dismallyoriented

On a brief roadtrip to pick up my second partnersys from the airport, "Icarus" by CHRISTON came up on shuffle. My wife made a joke about the Crane Wives being on testosterone now, in reference to their own "Icarus" song as the band she was more familiar with. This sparked a rabbithole of looking up every single song titled "Icarus" currently available on spotify. The result was a 90 min playlist and this corresponding tier list.

You can listen to the playlist here. Youtube mirror may be forthcoming.

Requirements for the playlist and tierlist

Title must be "Icarus" and only "Icarus". Songs with additional words in the title are disqualified and cannot be included in the Icariad.^[1]
Not every song was included; songs that were classified as "Singles" didn't get added mostly because I wasn't sure how to do it without accidentally just starting the song itself
Songs are ranked on two axes. First is overall song quality, second is on the quality of reference to Icarus (Icarusity, if you will). References were judged by:
- Whether they directly said Icarus's name or not
- The degree to which they captured the story
- The effectiveness of how they utilized the metaphor

Rankings obviously differed by the individual participant - where we had disagreements, I will clarify the ratings and reasoning behind them.

( Commence the Icariad )

That's it that's the post

Realized only just now I typo'd the title of my last recap post. Boo. At the time of writing this draft, I was trying to make sure I got this one out before we finished Mission 2. I did not finish this before we finished Mission 2 lmao. [Wife's note: HE SO PROFOUNDLY DID NOT DO THAT] Anyway, delays aside, it's time for Downtime!

For those of you who don't play Forged in the Dark games (FitD), games that use that system have a codified Downtime phase that occurs between missions. It's time for PCs to rest and recover from whatever stress & harm they've racked up, work on long term projects for themselves, and deal with any other complications and random events that the GM rolls up. It's also a fantastic time for character interactions between party members and NPCs. Each player has two actions to spend working on those aforementioned things.

All FitD games (as far as I'm aware) have a Complication that occurs during downtime. The GM rolls for a random occurrence off a table, based on certain in-game conditions like "how much trouble have you caused with your missions." Crews that have accrued more heat and bad attention will have more troublesome random events, some of which will involve factions that they've pissed off coming to. Resolve their problems, let's say. For example, we've taken -1 rep with Children of the Fault, the group that Isaiah belongs to, because even if you have really good reasons to scrub a mission it's still not a good look to take on a job and then say "Actually, never mind." Despite that we're still within the most basic heat level, so we would've been fine - had our GM not rolled the "reroll on a higher danger table" option and landed on "Quintessent Life - troublesome spirits and magical creatures".^[1] Which, to be fair. We did bring home a wholeass dragon wisp, so.

Because Songs for the Dusk is so community focused, it adds another feature to its downtime phase called "Threads". At the start of the downtime, you pick a broad theme or concept about your community that you can build your downtime scenes around. For this downtime, we chose, "How does gossip work in this town?" and began filling in the different avenues of how news spreads in our community, and how people talk to each other.

( A side note on Love Letters )

( Downtime 1 )

Sometimes there are influential old people in your life, or even just old people who were around as a passing fixture of your life because they were fellow members of your community. A good several of mine were teachers - the old Chinese man who taught me violin since 5th grade and hosted student recitals in his backyard, the Russian woman who taught me piano and did her damndest to teach expressive body language when I didn't understand why it mattered or how to feel it in my performance, the other old Chinese man who ran an art class at my local Chinese school and gave me unexpected gender and life goals. They're important parts of your life but only for as long as you're doing the thing that keeps you in contact. And then you quit, or get a different teacher, or graduate and move away, and you leave each other's orbits. You look at the calendar year and remember how long ago it was when you knew them, and you don't know exactly how old they were when you were last together but you can sure do the math on the odds of life expectancy.

