April 2020 Wrapup

April 2020 continued as a strange month in this strange year. Quarantine continued – I left the house maybe five times all month, each time for grocery travel. I have seen my family only at a few arm’s reach and I’ve been doing all my work over the internet. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve stopped my phone being on silent all the time and answer it now. What a wild month.

This blog, themed around me centric media was a hard one to do but we did get there in the end, even if there were two points where posts almost didn’t go up on time – closer than I’d like to be, to be quite honest. Obviously, in a month like this, most of the articles are favourites – either topics I’d saved up for the rest of the year or burning opinions that inspired fast shots form the hip.

Still, I really liked my pieces on Bleach and the Ur-Quan. The Ur-Quan article was something of an experiment, too – I wasn’t sure if a deep dive into the lore and storytelling of a game universe like that would appeal. I’d love to do more of that if people liked it. I weirdly went in on Star Wars twice this month, with an article about how bad Sabacc is (very) and how good Ewoks are (very).  I talked about my beloved helicopter boy Blades, from the Transformers universe because apparently I’ve just become a parody of my own interests.

This month you learned how to become Corvo Attano and maybe picked up some tips on teleporter bullshit in 4th edition D&D, that’s great too. I talked about how important inns are to play narrative, about how oaths and pacts are things to enoble characters, not to punish them, and I insulted everyone who complained about murder hobos. Then throw in that I did a run-down of my Eresh Protectorate knightly orders for those of you who like that kind of thing!

I also finally put out there the article about Atheist Oppression, which summarises as yes we are, and thanks to bad actors, I can’t be taken seriously talking about it.

This month’s shirt design coincidentally ties into this month’s release of Final Fantasy Seven Again.

And this month’s video was, in hindsight, really easy to make! I got a good handle on how to make this kind of video over all my time practicing and I may find myself doing more stuff like this – long rundowns of character groupings. At least if you enjoyed them, please do let me know.

Who's This Dingus: Phoenix Wright Edition

My personal life is just very stressful. There’s a lot of work that needs doing, there’s not a lot of boundaries between types of work and there’s a real challenge keeping the days of the week straight. I don’t want to accidentally miss the day in the week when I need to put the recycling out, for example.

Those of us who get through this are going to do it by being careful and being caring. So that’s what I’m trying.