Chaos Shuffle

 Well I may not be making the stated Blaugust goal but I’m going to keep trying and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get into practice and have more content for you, gentle reader. In lieu of one of the listed prompts (or tangentially related to the one about starting content creation) I bring you this: This post hits home like nobody’s business. I’ve spent WAY too long masking and trying to fit other people’s unstated expectations, and honestly? I don’t recommend it. But for the past year or so I’ve been working on a project with a couple of internet buddies called The Jackson Two . What started as a guest one-shot of an old RPG turned into a nigh-weekly hangout of three friends with senses of humor that are frankly muy simpático. It’s been   super fun to hang out and chat about YA books from a 30-something’s perspective, picking out the less obvious mythology references and the perspectives of a teacher from Texas.  And just going down the ADHD bunny trails that come up in conve...

  Alright amigos, let’s try this again.  It’s a time of transitions, I’m in a new place and kind of ready to reinvent myself career wise.  But on a smaller scale I’m restarting this thing because my dear   friend The Bageler   got me into BLAUGUST so maybe I can express some things in a short blog post between childcare shenanigans.  So! Tell us about some community that you are part of and why it interests you or how it impacts you? At present there is just one community/fandom I’m in.  It’s a discord server about a book series called The Sisters of Dorley Hall .  They’re a very nice bunch of people with enough folks around my age to catch my decade-old references pretty well. There are also some younger folks and people new to the topics of discussion, so it’s easy to ask for advice and give it in turn.  Also it’s a small enough group that you can get a feel for the community without being overwhelmed by the number of posts. What topics yo...

 So it's been a few years since I've played Warmachine (the Privateer Press game, not the Marvel guy), but there's a part of their Iron Kingdoms lore that always seemed really cool.  They've got dragons that fit the usual description: big, winged, fire-breathing reptiles that each come with a godlike superiority complex.  But if you manage to kill a dragon in the IK world, there is a large crystal at its heart that contains the <i>actual dragon</i>.  The athanc crystal holds their true identity, and any biomass they accumulate for a body is just a fun means for hauling that big rock around.  "Aha!" you may think, "so to kill the dragon completely you have to break the magic rock! That's a neat complication to your usual dragon fight." And then you'd find some way to break the athanc and learn a very important lesson.  Breaking the crystal doesn't destroy the one dragon. It just makes MORE dragons. This lesson was first painful...

Greeting fellow travelers.  As the land of micro-blogs decays under the rule of an unfit leader, I join the diaspora of people returning to good old-fashioned regular blogs and RSS feeds for reading them.   I don't make any promises as to what you'll find on this particular blog.  I'm a 30-something dad of two with interests that range from science and wildlife to tabletop nerd-games to  mythology and occult-ish topics.  I'll try to keep each post on one topic at a time, but the mix will probably be randomized (hence the name Chaos Shuffle).   If nothing else this will be a good place for longer-form writing and getting into the habit of stringing more than a few thoughts together at a time.  My small kids are determined to interrupt any attempt at adult conversation in our house, so I need the practice.