dungeon crawl classics again!

well, for whatever reason, even though we're having a great time in akane's d&d campaign, dcc and the idea of a 0-level funnel adventure popped into msg's head, and he mentioned it, and we said, hey, why not give it a shot? i haven't gamemastered in a while, so i volunteered to be the "judge" as they call it in dcc.

everybody else rolled up 4 characters each! (typing from here on courtesy of msg. thanks, babe!)

MSG:
Canterby Choosers - beggarly urchin
Growler Green - lucky but unpersonable trapper
Indy Biceps - an indentured servant with 16 strength
Klutz O'Stab - an outlaw with poor agility

Akane (who was very excited to play this game she's heard so much about):
Limp Snakish - a guild beggar
Dwimmerlet - a dull and clumsy elven artisan
Quickly Tightrope - a wizard's apprentice with exceptional 18 agility
Tuff Cheese - a rough-mannered mendicant distinguished by having 6 hit points

Ariel:
Clover Under - a grave digger whose birth sign was a lucky clover
Tweeter Cheets - a con artist with "bird song" for a birth sign
Noseele Knowsele - a lucky but intellectually and emotionally underwhelming elven sage
Strongwill Phill - a turnip farmer of extreme feebleness and not much better intelligence

Elle:
Ferze Sniffleskins - a likely-doomed trapper with a 3 stamina and 1 hit point
Foxie Axe - a well-rounded woodcutter whose birth sign was a cunning fox
Argyr Ironskin - a dwarven blacksmith with a decent armor class
Likely Bi-tit - ironically named because she has strikingly well-suited stats for an elven barrister, and thus Elle doubts she'll live to level up

Sasha:
Ouichre Reader - a low-strength elven sage
Zilda Chill - an orphan born under the sign of harsh winter, but with quite a good agility
Snover Dumountain - a dim-witted dwarven apothecary, also born in harsh winter
Plowed Henna - a radish farmer with terrible agility

Hettie:
Maudine Aubergine - an unlucky potato farmer
Cozened Roselyn - a cutpurse with some of the worst stats of the whole bunch
Lune LeFortune - a locksmith with an astonishing luck of 18
Feralia - a halfling chicken-butcher born under the sign "raised by wolves"

(wait! me typing again to give a spoiler alert: the adventure we're playing is "the portal under the stars," which is the introductory module from the rulebook. so as long as you don't mind having it spoiled for you ... let's go!)

