#also hi sorry I should have dug around for old blogs and sources for these theories

[lizardthelizard]

what fan theories are you thinking of for the appreciation week? 👀👀👀

Omg hi <3 <3 <3 Always a pleasure to see you in my inbox, thank you for the ask :)

Okay, okay so.

So far, I have three theories floating around in my mind. I joined the OUAT a little too late to actually see any of them first hand at the time, but they're SO much fun to read up on and explore even long after the show has ended.

Fan theory 1) is that the Blue Fairy was secretly the Big Bad of the show and would be revealed to be the main villain of the series. Or, at the very least, she was more villainous than she appeared to be on the surface. 'Shady Blue' is such a fun fan theory that I still see people talking about now.

I absolutely don't think the writers were secretly plotting for her to be the real villain of the story (though I'm not as well versed with OUAT lore as some others so anyone is welcome to give me evidence to the contrary. (and I know that Keegan Connor Tracy that played Blue joked about it/leaned into it )). However, the 'evidence' in canon that might suggest that Blue was darker than she seems can be...compelling.

Her harshness with Tinker Bell, the fact that Pinocchio becoming real very much had strings attached, the way she treated Nova and Dreamy...there are these little things that make her come across as (for lack of a better word) kind of a bitch.

But there are also more fascinating moments and details that people have brought up before! The fact that she's literally one of the oldest characters on the show. The way that Morraine, when talking with a young Baelfire, describes her as 'an ancient being that rules the night. The original power.' The fact that, when Cora tried to disguise herself as Blue, she was able to convince a young Snow that the Blue Fairy would ever be capable of encouraging murder.

Blue is a weird character. I have a personal vendetta against her (for Pinocchio related reasons) but she does have fascinating potential and if the writers had been able to pull this off, it might have been epic.

Theory 2 is the 'Dr. Whale is the Wizard of Oz' theory. This is a fan theory that I adore, although I haven't spent that much time researching it. Before the Frankenstein reveal, Whale was free real estate. And the Wizard of Oz theory just made so much SENSE imo. It fit the mystery of his character and the overall vibe and it was a hugely fun theory.

It also spawned a whole host of ideas about other characters playing the roles of characters from the Wizard of Oz (I believe I've seen Rumple mentioned as the Cowardly Lion, Graham mentioned as the Tin Man (since he literally has no heart) and Jefferson as the Scarecrow. But I'm sure I've also seen other variations on each character too.

Also, everyone kept joking about him being the 'whale' from Pinocchio but let's not talk about that theory

Theory 3) is about who August W. Booth was, and whether or not he was the Author of the book.

It's a theory that makes sense. He's a writer, he was adding pages to the book, his name (Wayne Booth) is a direct reference to the man that coined the term 'unreliable narrator'. It feels like the writers were purposefully leading fandom towards this conclusion so that the Pinocchio reveal would be even more of a surprise.

Anyway, it's an interesting theory to explore, although it's probably my least favourite on the list here. I think that his Pinocchio backstory has way more to play with and a much better depth of flavour, but the 'author' theory is still intriguing to ponder over.

[lotsofdogs]

A Random Tuesday + Ryder is Three Months Old

Hey friends! As I sit down to write the first part of this blog post (all of my work seems to be completed in small fragments these days!), the sun is shining through my office window. After several back-to-back days of clouds, rain and storms, it feels nice to see the sun again! Temperatures are back to the mid-80s in Charlotte right now which makes me feel a little ridiculous for decorating our house for fall over the weekend but since Hurricane Florence had us hanging out at home, it seemed like a good time to knock it out.

Hello pumpkins!

I wanted to pop in today to share another random day-in-the-life recap with you guys and give you a peek into our Tuesday. Let’s get to it!

Morning

All plans I had for waking up before the boys went out the window when Ryder was up before the sun with me with no intent to go back down. Thankfully Ryder almost always wakes up in a great mood, full of gummy smiles and sweet baby chirps. He’s often content to kick and wiggle on a blanket in the mornings so I got dressed for the day and then brought Ryder downstairs with me and set him up on the floor while I made coffee and spent some time going through one of the chapters of my small group’s most recent study.

Ryder wasn’t up for too long before he was ready for a cat nap and so I swaddled him up, placed him in the Rock ‘n’ Play, made myself a smoothie and then got some work done on my laptop while he snoozed.

(Sorry it looks so gross! I swear anytime I add cocoa powder to a smoothie it instantly looks like cat puke.) 

I spent my early morning work time tackling emails and following up on some upcoming partnerships before I heard Chase calling me from his room. Ryder was making noises as well, so I quickly nursed him and then we headed into Chase’s room to get dressed and read some stories before preschool.

