Stuff I did this evening:

• broke the connector on the battery pack I’ve been using inside the still-not-finished Octoclock while removing it to use it to power the Witchin’ Coat
• powered up the Witchin’ Coat via my computer’s USB and decided what fabrics I want to use to diffuse the LEDs (a white fabric, with a sparkly black one atop it)
• half-assedly cut and sewed one panel that will have LEDs attached to it
• picked all the conductive thread out of the coat, and removed the LEDs from it

I think that is enough for now. I took some notes as to the exact way I want to stack things (coat, LEDs, white fabric, black fabric) and am now going to put all the bits away until next time I want to fool with this.

Earlier today, I got the next page of Rita halfway done. Not as much as it sounds as it’s just a single figure that takes up half the page. There’s some background stuff I’d like to do as well; I might fool with that while I eat some dinner but I probably will end up just poking at the net.

And of course half the day went to just slouching in the living room playing video games. I have been playing Diablo 3, and finally got to the point where it started being slightly challenging – the last few bits of Act 4 actually kind of woke me up, and the final boss of that made me finally change up the mindless tactics that had carried me through the game. Finishing Act 4 finally unlocked difficulty levels beyond the first three, which are named “normal”, “hard”, and “expert” but should be called “beginner”, “easy”, and “normal” IMHO. I’m not sure I’d actually recommend it; the gameplay is okay but the story is so by-the-numbers, and the whole thing is kinda grindy. That’s been tickling some part of my brain that just wants to be awake but kinda bored during the deepest parts of winter; basically I guess it’s a good game to hibernate to. I’m also hoping it will be fun for local co-op when Nick gets back in town.
Anyway. I typed this up while eating. Which I’m pretty much done with. So I guess now I’ll post this, go brush my teeth, and go to sleep.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been dealing with a cold. I had no energy, everything sucked, all I wanted to do was lie in the living room playing video games. This morning, I woke up at about 5AM with a bloody nose. Presumably from all that nose-blowing. I grumbled and went back to sleep for a while.

Now I am up, and I feel much better. Which somehow seems… I dunno. Weird? I just lost blood, and somehow that seems to have finished up the cold.

I doubt, however, that I could have skipped the past couple days of clogged-up misery by sticking a leech up my nose.

Today there is an invitation to drop in on some friends up in the suburbs. There will be cookies and meat and whatnot.

Tomorrow there is an invitation to FaceTime with some friends in New Orleans.

But it is winter and all I kinda really want to do is stay inside where it's warm and enjoy the silence of a day with very few cars on the road.

I dunno. Ever since Christmas stopped being HEY I GET ALL THIS LEGO AND ALL THESE BOOKS it's kinda lost its allure. Especially because around that time is when my father died. It went from yay bright lights and gifts to a reminder of a big emptiness in my life, and it's never really recovered. Well, sort of. I don't usually dwell on my dead father on the day, but I am definitely much more likely to spend it in solitude than to seek out people. I kinda lost what little interest I had in seeking out people then. And it didn't help that it kinda became “the day we'd get dressed up and go eat somewhere with Grandma, while she bemoaned the fact that her husband and sons were all dead”.

This sounds much more depressing than it actually is! I just enjoy solitude and silence on these CELEBRATE FAMILY TOGETHERNESS!!!!! holidays. Thanksgiving is like that too. I go home a couple times around winter, but make a point to never do it over a holiday. Quite possibly because that would remind both me and my mother of the fact that my father's dead and we'd just cry a lot. Him dying on my birthday just really kinda ruined all holidays for us, to be honest.

(It is good to HAVE invitations to spend time with friends on these holidays. That keeps me from feeling like nobody loves me. But I'd really just rather sit in a quiet warm place and read or something and eat very little and not talk with a single person.)

This morning I was poking around playstation.com to try and figure out if I could get Sony to quit sending me two emails every time I buy a game – one to say “you bought a game!” and one to say “you added funds to your wallet”.