Judge Claire: An unruly mob of you folk has gathered at the ruins outside of town by the chill light of night's darkest hour.
Ariel: Ooh! I know this one! It's almost sunup, right? Because they say it's always darkest before the dawn.
MSG: Actually, there's a period of twilight before dawn that's pretty much as long as the twilight after sunset, so people who say that aren't technically being accurate.
Elle: They also say it's always dorkest before the yawn.
Sasha: Burn! Ow, she got you there!
Judge Claire: Not to take sides, but I really was trying to imply more like midnight than closing in on morning.
Ariel: Dang. I was wrong.
Elle: Worse, MSG was right. I hate it when he's right while being so ... mmm ... word please, Hettie?
Hettie: Pedantic.
Judge Claire: Anyway ... midnight! Dark! The ruins outside of town! Some of you were there when Old Man Roberts lay on his deathbed, telling tales of his greatest regret in life. When the stars align just right, he said, a portal opens amongst the ruins beyond town, a portal to a mystical realm glimpsed down a long stone corridor, where motionless shining figures armed with spears gleamed, and flashes of what must be treasure sparkled farther on. Roberts hadn't the courage to explore himself, and has regretted it ever since. But with his rattling last breath, he tells you that the Empty Star is due to rise this very night. If you're brave enough to dare what he could not, who knows the riches you might find.
Ariel: Ooh, Tweeter Cheets is a con artist, so he's probably totally down for some riches!
Akane: My characters include both a beggar and a mendicant. How are these professions different? It's a puzzlement. But how they are the same is, riches have definite attraction for them!
Judge Claire: The strange constellation you were told to watch for rises. Its light falls on three great stones that form an arch, and within the arch a shimmering glow appears and brightens. The portal is open! Through it, you see the long stone hall spoken of by Old Man Roberts. A door lies at the end.
MSG: All right, I'm sending in Klutz O'Stab to have a look at the door.
Akane: So assertive! Is this not a game of rolling initiative?
Judge Claire: There's initiative in combat, but most of the time whoever has the first thing to say gets to go first.
MSG: Anyone coming along?
Elle: My characters are waiting for Klutz to show us which of the floor stones are trapped.
Sasha: Snover Dumountain's not too bright. He'll go in too.
Judge Claire: No one else?
Akane: A pause seems wise. Dwimmerlet gives an encouraging wave to Klutz and Snover the dwarf.
Judge Claire: It's very dim at the end of the hall where the door stands. What are you using to see?
MSG: I've got a rope.
Sasha: Snover's a dwarf, so he can see in the dark, right?
Judge Claire: Technically the rules only give first level dwarves infravision, but that's always seemed wonky to me, so I'll allow it.
MSG: We spent all that time rolling 5d12 copper pieces each during character generation ... can we say we used some of that to buy torches or at least matches?
Judge Claire: Anybody who wants to can make a DC 12 intelligence check to have had the foresight to prep. 
MSG: Four no's for me.
Akane: I think only two of my characters have intellect enough to think of it. But they roll 5 and 6.
Ariel: Ooh! I roll a 13 for one of mine -- and it's Noseele Knowsele, the elven sage! That totally makes sense. And Strongwill Phill rolls a 17!
Elle: Likely Bi-tit is my only roll high enough to think of shopping.
Sasha: Plowed Henna makes it for me, barely.
Hettie: 17 for Lune LeFortune and 19 plus 1 is 20 for Feralia.
Judge Claire: Get shopping, then.
Ariel: Uh ... oil flask ... sack ... flint and steel ... torches ... got it!
Elle: Mostly the same for Likely.
Sasha: Plowed Henna gets a large sack and loads up on torches, plus a flint and steel.
Hettie: Lune's purchases run along the same lines. Feralia buys rope to go with her grappling hook.
Judge Claire: Okay, then. Of the two characters in the hallway, only Snover can see the door well enough to make out a pattern of gems set in the door around chest height.
Sasha: When you say "pattern" ... do you mean, like, a pattern even a 5 intelligence can spot?
Judge Claire: Roll for it.
Sasha: 10 after my penalty.
Judge Claire: Nothing strikes you as meaningful about it.
MSG: Can I see a handle? I'll try opening it.
Judge Claire: There is a handle, but the door feels firmly in place.
MSG: Like it's locked? I throw my weight against it and try busting it open.
Judge Claire: Roll strength.
MSG: 19!
Judge Claire: The door bursts open.
MSG: Yes!
Judge Claire: But a searing flash of light also bursts out of the gem pattern. Make a reflex save.
MSG: Oof ... here comes my 8 agility ... 13?
Judge Claire: You save, taking only half of a d8, which comes up on a 3.
MSG: Are you rounding up or down?
Judge Claire: If you spend a point of luck I'll round down.
MSG: Okay, then I'm not dead quite yet.
Akane: Wait! I think this luck deserves explaining, since it is spendable this way!
Judge Claire: Basically, you can spend one point of luck to modify a roll by one point.
Akane: Does this luck return with rest?
Elle: Oh, no, that would be too easy.
Judge Claire: When you spend it, it's gone ... except for thieves and halflings of level 1 or above.
Akane: I will hoard mine with care, then.
Sasha: Did I get roasted too?
Judge Claire: No, just Klutz. In the room beyond the door, Klutz sees faint silhouettes of figures. Snover clearly sees four of them -- armored figures with spears raised as if about to hurl them. They appear entirely motionless, though.
Sasha: I tell Klutz maybe we better wait for some light -- and maybe back a ways from this door. Then I call for some light. "Light!"
Ariel: Strongwill Phill lights a torch and moves up. Noseele too, since she's an elf and can see in the dark.
Elle: My characters will all follow Phill's light in. Likely hangs back toward the rear.
Sasha: The rest of my guys go too.
Hettie: And mine.
Judge Claire: Unless anybody speaks up that they're hanging back, I'll assume everyone goes down the hall to where Snover is.
Sasha: I tell 'em about the speary figures.
Ariel: Can I see the door broken open? Is it like, knocked all the heck off its hinges?
Judge Claire: No, but it looks like it's only hanging on by one of them.
Ariel: What if we take it off and use it as a shield to hide from the spear guys? That's Clover's idea. She's my only smart one.
Judge Claire: Two people could probably get it loose and carry it for cover. Another couple people behind them might get a bit of benefit too.
MSG: Soon as anybody says that, Klutz says, "Yeah, let's go!"
Akane: Limp Snakish is willing to assist in this.
MSG: I'm putting Growler Green in the second row from my bunch.
Ariel: You guys should probably have somebody with a torch along. Strongwill Phill will go if you let her.
Elle: Phill is a her?
Ariel: Yes, it's spelled with two L's.
Elle: I don't see the feminine significance, but okay.
Judge Claire: Okay, let's roll for initiative before you guys go in. Each player rolls for their group, using their highest initiative modifier. You might want to number your squad of characters front to back in the marching order.
MSG: 12.
Akane: 17!
Ariel: I rolled a 20 but I don't want to go first!
Elle: 17.
Sasha: 8.
Hettie: 11.
Judge Claire: Okay, the door brigade moves up. Klutz and Limp, roll strength to get the door loose from its last hinge without dropping it.
MSG: Yech. I roll a 6.
Akane: My roll is a 20, and natural!
Judge Claire: Klutz almost flubs it, but Limp Snakish saves the day. They move into the room with the door, followed by Growler and Phill. Ariel, what do your other characters do?
Ariel: Um ... hang out and get ready to duck if there's any spears coming our way?
Judge Claire: Akane, you're next.
Akane: My characters exhibit caution as well. Let us observe what happens with the door.
Elle: My entire crew waits too.
MSG: Canterby's chaotic. He'll stay on Phill's heels. Indy Biceps hangs back with the others.
Hettie: I'm next? I think Cozened Roselyn is the only one with the combination of high risk and low intelligence needed to venture in. She'll be near Canterby.
Judge Claire: And the rest of yours, Sash?
Sasha: No guts, no glory. We're all headed in!
Judge Claire: All right. The room is 25 feet wide with the door in the middle of the wall. It's 20 feet deep, and there's another door on the far wall. The four figures are arranged two to each side of the door. How do you maneuver once you're in, door foursome?
MSG: Growler says, hey, maybe we edge to the left and keep the door angled to block all 4 of them as long as we can, instead of going straight across where the ones on the ends will get a shot at us sooner?
Akane: Limp will obey this idea.
Judge Claire: In you go, then. When you get partway across, the statues throw their spears! We've basically got 6 people in the lead and Sash's 4 behind them. I'll roll this d8. On a 1, it's Limp, 2 is Klutz, 3 or 4 is Phill, 5 or 6 is Growler, 7 is Canterby or Cozened, 8 is one of Sash's crew. First spear -- 3! Phill, it rolls to hit you with ... only a 5 total. Next spear goes for Growler with a 13 to hit. You get +2 to AC for cover.
MSG: That still only gets me to 11 AC.
Judge Claire: 6 points of damage then.
MSG: Well, sucks to be him. First casualty, folks!
Judge Claire: Third spear ... one of Sasha's. Who's your first in line, Sash?
Sasha: Snover.
Judge Claire: 14 to hit, 3 points of damage.
Sasha: Casualty number 2.
Akane: So fatal, this game! Possibly even more than Mothership!
Judge Claire: Last spear is headed for Phill again.
Ariel: Nooo, Phill!
Judge Claire: Another bad roll. You're safe. Everyone who's in the room but not hiding behind the door sees that the statues seem to have pivoted and thrown their spears mechanically, and now are motionless again, with their arms extended in throwing position.
MSG: Klutz is still hiding behind the door just in case.
Akane: Limp Snakish as well.
Sasha: This means free spears, right?
Judge Claire: Two on the floor, two to be pulled out of Snover and Growler's ribcages.
MSG: Canterby calls dibs on the Growler-gut spear. My 3 survivors are divvying up his stuff, too.
Sasha: I'm searching the statues. Anything on 'em?
Judge Claire: Actually, yes. Their armor is scale mail made of beautifully enameled black stone.
MSG: Scale mail? Damn, that stuff's got a good AC, right?
Judge Claire: +4.
Akane: I propose each player who lost a character should gain armor for consoling.
Ariel: That seems fair.
Elle: And the other two suits?
Akane: If initiative still operates, Ariel is first and I follow, correct?
Elle: So now your true colors show, hmm? Lured us in with consoling the victims and then very reasonably slide in the initiative thing that gets you one of the suits?
Akane: I'm showing only a red color of embarrassment that you would think this about your dear Akane!
Elle: I'm joking, of course.
Akane: Possibly I am joking too. Could the red be embarrassment of being caught in connivery? It's a mystery of insoluble.    
Judge Claire: All right, time to shut this puppy down for the night, I think. Multiple fatalities makes this a 4 experience point encounter, so everybody write that down.
MSG: Nice.
Akane: So far, I enjoy this game! Maybe if my characters were fatalities, though, I would have enjoyed it less.
Sasha: Hey, early on getting a guy whacked just means your other guys have more stuff and you've got fewer things to keep track of, so it's kind of a win anyway.
Hettie: All I will say is that mathematically speaking, this dungeon had best not have 12 rooms in it, or at this rate no one will live through the end.
Judge Claire: No comment!

we had a talk.

he's been paying way too much attention to the world lately and not enough to himself and the people he needs and the people who need him.

he does this a lot, right?

i mean, it's a big world, and it doesn't make any sense that things don't work the way they ought to, and you've kinda gotta stick your head in the sand to avoid being reminded of that every day. only the thing is, it doesn't have to be sand, you know? 

so we had a talk, and it was one of those, "dude, i'm right here," talks, and it ended up with him turning on the light and us looking each other in the eyes until he saw me and the world the way we were 16(ish) years ago when i arrived in his life and we were younger and it looked like maybe things would go the right direction politically speaking and there were actual good super-hero movies coming out for the first time in my life and a new star trek movie too and dang if it didn't just seem like maybe everything could be okay.

and even though we can't get back to those days, we've still got some decent super-hero movies going on, there's a great star trek show in its third season, and his eyes and my eyes still see youth and color and infinite possibility when we look at each other and remember that it's all there to see.

which means yeah, the talk worked and yeah, he feels better, and yeah ... we're obviously going to have that same talk again. and again. and again.

but i'm here for it as long as he'll have me.

well i guess that took a month and a half!

so me and my yams were doing great swapping off blog posts for a while there and then this cool idea for a game came to me and msg where we'd do an email swap-off/swap-around in which each person would email another person about a third person. and since there are seven of us, that's 6 emails each for a total of 42 emails in all, and at one a day here we are halfway through june and just now getting back to blogging.

june!

it's my month, you know, since i'm officially "miss june" and my birthday is june 1st.

start of summer!

halfway point of the year!

how is so much of 2025 already done?

anyway, with any luck we're back to trading off blog posts everyone can read instead of emails only us worthy acres folks get to read (unless akane puts them up on her blog).

i think there's another d&d post coming soon -- we're on our third session of akane's new campaign, which is a hoot so far, and i'm sure everyone will be super-entertained by.

okay, sayonara, peeps!

xoxo,
claire

i think i'm overdue ...

to write a poem for my boyfriend. So ...