Whenever I walk into Chase’s room in the morning he almost always asks me, “Mom, you have Baby Ryder?” and immediately wants to get in his little brother’s face. It’s actually been a nice little incentive to help Chase get dressed at warp speed since I tell him he has to be dressed like his little brother before playtime can begin. We read The Cat in the Hat and played in Chase’s room for a bit before making our way downstairs for breakfast and a little more playtime before we needed to head out the door.

Chase only has school two mornings this week thanks to a hurricane-related closure on Monday and a teacher work day today and he was more than ready to see his teachers and friends. He ran inside and gave me a dinosaur growl goodbye. (He was a velociraptor yesterday, in case you were wondering.)

Once Chase was settled in school, Ryder and I made our way to boot camp!

While Ryder hung out in childcare, I went through a total body strength workout that looked like this:

(The workout includes my modifications since I’m still modifying quite a bit.) 

It felt good to move and sweat and Ryder seemed to do well in childcare. I chatted with some friends for a bit after my workout and then we headed home so I could nurse Ryder and get a little work done before preschool pickup. Ryder wasn’t in the mood for a long nap so my work time was cut a bit short but I took advantage of a very awake and very happy baby to snap some pictures of him to celebrate three months with this sweet guy!

I just love the way Ryder reacts to happy faces, voices and smiles. It’s almost like he looks at the world around him through the eyes of a tiny human sponge that just wants to absorb everything. His big gummy smiles seem to overtake his whole body and he’ll often curl up into a smiley ball that makes me smile right along with him.

Afternoon

Before heading out the door to pick Chase up from school, I figured I should take advantage of an awake and happy baby and made myself lunch. Everything came together quickly thanks to yet another Daily Harvest harvest bowl (the obsession continues!) and this time I added some shrimp and pumpkin seeds to the red lentil bowl.

(FYI you can use the code pbfingers to get three free cups on your first Daily Harvest order if you want to try it out!) 

After I was done eating, I loaded Ryder into his car seat and the two of us picked Chase up from preschool before making our way back home. I let Chase unwind and play in our family room for a bit while I nursed Ryder before corralling everyone upstairs in Chase’s room for a nap time picnic. (I told you guys I do this ALL the time! So random but it works!)

Once Chase was down, I brought Ryder into our bathroom and put him in his Dock-a-Tot so I could grab a quick shower before I nursed him and put him down for a nap, too. With both boys sleeping, I made myself a bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter (random snack but I was starving) and then began typing up this blog post. I ended up having TWO hours of time to work in the afternoon yesterday which felt like such a gift from my guys! It wasn’t fully uninterrupted (Ryder isn’t the most solid napper) but it still felt amazing to have time in the middle of the day to wrap up a future blog post and continue to chip away at my inbox.

Ryder was up before Chase and once he was done nursing, he seemed content to hang out with me in the kitchen in a little bouncer seat my friend Lauren gave me at preschool pickup yesterday. Ryder LOVES the bouncer seat in Burn Boot Camp’s childcare and since Lauren is doing a massive purge of baby things, she asked if we wanted her old one and I jumped at the offer. Ryder is a huge fan!!

With Ryder happy in his new bouncer seat, I quickly assembled dinner which looked like chickpea pasta paired with kale and shrimp. (I loosely followed this recipe from Clean Eating Magazine.)

We haven’t had the chance to get to the grocery store yet this week but I cooked up a big bag of shrimp we had in the freezer on Monday which worked well as a quick protein source in both my lunch and our family’s dinner. Freezer food for the win!

Evening

Chase woke up from his nap right around the time that we had a package delivery at the door. He was excited to thank our favorite UPS man (he’s practically a family friend at this point) and we immediately opened the large box to find the new comforter I ordered for our master bedroom.

I’m excited to see how it looks but sliiiightly concerned Ryan may veto this particular design choice and say it’s too frilly for his taste. We’ll see!

We spent the rest of the afternoon at home splitting time between our backyard where Chase “helped” clear our patio of debris from the weekend storm (thank you Aunt Laurie for his sweeper brush!) and our kitchen where we made a new batch of chocolate energy bites with dates, oats, peanut butter, flax seed, honey and cocoa powder.

Since Chase took a longer nap than usual yesterday, he was amped around dinnertime and had no interest in settling down to eat. He was also pretty content to play by himself with his toys and since this coincided with an evening cat nap for Ryder, I decided to roll with it and took advantage of the time to clean up the kitchen. Ryan arrived home a little after 7 p.m. and after a quick round of soccer with Chase, we all settled down for dinner. I reheated the pasta I prepared earlier in the day and we dug in!

Eventually we made our way upstairs and did the whole bed time routine. We finally had both boys asleep around 8:30 p.m. Ryan and I chatted for a bit before we were both ready to call it a night. I read my book until my eyes could no longer stay open. (I’m currently reading Total Control by David Baldacci. I like the story line and look forward to reading it at the end of the day but there’s something about the way the author refers to the main female character that irks me over and over again.)