I have no way of knowing if these people are still alive, or how their lives are going. For some of them, I'm not sure I deserve that information, in the sense that we were only tangentially connected and a next door neighbor who you never really talked to Isn't the kind of relationship you get intimate life details for. But the fondness is still there, the well wishes are still there. Even if I don't know that anyone is there to receive them anymore.

When "I'm literally 12" becomes abruptly and immediately true

For Alice, who asked me to write this.

—

One of the unique features of plurality is how people within the system don't have to be like the body. Just because they live in it doesn't mean they all must resemble it, or have their personal proprioception match up with the body’s external shape. This means that system members can vary in all kinds of ways - height/weight, ethnicity, species or body plan, and the topic of today’s essay: age.

It can be tricky sometimes for people to wrap their heads around what it means for a system member to look and be different from the body. After all, you’re not in their head with them, so all you have to go on perception-wise is the body, and it’s gonna look however old it is. What does it mean for someone to be 7 years old when their external body is 38? How should you interact with a system member who's much younger than the members you know? In what ways are internal children similar or different from external children? I'll be talking through the ways I’ve learned how to treat them well and care for them.

—

( Read more )

Got another Emotional Support Singlet essay coming soon - finished the draft last night in an ill-advised sleep-deprived writing spree and am running it past some folks for feedback and permission before publishing. It realistically won't go up until June, but I'm really excited. It's about child headmates (littles & middles) and the best ways to support and interact with them.

One of the things that roommate has been doing to try and build more life skills and independence is learning how to drive. So far it's been mostly practice with me, as I've had an extended period of unemployment and therefore had time to take them out during the week in the car. We'll be moving them toward private driving lessons, as I'll be starting a new job soon, and eventually my wife and I are planning to head to Canada in the next year or two, so a more structured and focused Life Improvement Scheme is going to be necessary to best prepare them for once they have to go elsewhere.

During one of our recent practice sessions, I had pitched a specific neighborhood that would be a good practice ground, and specifically pitched trying to drive there, as it's a very short ways from where we live. They were nervous about it, because the main road off of our neighborhood is a two-lane county route, which can be understandably intimidating. I was the same with my own learning experience back in my hometown. So I drove us to the practice zone, but on the way there I pointed out the relatively low oncoming traffic for the turn. And on the way back after practicing for a decent chunk with single lane residential roads, I had a small lightbulb moment.

Those of you who knew me from cohost may remember the post I made about "the circus faction in your trpg setting". The short version is I watched a video where an experienced circus performer taught a youtuber how to walk tightrope, and I was so impressed by the teacher's physical and mental fortitude that I wrote up a post on how to incorporate those aspects of circus life into characters who have that as part of their background. One of the pieces of advice that he gave was, to paraphrase, "It's the same trick 5 inches off the ground as it is 50 ft off the ground."

Which is to say: if you can keep your balance on the rope the whole time under perfectly safe conditions, then you have the minimum physical skill you need to do the same thing under riskier and more dangerous conditions. You are \*already* capable, you just have to keep your head during the dangerous conditions. The same goes for keeping a car under control on a one lane road. If you can stay in your lane on a one-lane road, you can do the same thing on a multi-lane road, once you know how to keep your cool. Good life advice that I'm gonna try to remember for lots of things, tbh.

Hello! It's been a hot minute since the last one of these. In hindsight, session-by-session updates was never going to be sustainable. However, as dedicated table notekeeper, I do have a nice big document I can hammer into a full-mission update. We'll do this in sections: player character intros, an NPCs reference section, and then the sessions themselves.

