Words are inadequate

I'd been invited to an election-watching party but Erin was unexpectedly free, so I spent the evening at home with her instead. Then uilos came home too around nine-thirty, and a differently very nice evening transitioned into a few hours of sleepy snuggly domesticity. That, I am pretty sure, is why I'm on as even a keel as I am.

I remember the aftermath of 2004. I felt angry, betrayed, confused. Today I mostly feel numb. ("You can't /feel/ numb. You can only /be/ numb. Be numb. Be numb.")

---

My friend tam_nonlinear died last night.

I mean, I don't know how accurate those first two words are. We were friends and her friendship helped me through some very rough patches. She took me to Tribal Cafe, an amazing monthly belly dance show in DC, and introduced me to Avatar: The Last Airbender, and gave me "Thanks, Robert Frost" and "After the Pyre" when I needed them. She was also prickly, and I did a number of insensitive things that upset her, and I don't know if she ever accepted my last apology some years ago. For a year or two I've been torn between writing her to see where we're at, versus leaving her her space.

Her last writing, posted this morning: Sycamore. We do not always get to recover.

---

Today I pull into myself.

When I reemerge in a day, a week, next year, I want to forge a still safe space and open it to good people. I want to build a thing -- a community -- that increases the kindness in the world. Ideally I'd like for its seeds to spread in some fashion but I suppose that's not necessary. I have very little idea what it would look like; only a sense of ... atmosphere, I guess.

I've been chewing over this idea for months, if not years now. Too, it's perhaps something concrete and useful in a time when there's less hope to go around.

You can't save the world, here, says Erin, just contribute to a little corner of it.

I want to give other people a chance to recover. Maybe that's enough.

Last winter I invested in a decent pair of headphones, on the grounds that if I'm going to be listening to more music I may as well listen to it in comfort. (Audio-Technica ATH-M40X, if anyone cares; the M50X came highly recommended, and these were half the price and something like 95% as good.) There's been a definite improvement in my quality of life. I no longer have to fiddle with earbuds, the sound is distinctly better and more full, and as a bonus my ears stay warm in the winter.

Today I finally realised that there are all kinds of neat subtle harmonies in Break Me Slow that I had never picked up on with tiny lo-fi earbuds. Who knew?

---

Then last night I finally got around to watching the DVD that came with the 10th anniversary special edition of David Bowie's Black Tie White Noise (recorded 1993; picked it up over the summer). It's more or less an hour of Bowie talking about making the album, interspersed with musical cuts. This is Bowie at the top of his game creatively, and just beginning to hare off in a wildly new direction for the rest of the decade.

I hadn't realised that three of the tracks on the album were covers of other artists. They fit seamlessly. "Nite Flights" in particular feels exactly like a nineties David Bowie song.

I had also somehow forgotten how magnetic Bowie can be. Arresting, and clearly well in control of his art while still happily exploring new avenues.

January 2016 was some bullshit, is mostly what I'm saying.

---

From the department of when I'm wrong I'm wrong:

And so I never got back in touch with her after that. By the time I could start thinking about possibly doing so it was not quite a year later, and I figured I'd just lost out.

Well. It seems I figured wrong.

The last couple of weeks have been supremely interesting. I feel more solidly grounded in myself than ... maybe than I ever have, while at the same time luxuriating in all that great new-connection serotonin & dopamine. It's neat. Makes it hard not to walk around with a tiny goofy smile all the time, though.

Friday night I put a large number of things in a slightly less large number of boxes. Satyrday, tripped down to Bellingham with uilos and culfinriel. Spent around $80 on the USPS because even with the car rental it's cheaper than shipping through Canada Post. Faster and less US Customs-intensive, too.

Bellingham has a new "game store." Disappointingly, it's actually a Warhammer / Warmachine store with a bunch of Magic cards and two shelves of boardgames. So that took about five minutes to peruse. On the other hand, Mallard's is currently serving frankincense ice cream (ETA: recipe courtesy thanate), which may be the best ice cream I've ever had. (The pomegranate sorbet from Moorenko's is disqualified on the shaky grounds that it's a sorbet, not an ice cream.) And the dueling used bookstores remain fine places to find any number of things. One, for instance, has volumes two through four of Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, which I've heard a couple of people say nice things about and which I have resisted picking up because, hello, volumes two through four are of little use to me. I did pick up a(nother) giftable copy of JMF's Growing Up Weightless, because it's one of those books (along with The Dragon Waiting, and The Last Hot Time, and Heat of Fusion if I ever saw that in the wild) that I buy on spec because surely I know someone who needs it, and because I adore the cover. (Of which there is not a satisfactory image online, because much of what I adore is only visible in the wraparound.)

---

Since then I have been fairly brain-dead. Not sleeping well has been part of it; not sure about the rest, if there even is anything that's "rest." I did have a lovely evening last night with a handful of people I'd mostly never met before, at a small local poly meet... thing. The jury is still out but it may be the type of thing I'm looking for.

Also, as of season 4, Battlestar Galactica has gone so far off the rails that it can no longer see the rails from where it is, and in fact retains only a dim memory that once there were rails for it to go off of. Or, to quote Douglas Adams, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic."

