Sitting down to a Saturday afternoon #DnD game and the GM just dropped an April Fool's element: We all got pasted with magical pixie spitballs that gave us each a minor magical curse, randomly determined by which chair we chose for the game. Here's mine:
Update: Fighting a gelatinous cube. My fancy, dignified, reserved elf is finger-gunning the hell out of this thing. Turns out that magic missiles and minor magical finger-gun curses go together pretty well.
Further update: Uh-oh. Our paladin is in trouble.
Also, his minor magical curse apparently involves farting. A lot. Especially when he uses his dragonborn breath weapon. Thank goodness I didn't draw that one.
We escaped the gelatinous cube and our magical curses, one of which involved a character saying "That's what she said" about 400 times during the session, and one of which involved our paladin rolling on a fart table every time he made a check. (Nat 1: "You poop a little.") #DnD
Our paladin and bard players are now energetically telling a real-life story from early in their relationship where they got food poisoning from oysters and spent a weekend violently crapping themselves in a hotel room. They have a lot of thoughts about relationships and poop.
Bard: "It's so weird when people don't want to poop in their friends'…"
[Oddly long pause.]
Me: "Uh. Their friends' pants? Their friends' hands?"
Bard: "Their friends' houses. But now I have other ideas. It's so weird when people don't want to poop in their friends' sandwiches."
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My husband and I watched the pilot of STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS last week and were pretty annoyed with it. We haven't gotten around to episode 2. At the time I was just mildly not into it, but the past few weeks in politics have underlined what I found so frustrating.🧵
There's the run-of-the-mill silly TV stuff. Like a whole batch of recycled characters from other STAR TREK media. Not my thing. Or Pike insisting on taking Spock on a mission where his physiology makes him the worst choice to go. Predictably, that derails the entire mission.
There's also the weird Spock sex stuff. I can't keep up on more than a fraction of TREK media. Did they retcon Vulcan sex alongside Klingon foreheads? I'm not sure how this fits with past Vulcan sex stuff, but it sure fits with "It's a series pilot! Show some skin!" policies.
Playing D&D with the usual Saturday crew. We're in a goblin village called Yellyark where they've built all their tents on a big canvas platform tied to a big bent-over tree. They've just explained that when danger comes, they fling themselves to safety. There's a diagram!
.@CAwkward immediately proclaimed this "the self-yeeting village," which I've just realized should be called Yeetyark, or possibly Yeettown. When they relocate, they can call their updated location New Yeetington. We are all way too taken with this idea.
When we met Yeetyark's goblin queen, she told us about their undead problem: there are tons of them in this area. "There is no good eating on these creatures."
@cdrLogic: "You realize they wouldn't know that unless they'd tried it. There is no other reason to bring that up."
As a general ongoing 2021 project, I'm seeking out more short stories. It's been an enjoyable way to encounter new authors, stretch my reading habits a little, and understand the craft better. Here's a thread of what I've read, with links in cases where the stories are online:
Today: The spouse rarely reads fiction these days, so when he recommended Monique Laban's "The Failed Dianas," I jumped on it. It's great: a young woman meeting her older self. Sorta. You'll quickly predict where it's heading, but likely not where it goes. clarkesworldmagazine.com/laban_02_21/
The descriptions in this are downright delicious, as characters describe their obsessions and where they found purpose in life. And the end got me pretty teary. I've never been all that subject to family pressure or expectations, but I'm SUCH a sucker for stories about it.
With the Dems holding a slim majority in the Senate, it's time for bipartisan compromise and legislation that serves both parties equally.
Just as soon as COVID is eradicated. And the Voting Rights Act is restored. And the detainment camps are shut down and ICE is abolished and
…we've rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement and restored the USPS' independence and rebuilt the EPA and enacted campaign finance reform that doesn't prioritize corporations over people and enforced the emoluments clause and revived federal protection for LBGTQ people and
…established a nationwide database on lethal police violence and sent about a thousand people to jail for corruption and/or hate crimes and definanced the Wall and re-suspended evictions and passed the $2k stimulus and investigated the massive Russian spying hack and