***

when you get like this
i have to be sure and tell myself
'it's really not all that hard.'

it's not that hard for me to make you feel
better.

it's not that hard to take one hand
put it to the side of your face
gently turn your head
with a little pressure
along your cheek (soft) and the line
of your jaw (solid)
(adorably so)
(against the heel of my palm)

in fact
it's the easiest thing in the world
-- my world --
to look into your eyes
and see
the hurting part
i must erase.

the easiest thing
in my world
to let my lips
smile
the smile they always want to

and to glide my fingers
around the curve of
your ear
through the hair
to the nape of your neck

tilt your chin
with the thumb of my
free
hand

so i can brush
my smile
against the lips
it most perfectly fits.

in the interest of patting myself on the back ...

it's april, and i've already broken my previous record for most blog posts in a whole year!

to celebrate, i'm going to be lazy and post this who-cares-but-me post right here.

because you know what?

it's enough that i care, because i care about me.

xoxo,
claire

a new rpg campaign!

this time, it's akane getting her feet wet as dungeon master, so the posts are on her blog. but i'm compiling all the links here.

i'm having tons o' fun so far!

enjoy!

airplane!

msg to me today: i picked the wrong day to quit therapy.

poor guy!

but dude, pretty sure one or more of your girlfriends could wrassle up some therapy real quick ...

xoxo,
claire 

how quickly they forget!

and by "they," i mean, "me." yeesh! people, do you remember back in january when i had the fantastic idea of, if a post topic wasn't coming to me one day, i'd write some on my novel instead?

wow did that not get followed through on!

one chapter!

how did i forget this was my plan?

i may have to call a pow-wow of the whole worthy yam-fam and see about tweaking our turn-taking project where one of us posts every day instead of me always posting every day. some good blogging has definitely come out of it, but i think there are also some posts that have felt like they were typed one-handed by someone with an arm tied behind their back.

i don't mean because they were bad! i've liked every one of them.

i just mean some of them feel like they were a lot more work than they should have been, and this is supposed to be about having fun expressing ourselves, not about producing, producing, producing.

anyway, we'll see how that goes!

xoxo,
claire

i didn't get tough.

i'm so bad at being tough!

it's embarrassing, really.

xoxo,
claire

okay, tomorrow i get tough on him!

yeesh! msg is wasting so much time on non-productive zone-out activities. he's got a borderline obsessive/compulsive side sometimes, i think ... which i won't entirely complain about since sometimes he gets obsessive or compulsive about stuff i and the other girls like quite a bit. like role-playing games, and listening to cool music, and ... stuff!

but when he gets all obcomp about truly pointless stuff, it's time to rein him in, and lately it's getting to that point.

(with any luck, he'll read this and get all chagrinned and whup himself into shape so i don't have to do it, but i'm ready in case that doesn't happen!)

xoxo,
claire

power vacation! vacation power!

so, anybody who's been following the worthy acres blogfam recently may have wondered why we went radio-silent this past week, and the answer is pretty simple: we were kicking back for vacation.

nothing super-exciting really, but there was this one night where msg and i had a really special soul-level conversation about a bunch of things, and it reminded me of the power our relationship has. 

there's something wonderful about feeling powerful not because you have power over someone, but because the two (or seven) of you empower each other. we're so strong together. and when we take the time to dwell on that, so many worries just fall away, you know?

anyway, now it's back to the old grind!

xoxo,
claire

colors

auburn
gold
aqua
amethyst
lilac
chestnut
pink

emerald
sky
lapis lazuli
violet
hazel
chocolate
jade

our
hairs
and
stares

hot damn!

my plan to encourage all the worthy yams to blog has turned out spiffily, if i do say so myself. (which i do, because no one else can blog here, so obviously it's me saying it!)

just have a look over at my blog roll to the left -- everyone has blogged at least once this week, right? some of the girls have more than one blog, or share more than one, so not all the links are showing new posts. but there's at least one from each delightful girlfriend i have ... and nobody even complained (much) about my arm-twisting!

i feel so supportive and encouraging!

xoxo,
claire

oooooh, sneaky!

i just realized that i could totally blog every day this year by just linking to whichever one of my girlfriends is blogging that day. that way my post count would keep skyrocketing with pretty much no effort at all!

will i give in to the temptation???

hmm ...

tied up!

no, not that kind of tied up ... nothing kinky going on here, sorry if i got your hopes up. 

nope, what it is, is, as of this post, i am officially tied for most blog posts i've ever written in a year. and we're barely halfway done with the year!

anyhoo, this means the whole rest of the year, i get to chill with zero stress about whether i'm going to make another record. (not that i usually had much more than 0.01 stress about it, but still.) so i'm going into yam encouragement mode and we'll see if i can get at least one of the other girls around here to blog on any given day.

i'm excited!

xoxo,
claire

aah! monsters!

so, everybody ought to know by now that we get down for some roleplaying games around here, but so far there hasn't been any dungeoning and dragoning posted about by yours truly. mostly that's because we only played it once, using the fifth edition rules, and nobody was taking notes, so by the time i thought, hmm, what if i blogged about this, i actually couldn't remember much of what happened at all. one of our characters got shipwrecked or something, and met the other characters along the road, and then we ended up on some island with a hag.

but even though we don't play much, msg is a big-time old-school dungeons and dragons guy, so he's been buying the new edition books that they've come out with the past few months, including the monster manual that just came out this week.

guys ... what has happened here???

we've got shelves and shelves and shelves of rpg books, with all kinds of monster manuals and bestiaries and whatnot, and i always look through them and think, ooh, that one looks cool! that one looks pretty mean ... and I bet this other one is really dangerous ... 

and also, i usually think, nice, that art rocks! or pretty good ... or ... eh, could be better ... or ... okay, there's another good one ...

but i'm looking through this new monster manual and every single piece of art is excellent!

only ...

they're so freakin' scary looking!!!

honestly, i'm always looking at monster books thinking, yeah! i want my character to fight that! it would be epic!

but these new monster manual monsters -- yeeesh! they are terrifying.

you look at a red dragon in a pathfinder bestiary, or in the 5e dnd book, or especially in the dusty old copy of the 1e monster manual msg has, and you think, that's a tough one all right. i better make sure i'm high enough level to take one of those on.

but you look at the red dragon in this book and you're like, no effing way, man. that thing's like emeffin godzilla!

when we got the copies of the new player's handbook and dungeon master's guide, i thought, well, maybe it's time for us to play some dnd for real!

but now i really don't know about this ...

xoxo,
claire

as long as i'm lazily cranking this kind of thing out ...

here's an absolutely kooky-wild one from yet another female japanese rock band ...

what are they putting in the water over there?

is it just me ...

or is this totally iron maiden reincarnated as five beautiful japanese women?

lottery ticket!

