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Aug. 27th, 2025 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverI haven't actually written anything here for a while, since mid-July other than posting story announcements, but I'm stuck here at the garage getting an oil change for two hours, so I thought, why not post? Sorta stream-of-consciousness, probably not particularly entertaining.
I'm a bit bothered by the fact that I haven't really been doing anything productive for nearly two months now. Mostly I'm referring to not making much headway on cleaning the house and destroying junk, but you know? I realized yesterday that I have actually accomplished things, among all the computer game playing that I've been doing.
Probably the thing I'm most proud of is cleaning out a whole room (well, 2/3 of one -- the rest of the space is inconvenient and thus has been relegated to holding piles of junk we haven't organized yet; this is not the only space in the house that is inconvenient and I think the designer has never had to live in a house that they designed before) and converting it into a game room. For us, a "game room" means a table for the two of us to play tabletop games, not like a big rec room with a pool table or whatever, and it doesn't need to accommodate more people because we never have people over.
(Ooo, thunder! I'm currently talking on Slack with my husband and he told me it started to rain and thunder at home. I've been watching the rain cell on the radar weather map creep toward me, and it just started here, two minutes later. And now the downpour! That's good, we need it.)
We cleaned out the room, then I bought and assembled two L-shaped bookcases and put them in a U at the back of the room, and we've loaded them with games, gaming accessories, and some of our hobbies, anything that we're planning to do in that room. And then, there's a card table and two chairs, but the table will be replaced later this year with a gaming table that I have my eye on.
I've been doing a bit of writing, including working on a multi-chapter that I haven't looked at in a long time. That one's been problematic because I've had to rewrite it three times now. I originally made one assumption which turned out to be wrong, so I wrote it again using another assumption, which turned out to be wrong as well, and then actually did the research and verified that my third assumption was correct and rewrote it. It still has some parts that I'm not sure what to do with, but I just got an idea from something I was watching that would work, so I've been working on it.
One of the most interesting things that has come out of all of this house-cleaning and house-clearing is that we've started to tacitly institute rules for general living. It's like, we've been living in a cluttered, messy, dirty house for so long that now that parts of it are clean, we want to make sure we don't fall back into messy. For example, the house entryway is now clear and we now have a rule that if anything that gets left in the entryway (for example, coming back from shopping, we might drop the bags near the door) must be dealt with by the next morning at the latest.
Another example is, I have this tray table that we use while playing games that need more space, and one day, I put it at the top of the stairs (just outside the game room). We found that it was convenient for placing things there temporarily, like stuff we need to take downstairs. So now, the rule is, nothing permanent can be placed on that table; it can only be used, as my husband terms it, for "staging" things. Eventually, I'm going to replace it with a nightstand or something, so that it can serve both as storage as well as staging.
(Hey look, I'm using horizontal rules now! This is great for separating stuff when I don't want to make separate cuts)
But I have been playing too many computer games. My current obsession in No Man's Sky, which is remarkably engaging even though I haven't been doing the main storyline or even ventured toward the more dangerous space. I've just been exploring planets, doing quests, and building up my settlement and base, all with the intention of building better ships. It's slow going, but I'm having fun.
NMS does have multiplayer play, where multiple people go on "expeditions", but I've been too nervous to go do them. Since my husband doesn't play (the game doesn't have enough shoot-em-up for him), I'd have to go team up with random people and I'm afraid they'll be contemptuous of my poor skills and my low equipment levels. I probably need to go research what these expeditions are to see what I really need to do them.
I did play quite a bit of the new Rimworld expansion and loved it, though I didn't actually get to the point of building a gravship. I fell in love with the new colony I built and didn't want to lose it by sending the colonists up into space. Another game that I've really been enjoying is Die in the Dungeon, which in my opinion, is one of the best dice-draft roguelites out there.
Another thing we've done is finally watched the rest of Star Trek: Lower Decks. We watched the first three seasons a year or two ago and loved it, and finally got the last two seasons, and, well, it really wasn't as good as we remembered. It felt like the show was trying too hard to be wacky, by having the characters over-react to things. It's a common trope in the show for one character to misinterpret what another character says and run off to do the wrong thing, which of course gets them into deeper, wacky trouble.
