Count Down…

Blog 135 2-15 Dec. 2024

Start off with an apology.

I fully intended to blog each week in December. I said as much after my “Should I Just Quit Blog. But I caught a cold, and have spent the last 10 days sick.

Even now as I type this, I’m still not fully out of it.

I feel good enough to get things done though.

Last week, I woke up and immediately said I had no where to go and went back to sleep.  I needed the rest.

Quitting?

I’m still in a mood. And I still think about quitting it all.

The last couple of weeks did start to turn around though. I had a post on here asking me to keep going, and several more on my social media. Hell, I even had a reader who came into my day job and asked me to keep going.

That was very nice, and very unexpected to have a customer stop, turn back to me and say, “Hey, please keep going with the blog. I find them fascinating.”

Fuel

Mentally and emotionally, I’m running on fumes. Barely anything left in the tank.

I’ve doubled down on escapism to deal with the problems. Putting more effort into gaming, characters, and media consumption. I know that most of that is just head in the sand type of stuff. Ignore your problems. But I’m being honest here, and this is the only way I can see to deal with them.

Shit is only going to get worse, so better to build up what meager defenses I have. And winter is not a help on that front. I’ll warn you now, this blog might become half media review going forward.

Though it might not be going forward.

Out of my Hands

So, I talked about quitting and then I tried to gather enough fortitude to reject quitting. But it might not be my choice anymore.

I received the bill for renewing my site.

And I forgot that I locked myself in for a three-year cycle. You get a discount if you pay for three years at a time. The problem is I can’t afford that bill. Even if I just did a 1-year renewal, taking the discount out, its only saving about $120. Might as well do the 3-year.

And the 3-year would force me to keep going for longer. I don’t like wasting money… sort of… kind of… I do tend to delve into “retail therapy” often. Hence why I’m so broke.

I’ve always used minor reasons to keep me going. Silly little things have saved me for the worse days. So, I’ll probably max out my last credit card and give me myself a reason to keep going.

Also, another problem weighting down on me.

Joy.

Going ON

So, if I’m gonna keep going forward, I need to get back on topic. I need to get the novel started, I need to tell more DnD stories, I need more character studies, more comic reviews. Movie reviews, and K-drama reviews.

I need content to keep you reading, and a reason to keep my fingers on the keys.

What can we talk about?

In the last three weeks most of my games got skipped, but I did get to play a new character in one of the chapters for the School Daze game.

To save some time, you really need to go back and read the last few posts to get the full story on the Game. The short version is: we are playing through 10 prequel chapters where we play characters at different points in history.

DnD Tuesday Nights

I already talked about my first character. At length in a few of these blogs. And because of skipping a few weeks on here, I never got to talk about my second character. And because these are short “chapters” I’ll be starting a new character on this coming Tuesday.

As I create each of these characters, they quickly become my favorite and they become better and better.

My second character was a Gnome Assassin named Mouse. In reality, he was originally an elf noble who was a hero in the war. During one of his missions, he was sent to free some power heroes/ POWs. In reality, these people were war criminals. Mouse managed to break free the criminals but lost his life protecting one of them.

That individual used druidic magic to reincarnate the elf lord into the tiny gnome who would then become his assassin.

The game was too short for me to get into any real depth with the character. But I did get to have a scene at the start of the first session where my character used gnomish magic to disguise himself, sneak into the garden of his old house and watch his widow. As my character was listed as Killed in Action, his wife remarried.

It was a good scene, even if just a short prelude.

New Character 3

Chapter three of the prequels starts the year before the main-story. A bunch of temporal druids sense a massive shift in the timeline and send a team back in time to fix the problem.

I’m playing a veteran of the war. A half elf who was part of the Elven side of the war who followed orders and became a “hero.” Becoming a legend over time for the insane deeds and the horrible war crimes he committed… I mean legendary “heroics.”

I’ve come up with a story, but I haven’t gotten the DMs approval yet. So, I don’t know if this can be true or not. To explain, we’ve played characters who were neutral to the two sides of the war, elven side, and now neutral again. During the first game the elves were total A-holes and came across as war criminals using the foulest magics to succeed. In the second game, we played on the elven side and came across a bunch of human atrocities.

So, now we have my veteran:

Solace the Glasswalker

Solace was born as half elf and half human, but he joined the elven side of things. He fought as a hero, blindly following orders and becoming desensitized to the crimes he was committing. Of course, they were all in answer to equally heinous crimes committed by the Alliance.

Atrocity after atrocity.

This is the part that needs approval: As he got older and his legend grew further, he began to look back at his career, a century of war, and murder. He noticed patterns and other problems. He began to questions some of his past exploits. He wondered if there was actually a third faction to the war, a shadow power that was making the elves and Alliance destroy themselves.

His eyes looked to the elves’ greatest ally, the Dragons. Were the dragons manipulating things? Every time the humans advanced, the dragons would suddenly gift more magic items, or new spells to the elves. The balance kept tittering back and forth between the sides.

Maybe Solace was just wandering through paranoid conspiracies. Maybe he was on to something. He was summoned for an important mission and during that mission he was horribly maimed and crippled. It was only through magic and gifted relics that he was saved. And then he was paraded out as a symbol. A war hero who came back from the worse the alliance could do. A propaganda machine.

Eventually the man who always followed orders, demanded his retirement. Citing his aches and pains and crippled body. He left the elves and wandered into the groves of the temporal druids. To live in a neutral land away from the war.

He wants to go back in time and either erase himself from the timestream, or prove his theories that the dragons are manipulating everything.

WOW, words.

Once again, I have gone on longer than I expected. And I was ready to spend a few pages talking about k-dramas. Ha ha

Let’s end it here for today and save something for next week.

I actually feel pretty good right now. I think I’ll find a way to pay to keep this site open.

Thanks for reading.