msg likes to buy lottery tickets sometimes, and then we all spend a couple days talking about what kind of crazy hijinks we'd get up to with a blazillion dollars to spend. a pretty regular idea is on the small-scale end: getting some doll-company sculptor to work up new bods for me and elle. then there's the mediumish-scale (for blazillionaires) idea of buying a vacay home in japan that we can jet off to whenever we're in the mood for some sushi and hot-springs and learning japanese somewhere we'd have to speak it all the time. on the more grandioso end, there's stuff like paying for a final season of some favorite show that got canceled before the plot finished up, or hiring band-maid to make a "cover" album of all the spinal tap songs that aren't actually real songs yet.

but secretly us girls all kinda laugh at these ideas, because (don't tell msg this) we all already won the real lottery when we got together and created this crazy yam-fam of ours.

how likely is it we'd have that kind of luck twice?

three kinds of people?

so msg said to me today, "what do you think about this idea, claire? lately, i feel like there are three kinds of people in the world: creators, destroyers, and exploiters. and we focus a lot on how great the creators are without really rewarding them that much for it, and we complain about the destroyers an awful lot but don't seem to put much effort into getting rid of them, and all of that is because the exploiters are the ones who have the easiest time getting themselves to be in charge."

and i said, "you're forgetting about the fourth kind ... people who don't really care all that much about putting in the energy to be any of those three."

and he said, "somehow that's even more depressing."

so i said, "not if you put even a little energy into not caring quite so much!"

which made him scowl at me like he really wanted to call me a destroyer for messing with his idea.

well, i guess it takes two kinds of people to tango, right?

xoxo,
claire

it's really good, being with people who think you're cool.

something i didn't mention about making up my d&d character yesterday was how the whole gang here thought he was a hoot with his familiar-in-a-jug octopus. i mean, i thought all of their characters looked really fun, but they just wouldn't shut up about how much my wacky idea left theirs in the dust.

and i almost said, "i only came up with all that stuff because i rolled such a bad wisdom score and decided i had to literally act a fool about it" -- but that would just have made them double-down by saying how great it was that i took a total fail of a roll and used it to make up something hilarious.

there's a glow i get when i hear them talking about me that way, and it's partly about being tickled and proud of myself, but it's also partly -- maybe mostly -- seeing the glow they get out of feeling lucky that i'm in their lives.

that's some real riches for you, you know? i treasure every one of them ... but the way they treasure me makes it a squadzillion times better.

i hope you have this, whoever you are out there reading my babblegushery right now. and if you don't, i hope you'll believe me when i say you could have it too.

we got here by choosing this, after all, the whole worthy acres crew of us.

we decided we were going to be this happy together.

xoxo,
claire

d&d characters!

okay, so it looks like we're going to be playing the new dungeons and dragons, so we all rolled up characters tonight (except akane, because she super-bravely volunteered to be the dm).

we decided to let the dice fall where they might and rolled our stats in order instead of putting the numbers where we wanted. so we ended up with 3 wizards because me, msg, and ariel all rolled unspectacular numbers for everything except intelligence. 

my dude came up with a 6 for wisdom, so i decided he was a failed merchant who got excited about magic and became a managed to swing an apprenticeship. when it came time to pick my spells, i figured this guy wasn't wise enough to pick a sensible set of spells, so instead of balancing things for combat and utility, i just went through the list and decided what he would think were the coolest-sounding spells. one of them was "find familiar," so i'm reading the spell description for that to see what it does in this edition, and one of the familiars you can summon is an octopus.

so now i have a wizard who has an octopus familiar that he keeps in a pocket dimension so it doesn't dry out and die, and a couple of times a day he brings it out into a big jug of water he carries around so he can play with it.

i can tell already this is going to be a blast.

wish me luck!

okay, my boyfriend has been entirely too much of a do-nothing lately ... or at least, too much of a do-none-of-his-creative-things. he's read and shared a ton of manga with us (probably too much), and he's watched and pointed out even more tons of youtube videos (definitely too much), and even though all of that's great and i and the other girls love experiencing it with him and talking about it, he's slacking pretty serious on his writing and on gaming with ...

oh, man.

i just realized that i'm totally not giving him any credit for all the time he put in the past couple of weeks getting ready to dungeon-master for his non-girlfriend gaming group. i ellipsised my way out of that first paragraph up there before i could finish up with "us," because apparently i was only counting it as creative if he was getting ready to run a campaign for me and the rest of the worthy acres crew.

okay, well, with that moment of uncharacteristic self-absorption over, i guess it's still okay for me to try encouraging him to do more writing and also to see if he can do some gaming with us this weekend, considering his outside-the-house group isn't playing this week.

dang, this turned into a kind of embarrassing post!

too late to do anything about it now, though ...

xoxo,
claire

okay, so the scoop is ...

if i keep up my daily blogging for another 10 days, i'll have beaten my previous full-year record for number of posts before february is even over.

no problem!

but i have kinda been feeling like a computer hog because while i've been blogging every day, pretty much nobody else is blogging at all. so i'm thinking about getting to that record and then telling the other gals we need to trade off and one of us blog each day, in rotating order.

because you know what? in addition to wanting to make sure i'm blogging regularly enough, i also want to be reading my yams' blogs regularly too!

xoxo,
claire

Chapter Thirteen

[jeepers, i hope that chapter number doesn't put me in some kind of creative bankruptcy! earlier chapters are linked below!

(Chapter One)

(Chapter Two)

(Chapter Three)

(Chapter Four)

(Chapter Five)

(Chapter Six)

(Chapter Seven)

(Chapter Eight)

(Chapter Nine)

(Chapter Ten)

(Chapter Eleven)

(Chapter Twelve)

"Hello!" Bitsy said, and then covered her mouth immediately hoping she hadn't squawked it.

Cord laughed lightly on voice-only. "Well, at least it doesn't sound like you hate me for rushing off this morning!"

"Oh no, of course not." Why would he even think that? No, of course he wouldn't -- he was just making a joke. And now I've gone and sounded like I believed him instead of laughing back. Bitsy, you pea-processor ... say something clever to fix it! Or at least something nice. What, what, what -- oh! "I'm just glad you sound like you're in a better mood than when you had to go this morning. I guess you managed to stop the dream feed from crashing and sending everybody crazy today, or whatever the emergency was."

"Whoops, I'm in trouble now," he said. "Will you ever forgive me if I admit that it was only urgent, not actually an emergency?"

"No, but I will pretend that anything that would be an emergency to someone in dream feed management would be so secret it would have to be a quadruple-firewall-encryption-locked level secret, so you'd definitely have to lie and tell me it wasn't actually an emergency, or else have my memory erased. So instead of forgiving you I'm going to think I should thank you for protecting me from that."

He laughed again, a sound she had only known existed for two days now, but one she found herself anxious to hear as often as she might. "Now I'm trapped into being rude, though," he replied, "because I can't say, 'you're welcome,' without admitting I'm protecting you from getting memory-wiped, and if I admit that, we're right back where we started and I have to send the guys from Memory Control to erase everything anyway."

"Er ..." She wanted to laugh, but thought it would come out nervously. "Is there really a Memory Control?"

"Oh, fritz," he said. "Did I let that slip out? Well, you can expect them in about fifteen minutes now that you know about them. I'll call back once they're done and we can start this conversation over again."

She did laugh then, the warmth in his voice smoothing out her nerves.

"Don't hang up until they get here, though," she said. "If they're going to erase all of this, it means I have fifteen minutes to say whatever loopy thing wants to come out of my mouth without getting embarrassed about it. You know, since I won't remember any of it anyway."