First, player characters. We're running the "Magpies" crew type, a party based around engineering, salvage, and demolitions work. Songs for the Dusk features crew playbooks, so that any given party has a "class" of its own, with a missions specialty. Ours was demolitions, hence the party name of "Crashers" and our home base, which we dubbed "the Crashpad"

On the roster, we have:
- Marl, the Aegis (it/she) - the team bodyguard, an ex-military wilderness guide who ran escort and protection missions for people in remote locations. It is a quadrupedal crab-like robot with shield-shaped legs and armor plating that it can swap in and out for different missions
- Yara of Nowhere, the Scholar (she/her) - An owl-esque person with feathers and big eyes (enhanced by her glasses). Scholars are the general nerd and research class. Her player came up with the organization "Nowhere", a semi-secretive order which preserved the infrastructure of the internet and archived digital knowledge through the apocalypse and into the current times. All formally inducted members of Nowhere have access to a set of accounts and digital permissions that allow them to hack into systems from the Radiant Era
- Quentim Parable, the Charter (he/him) - my guy, bog standard human, a former traveling caravan merchant who stayed in town to help during a time of struggle and has failed to notice that he no longer intends to leave. The most concise way to describe Charters is the "logistics & support" class. All of the abilities are themed around Blades in the Dark-style flashbacks, planning ahead, and giving mechanical advantages to the rest of the crew. It's very "all according to keikaku" and I love it so much
- Gail, the Scrapper (it/she) - the team techie, a bat-like person with a prosthetic left leg, and a dragon therian. She came to New Haven in the hopes of learning how to become a dragon. Gail is the hardware person to Yara's software expertise, and she has a toolkit full of Fun Gadgets and a lil dragon buddy-bot named Byte
- Morena "Momo", the Witch (she/they) - a New Haven native, a human with green-tinted skin and gold-speckled eyes from a childhood case of dragonpox. She works at the town library, and was granted some small mobile DIONE nodes that can function as her familiars. They take the shape of animal-themed jewelry that can spring into action when needed

---

( NPC reference )

---

( Mission 1 Summary )

Funny relationship moment from this morning that I wanted to share. Even though my wife knows I love her a lot, she is someone who craves romantic gestures. I am not terribly romantic in that sense - I default to practical or literal responses instead. The intuition for that type of response and when it's appropriate/expected just isn't there. So we've been practicing about it.

When my job started getting really bad, we started saying "have a good day at work" to each other. I finally left that job on Friday. But today wife was standing by the front door ready to leave, when she turns around somewhat expectantly. And I'm like, "Don't you have to go?" And she says, "You gotta say the thing."

It takes me a few seconds before I have the lightbulb moment and shout, "Oh! Have-a-good-day-at-work!" like a kid getting the right answer at a spelling bee. She was so endeared she picked me up and squeezed me about it.

He can be taught.

You ever play a worldbuilding game and then some players make a pitch that turns into a 30 min discussion that proceeds to define the entire rest of the campaign?

Needless to say. A lot of TQY happened since my initial post, so now I'm making this general summary of events for personal reference and to holler at folks about it. You can see my previous recap of the first chunk of Spring at [this link].

Some important Spring details I left out

Our scarcities were History, Lake Ecology, Fuel, and Familiarity with the Landscape. Our abundance was Wild Game
The teens, who were doing a secret mapping project to learn about the area, landed themselves in huge trouble when one of them fell into the canyon while carrying a DIONE node they weren't supposed to. Thus making contact with the tech restoration community in the canyons, and \*also* revealing DIONE's existence to them. The adults elected to revoke node access to all the kids due to this recklessness
General attitude toward the cavern community is "cautious interest". People are very protective of DIONE and don't know if these techies can be trusted yet. We successfully establish communications, a relationship of information sharing, and DIONE grants them a single node for communication

Now for the rest of the seasons!