... and we just had five minutes of snow hail downtown. All melted now of course, but still nice to see.

... running a Technoir game on Thursday nights, for uilos, semilocal J--, and M-- who physically reminds me a great deal of Andy "Not the President" Jackson. Character creation... I'd like to say it went well, and maybe it did, but it also involved a great deal of flailing about on my part because I'm not all that familiar with the system and I didn't have a Transmission printed up and ready to go. Still, I'm looking forward to the first real session next week.

The whole concept of Transmissions (insta-plot generators) is bloody brilliant and may have been designed expressly for my GMing style. A given Transmission contains a page-long description of the city it's set in and six lists of six items each: contacts, events, objects, factions, locations, and threats. Contacts (NPCs the PCs have some relationship with before the game starts) and threats (smaller than factions; usually 3-6 NPCs who'll be opposing the PCs in some way) are fleshed out and given stat blocks; the others get a sentence or two and maybe some tags (system-specific attributes). I randomly add three of these items to a plot map during character creation and brainstorm connections between them. Then any contacts that the PCs call on for favors during chargen get added to the plot map as well. As the game goes on, the PCs lean on their contacts for information, the contacts get connected to other plot nodes and bring in additional random plot nodes themselves, and I tie it all together in a coherent fashion. The hard part, as usual for me, will be knowing when to stop adding nodes and start moving towards wrapping it all up.

... through the first season of Leverage, which was great fun. The pilot and the two-part season finale are some excellent television and the rest of the season didn't suck either. Good inspiration for a cyberpunk game. Parker and Hardison make me inordinately happy, too, and it's so very nice to have a show where I don't dislike any of the main characters.

... writing a story in the space of two weeks for a contest, in the hope that external deadlines will motivate me more than self-imposed ones and/or this story won't run into whatever it is the Bookwyrms one did. Already got a setting, a plot, and some events that are pulling the story in a completely different direction. Business as usual.

Is there a word or phrase for the kind of TV/movie SF that involves brightly-colored diaphanous robes and buildings made of featureless white stone with glowing crystals and control panels inside? Ray guns and blocky silver robots may be involved as well. It's not exactly atompunk / Raygun Gothic, or maybe it's a narrow subset of that aesthetic.

... making a habit of going on not-dates with women after they've said, for varied and excellent reasons, that they don't want to date me. (In other news, two! and it's not even Valentine's Day yet.) I'm mostly okay with this development. I've very much missed one-on-one conversations with people I trust other than uilos.

... laughing my fool head off, in a combination of admiration and self-recognition.

... very tired. Goodnight Gracie.

So a week or two ago I spent an extended weekend in Seattle.

( It was fun. )

From rbandrews:

1. Other than people who live there, what's so great about Seattle?

The temperature and humidity. The transit system. Pike Place Market. Being right by the water. The way the clouds part and the sunlight's bright enough to shatter the gloom. Mountains. It's just my kind of place.

2. What is the worst job you've ever had?

A&W cashier, 1997-2000. Long hours, bad pay, high stress, a manager (Jed) who spent all his time on the phone with his ex-wife, an assistant manager (Carlos the Asshole) who'd mastered the art of sucking up to the boss while making everyone else's life miserable, and coworkers who for the most part ranged from "horrid" to "mediocre." Things improved when Carlos left after a year, and Jed left after another, so by the time I quit it was only godawful instead of staggeringly horrid.

3. Would you rather be a famous author, famous game designer, or a rock star?

Rock stars make more money and get more adulation, but I've still got to go with "author."

4. What is the thing you miss the least about Blacksburg? (turnabout is what kind of play, again?)

What Jonathan Tweet referred to as the "mystic s*** crowd" in Over the Edge. I'm not talking about the pagans; I'm talking about the morons. (There is, of course, some amount of overlap.)

When I was busy being depressed and failing out of college in spring '97, I spent a lot of time in Owens food court: there was almost always someone to talk to, and the refills on cokes were free if you brought your mug. One day the fluorescent light directly overhead was having some problems: every fifteen minutes or so it'd go BZZZZT and cut off briefly. During the several hours I was there I had no less than four different people, at different times, notice the flicker and say some variant of "sorry about that, i'm not shielding too well today."

(I also had a roommate tell me not to have sex on the vernal equinox or else I'd get my partner pregnant. I'm mostly willing to chalk that up to passive-aggressive shenanigans, but it's still good for a head-shake.)

5. What convinced you that polyamory was right for you?

Prior to Thanksgiving 2005 I spent months if not years resisting the idea that I might be poly, because the only examples I had weren't ones I wanted to emulate. I wasn't poly, and wasn't in love with two people; I was just confused and needed time to sort out my head.

Then over Thanksgiving I was spending time with some old friends late one night, and found myself having the following conversation inside my head:
"It would be really easy to fall in love with her."
"Oh? And that wouldn't mean I wasn't in love with uilos or nixve?"
"... no, it wouldn't."
"Well, then."

(It's a valid but ultimately academic question as to whether my willingness to have this conversation with myself was sparked by my_catharsis's death the day before.)

"Should you explicitly request to play, I will choose 7 of your LJ profile interests for you to expound upon (in your own journal)."

( rbandrews, salzara_tirwen, diadelphous )