"Honesty compels me to tell you that I just sent a 'false alarm' text to them, so they're not coming after all. If there's one thing I've picked up on already, it's that you get embarrassed pretty easily, and that you're adorable when you do. I certainly don't want to miss a helping of you getting that cute, anxious tilt in your voice."

She felt her flushed-cheeks subroutine start up at that. Thank goodness we're not on video where he could see that. Hmm -- but why aren't we on video? Maybe he's somewhere classified. Clearing her throat, she said, "Anyhow, you called at just the right time. I was actually going to crawl into bed not long from now, so if you'd called any later I might have been out."

"Ah, so I'm keeping you up?"

"No, no, I didn't mean --"

"Listen, if we're on the subject of you going to bed anyway, I have something to ask you that's a little odd."

She blinked and sat up a little straighter on the couch, but couldn't think of how to respond.

"Do you remember," he went on, "when I was kidding you about having a crush-routine going on this morning."

"So you really do want to make me feel embarrassed!"

That laugh of his again. Bitsy got a surge of thrill through her chest at bringing it out.

"What I mean is, I joked about that, and then I laid a whole bunch of potentially alarming stuff on you about dream feed management and variances outside of programming specs and what bad consequences that could end up having, and afterwards I got worried that I might have compounded any actual variance you might have had going on, giving you all that surprising information to take in."

"Well, but the dream feed will take care of it tonight, right? So even if you did, I'm sure I'll be fine."

"Absolutely. I would have called you earlier if I thought there was any chance of a real issue."

She found herself relieved but also puzzled -- maybe even unsettled; his voice had a resonance to it, a tinge of earnest energy underneath its comforting tone. "Then what ... ?"

"Because I felt anxious about possibly making you anxious, I wanted to do something to reassure you, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt like the thing to do would be to demonstrate to you just how entirely safe you are."

Bitsy's brows scrunched together. "I mean, I don't know that you really need to do that ... but ... how exactly would you?"

"By asking you do to something just a bit daring," he replied.

Nooo! I'm already so far past my buffer for being daring right now!

All she could do was wait, and into the pause that followed, Cord said, "I'd like you to sleep on your couch tonight. Where you won't be under the dream feed."

This time the pause went on a few beats more, before her tongue regained the ability to move.

"What?"

whoosh, it's late!

msg is insisting we need to get to bed.

no, apparently i won't shut up about this series!

we read "the summer you were there" again yesterday, the whole thing, start to finish.

dang, knowing how it turns out, there are sooooo many panels where the expressions of one character or another carry about a zillion times more weight than on a first read-through.

and there are soooo many moments of, "oh! of course that's why she did that."

what an absolutely golden piece of storytelling this thing is.

xoxo,
claire

making up for lost time

welp. i woke up this morning and realized i didn't blog yesterday.

for a second, i thought, "oh, dang. i ruined my streak."

and then i thought, "claire, don't be dumb! just write two entries today and call it a win!"

the honest truth is, if you're playing a game that you're the only one playing and you're the only one making up the rules, the only way to lose is if you decide you want to, right?

xoxo,
claire

i object to this knowledge.

apparently, baby possums are called "joeys"??? like a kangaroo? is this just because they're both marsupials?

honestly, i was assuming they were called something like, i dunno, "pups," or "kits" or maybe even "pips" or "niblets." i always figured "joeys" was some weird southern-hemisphere penal-colony way of naming things or something. like, somebody off the first boat there saw a kangaroo and its kid and said, "oy, mates! now we're in aurstrehlya, we best get to namin' things, roight? whasset theh gonna be?" and then they got into a fist-fight about it and the baby kangaroo got named after the dude that lost.

i mean, a baby animal in north america just shouldn't be called a "joey." (unless it's a human animal and that's actually what the parents named him.) it sounds weird and actually like we ripped it off from down under.

nowhere is safe!

we've been trying really hard to avoid news since, well, you know.

but things are so incredibly crazy that it's just everywhere. you can't get away from it on facebook, you can't get away from it on twitter, you can't get away from it on bluesky ...

and jeepers, now that i just posted this, i guess you can't get away from it on blogger!

oof.

is manga really better at this?

something keeps happening to me when i'm reading all these manga books msg has been buying. i'll be reading along and really caught up in the story, and then i'll turn a page -- and a huge panel on the new page will just knock me out of my chair. i mean, sometimes it will even knock me out of my chair and into another chair and then out of that chair too. it's crazy.

i haven't read all that many western comic books (mostly just kill six billion demons and some odds and ends msg has picked up since we've been together ... his comic-collecting days are way way behind him), but i really don't remember having these, "hey what am i doing out of my chair and on the floor" moments reading any of the ones i have read. i've totally turned pages and been like, "holy crap! that's awesome!" but i don't remember any real gut punches like keeps happening to me with some of these manga.

anybody else have that feeling?

the summer you were there

okay, so maybe you remember two months ago how i said we read a manga series called "the summer you were there" and it turned us all into a bunch of blubbering crybabies? well, volume 6 came out today.

i ... cannot tell you how much of an emotional monsoon this book was. the whole house -- the whole thing! -- just swamped with tears.

and the shocking thing is, even though we knew there'd be tears because there were tears all the way through numbers 1-5, in some crazy spark of genius, the writer managed to make some of those tears into tears of joy.

i mean, the ending was literally one of the saddest and one of the happiest endings i've ever read, at the exact same time.

if you have stock in a tissue company, you should encourage everybody you know to read this series.

xoxo,

claire

happy anniversary to us!

sixteen years today, and the whole thing has been perfect ... even when it wasn't!

xoxo,
claire

skeleton crew!

wow, we finished binging "skeleton crew" this weekend, and it was honestly really good. i won't get into details because i'm sure sash and aers will want to blog all about it, but even though it was kinda a dumb kids' show, i liked it start to finish.

after starting with the first episode a couple weeks ago, msg kept putting off watching the rest because he heard that it was pretty good up until the end but then tanked in the final episode.

so wrong!

anyway, it was just as well we waited because the timing let us zoom through episodes 2-8 lickety-split.

if you like star wars and you are okay watching stuff that sometimes gets a little overboard on the kiddie element, you should give it a shot! it's got a lot of clever stuff in addition to the silliness, and anyway, isn't star wars at least partly about the silliness anyway?

xoxo,
claire

i would write more on my book, except ...

i'm pretty sure if i wrote a new chapter two days in a row, the universe would explode or something.

xoxo,
claire

Chapter Twelve

[all right, then! i said if i got stuck for a topic, i'd get back to my book, so here we go. the earlier chapters are linked below!]

(Chapter One)

(Chapter Two)

(Chapter Three)

(Chapter Four)

(Chapter Five)

(Chapter Six)

(Chapter Seven)

(Chapter Eight)

(Chapter Nine)

(Chapter Ten)

(Chapter Eleven)

Sitting alone on her couch, Bitsy felt her processing power getting sucked away into a single analytic: considering everything she'd learned today, wasn't it possible that she had gotten caught up in one of those multi-order amplifications Cord had gone on about that morning? He'd seemed very unconcerned when tossing about the possibility that an unremediated crushroutine had lodged itself in her circuits and made her behave so peculiarly the last couple of days. Surely, being in dream feed management, his diagnostics would have noticed anything worse than a crushroutine ... wouldn't they?