( Summer )

( Autumn )

( Winter, the final season )

( Post-Winter addendum )

---

[1]: Songs for the Dusk is very explicit about Tamaris being a post-cataclysm Earth. The Radiant Era that preceded the current time was a technomagic utopia (with an exploitative underbelly, same as the world now). ^[return]
[2]: The text of the card: "Winter is harsh, and desperation gives rise to fear mongering. Choose one: Spend the week calming the masses and dispelling their violent sentiments. The week ends immediately. [Or]: Declare war on someone or something. This counts as starting a project."^[return]

My wife and I have been rewatching the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. It's a very good fantasy adventure series, one we first watched while they were going through their initial Teeth Troubles back in 2023. It's about the titular character, Frieren the Mage, who was once part of the adventuring party that slew the Demon King. The show begins 80 years after the end of that quest, when the party leader, Himmel, dies of old age. Frieren, who is an elf with a lifespan measured in millennia, is abruptly confronted with the passage of time, the mortality of her human companions, and the fact that this 10-year journey of hers actually meant way more to her than she realized. After Heiter, the other human party member, passes away, Frieren begins questing with his student, reckoning with the weight of her past, and the ways the world has moved on after 80 years (for better and worse).

I love the ways this show grapples with legacy, generations, and time. It constantly finds ways to rhyme the events of the present with the quests and memories of Frieren's past, in a way that I find thematically interesting and convincingly done. I love the way the deceased characters echo throughout while the weight of their absence stays real and present. I do think the entire premise of the show is beautifully rendered in the opening titles of cour 1. The theme song ends with a split screen panning in opposite directions - Himmel and the old party panning forward on the left side, the successor party panning backward on right side, and then both halves of the screen merging into one shot as Frieren emerges from the seam in the middle. Chef's kiss. Cinnamon tography.

The other thing I wanted to bring up is the ways this show thinks about and portrays immortal/long-lived people. There's a really interesting conversation Frieren has with another elf she meets. He's a monk, a follower of the main (only?) religion of the setting, while she's more of a skeptic. They ask about each other's reasoning - Frieren finds it unusual that the goddess has never appeared since the mythic Age of Miracles. And the monk's reason for believing is that nearly everyone else he's ever known in his life has long since passed away. A lot of the notable things he may have once done, the people he's been, nobody living now really knows them anymore. Having an immortal deity in his world means that there is Someone Else, who will be eternal and who will always know him wholly and has context for the entirety of his life, and will address this fundamental loneliness that's a consequence of his longevity. Once he dies he will go to Heaven and meet his long-dead loved ones and the goddess, and be praised for the life he's lived.

That's a super interesting and compelling reason for a long-lived person to believe in a religion! So often it feels like I see the atheistic tack that Frieren takes, that living so long and seeing so much reduces the space in the world for a deity to be hiding. But to have an almost-immortal who draws real significance from holding a faith, and in a way that's unique to his longevity, is cool as shit.

I remember reading a post from an older trans man, about the moment he stopped being able to sympathize with other trans men who were earlier on in their transitions. He was sitting in a support group, listening to some younger guys vent about their social anxiety contacting doctors for access to healthcare, and realized his main reaction was impatience. A sort of, "well if you don't suck it up and do it, how are you going to get what you need?"

You have these sort of twin truths of "anxiety does in fact keep you from meeting basic needs in a way that Sucks Tremendously," and also the understanding that like. A phone call will not kill you. The understanding that at most the person receiving the call might be rude, or annoyed, but that even if it goes badly you will live to call another doctor's office. Obviously there are circumstances that can change this - if it takes you hours to gin up the ability to make this call at all, if you do in fact rely on this one office to access necessary care, the stakes of it going badly change. But for a large swathe of people, the danger is entirely in the head. And for someone who has done it already and learned how to cross that barrier, well. It can all feel very just make the jump already, doofus.

I've run into a couple folks who feel profound fear and anxiety about change or certain life experience milestones, in a way that has me feeling like the grumpy older guy. I say this as someone who did once struggle with severe social anxiety, and who still gets profoundly anxious about other things in my life. I feel both a sense of the severity of the obstacle, but also the impatience. It is sort of like learning how to ride a bike - something I did as a kid and Also experienced profound anxiety about for a bit, lmao. When I started moving from training wheels to a free-standing bike, I was so scared of falling over that after losing my balance for the first time, I simply did not touch my bike again for about a year - always opting for the Razor scooter or my roller blades. And like. My avoidance was entirely reasonable, it fucking blows to fall and get scraped up. It's scary and it hurts. It takes a lot of support and fortitude to willingly put yourself in the way of pain.

