice for grad school, Simmons, which was very exciting. It still is, actually.

Then I went out with my bestie to an event on trans day of visibility, Sunday. People kept saying Easter for some reason, dunno why. That was fun but draining because I was still getting better from the gluten.

That same day I talked to my ex-wife at length for the first time since I left. We've chatted and said stuff to each other from time to time, but hadn't really talked about the divorce and everything. We finally did, and caught each other up on our lives, and it was good but took a ton out of me. It still hurts a ton that neither of us really want things to be this way but also can't really make them go back to how they were. It was also strange talking to her and realizing we're not familiar with each other anymore. I don't like feeling like she's a distant person in my life now, but that's how it is.

I think Monday was normal?

Tuesday I had physical therapy and my hair color fixed. That alone was pretty tiring.

Wednesday I read a long article about the use of AI systems by Israel to produce target lists and track targets and automate the murder of thousands. Something about it caused me to have my first serious anxiety attack in a long time. I was largely non-verbal and lacked significant motor control for hours. I still feel the damage to my soul, and will for a long time. I twitched so hard and so much that my arm hurt all day today.

Today was good. I showed movies I love to my friends online. I'm glad I was too lazy to ever democratize movie night when I thought about it before. I don't think it would add much to the event in the long run, because formally polling a group of like 12 people maximum about what they want to see each week is tedious, but also because I get to turn it into whatever I need each week. This week I needed comedies I'd seen before. My friends showed up and we laughed and had a chaotic little fun time and it was great.

I really needed that. Truth be told I could prolly use it again and again and again. I am in need of some serious mental restoration from all this stuff.

[annoinferno]

Fear of Politics (3.4.24)

My parents are accepting. My new hair stylist is accepting. We all know what I mean when I say accepting. I mean of trans people, and me in particular. And they really are, it's not just that they grin and bear it or put up with it for my sake, no, they really do accept trans people.

But they are afraid of being political. Not all the time. They have distinct opinions, explicitly political ones that they hold dear. But my hair stylist was saying she has a client who is a conservative retired cop and she loves him, he's great. Her tattoo artist is also a conservative man and she likes him too. I think "what's that like, being able to do that? To be able to like someone you know is conservative and keep them in your life? How do you tolerate the presence of someone whose dispassionate political opinions are my death sentence? Where, where is your spine?"

I say nothing because it would be attacking a straw man. She only said conservative, not in what ways. Maybe they just like going to Church and the legal fiction that children are property of their parents.

My dad asked me to read a blog post of his. He has a travel blog. He asked if it seemed political. It's about his recent trip to a National Park that is along the Mexico-Texas border and how easy it was to cross, how open, and how it contrasted with what you hear and expect from the news. Does his post seem political? I said of course it does. How could anything seem apolitical anymore? But he wants to come across as if he doesn't have an opinion, because conservative people read his blog and it would be a hassle if they didn't like him. That's not what he says but that's what it boils down to.

When push comes to shove, my father is not a coward. But when it is only push, or not even push yet, apparently he is.

I don't even know what to say. It's been a long day and I'm tired. The fascist surge is enabled by polite people.

[annoinferno]

Trans Day of Visitation (a fiction) (1.4.24)

The crickets woke me up, or I should say the lack of crickets. The July heat would smother us in our beds unless we forced the double-wide window open, careful to not get splinters and thinking every night, we need dad to repaint the sill. The crickets were on par with the daytime traffic outside when I moved to New York City later on, but more regular and with fewer invectives.

They went quiet, and I rolled over, bleary. If you've ever woken up because your power went out and the sudden quiet got you, it was like that. I wasn't really awake yet, not until my brother said, "outside!" in a whisper, the bunk below me. I looked outside on reflex, out the open window that our bunk bed ran along. I didn't understand what I saw.

The lawn was in daytime, mid-afternoon. The sky was a black I've never seen since, totality. The stars were still there, but their light was stuck, dead in space, no longer part of the world as the house and lawn. Between the lawn and sky was the ship, spinning slowly, classic saucer shape. Part of the difficulty is that everyone laughs at the shape. It looked that way, but no one takes a flying saucer story seriously. How could they? I wouldn't. But it was a saucer, and I can't make myself lie either.