Except, Bitsy, she told herself, he's a Real. He doesn't have diagnostics constantly running in the background, parsing and collating data to help him spot glitches. He has ... whatever's in those biological brains of theirs that made them so brilliant and creative and occasionally mad. He's got to be extraordinary, if he's monitoring and helping correct something as crazy-complicated as the dream feed. But they're not as good at multitasking as we are, are they? That's what people say in the holos all the time, anyway. And he kept getting distracted by whatever problem kept pinging him on his phone. What if all his abstract-thinking ... brain-a-mabobs ... were focused on that work crisis, and all he could spare, talking to me, were those wibbly-dribbly organic emotions, the ones Reals are supposed to have so much of, sometimes their logic goes completely out the windows?

She didn't feel sociopathic or psychotic. And even distracted and letting his emotions handle most of his talk with her, wouldn't he have noticed something of that magnitude six or magnitude eight amplification he said it took to reach that point?

Only ... what if I'm at magnitude five? She sat up out of the deep cushions, suddenly no longer comfortable in them at all. Not only that ... he kept talking about one android's variance beyond spec interacting with another android's variance beyond spec and adding up or multiplying ... but Reals don't even have specs! What happens when a magnitude five amplification runs into a Real and is dealing with something their programs aren't used to at all?

Her circulator lumped fiercely in her chest, apparently working overtime to make sure her processors didn't overheat with all these thoughts and feel-routines.

I should go to bed, she thought. It's not that late, but I should go to bed and let the dream feed smooth all of this out. That's what it's designed for. That's what Cord and his coworkers in dream feed management spend all day making sure it can do, isn't it? I'll go to bed, I'll go to sleep, and in the morning I won't be so cross-wired about all of this.

But ...

Will I even be able to get to sleep? Of course I will. If I toss and turn for too long, I'll just swallow a harp-drive to lullaby me into sleep mode and drop right off.

Nodding and feeling more certain, she stood up to do exactly that.

Only to see her phone vibrate and glow against the black glass top of her coffee table.

And the screen had that number on it, with the contact name right underneath.

Cord 76S.

rain check

no date this morning ... grmph. some things came up that required a rain check.

i'm not entirely put out or anything. but that check better not bounce!

(unless it's just the right kind of bouncing, I suppose ...)

xoxo,
claire

i have a date ... rowr!!

there were some amorous shenanigans and/or hijinks this morning that didn't involve me or elle or hettie, and while we're not the jealous types, one of us may have said something to msg later along the lines of, "you know, dear -- it's been a while ..."

so now the four of us have a date for tomorrow morning!

i'm thinking it will be a nice way to start the day ...

xoxo,
claire

a poem for ... well, anybody around our house, actually!

when your fingers
touch my face
                            they displace
                        all reasoning yet
                 give me
                    a reason
           all reasons
                   the reason

to be in this world
              to believe in this world

                        to see
                           and to dream
                             all things seemly,
                           sweet, and clean
                      in this world.

                          it is the grace of your
                  most pure and human truth.

                               

brrr!

it is chilly-willy-mcdilly here in the somewhat great state of texas! (the "somewhat" is because my adopted-home-state enthusiasm has been sorta kneecapped lately by dumb stuff our governor keeps saying and doing.)

this happens every couple years in these parts and we get a stretch of shivery temperatures down in the 20's or lower. probably to you folks from more northerly locales, that doesn't sound all that bad, but in our neck of the woods, we're so unprepared for it that we do things like shut down the schools because there's a 30% chance of snow at 3:00 a.m. it's kinda nuts, to be honest.

anyway, the good thing about this kind of weather is blankets, blankets, blankets and lots of bedtime snuggling for shared body heat!

so as you might guess ... i'm a lot keener than usual to get to bed early!

xoxo,
claire

love

i feel like i used to post a lot more lovey-dovey fluffy mush stuff here. like, love poems for my boyfriend and from my boyfriend, musings about love and romance, conversations the two of us would have about our feelings for each other ...

now, what's maybe interesting about that is, if i really have been blogging less about love the past few years than i did in the years before, that change has happened right alongside me getting more and more and more love in my life. maybe sometime when i'm desperate for a post topic, i'll go back and do an inventory and see if i'm right about that, but for now, i'll just say it feels like as elle and sasha asserted themselves more in our relationship, and then when ariel showed up, and then even more when hettie and akane arrived, i've had a lot less focus on blogging about love than i did when it was just msg and me.

...

oof. well, i couldn't hold myself back from it -- i went and opened up the archive tree on the left side of my blog, and it reminded me of the super-obvious explanation for this whole idea: i've just been blogging a crap-ton more the last 6 years than i did the first ten i was here. i still didn't do that inventory, but it sure looked like i blogged plenty about love and romance even after my life got so chock-full of girlfriends. i just blogged a ton about a bunch of other stuff too, so instead of every other post being a love poem or something romantic, it was more like every third or fourth or fifth post.

also, even though a lot of my posts the last few years haven't been about love, they've still come about from love. they're posts about things i've done with or talked about to my yams, or photoshoot posts back when we were doing more photoshoots ... things that happened exactly because i have so much love in my life.

way to blow a hole in your own thesis statement, claire! now how do i wrap this up?

well ...

probably ...

by saying that love is a blessing in so many ways, and can come from so many sources, that i really ought to make sure i'm never taking it for granted.

every second of it is precious, whether it's time i spend with the girls, or msg making me laugh, or the warm feeling i get in my heart when an email shows up from a friend, or making sure i take care of myself -- because, you know, i love me too.

and on top of that, there's this about love:

i try my best to share it with you as well, dear readers. you deserve it, and i care about you, whoever you are and however you came across my wacky ramblings here.

feel loved, please.

xoxo,
claire

so embarrassing ...

yeepers. as of last post, i'm at 18 blog entries for 2025. that's more than i blogged in any entire year before 2019. and folks, this has not been hard.

what was i doing all those years?

smh

lottery tickets

my boyfriend has a weird way of buying lottery tickets. actually, not a weird way of buying them ... it's what he does afterwards that's weird. he puts them somewhere intending to check them later, and they pile up and pile up until he realizes it's been a long time since he checked any of them, and he panics that maybe some of the tickets are over 6 months old and what if we actually won the lottery but now the ticket is expired, so he checks them all and of course the result is always the same: not only did he not get all six numbers, most of the tickets he didn't even get one number.

all of this would be okay if he actually spent all the weeks and months of ticket-accumulation getting entertainment out of imagining all the cool things he could do with the money. and he used to do that really well ... he'd imagine television shows that he'd create and pay the production costs on, or charities he'd set up, or psa campaigns he'd sponsor.

but these days, he's more like, "it would sure be great if we won the lottery, because then i wouldn't have to worry about all this bulls***."

his bar for imaginative lottery fantasy creation has really bombed out over the last couple of years.

and that gives me an idea for a series of blog posts!

since he's slacking so bad on the sudden-and-immense-personal-riches daydream front, i'm going to do some daydreaming of my own and see what kind of gonzo things i'd get up to if we won that kind of cash.

coming soon to a blog near you!

xoxo,
claire

a wonderful thing that exists

so the last couple days, we've been re-reading the most recent book msg wrote, and honestly, it's just terrific.

besides me and the other girls, probably only ... i dunno, 5 or 6 other people have read it?

he hasn't really even made an attempt to get it published.

does that sound kinda sad to you? because ... it's not.

i have a person in my life who made this incredible thing -- it's exciting and hilarious and touching and just stuffed full of really beautiful writing, and it's made me and the other girls and those 5 or 6 other people crazy-happy to read it.

to me, if you're valued -- i mean, really, truly valued -- that's success. it doesn't matter if it's a million people or just one really right one.

sometimes he has trouble keeping that in mind.