But also. Falling off a bike won't kill you, unless you've made the singularly ill-advised choice to start learning how on the side of a cliff, or in live traffic. It'll hurt, you'll maybe need to set the bike aside for a bit before being ready to try it again, but you won't die. You can get back on, and try again, and eventually you can do funny tricks like a running mount/dismount. Braver people than me pop wheelies.

When you're the one who's in the anxiety pit, and haven't taken the plunge yet, you have no point of reference for how it will go. How realistic any given bad outcome is, or how endurable it may be. You don't realize how survivable a given scenario is, until you've done it. And it is frustrating sometimes, to be the person on the other side, already on the bike or in the pool, knowing exactly how to make it through and watching someone else jump at shadows. But like, I don't think I could've talked kid me into getting onto the bike again any sooner. Not unless kid me could've believed that I was from the future, having already done it, and even that feels flimsy as hell when you're scared. The only thing that could've done it was kid me eventually getting back on the bike and taking another shot, until suddenly I could feel the bike balancing itself under my own speed. Until the moment of fear passed and I was okay, if not always the same after.

I just wish there were a way to pass that on to others easier. But they will get there on their own time.

Edit (3/24/25): I have found the original excerpt! It was an essay called "Trans Grit" by Cooper Lee Bombadier, collected in a 2016 anthology titled The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care, edited by zena sharman. You can find the excerpt [here]

So I've been watching Crash Course: Religion, because despite it being kind of a hot-button and not always well-handled topic (gestures at the reality of the US being a deeply Christianity-centric place), they've managed to make a pretty solid primer that discusses and teaches religions on their own terms, instead of through a Christianity-tinted lens. I'm pretty sure the first video of theirs I watched was the African Diasporic Religions one, and very soon after the Chinese Popular Religion video followed.

I would highly recommend both videos (and frankly the entire rest of the series, if it's of interest - naturally it's very 101 basics due to the nature of being a short-form video series, but a good primer is a good primer). But the topic of interest for this post is about the Ghost Festival, which is the main topic the video centered on.

In short, it's a holiday kind of like Día de los Muertos. The spirits of the dead have returned to Earth, so the living leave offerings and food for their departed relatives, burn paper money (and other paper replica objects^[1]) so the smoke can carry to the dead, and have a big party about it. It's admittedly not something I've ever celebrated - needless to say it's not exactly a big thing in the US, so I've had no occasion to. But the idea of leaving food and other offerings for the dead is something that stuck with me, because it features a lot in Chinese funerary practice. I remember the one time my parents took me to visit a relative's grave in China - we brought oranges, they lit incense, and they got on their knees and bowed before the tombstone. My mom mentioned specifically wanting to teach me these traditions, and well. Boy howdy did it stick.

There's another relevant part from the Crash Course video, which is that the comments section contains my favorite anecdote from any of these videos so far. It's someone recounting an anecdote from their grandma, and a funny bit of cultural exchange.

greenblaze9189
When my grandmother was a young woman growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, a mischievious cousin of hers once went to a member of the Chinese diaspora and asked "why do you leave bowls of rice by grave sites? When are the dead going to come up and eat the rice". He received a response "the same time your dead come up to smell your flowers"

Fantastic response. Five million points for you random old Chinese guy in the Caribbean.

Anyway. I shared that comment a bunch of places and some folks thought that was actually a really interesting way to think about the practice. And like. In all honesty that's largely the way I think about it for myself? Because like. I know the dead are not going to be able to eat anything I leave for them. They're dead. (And frankly, the ecologist and Chinese guy in me is grumbling about potential food waste.) So the significance for me lies entirely in the doing of the act. Doing it is a sign of how much they matter to me.

