Icy Day of Cold

Journal #142 9- 16 Feb 2025

I’m noticing a pattern.

Last week, we got blasted with a goof 3-5 inches of snow, today we’re blasted with 4 inches of snow and then freezing rain on top. As I write this its still drizzling rain and everything is an icy nightmare outside my door.

It’s Sunday, I have nowhere to go and not much else going on, so who cares about snow? But at the same time, it needs to be cleaned up and it sucks that it hits every weekend.

The Week

We had a smaller blast of snow on Wednesday night into Thursday. Didn’t even have to shovel it was melting and gone before noon. This pattern looks like it will repeat in the coming week as well.

But you’re not here for the weather.

To be honest, I’m kind of surprised to see that people still read this. I’ve been out of sorts for the better part of half a year. With my desktop dead again I’ve written nothing in that time. At least in the beginning I was writing notes, drawing maps of the city, crafting characters and storylines. Then I started working on a D&D campaign. But went no where on that one as well.

I still carry a backpack full of notebooks with me to work every day, just in case I want to work on either again.

I’m surprised to still have your attention.

My week was work days, I read about 20 comics, started a new k-drama, watched a whole series of YouTube videos that covered timelines in various horror franchises. About 15 videos in total. Also, got to play one and half game nights of D&D. That was the whole week.

Seriously.

Game Nights

Since, these were the shortest of the events I can sum them up in a handful of paragraphs.

Tuesday night we switched up games and introduced new characters in a heavily homebrewed game. We managed to get the characters to meet and even to come together. But outside issues paused and ended the game early.

Saturday game we rotated to game 1 of a new campaign as well. For the first time in…. it has to be at least five…six years? We started as first level characters. And I will admit that perhaps we were a little cocky.

It’s been a long time since any of us played first level.

We played for a little over an hour, an had two encounters. In the second, my character got smacked down to zero HP in the second round. One of the other players ran up, took out one of the enemies, and then was outright killed by a goblin boss. The final, remaining character, managed to finish off the goblins and I survived, but we lost our companion and retreated back home.

We then spent an hour talking about monster stats while the player created a new character.

Comics

Not much to say here. I’m still falling behind.

Even with reading twenty of them last Sunday, I’m still weeks behind in my reading. I might have to read a bunch more this morning, after I finish writing this. The pile is still way to high, and if I really want to lower it I need to sit down and read through a bunch of my trade paperbacks.

I forgot about my resolutions, but I just remembered that I promised to read novels as well. In my defense I have been reading some non-fiction. So, books are getting read but not nearly as fast as they need to. I have so much bulk to get through. Stacks of novels, comics, textbooks, and trades. Hell, I have about a dozen RPG books I need to get through as well.

It’s the k-dramas, visual novels, and sub-titled media that really takes up all my reading time.

Enough Whining

In all cases I have enough reading material to last me the rest of my life. Or at the least several years if I did nothing but read every hour of the day.

I’ll get to it all or I won’t. We’ll see how things go.

What else should we talk about?

Now that it ended, I’m finally back to catching up to Critical Role Campaign 3. I’ve worked through about 22 episodes this month. I’m just about 30 left to reach the end.

K-Drama Slow Down

Even with trying to learn Korean, I still need subtitles, so I am not at a point where I can do anything else while watching k-dramas. Ergo, I either need to slow down on my drama watches or I need be ok with everything else piling up.

At my current rate of consumption, I’ll probably only watch one or two shows this month.

The show I’m currently watching is called Lovely Runner, and it’s a bit of a departure for me. It heavily features and relies on Time Travel. And Time Travel is one of those things I tend to dislike. Or at the least, I don’t enjoy it.

I tend to start overthinking things. Like the ripple and paradox effects created by the main character. But I’ve also discovered that that besides the science it’s the socialization of the characters that bothers me.

Let me explain that. Character goes back in time and they act out because they don’t believe they have time traveled. They make a huge scene, embarrass themselves, act out, etc. The way my brain is wired, I feel all of that embarrassment. I get awkward, cringe, and usually yell at my TV telling them to internalize their panic. Stop saying everything out loud and looking like a crazy person.

Between over-analyzing, and feeling the anxiety of the character, it is so uncomfortable for me. And then you add in how the changes they make affect the future and the story. Some writers super drop the ball with this (looking at you Sisyphus) and Lovely Runner looked like it was going to do that, but then it changed things.

Lovely Runner Time Travel

So, in the early episodes we have two things that really bothered me, and luckily the biggest one ended up fixed.

Let’s start with the first. The FL goes back in time, dropping into her teenage body intent on changing the course of her life, and the life of the ML in the future. During the course of the show, she gets three chances to jump back into her old life, each jump back seems to be for three months.

First Problem

My first problem, when she goes back its just her memories dropping in her younger body. The PROBLEM, her teenage self “blacks out” during these three months and then she goes back to the future the teenage her has zero memories of what she did. Sort of.

It causes all sorts of problems that mostly undo the changes she’s trying to make. Like rejecting the ML and running off after the guy who was a POS originally. Or having her family take her to a bunch of shamans who try to “exorcise the ghost who possessed her body for months.”

It’s just heart breaking watching her crush the hearts of the ML and 2ML.

Second Issue

The second problem was in returning to the future and realizing that a bunch of little things changed in her history and she had no idea how and where. At first this bothered the shit out of me. Because she had 15 years of her life that changed and no clue in how. Making her return to her life a bit of a nightmare (at least for me weird anxiety).

But then the show started to fix this. And this is what I really like. As she interacts with people and places, the various memories of her life start to flashback into her mind. Refilling in the blanks. Which I love. For example, she comes back and she now owns a car, but originally, she never learned to drive. Once she gets behind the wheel, the memories of her driving come back and she’s fine.

This ability to have her memories slowly refill and reorder gets used even better in the third time she goes back in time.

She makes some major changes in her life in the third time back and the ripples change the future. The memories start coming back to her while she’s still in the past. Ergo, she sees places and things that trigger these future memories and starts to get to react to them.

I still have four episodes to watch to finish the show so I don’t know how she’s going to use these memories to fix the problems and avoid her fate. But I’m super into it since the time travel is only her memories. I have this theory, or idea that if the writers are super ballsy that they might kill the FL. And then the ML would believe her about the time travel and use “the device” to send his own memories back and fix it. That would be a huge twist where she used all three of her uses to go back but then he gets his own. But I don’t know if they could do that in the four hours remaining in the show.

And now I want to watch those four episodes and finish it… but I have comics, critical role, laundry, and a dozen other things I should be doing.

Damn.

End

Speaking of laundry… I need to stop this here and get going. Thank you for reading this far and stay well folks.