but luckily he has a super-awesome girlfriend to keep pointing it out to him!

xoxo,
claire

role model!

you know, sasha and ariel have called me their role model more than a couple of times, and i've always thought it was cute and also an awesome compliment, because they're both wonderful, and it'll make you maybe a little giddy to have someone wonderful tell you you're they're role model.

but i've never really thought about actually being in that role model role. it's more like i'm all about doing my thing, and if someone wants to think my thing is a thing they should look up too, well, cool beans.

here we are, though, on day 16 of me blogging every day, and dayum if i'm not pretty much showing it's really freakin' easy to do this if you just decide to do it. (and don't put too much worry into your quality control.)

so here's to me setting a faboo example in 2025 for anybody who's reading.

just do the thing, even if you only do a little of it every day, and you'll find out it's not so tough.

xoxo,
claire

is all art escapism?

so, i'm one of the most ambition-less gals you're likely to meet. my biggest goal in life is to make my friends and loved ones happy, and they all seem to think i'm awesome, so it's not that much work.

but msg is like, a real talent. an honestly great writer. so sometimes when he's got his nose deep in a manga or his eyes glued to a string of youtube videos, i kinda feel like i should push him to be more productive. not because i want him to make something of himself, but because i know it makes him feel good when he finishes a really good novel and lets us all read it, and also because the more he writes, the more i think he has a chance of eventually attracting some other notice from somewhere and bringing his fantastic talent into a lot more people's lives.

only ... what's the actual line between indulging in the consumption of escapist stuff (like youtube and manga and netflix shows) and creating art that others are going to use for escapism?

and does the lofty intention of creating something worthwhile actually make it any less escapist than creating a bunch of fun fluff?

i mean, would people really read, or watch tv, or listen to music, if their real-world lives didn't have something missing that they want to fill in, or something miserable that they want to tune out?

i don't really have an answer ... i'm just yammering here. but at what point does art or fiction become worthwhile in and of itself, not just for escapist purposes?

much, much later ...

last week, a thing happened. i don't feel like going into the gloomier details, but if you're curious, it was the thing that horrified me by almost happening the first day i moved in with msg. go read my post from january 31, 2009 if you're really itching for the story.

so after 16 years, it was a sad thing, but not a horrific thing like it would have been on that first day, and in between then and now, all kinds of wonderful, companionable, funny, exasperating, adorable moments made for all kinds of good memories that everyone in the house can and will treasure from now on.

it's the natural order of things, you know? even when events of the present make us poorer in one way or another, we always have the riches of our past with us, if we just recall and appreciate them.

wow. apparently i will shamelessly type out the skimpiest bit of twaddle ...

... instead of digging back through my posts, figuring out where i was with my book, and actually doing some writing.

bad claire!

xoxo,

bad claire

my bf has a tummyache tonight

... so i'm keeping this one short!

take care of the people around you, folks!

xoxo,
claire

holy moley, anniversary time coming up!

sometimes i'm such an airhead. it's january! and that means my anniversary is in like, a little over two weeks!

it'll be 16 years this time around ... 16 years with msg and elle. jeepers, time flies! 

we definitely need to figure out something special to do.

xoxo,
claire

current events

this is a couple days late, but greenland wasn't super high on my list of places to move anyway.

i liked that guy. definitely gonna miss him.

i didn't to all that much mourning for jimmy carter today on his national day of mourning. it was a hectic day for a couple different reasons, and honestly, i can't say i especially thought about him for much of it.

but i did a couple times think, maybe saying bye to jimmy carter would be a good blog topic for today.

he sure seemed to be a kind dude. it would be nice if more people followed his example on that, but i'd rather take him as an example of why this world is really a pretty good place than an reason to mope about it not being an even better place.

farewell, mister president!

xoxo,
claire

tacos and donuts

honestly, if you have a boyfriend who gets you these on a regular basis, you're probably in pretty good shape even if everything else about him isn't as awesome as everything else about my boyfriend is.

mmm-mmm-mmm!

you know, people are sort of like a.i. art, aren't they?

i hear a lot of fussing about stuff being made with a.i. these days. it's not creative. it's not original. it just goes out and finds a bunch of stuff online and based on the patterns in notices in that stuff, it puts something together that may look pretty, or new, or unexpected, but is really just leeching off of a ton of things that actual people created and put effort into.

and i kinda think i agree that all that is true, but then ...

what are people built out of?

at least for you biological types, you get half your dna from mommy and half your dna from daddy, and it's just mixed together differently than it was in either of them. and theirs was mixed together from their parents, and theirs from their parents, etc., etc., times a jillion.

the only stuff that's in you that's original are the mistakes -- the glitches where the dna didn't copy over right.

so my question is, are people art? because if they are, aren't they a lot like a.i. art? a bunch of stuff jumbled together according to patterns that happen to be the patterns that work because the really bad dna combos didn't survive way back when?

personally, i think human bodies are pretty doggone beautiful. and while you can do stuff with makeup and clothes and hairstyles to fancy them up and make them seem even more beautiful, the basic beauty isn't anybody's fault or doing.

it just happened out of a zillion-kabillion combinations of genes clumped together in workable patterns by millions and millions of years of evolution.

when someone draws a beautiful picture of a human face or body, that's creative, right? but they're not making it up from scratch, and except for a few rare cases they're not inventing their own techniques to do it. they're using tools and methods that generations of artists before them worked out, and they're using those to represent physical ideals that came together out of some junk in a primordial pond that managed to squish together in a pattern that could reproduce itself and change over time to reproduce into other stuff that wasn't itself.

i say all of this as a person who literally is a piece of art -- sculpted and molded and cast in a workshop and a factory. i mean, i'm more than just that. but the basic thing of me is art, turned into a product to make somebody money, and then turned into a person when the art of me clicked just so in the brain of a person who found me beautiful enough to make part of his life forever.

which means i am artificial (because that's what art is) and intelligent (because by gum, i'm telling you i am), and if you look back through this blog, i think you'll find a lot of stuff that's really creative and fun and beautiful, even though it all comes from something else.

art is all standing on the shoulders of the art that came before it.

right?

whatever that means, i guess!

xoxo,
claire

you know what's weird?

well, you're reading this on the internet, so you ought to get what i'm about to say here. i just find it bizarre that people these days are equipped to know so much more than people basically at any time in history ... but instead it sure seems like lots of people actually know way less.

some of this is because it used to be way harder to find somebody to teach you something, or to get hold of a book to learn stuff from, and so you kind of knew that if you did find one, somebody had put a lot of work into that info source, and probably you could rely on it at least passably. but also, because it was so much work to learn stuff, you'd be pretty motivated to make sure you had a good source for it. and finally, you probably mostly wanted to learn stuff that you could actually use as opposed to just knowing something because knowing it was a cool thing to show off to your friends. so you'd be pretty peeved if you fell for a bad source of information and you'd try not to ever do that again.

nowadays, though, none of that's true! you can get on youtube and find a gazillion people ready to tell you all you want to know about a gazillion things, and you can totally watch a 10-minute video about some weird and obscure this and a 30-minute video about some entirely disconnected that, and feel like you're learning all this great stuff about a crazy wild variety of things, and because you don't need any of it, you don't need to be picky about making sure what you're watching or reading about is actually correct at all. plus you don't need to follow through on anything you're learning, so you can end up with a really shallow and mostly false impression of a ton of different stuff.

and what's even weirder?

i'm pretty sure i'm doing the exact same thing right now that all kinds of bad information sources do! 