In life, making food is a way I can care for my loved ones. Cooking from scratch is something I love to do, and something I get a lot of enjoyment and meaning from. Making food for the dead is just an extension of this. It is the step up from burning incense and bowing at the tomb. This is what you do for the dead. This is a way you can love them even though they are gone.

Tl;dr - I am shaking hands with the Oaxacans and other Mexicans who celebrate Día de los Muertos. Same hat, different background.

---

[1] I am delighted to inform you that these offerings have arrived to the 21st century, in that you can burn paper smartphones and sports cars if it so pleases you. Humans are gonna human, lmao.^[return]

[2] Funny familial anecdote also - one of my uncles saw his grandma setting an empty table when he was staying at her village as a young kid, and told his parents that "grandma was making dinner for no one". They proceeded to tell him very firmly that it was shut-the-fuck-up friday, because the Cultural Revolution was happening at the time and openly doing that kind of folk practice was Rather Illegal. Shut the fuck up and let grandma make food for her husband in peace.

First post of 2025 and it's a completely inconsequential one. I can be a somewhat literal and pedantic person, in a way that can sometimes ruin other people's attempt at A Funny Bit, or lead to me running headlong into a hypothetical question that wasn't meant to be answered at all. There are two terms I've coined/borrowed to describe some particular ways in which I Get Got by this pedantry.

The first is "getting smoothsharked", which is in reference to a beloved tumblr meme. The artist Branson Reese posted a comic with a punchline about sharks being smooth, and then began baiting pedants in the twitter replies by repeatedly insisting on shark smoothness in increasingly ludicrous ways. Naturally, it also attracted a similar crowd of pedantic corrections on tumblr, with other users taking up the mantle of trolling them. Most people see this thread as like, a cautionary tale against wanting so hard to be Smart or Right that you've blinded yourself to the situation, though I've seen some autistic folks critique the thread as being cruel for its social deception. Which also makes sense; being wound up by people being willfully wrong is also a bullying technique. I use "smoothsharked" here for when I'm slammed into the position of the pedants - people are participating in a comedic bit about being intentionally wrong, and I am too irritated or upset by the inaccuracy to participate. Smooth sharks don't do it, but the "birds are a conspiracy" meme Especially gets on my nerves. Things that are important to me, or remind me too much of things like climate denialism and other politically and socially dangerous ignorance, will smooth my shark right to hell, even when I recognize it's not meant in that way.

Getting "nerdsniped", meanwhile, comes from this xkcd comic. In the original comic, it's about presenting a nerd with a problem that's so compelling that they're distracted into inaction and get hit by a truck. In my usage however, it refers to when a piece of media contains a factual inaccuracy relating to my field of expertise, which renders me entirely unable to focus on anything else. The difference between nerdsniping and smoothsharking is that a nerdsnipe isn't based on intentional inaccuracies - it's based on an imprecise or mistaken understanding of a concept, and also the fact that I am Cursed With the Exact Knowledge that makes an otherwise inconsequential detail Annoying As Hell. For example, there are plenty of reasons to hate The Big Bang Theory, but instead of all the more substantial reasons, the one that sticks in my craw the most is the theme song. Specifically the lyric, "The earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to drool". Autotrophs are organisms that make their own food - photosynthesizers, chemosynthesizers, etc. Usually plants or single celled organisms. Notably, none of these organisms have salivary glands. They are literally incapable of drooling.

Does anybody care about this? No! Absolutely not! It's a funny phrase that rhymes and fits the meter and evokes primordial slime. It does not matter in any meaningful sense. Will this specific lyric still drive me into an indignant rage every time I think about it? Yes! Fuck!^[1]

---

[1] To be fair, some of that rage is due to fatigue and irritation. In 2023 my job contracted with a boat where one of the crew members would have Big Bang Theory playing on a loop all the dang time. It was his favorite show and unfortunately it meant 2 weeks straight of hearing that goddamn theme tune and seeing the same episodes over and over again. This is also excepting an additional trip where he left his dvd player running on the title for nearly 30 min. If I did not hate the show before, I certainly do now.

