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 ...
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
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
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?
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
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
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.
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
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
[jeepers, i hope that chapter number doesn't put me in some kind of creative bankruptcy! earlier chapters are linked below!
(Chapter Two)"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?"
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
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