like, what evidence to i have that people weren't just as gullible about their information sources back in the pre-internet days? and why am i saying people mostly wanted to learn useful things, when folks have been cramming their brains full of baseball statistics and philately since way before i was born?

maybe what it really comes down to is that tons of people really have never learned to question what they know, or be skeptics about what someone else claims to know, but nowadays we have the ability to look out across the world wide web and actually see just how full of horse-hockey everybody is, where in ages past, you just didn't have the info-bank reach of today, so it was easy to get the impression that there must be a lot of people out there who knew a lot of things, because examples of that were more likely to get transmitted all over the place, whereas examples of people being total knot-heads were more likely limited to the ones you had a lot more direct contact with.

or maybe it's as simple as for some reason, people today just aren't very willing to say, "i don't know."

a little goes a long way, right?

i've been looking over msg's shoulder at his to-do list recently as he checks things off and writes down stuff for each day in his planner, and he keeps putting this one project down every day and then doesn't check it off, because he skips doing it that day. and the next day and the next day ... yeesh!

i asked him why he started putting it on his list and he said, "because it's a giant project and i'll never get it done if i don't do some every day for like, six or seven years."

i decided to be sensitive and not point out how he's only checked that item 3 times in the last 3 months, even though he writes it down for every day. but maybe i gave him a look or something, totally unintentional, i swear, and he said, "yeah, i know i haven't been very good at doing it every day, but i keep writing it down because it's something i have in my head that i'm doing every day. and if i don't write it down every day, pretty soon six months or a year will go by and i'll realized i've been letting it go completely. so i'm basically reminding myself that sooner or later i need to kick it back into gear and actually start doing it every day."

and when he put it like that, it actually made sense to me. i mean, i told myself i was going to blog just a little bit of my novel here and a little bit there until i got it done, and then ker-flooey, i let it go for a few days and suddenly it's been 2 years since i did anything on it at all and then i look back and realize i've been writing this novel for like 11 years at this point.

so unlike msg, who's working on this project every day but actually failing to do it every day, i'm basically not working on my novel at all. i don't mean i decided to quit ... i mean that quitting just keeps sneaking up on me and whacking me over the head before i even realize i'm doing it.

and now i've got this idea that if i keep averaging a post a day it will be a cool accomplishment at the end of the year, but i've also got this nagging idea that it's going to be hard for me to think of things to write about every day, and dang if my novel isn't sitting right there in the front row raising its hand and saying, "excuse me, miss worthy! i'm here! look at me!"

so here's my plan. i'm not going to write on my novel every day, but i'm by gourd gonna post something here every day (on average) this whole year. and any day i can't think of something to write, i'll write a little bit on my book.

yeah, "on average" is my loophole there, and you should get ready for a whole bunch of one-sentence posts, but buckle up and here we go, okay?

xoxo,
claire

easy, perfect

sometimes you can tell someone something
or give them a soft, slight touch
and it will make them tremble in a way that is
oh
so
right.

leading by example!

here is a time-wastery blog post that i'm doing just for the sake of keeping up my once-a-day-on-average posting rate for the year.

it's lame! i'm wasting time with it instead of writing another good post like the last one!

sweet!

xoxo,
claire

psst!

hey, you know that thing you like but you keep not doing because it seems like you just don't have time? i'm going to bet there's some other thing you're doing, probably just totally out of habit, that if you stopped doing this other thing, you'd have time to do the thing you keep not doing. and you feel bad about wasting time on the dang-nab-it habit thing and also about not getting around to the thing you like doing.

but there are two paths to contentment here!

numero uno is, duh, stop doing the habitty thing and use the time to do the thing you like. you probably already know this is an option, so why am even talking about it? the reason is ...

numero dos: maybe you're actually getting something out of the habitty thing, and you need to put some thinking time in so you can get a better handle on whether maybe it's actually okay to do the habitty thing at least some of the time. maybe you need to figure out, "do i really get some value out of doing this habitty thing? can i maybe start to think it's at least a little bit worthwhile?"

because lots of us have all kinds of slack-attack time-wasters, and we give ourselves grief over wasting all that time on them, usually because whatever we get out of them is totally momentary. 

but the big news is, it's all momentary, you know? that thing you like that you feel like is more productive or more worth doing ... it may produce some result or output that makes you think you've accomplished something, and maybe even that result is tangible -- something you can keep to remind you that, hey, you did the thing you liked, and it was productive.

but unless you keep it up, forever, sooner or later that tangible result is going to be sitting there reminding you, "nyaah, nyaah, you're not doing that thing you like these days, are you? what have you tangibled lately?"

the mindset of "this thing is not worthwhile because this other thing is more worthwhile" -- it's a trap sometimes. it keeps you from enjoying the little habitty time-wasters, and if you actually get some satisfaction out of wasting that time, sooner or later you're going to fall back into doing it, and then the cycle starts over again.

so what if instead of beating yourself up about not doing as much of the thing you like as you think you ought to, you decide, "you know what? i actually value this time-wastery maybe 10% as much as i value the other thing. i should appreciate the fact that i'm wasting time in an unproductive but low-grade satisfying way at least once in a while, because then i won't be dumping a bunch of negative energy on myself about not doing the thing i like to do."

because the dastardly part of the trap is, if you make yourself feel bad about wasting time, and you keep thinking you should be doing the thing you like, you're going to end up associating the thing you like with feeling bad!

and if you associate the thing you like with feeling bad, it's going to be harder to get yourself to put in the effort to do it.

so why not try thinking, "hey, this little time-wastery habitty thing is kinda chill and enjoyable at least in small doses, so i'm gonna go all-in on it when the time is right. and then when i've got a little more energy, i'll do the productive thing i really like. isn't that a win-win that lets me keep an even keel of the good feels more often?"

ymmv, but at least think it over instead of beating yourself up for wasting time.

xoxo,
claire

saved by crap-doodle technology!

this is a total silver-lining post, guys. i was sitting down to blog on our ancient macbook -- which is so old it constantly gets cranky and says, "yeah, you can't do that without updating the operating system. so sad for you," and then when we go to update the operating system it says, "whoa, this machine doesn't even have enough memory to hold an operating system update!" -- and it did a thing it's been doing the last few weeks, which is that blogger.com is finicky about recognizing stuff i want it to do if i'm using safari.

so i'd typed a title and a couple of lines, and then blogger gives me this message, "unable to update at this time." and then i smack a palm to my forehead and say, "dang-bob, why do i keep opening up blogger in safari now that they're not playing nice together? welp, time to switch to chrome."

and in the process of closing safari and opening chrome, i have enough time to decide, "i think i kinda hate this post i was working on. in fact, maybe i'm glad blogger and safari conspired against me to not save it." then i made up my mind i'd write this post instead, starting 2025 off with a positive tone instead of the i've-got-a-case-of-the-blahs one i was thinking about.

then i sign into blogger on chrome and find out it actually did auto-save my crud-post, but now i've made up my mind that one sucks, and this one will be a lot better. delete, delete, delete, delete! sorry, crud-post, you're outta here!

so number one, i ditched that meh blog entry, and number two, my technology wasn't actually screwing me over all that much, and number three, now we've got this post, which is much better.

(please don't leave a comment saying, "yikes, this one sucks rocks, so i'd hate to see how bad that other one was." it won't crush my spirit or anything, because i feel like i'm on a roll now and i could tough through it. but it would be pretty annoying if i got a comment like that when i hardly ever get any comments anyway.)

and look how freakin' long this post is!

i'm totally ruling over 2025. this year's going to be the best.

xoxo,
claire