Current Mood: silly

ghostqueens has been running a Songs for the Dusk campaign for me, metamour, and a loose collection of other friends. Earlier this month we finally met for the first session, a round of The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. It's a map-drawing and worldbuilding game, where you use a deck of cards to play out one year in the life of a community, before the Frost Shepherds arrive in winter and end everything. The deck is split out by suits, one for each season, and each card is a prompt describing what happens each week of the titular year.

It's a game I like a lot; I'll be bringing a copy with me to a new year's eve party I'm attending next week. It's been a fun way to get everyone used to being at a table together, and riffing off of each other's ideas. We've managed to make a really Songs-ass community

Highlights

- Our town borders the Resolution Lake in the Meridian Valley. Both of these are part of the existing SftD setting. It’s flanked by a swamp, and there’s another tech restoration community living in a canyon to the north of us, who have settled into caves in the canyon walls.
- A large potentially pre-Radiant pump station lies at the edge of the lake - it’s old, abandoned, and completely untouched by nature even after centuries. There are a lot of other underground caverns and passage to an underground portion of the lake
- the oldest community member is Distributed Intelligence One, aka DIONE. She is an AI who was stolen from unknown previous creators/owners.

- By distributed I mean that she has nodes which are either normal servers or portable nodes carried by community members. She needs a minimum of 5-6 nodes within 10m of each other to achieve full sapience.
- Nodes which fall below that concentration can still record input/retrieve data, those just behave more like Siri-level programs, and return information to the whole when brought back within range.

- A coming of age ceremony for children involves being granted their own personal node to carry.

- there are flowers in the area that attract a lot of Transcendent and/or spirit beasts. we’ve yet to elaborate on this detail

- other notable fauna include the crocodiles who live in the lake (one of which has gone and laid a whole nest in the middle of our town), and a large pack of wolves who are a eusocial hivemind

We're only 10 weeks into Spring, because one of our players couldn't make it, and we want to make sure it has a chance to play in the starting season before we move on to Summer. But mannn I'm so excited to find out more about our lil town and to keep playing in this setting together. DIONE is everyone's favorite NPC already (including passerby I've told about the campaign), one of the players wants to make her familiar an active mobile node, and her maintenance needs are an Immediate good hook for our crew (Magpies, techies and scrappers). It's gonna be real fun to figure out how each of our players fits in with the community and what each of our social connections are.

By which I mean she and the rest of her system have all joined dreamwidth! You can see their introduction post here: https://ghostqueens.dreamwidth.org/300.html

Go say hi! Give a follow porhaps

I am mostly being tongue-in-cheek with the title, but like. There's a kind of funny and charming thing I've noticed that people will do when shopping at this grocery store. For those who don't know, ALDI's is a German discount supermarket chain that started expanding its presence in the US in recent years. One of its key features are the coin-locked shopping carts. All of the carts are locked together in their stall until you insert a quarter to disengage the lock. Upon returning the cart you lock it again and retrieve the quarter.

Naturally as with any coin-operated anything, people sometimes are caught without change. So occasionally, people will return carts but leave the quarter in the unlock slot, or will pass their carts to people who've just arrived, to save them the hassle. But the funny thing I've noticed is that the handful of times I've done a cart handoff to someone, they've always handed me their quarter.

It's funny! It's funny because like. You don't need to, I'm doing this for free, I can get other quarters. But everyone still understands "a quarter" as fair value for having access to the carts. So they thank you by giving you theirs. And I'd be lying if I said the gesture wasn't appreciated, small physical token of thanks for a small gesture. What a funny and endearing social phenomenon.