The show isn't helped by its need to have everything turn out just fine in the end. For example, the science officer, Tendi, is an Orion (which is a race of space pirates) and the heir of one of the major pirate houses (think: mafia). In one of the episodes, she and her sister have to do a space race to maintain the honor of their house, and if they lose, the house is obliterated and loses all its property to the ruling council. They actually do lose, reducing their house to poverty, and when they tell their parents, their parents say, "This is great news, actually. We were already thinking that we'd like to retire from piracy." Really???
And then... The other half of the episode was about the Federation helping a planet that had just discovered and installed replicators and was eliminating currency and wealth from their society (it's called "post-scarcity"). One of the formerly wealthy families started doing terrorist attacks to try to send the society back so that they could continue being wealthy, and the government confiscated their wealth and gave it to the captain of the Cerritos (the ship in the show) for disposal. So, the captain gave it all to Tendi's parents. Double really???
One more thing that ST:LD does that I can't stand is that the characters must always state the moral of the story in a long speech. Things often go downhill because a character makes an assumption, and then when the character realizes what they've been doing wrong, they always tell the other characters, "I thought that (assumption), but all this time, (this) has been happening and I didn't realize that you've all been feeling (this way) and I'm such a moron." I mean, it's exactly like that. If there are two characters that have epiphanies like this, then they both have their speeches like this, one after the other. It's weird, it's not realistic, and it's annoying.
There was one episode where Mariner is stuck in a cave with a Klingon and they actually talk to each other and she works out her problems through that conversation, and that was amazing. However, that's the only time it happens. Every other time a character realizes what's wrong, it's an epiphany followed by a moral speech.
To be fair, the stories are good and the characters are fun to watch, but the delivery is just not the best. It wasn't enough to kill our enjoyment, but it's definitely enough that we probably won't watch it again. Though, the season enders tend to be much more serious and meaningful, so maybe we'll watch those again sometime.
Now, we're on to the latter seasons of Duck Tales before we cancel our Disney+ subscription in October.
I'm a bit bothered by the fact that I haven't really been doing anything productive for nearly two months now. Mostly I'm referring to not making much headway on cleaning the house and destroying junk, but you know? I realized yesterday that I have actually accomplished things, among all the computer game playing that I've been doing.
Probably the thing I'm most proud of is cleaning out a whole room (well, 2/3 of one -- the rest of the space is inconvenient and thus has been relegated to holding piles of junk we haven't organized yet; this is not the only space in the house that is inconvenient and I think the designer has never had to live in a house that they designed before) and converting it into a game room. For us, a "game room" means a table for the two of us to play tabletop games, not like a big rec room with a pool table or whatever, and it doesn't need to accommodate more people because we never have people over.
(Ooo, thunder! I'm currently talking on Slack with my husband and he told me it started to rain and thunder at home. I've been watching the rain cell on the radar weather map creep toward me, and it just started here, two minutes later. And now the downpour! That's good, we need it.)
We cleaned out the room, then I bought and assembled two L-shaped bookcases and put them in a U at the back of the room, and we've loaded them with games, gaming accessories, and some of our hobbies, anything that we're planning to do in that room. And then, there's a card table and two chairs, but the table will be replaced later this year with a gaming table that I have my eye on.
I've been doing a bit of writing, including working on a multi-chapter that I haven't looked at in a long time. That one's been problematic because I've had to rewrite it three times now. I originally made one assumption which turned out to be wrong, so I wrote it again using another assumption, which turned out to be wrong as well, and then actually did the research and verified that my third assumption was correct and rewrote it. It still has some parts that I'm not sure what to do with, but I just got an idea from something I was watching that would work, so I've been working on it.
One of the most interesting things that has come out of all of this house-cleaning and house-clearing is that we've started to tacitly institute rules for general living. It's like, we've been living in a cluttered, messy, dirty house for so long that now that parts of it are clean, we want to make sure we don't fall back into messy. For example, the house entryway is now clear and we now have a rule that if anything that gets left in the entryway (for example, coming back from shopping, we might drop the bags near the door) must be dealt with by the next morning at the latest.