It was grey, flat grey, the color between life and death, except for the bright, radioactive pink rectangle, dead center of one side. It didn't rotate with the rest of the ship, and got progressively bigger until the perspective wore off and I realized it was pressed against our window, blotting out everything else and searing the backs of my eyes, showing me the strange spiral pattern that filters out ultraviolet in the human eye. Figuring out what that was took me years in the library and I only found out by a series of accidents.

We felt a pull, from inside, half mental half physical. My brother was in the top bunk where the window was open. I heard him shout and struggle, scrambling in the bedding, but I couldn't look or help him because I was being pulled into the glass. It was pressing me with the full force of my body against the window, and I was trying to push off without getting splinters or pressing on the glass even more. I was scared it would shatter against my weight and slice me apart. I yelled for my brother to help me, but he couldn't. He was drifting out into the pink, yelling, I don't know what. He was swallowed by the light and it felt like my eyes were bleeding, and then he was gone. An instant of the yard in daylight, the night swallowed by some infinite remove I can't understand to this day, and then it was all back to normal.

I fell into my bed and lay there exhausted, sweating, sore, and must have passed out. In the morning I thought it had been a dream until mom asked over breakfast if I knew where my brother was. It came back to me, but I was old enough to know she wouldn't understand or believe me at first. I said no, and only told her that night about what I remembered, and she shook her head at me, brown ringlets bouncing off the handset as she waited on her dad to answer the phone, a deep frown on her face. She must have thought I imagined it or was trying to cheer her up and didn't know how. Later, when I started to stick to the story, she would get quiet and angry. Dad never acted like he believed my story but he did make jokes alongside it, talking about body snatchers, the aliens, he'd raise an eyebrow at me and smirk while focusing on the Packers game, waiting to see if I'd be hurt and offended or joke along. Joking along gave him a win, it was agreeing by comedy that he was right and I was stupid.

Years later I saw his double, or replacement, or I don't know what. Down outside the pool hall, with bleached blonde hair and a leather jacket and firetruck lipstick, getting on a Kawasaki. I called out, shouted my brother's name, it was him, I felt it deep in my chest, and she looked at me, startled, afraid like someone had fired a gun at her. When she saw me she shook her head and said, "Not me. My name is Sadie." Before I could respond she had put on a helmet and started her bike and I couldn't shout over it as she rode off. She looked so much like him. Over dinner that night I worked up the courage to tell mom and dad about it and they both got quiet. They wouldn't say anything about it.

After I pushed the topic by myself for a minute my dad stood up and slammed the screen door on his way into the backyard, so hard the plates in the kitchen rattled. Mom stood up from the table and started washing the dishes and only said, "you have to stop this alien shit."

I moved out a year later, torn by my conviction that something extraterrestrial had happened to my brother and my parents' grief at his absence being damaged more and more by what I knew was the truth.

[this started as a joke about my dad accidentally calling today "trans day of visitation" instead of "visibility" and me telling a friend that must be the day we all come from our UFOs to grace this earth. Then we joked that it was the X-Files and Fox Mulder is just the biggest chaser on Earth. It sorta developed into this, which I didn't want to write because I'm really tired, but it kept fucking going. With a lot of revision and expansion it could be turned into something pretty good. It could get me cancelled for feeding into reactionary rhetoric about trans people being body snatchers or groomers, but I have ideas about how to dodge doing that, though whether they are ways that will work on the average reader, that's another matter.]

[annoinferno]

Drag (31.3.24)

My gluten sick is wearing off but now I'm depressed. Bluh. Might go out to a trans day of visibility event tomorrow. Dunno. Sleep.

[annoinferno]

Good Bad Time (29.3.24)

Bad news: I've been glutened so this post will be short.

Good news: I got my hair cut and the new cut is great.

Bad news: the color is wrong and I want it fixed.