This might be a bit of a strange one. So earlier today a post crossed my tumblr dashboard, one with a load of excerpts from the NYTimes piece "100 Small Acts of Love". I may or may not read the full piece sometime later today. It is more or less exactly what the title says - a list of things that various couples do for each other as expressions of love. Leaving daily medications out, learning how to cook a beloved food and making it together, singing loudly to mask a sound the other cannot stand (the wife in question had actually gotten over that particular bit of misophonia, but didn't tell her husband because she loved his off-tune singing).

It's that kind of stuff, right? The small everyday things. Even the little excerpt of 20 or so examples had me tearing up at work. They're all so human and mundane.

( I'm not a person who is particularly good at saying )

So I returned to my local SFF book club after 3 months away, only to stumble directly into their end of year holiday potluck. Went home with Several leftovers, which was great, but more importantly one of the librarians who ran the club hosted a deeply funny and challenging trivia game. I ended up stealing his notes afterward (with permission), because there was one section that was entirely based on contrived puns of SFF book titles and I wanted to inflict them on everyone who stood still long enough.

The question format was a hypothetical news title that you had to reduce down to the book title it came from. For example: "Beyonce in prolonged battle with Cher" -> "Star Wars"

Here are the questions, I'll put the answers below the cut. Feel free to guess in the comments!

"Blizzard causes fifty car pileup"
"Classic magazine to be published with rippled cover"
"Leno now a subject of derision"
"Mathletes are now famous people"
"The Planet has become Amazon" (the self-proclaimed most difficult one)

---

( Answers below... )

So my butch, Ace, has been dating me and my now-boyfriend Mercury for a hot minute. We have had a running gag for about the duration of our collective relationship that one of us is Ace's "smart boyfriend", and the other is his "hot boyfriend". This mostly started out as a snarky jab on Ace's part, calling the MS in Marine Science boyfriend the hot one, but once we established that this was a Dichotomy in which only one of us could hold a title at a time, me and Merc both started gunning for Hot Boyfriend. And it's been a deeply silly back and forth ever since.

Usually, the title swaps off when one of us does something sufficiently foolish, though we've also had rare occasions where someone has earned the Smart title, like when Mercury figured out a hands-free way to use a heating pad on his shoulder for important pain relief. Well-deserved. However, we've recently come into a problem - I've done a three-for-three combo of Dumb Shit that's so powerful, I may have ruined the game.

To wit, in the past two weeks, I have:

1) Touched Quinn with my bare unwashed hands after handling an actively moldering potato
2) Exploded a plate in the microwave by overheating it (I was following directions for chicken tenders, but neglected to adjust the time for a single tender instead of the recommended 3-4)
3) Bit one of my cat's toy strings when Quinn dangled it in front of my face for a laugh

With a performance like that, it would take a borderline-catastrophic incident on Mercury's part to put him back in the running for Hot Boyfriend. And that is too dangerous a condition to stand. So we've now called a brief moratorium on the hot boyfriend/smart boyfriend game, until the statue of limitations on my November-fuckery has elapsed and we can start with a clean slate once more. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my extremely dubious crown, and hoping for a slightly less batshit December. Or maybe January. A guy can dream.

Profile

dismallyOriented

August 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Sep. 1st, 2025 11:20 am

Recent Entries

The Icariad: A Tierlist of Songs called "Icarus"

Wau

Songs for the Dusk: Downtime 1 Recap

Sentimental well wishes

How to Handle System Kids - A singlet/plural etiquette guide

Fuck yeah new essay coming

How to drive like a tightrope walker

Songs for the Dusk: Mission 1 Recap

Morning wifeposting

Songs for the Dusk: The Quiet Year, game overview

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Fear of change

Thinking about love part 2: Feeding the dead

Two flavors of pedantry

Songs for the Dusk: The Quiet Year, Session 1

Merry Christmas! Also my wife exists now

ALDI's is a portrait of humanity

Thinking about love

Punny SF/F Trivia

The hot boyfriend/smart boyfriend dichotomy