Another example is, I have this tray table that we use while playing games that need more space, and one day, I put it at the top of the stairs (just outside the game room). We found that it was convenient for placing things there temporarily, like stuff we need to take downstairs. So now, the rule is, nothing permanent can be placed on that table; it can only be used, as my husband terms it, for "staging" things. Eventually, I'm going to replace it with a nightstand or something, so that it can serve both as storage as well as staging.
(Hey look, I'm using horizontal rules now! This is great for separating stuff when I don't want to make separate cuts)
But I have been playing too many computer games. My current obsession in No Man's Sky, which is remarkably engaging even though I haven't been doing the main storyline or even ventured toward the more dangerous space. I've just been exploring planets, doing quests, and building up my settlement and base, all with the intention of building better ships. It's slow going, but I'm having fun.
NMS does have multiplayer play, where multiple people go on "expeditions", but I've been too nervous to go do them. Since my husband doesn't play (the game doesn't have enough shoot-em-up for him), I'd have to go team up with random people and I'm afraid they'll be contemptuous of my poor skills and my low equipment levels. I probably need to go research what these expeditions are to see what I really need to do them.
I did play quite a bit of the new Rimworld expansion and loved it, though I didn't actually get to the point of building a gravship. I fell in love with the new colony I built and didn't want to lose it by sending the colonists up into space. Another game that I've really been enjoying is Die in the Dungeon, which in my opinion, is one of the best dice-draft roguelites out there.
Another thing we've done is finally watched the rest of Star Trek: Lower Decks. We watched the first three seasons a year or two ago and loved it, and finally got the last two seasons, and, well, it really wasn't as good as we remembered. It felt like the show was trying too hard to be wacky, by having the characters over-react to things. It's a common trope in the show for one character to misinterpret what another character says and run off to do the wrong thing, which of course gets them into deeper, wacky trouble.
The show isn't helped by its need to have everything turn out just fine in the end. For example, the science officer, Tendi, is an Orion (which is a race of space pirates) and the heir of one of the major pirate houses (think: mafia). In one of the episodes, she and her sister have to do a space race to maintain the honor of their house, and if they lose, the house is obliterated and loses all its property to the ruling council. They actually do lose, reducing their house to poverty, and when they tell their parents, their parents say, "This is great news, actually. We were already thinking that we'd like to retire from piracy." Really???
And then... The other half of the episode was about the Federation helping a planet that had just discovered and installed replicators and was eliminating currency and wealth from their society (it's called "post-scarcity"). One of the formerly wealthy families started doing terrorist attacks to try to send the society back so that they could continue being wealthy, and the government confiscated their wealth and gave it to the captain of the Cerritos (the ship in the show) for disposal. So, the captain gave it all to Tendi's parents. Double really???
One more thing that ST:LD does that I can't stand is that the characters must always state the moral of the story in a long speech. Things often go downhill because a character makes an assumption, and then when the character realizes what they've been doing wrong, they always tell the other characters, "I thought that (assumption), but all this time, (this) has been happening and I didn't realize that you've all been feeling (this way) and I'm such a moron." I mean, it's exactly like that. If there are two characters that have epiphanies like this, then they both have their speeches like this, one after the other. It's weird, it's not realistic, and it's annoying.
There was one episode where Mariner is stuck in a cave with a Klingon and they actually talk to each other and she works out her problems through that conversation, and that was amazing. However, that's the only time it happens. Every other time a character realizes what's wrong, it's an epiphany followed by a moral speech.
To be fair, the stories are good and the characters are fun to watch, but the delivery is just not the best. It wasn't enough to kill our enjoyment, but it's definitely enough that we probably won't watch it again. Though, the season enders tend to be much more serious and meaningful, so maybe we'll watch those again sometime.
Now, we're on to the latter seasons of Duck Tales before we cancel our Disney+ subscription in October.