Sadly, I could not find a “I am a grownup who pays for her e-goods with an actual credit card, please stop playing this ‘wallet’ game with me” setting. But I did find this:

Sony calls it the “portable ID” and wants me to stick it in my forum signatures or something. I call it the “no-life tracker”. If the little blue thing on the trophy collection stats ever begins showing a number larger than 0, please check if I’m alright; that tracks how many “platinum” trophies I have, which are typically only acquired by getting every other trophy a game offers.

“It appears that someone used Greek characters to draw a crude representation of a penis. Please do not do this” – a snarky header added by the weird e-mail client I was using in a dream.

Mom calls. Pages – which came with her computer – wants to update. But when she says ‘ok sure update’, the App Store complains that she’s not authorized to update it.

“Hmmm,” I say. “That sounds like a problem on Apple’s end. I’d contact Apple support.”
“How do I do that?” she asks.
“Hah, I dunno. I’d google ‘apple support’ and go from there.”

And then she says thanks, and hangs up the phone to go do just that.
I am so delighted that my mom is NOT TOTALLY AFRAID OF COMPUTERS and understands how to use the googles.

So last night I was siezed by AN URGE: I wanted to make a D&D character. I have no real plans to play in a campaign. I just wanted to make a D&D character. Specifically, an assassin/magic-user multiclass, who mostly uses her magic in the service of getting behind people unobserved, stabbing them in the back, and getting away again before anyone can react.

I ended up grabbing a torrent of the 5th edition Player’s Handbook (if I actually start playing I’ll buy it for real – hell, if I could have bought a PDF for like $10-20, I would have, but WOTC only wants to sell me a physical book) and staying up until like 2AM flipping through it on my iPad , taking copious notes in a previously-empty black sketchbook.

The one thing that really stood out for me about the 5th edition – besides it being really really pretty with a ton of gorgeous, gender-inclusive art (and a paragraph that explicitly includes queer and trans characters!) – is its explicit insistence on storytelling hooks. Players have to choose a background of what they did before becoming wandering adventures, as well as picking an “ideal” the character aims for, a “bond” with something in the past, and a “flaw”. All of these are obvious places for the DM to hang stories. Much better than “well I rolled up this collection of stats, what happens now”. Hell, just deciding on a class offered story potential – I decided to pass up the “Arcane Trickster” rogue specialization in favor of a dual-class rogue-assassin/warlock (Arcane Tricksters cast magic, but only illusions, and a lot of the spells I wanted weren’t illusion). The warlocks are a species of magic-user who get their powers from A Deal They Made, whether with the Fair Folk, the Netherworld, or Tentacles Outside Of Space And Time.

Admittedly for all I know they could have started playing with the idea of ‘bake story hooks into character creation’ as early as 2nd Ed, as the last time I owned D&D books was 1st Ed AD&D, but whatever. I like it. Solely going on ideas from the Player’s Handbook, I ended up with a half-demon lady whose non-adventuring gig is “entertainer” (mostly dancer and tumbler), but who also kills people on the side, and has made a dubious deal with some Lord or Lady of the Fair Folk that results in her having magical power. There are a lot of blanks left to fill in, but I feel like the system is designed to evoke answers for these blanks – for instance, one of the starting items of an entertainer is “some token of a lover” and I’m wanting to put that together with “made a deal with the Fair Folk” and have her doing various dubious jobs to try and get back the lover who the fairies stole. Which, well, I mean that’s something that could drive an entire story, isn’t it? A hell of a lot better start than what I remember getting out of all the steps of character creation in 1st Ed back around 1983.

(also if I ever do actually play her I am going to beg the DM to let me take the bard cantrip ‘Vicious Mockery’ because I totally want to deal in INSULT SWORDFIGHTING now and then.)

Edit. I drew her over breakfast. Are you happy yet, brain? Can I get back to work?