If everything's a dream,

Not sure there's much to say about this week…

My hearing has been behaving oddly for a while. I'm not sure if this is down to different acoustics in my new room -- I think maybe the lack of proper carpeting is not helping? -- making things like the printer or the heater a lot louder than I'm used to and confusing the software, or if it's just my ears being randomly weird, or if my thrown off schedule and lack of proper sleep is making my brain too mushy to process what it hears?

Saturday's DND group has been getting better slowly, and a fifth party member joined us yesterday! It's still very rambly and we don't really have a story yet, but it's been enjoyable. Yesterday's session was a festival day and I -- my ranger character, that is -- won an archery competition. It was an event with moving targets, which I found deeply ironic. (^_^)

I finished reading Artificial Condition and started Rogue Protocol, Murderbot #2 and #3 respectively, and I continue to enjoy the hell out of them. The protagonist is the saltiest protag I've ever seen. Also the saddest, and most anxious, and also nicest and most protecting -- while maintaining their high sodium content of course. Can never admit to liking people or saving them. No.

I like to watch the street's cats lounging on the shed roofs. That's nice. enemyofperfect says it's my irl Neko Atsume. I 'have' three cats -- Calico, so named for obvious reasons, Bear, because grizzly dark coat, and Tiger, because they've got the stripes, if not the right colour. They're all beautiful and I love them u.u

In addition to Final Fantasy feelings, something else that's made me happy lately is DND, which I still cling to like... a thing you cling to for safety...?

enemyofperfect wrote something really nice about a thing I did in Monday's sessions and I'm terribly touched, not just because they said nice things about what I did in the game, but also for saying nice things about me where other people can read which makes me feel less hazy in my personhood and that's also very nice.

I play DND. I mentioned this once in a previous post, but I don't think I adequately explained the effect it has had on me. Sometime in February of last year, enemyofperfect and I -- at my behest -- spent half the night poring over character creation, and I downloaded the Lost Mine of Phandelver module -- because I couldn't help myself -- and we rolled a couple of the pregen character sheets, just to test it with. We didn't want to homebrew something, or play with these characters we made, when after all… what if we didn't like it? Well, apparently we do like it, because we've been playing almost every week for a year and a half, seventy sessions next Monday and who knows how many hours all together.

( DND is a tool for the development of personhood, fight me (ง'̀-'́)ง )

But I digress. What I'm trying to say is that DND is good for people on many levels, and everyone should be playing. Waking up at 2:00am and talking hypotheticals until dawn, until I was too drunk on sleeplessness to be shy and scared, until I said "Hey, do you want to play a small module…?"

I'm pretty sure it was the best thing I ever did for myself.

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If you're interested in the DM's perspective of this, you can read E's post here