Spring Already, Time Flies

Journal 145 24 March – 5 April 2025

I’ve become super busy with other creative outlets. Mostly painting, world-building, and finally reading a bunch of the comics and novels piling up around my room.

My current series of RPGs has been engaging my world-building and character brain. With the one game alternating through 10 characters before we ever start the “real-game.” And having several other games I’m in with it, I’ve had to come up with a bunch of characters.

Character Overlap

At first, a bunch of my characters overlapped. Hell, my first three characters were all fighters with two-hand weapons and similar builds. Only their stories, backgrounds, and personalities were different.

Thinking about it now, that doesn’t sound so bad. Sure it’s the same mechanics, same class and similar “play style.” But the roleplay is different. They talk different, walk different, act different, and I can explore the fundamentals that make similar characters different.

Of course, the first fighter was only in a short game and is already done, and the other two fighters are in secondary games. One of which that has only had three sessions in two months. So, I’m not actually playing those three fighters all at the same time and things worked out.

Other World-Building

All this thought about characters has had me thinking more about the characters in my novels, and in other games. I started to come up with more ideas of stories, either gamed or written.

And then just recently the new Cthulhu by Gaslight books came out. And I started looking through them. Reading new RPG books is always a problem. As I end up wanting to play or run a game in the system and I get sucked in. I actually have a stack of RPG books I’ve bought over the last year that I haven’t read yet because I get obsessed for a month or two when I read one of them.

I made the mistake of listening to the Modern Mythos podcast (great podcast and NEVER a mistake to listen to Seth and John), and hearing all the details of the Gaslight Keepers book.

They have rules that seamlessly incorporate Pulp characters into the Victorian setting and I have a concept for a closed room mystery where the players would play various investigators called in to help the baffled police.

So far, the idea is just a kernal in my mind, I haven’t taken the time to open a notebook and start to really flesh it out. Of course, I’m reminded that I have six notebooks in my backpack currently that outline an entire setting and the beginning of a D&D campaign. One that I worked on for over a year and has been sitting, waiting for the day I would start running games again.

At the rate I’m going I feel I will never get to do it.

Moving ON

Let’s put the gaming topic behind us. I’m shocked that its already April, time is flying by faster than expected. Though if I’m being honest, I wanted winter to be quick, and it certainly was.

I’m super looking forward to Easter this year. Mostly because I have a weird tradition with Easter that started when I worked for Sears and used to work every holiday. It’s a tradition I’ve come to love deeply, and it’s a full weekend of good food and good times. I look forward to it immensely.

Media Consumption

Sadly, media consumption is about the only thing I can talk about to fill this space.

I feel bad about it. And yet at the same time I enjoy these talks. If a blog can be called a talk?

I’ve finally started to catch up on my comics reading. I’m still a few weeks behind but I was still back in January with my reading before last week. I’m beginning to think I can cut back drastically on my titles per month.

So many of the stories are dragging and boring to me. And I have a habit of stubbornly supporting favorite writers or artists.

Not all of their books are created equal.

K-drama

Besides comics, I’ve been hitting the dramas pretty hard. I started adding C-dramas into my K-drama mix. I finished the three shows mentions in my last blog: Chinese revenge business story, My Lethal Man (batshit crazy), Korean “21 Jump Street” Undercover High School (the BEST!), and office romcom My dearest nemesis (really good).

The next shows I wanted to watch are all live dropping episodes every week, so I decided to watch some filler shows while I wait for the last episodes to drop.

I’m currently working thru:

C-Drama Cute Programmer its about a girl who gets into a male only programming group at a company and falls for the CEO/Lead programmer. I’m not quite doing it justice, its like its name, cute.

K-drama, Judge vs Judge  I was mislead into thinking this was a romcom, when it’s a serious set of court battles dealing with murder, corruption, and worse. With a sprinkle of romance. I’m really here to get my Park Eun Bin fix, since I love her so much. I’ll have to tolerate Hulu and watch her new show on there, Hyperknife.

Why HULU sucks

Diseny+ makes some great k-dramas and until last month ALL of them were only viewable thru Hulu in the US. Now, a handful are on the Disney+ app but not all that I want to see.

Hulu just SUCKS as a streaming service. If you pay for an app, then you shouldn’t have commercials, and if you do have commercials, how about at the beginning and end, maybe one in the middle?

Hulu has some great Anime on it… can’t watch any of them. Why? Because a 26-minute episode has 8 90-second-long breaks in it. All placed badly in the middle of scenes. Hour long episodes are almost tolerable, but it makes binging a whole show impossible.

Anyway, I’m just complaining now.

This weekend, today as a matter of fact, the last episode of another drama drops, so I will power through The Potato Lab as my next k-drama.

What Else?

I hit the year mark in using Duolingo to learn Korean.

Yes, I know Duolingo does not make you fluent in a language. But it does help with my ear, my pronunciation, and just learning vocab. I admit I forget words constantly and I cannot string together a real sentence…. BUT I have been able to catch and understand more things in the shows I’m watching. Catch words without needing the subtitles.

Also, since I hit a year in one language why not hit two years with a second. I’m refreshing myself with Italian.

And that’s about it. I’ll probably miss the next two weeks of blogs, we’ll see if I get next week done or not, but Easter is right out.

Thanks for reading this far.