Good news: I got into Simmons, my top choice for grad school, so I'll be accepting my offer and enrolling!

[annoinferno]

Hobbyist (27.3.24)

Today I watched a lot of anime with RCC, and made some maps for my Cyberpunk players to cause trouble in, and then when I intended to do more work for CPR, instead I did a project I've put off for a year or so.

Children of the Stones was a 1976 British TV miniseries, sci-fi in the Doctor Who sense of the time, but with an actual interest in being consistent. It takes place in an English village and concerns the odd qualities of some standing stones in the area. It aired in 7 episodes, but when I found it online it was as a single 2.5 hour behemoth.

Unfortunately I found the subtitles as seven pieces corresponding to the original format, which included "last time on" recap segments, titles, and credits.

It took me a little while to figure out a work flow but I got one eventually, and it was a pleasant task to tinker through. I learned every episode had a mid-point break I had to re-time around, but others the subtitles were very clean and correct.

Except for one little thing. At the end of a single episode the subtitles switched to Italian. It was only a dozen lines, and they seemed to be a genuine translation effort and not a machine translation based on how they handled certain phrases, such as "but why not?" which wasn't transferred exactly literally. I'm assuming they were as official as the English subtitles I'd been working with, but couldn't actually tell you. They were in a scene with some technical language I don't know, so I had to mark a few things as unclear.

How the Italian lines got mixed into the English subtitles is a mystery.

Anyway that's the kind of thing I do for fun sometimes. I'm not one of those monsters of effort who is responsible for thirty scientifically accurate Wikipedia articles about fish, but I do my small part. By which I mean I haven't even uploaded my version of the subtitles anywhere, maybe I'll do that tomorrow.

[annoinferno]

Lessons in DMing (25.3.24)

So I've been running Cyberpunk Red for awhile now and I want to write down some lessons I've learned:

1. check in with your players!

This seems so obvious, but it's very helpful for me every time I do it. Hooray, players!

2. When the rules suck, fix them.

I've usually played games where either rules didn't exist because they were so light or they were like DnD where you only go poking around with a serious purpose. CPR is a game with weird vague holes all over and a lot of the rules you do get kinda suck. Armor is a big example. Armor only gets damaged if damage goes over it, by the rules, but that can cause certain armor levels to feel invincible unless you build exactly for them. We made it ablate much quicker which actually makes life dangerous for the PCs but also saves them from having to roll 10 attacks just to start wearing down the biggest bads.

3. Get players involved if they want to be.

Mine have started suggesting new items and rules, and I love it. Some new item creation is offered by the invention rules, but they're suggesting new ones for the market and it's rad. They also suggest NPCs and plots to me which is very helpful to see what they want to do. We're playing a very open ended game which is not my usual experience, so it's all very handy for me.

4. The game is what you make it.

Obvious! But sometimes as DM I'm too cautious, too conservative because I'm worried my players won't like it. Ridiculous. If they don't like it they can speak up or I'll ask them. I need to be more adventurous.

[annoinferno]

Old Stuff Is Better (23.3.24)

I dropped 3 of the 4 anime I picked up this season because they weren't as good as Dennou Coil, a show from 2007 I started watching recently.

Most recent novels I read can't hold a can't to older ones.

Movies? Same thing.

Old shit is just better.

At least when you to get to use the sieve of curation and selection. There were at least 2 shows this season that were great. If that is the case every season then there were 8 great shows a year, or 80 a decade. I think the actual numbers are often higher, but it's easy to see why it feels like the 90s had so much great anime, it's because the 80 best shows are pretty well known now, that sort of thing.

I do prefer the look of older stuff to a lot of newer stuff, but that's not really what makes a show better. I love beautiful animation but Yu Yu Hakusho moves worse than a lot of more recent stuff. Greatness is deeper than just that.

I just wrote this for myself really, because every so often I think, damn I dropped three shows this season? Maybe anime sucks now. But it obviously doesn't.

This turned out to be not nearly as deep as it felt when I started writing it, I think I really have to go to sleep.