The seasons turn, the days end, and we come once more to another full month of articles over here on Press Dot EXE. March is gone, and with it I want to take a moment to talk about what I’ve done this month; what writing is here, what you can check back on a whole month of content and see if there’s anything that stands out to me that you’d like to check out.
One of the strangest things about these posts is that they feel to me like a ‘cheat’ – like I’m doing a bunch of work on these posts, when I’m working hard to present the best writing I can on an interesting variety of topics, and then every month you get one fewer post, because there’s here, a menu.
Except then I find out how even the most obsessively interested people looking at my content tend to miss stuff, because the internet is hard and I realise it’s important to take a moment and reflect like this.
Anyway. Hey, here’s a summary!
This month’s Game Pile articles:
And the other side, the Story Pile:
In my ongoing effort to exhaust every possible cool thing I like to talk about in the context of Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop games, I wrote about the mount rules in 4th Edition D&D, the way that exotic weapons reflect unconscious racism in the creators’ minds in 3rd Edition D&D, and most importantly to me and my stuff, the way I’ve repurposed Dwarves in Cobrin’Seil, and what I’ve changed them into – the Dio Baragh.
I also wrote about the Dnyarri, because I like Star Control 2, and tied that into themes of the absolutely dreadful habit of videogame communities to forgive uh, just the worst people for things they don’t think they did wrong.
This month was an opportunity for reflection; I was able to talk about how I’ve been affected by the change in my life by getting a new fridge, and how I feel about regifting and ownership of games as objects, then about how I form habits. I also took some time to think about how I feel about myself, and about criticism I have for things I love. Finally, because Tab asked, I wrote about the ideological underpinnings of hammers and sandwiches.
I like bland name products that show up in anime – you know, the WcDonalds and the like. I watched Kaguya-Sama Love Is War recently, and was taken by the ‘SOMY’ battery branding. It reminded me of a childhood of 2 dollar stores and terrible brand names that were trying very hard to be both enough like a thing you wouldn’t notice at a glance but not enough like a thing to get sued. These days well, we know they just don’t care about enforcing that kind of branding much.
Anyway, I made a SOMY PLACETATION branding design and giggled at it for a bit.
It was kind of inevitable, wasn’t it?
I mean, I’ve been extraordinarily careful this pandemic. I’ve given up on a lot of basic politeness and small social interactions in the name of controlling my environment. I don’t have that control over everything, though.
My mother tested positive for Covid late this month.
I am holding my breath as I write this. It’s not just her – after all, she shares her house with others, and everyone is vaccinated as much as they can be. I have other relatives who have tested positive, too, and my father is going to be spending this time in isolation too. I’m not going to see them, I can’t go see them. I don’t have a car so I can’t even do favours for them. I got to spend a day having hypochondriac worry that maybe I had symptoms and that worry turned into a headache (and a headache that I thought was a symptom) and — all of that.
You know, the things brains do.
I can’t make this better. I can’t fix this. I can’t help.
I just have to sit and hope.
In another, unrelated thing, a drop of Fundie Stuff, I went to the Dapper Dinosaur channel and spoke for two hours and had a chat about what it was like growing up in a weird Young Earth Creationist space.