Today should be a good one over here as Chase has the day off from school and we have some fun plans with friends at a local park on the agenda this morning! I hope you all have a great Wednesday and I hope to see ya back here tomorrow for a yummy recipe I have coming your way!

[Read More ...] https://www.pbfingers.com/a-random-tuesday-ryder-is-three-months-old/

[xt1erminator-blog]

“Celebrity” DMs That Slay

I love Dungeons & Dragons. I love playing it, DMing it, reading about it, watching YouTube videos on subject matter relating to it (Nerdarchy, Matt Colville and Drunkens & Dragons: Play D&D Like A Badass are all great YouTube channels with quality content).  Some games are even great to watch live streams of, especially observing talented “celebrity” Dungeon Masters working their magic, some of them admitting a lot of their “performance” and the content they come up with for their players is improvised and off the cuff.  It takes a lot to pull that off.  Most games out there however, are very difficult to watch and enjoy. There are too many distractions among groups when streaming stuff and it can be boring.

So, for anyone new to the D&D hobby that might be reading this blog, I just wanted to write up some stuff on three of the best publicly known Dungeon Masters out there thanks to the Internet - most of us into D&D will know who they are, and they are all are on a lot of people’s Top 3 Dungeon Masters Ever lists I’m sure. These guys put in some crazy hard work to help the online community better ourselves as Dungeon Masters. Thank you.

(And you know, I should have mentioned this in one of my first posts on this site, but I’m not a professional blogger or even a good writer. This is just my space to shoot the shit (probably mostly talking to myself no doubt) about one of my favourite past times, D&D). Warning: some of this post may seem out of logical order, sorry in advance :)  I had to go back and edit it a few times. Apologies for any inaccuracies as well but I’m pretty confident it’s solid.

Chris Perkins, “Celebrity DM to the Stars”

Being a semi-regular reader of Dungeon magazine for quite some time, I didn’t really pay attention to names of the authors of the short adventure modules published within the magazine’s pages.  When I reconnected with the hobby a couple of years ago after hearing a lot of good praise about 5th Edition D&D, I did more and more research about the people behind it, and naturally stumbled across reading about Chris and the Acquisitions Incorporated live games run at some of the PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) Conventions with the Penny Arcade guys (Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik and Scott Kurtz, as well as occasional appearances by celebrities/TV personalities like Wil Wheaton and Morgan Webb, author Patrick Rothfuss, etc.).  Then I went back through old Dungeon magazines after reading that’s how Chris got his start to getting his foot in the door, and have since become a fan of his. He’s even replied to Tweets of mine once or twice. Woo.

I am very entertained by how Chris runs his live games. It’s quite easy to see why he is held in such high regard. I started to lose a little interest in his work however when his regular weekly Dice, Camera, Action web series started. They were starting to run a series based on The Curse of Strahd just before the book released. The PAX games are still great, as are the in-studio AI series episodes, however with Dice, Camera, Action things seemed to really be a struggle and it was hard to follow and really get in to. Between technical difficulties in the first few episodes, to things taking a long time to pick up due to excessive chatter which was in my opinion a waste of time (get on with the game ffs! This happened quite frequently), it was hard to keep myself entertained and motivated enough to finish watching each episode. By the 6th episode or so, I stopped watching D, CA entirely. I decided to revisit it recently and while the presentation is a bit better and they seem to have worked out the kinks in the system, I have come to the conclusion why it wasn’t a success for me: the cast picked for this series is not very good. It’s not Chris - how can it be. The guy is probably the most dedicated and passionate Dungeons & Dragons fan, Dungeon Master, works for the company who makes the game (Wizards of the Coast), and spends a shitload of time on Twitter answering questions from fans with his unique sense of humour, I love the guy (not that way).  The cast though. Very weak. Generally speaking they are either too silly to take seriously or not entertaining enough in role playing their characters (hey, I’m not very good when I play and probably an even worse DM so I’m not tooting my own horn by any means), etc. but they are on camera for this and I really cannot believe so many people like this show like they say they do. The whole “Waffle Crew” thing I just don’t get I guess. The cast isn’t exceptional and I think Chris should be spending his time with a different group doing bigger and better things. Again, I am a heavily opinionated bastard as stated in the header of this blog :) “ProJared” is probably the weakest link in the D, CA group. He just doesn’t bring anything to the table and quite honestly, his attitude sucks. It is a puzzle to me how he was chosen to partake in this show with the legendary Christopher Perkins, DM. Just watch his videos on his YouTube channel, ProJared Plays I believe it’s called. I suggest watching his video entitled “Worst Player Ever”. Wait for the part where he describes how he “loses his shit” with “Steve”.  But enough about him... Chris rocks.

