Boy, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on here, eh?

This blog functioned as a writing diary mostly, but I’ve all but stopped writing in the traditional sense. In February, I started a new job–one that I worked very hard to get and I’m incredibly grateful to have, but it has been eating up my time and brain power. I’ve had to hit the ground running and really dive in and learn and grow. It’s been going well, but it’s also not been easy. There have been a few late nights and stressful weeks, especially when the guy who was my trainer took a job at a different company and took a lot of tribal knowledge with him.

Work and the state of politics have kept me from being particularly interested in writing, so I’ve actually been doing more political work. I’ve attended several protests and participated in a door-knocking campaign to get out the vote for some local candidates. Those candidates, of course, were summarily trounced in the local election–most of the surrounding towns and counties voted something like 75-85% Republican–but even having progressive candidates running is a big change since most of these positions were uncontested for years.

On top of that, I got really into movies. So much so that around April, my brother and I started a horror podcast where we paired up movies that shared some sort of theme or subject matter, and we dissected them academically. It was a fun project, and I’m really proud of it. It’s unfortunately, on hiatus because I couldn’t keep up with editing an episode every two weeks, and even with my brother trying to help, it started becoming too straining on my time. We ended up missing several weeks repeatedly, and it was embarrassing. We were lucky to be hosted by Brennan Klein from Scream 101 and producer of Attack of the Queerwolf from Blumhouse, and he honestly would’ve been happy to keep hosting us, but I felt bad taking up his space for something that we weren’t really putting much into after a time, so I asked him to take them down, and if we decide to pick it back up again in 2019, we’ll just host the podcast ourselves.

Beyond that, I’ve also been getting really into Dungeons and Dragons. A couple of friends from college–including Brooke Johnson–started hosting a D&D game around March or April. It started as just my wife, her husband, and myself, with Brooke DMing. It was a ton of fun, and when she added a couple of other people they knew into the game, after a bit of an adjustment, we all sort of meshed. In the meantime, I started watching Critical Role, and wanted to try my hand at DMing, so I ended up doing a little one-shot sidequest with them and looking to start up my own game as well.

I’ve been running my own game with my wife, my brother, and a few people from work, and that’s been where a lot of my creative energy has really gone. I’m homebrewing the whole campaign (obviously using D&D races and basic building blocks), and it’s been very rewarding to see everyone quickly becoming invested in the game.

I think I’m going to post some short campaign diaries (actually they’re the recaps I read at the start of each session), just for posterity and for the record, and maybe flesh them out with extra info about what was going on from a player perspective.

I first played 3.5 in college with Brooke and her at-the-time boyfriend, but the campaign didn’t last long before it ended up falling through. And then I played a little bit back when I first moved into the area a few years ago, this time 4th edition, which I think had just come out. Getting back into D&D, this time 5e, has been great. I forgot how much fun getting to disappear in another personality can be–it reminds me of doing theater in college and how much I enjoyed acting.

And that’s all the updates for now. I may post some more D&D related stuff–things I’ve found with my first time truly DMing, ideas I’ve come up with and how they’ve panned out, plus campaign diaries are always fun.

‘Til next time.