Matt Mercer, He’s Pretty OK

One of the players in a campaign I run is a very, very big fan of Critical Role. If you don’t know what CR is, Google it. It’s one of the reasons she became interested in Dungeons & Dragons and wanted to try it out, which opened a huge floodgate for me that had been closed for several years, and caused my re-connection with the hobby a couple of years ago. The addiction resurfaced and hundreds (OK, probably thousands) of dollars later I am the proud owner of a collection of nerdy D&D stuff that has been amassed. Damn you, Liesl.

Anyhow.  I was curious and tried watching some episodes of CR. At the time, I wasn’t into it. Not at all. I wouldn’t say I am now either, but I have probably watched around half of the 80+ episodes and find quite a bit of entertainment in the performance everyone in that group delivers.

So, at the time we started getting into 5e via the infamous Starter Set, featuring the introductory Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure module. Naturally, I ran it improvising mostly everything and only referencing major area and plot details when absolutely required.  I admittedly do not care much for running any of the current 5e premade adventures and therefore probably won’t ever run any of them in their entirety (I will pick apart things, and throw in content from an old Dungeon magazine, even 4e source book, etc. or borrow a part from some other WotC hard cover adventure campaign book, that, like I said, will never run in its entirety). There’s good stuff in there, but it doesn’t play like modules back in the good old days. Anyhow I think it went well. The more we played, the more references were made to Critical Role and how Matt did things. So I got more and more curious and gave Matt and CR another chance. Glad I did.

It turns out what I really went back for though after thinking I didn’t like CR, was Matt Mercer (after awhile the cast of that show grew on me, but I was paying particular attention to Matt most of the time). It’s absolutely unlikely I would ever be able to pull off 1% of what he can do with voices, and describing and gesturing things when he spins his tale - but I try to absorb everything I can, and hope my poor little brain remembers just a smidgen of it and it enters my game at some point and does just a little bit to help my improvisational skills. I don’t think I’ll ever attempt performing NPC or monster voices, but who knows... like they say, you’ll never get anywhere with it if you don’t just start doing it, no matter how much of a fool you think you are making of yourself. There is a reason why Matthew Mercer is regarded as one of the best Dungeon Masters in the world, because he truly is just that damn good.

Also - FORCE GREY IS AMAZING. It’s a short run series Matt DM’d for several other celebrity players including the immortal Brian Posehn.

Matt Colville, the YouTube DM Activist

Finally, I think my personal absolute favourite "popular” Dungeon Master these days would have to be none other than Matt Colville. He claims to be a normal person just like anyone else, but he’s totally a celebrity now, to me anyhow. Ha ha. Dude, you’re on a now-quite-popular YouTube channel. You’re awesome. Thank you.

Matt is a writer by profession. He’s got a couple of fantasy novels he’s written that you can find on Amazon.com (Priest, and Thief I believe are the titles - check them out).  He’s also lead writer at Turtle Rock game studio in California. Makers of games like the Mercenaries series on consoles, and more recently the party vs. big bad enemy shooter Evolve (he says he’s most proud of this title), all of which Matt did major writing on. From the game sessions I have watched that he has posted on his channel, it is evident that he is very creative and an extremely bright person more than capable of running a really great game that is well thought out and has all the bells and whistles and logistics of everything worked out just right (in my opinion). I wish I could run my games with his brain :)

The last few videos I’ve linked on my blog here are a few of my favourites of his, and they have really kickstarted my brain. So now I am thinking of better ways to run my games, and attempting to infuse a similar kind of quality material that Matt seems to ooze out of his noggin.  Watch his videos, all of them. When I first discovered his channel, I was amused. However, after watching maybe a half dozen more videos, I had to stop. I think it was the rapid rate at which he discusses the topics presented, it was maybe overwhelming me. I took a break for a couple of months and avoided his channel.  Then a colleague and I were discussing him, and in hindsight I realized I really totally dug his stuff. So when I went back to checking out his videos and gave some thought about what it is that he is doing with his channel, and what he is doing to help Dungeon Masters (new or old) better the quality of their games. I watched every single video (and rewatch several frequently for inspiration) and it’s now my top rated Dungeons & Dragons influenced channel.

I respect his genuine passion for the game and how he conveys his message to us, and appreciate the time he takes to create such brilliant content for the DM crowd. I highly suggest subscribing to his channel. If you can get past the fast paced talking, it’s worth the time to check his stuff out. If there ever was such thing as a “Church of D&D”, Matt Colville should be the high priest of it.

In the words of Mr. Colville:

“Peace. Out.”

And now, enjoy some whiny ProJared! (”he’s such a dumbass!”)

-runDMsteve