It didn't work, and now I smell like a tart. A *fruit* tart.

talk about a TTRPG system other than Dungeons and Dragons

Easy — there's a number of them I like. Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week/Thirsty Sword Lesbians/Apocalypse World/every other PbtA game out there come to mind, as do some lovely GMless indie ones (Stewpot! Rusalka! Fiasco! The Quiet Year!), BUT.

Honestly, okay, the top complaint I get about tabletop?

"I don't want to play online, I don't want to play with strangers, and I don't know anyone offline that wants to play with me, where do I even start?"

The answer for that is:

SOLO GAMES.

There's a bunch. I'm not talking about the weird D&D hacks, either, though those do exist (and I don't recommend them!). Solo tabletop as a genre has expanded a lot and there's a bunch of wonderful stuff out there now. I've played a few, but my favorite, by and large, is Thousand Year Old Vampire.

In TYOV, you play as a vampire made sometime in history. You pick when, give yourself a handful of possessions, and then roll dice and respond to prompts to figure out what happens to you. Do you survive and thrive, or do you die? What do you remember, what do you forget, and how do you adapt to being a vampire? It's extraordinarily well-done, and unlike a lot of journaling games, which can feel like writing prompts, it manages to capture the experience of roleplay extremely well. I played it for the first time a couple of years ago, and ended up documenting what happened to a Roman peasant girl as she lived through the collapse of the empire and into the Middle Ages. Some of the choices I was faced with and things that my character had to do were among the hardest I've ever made as a player, and it required a great amount of consideration and thought to move from point A to point B. The game broke my heart (in a good way), and I highly recommend it. It is, to this day, one of my favorite games. ♥



In non-Talking Meme Month news: reveals happened for the January round of a remix exchange I'm involved in, so I now have something new on AO3 that is (surprise!) not rated E.

And I Awoke on the Cold Hill's Side (rated T, 7.5k words) is a love letter to growing up queer in Salt Lake. It's set around the time that I would have been in undergrad. It's not perfect (what is?), but I hit the mark for what I set out to do, and, well, yeah. People familiar with the valley can probably pinpoint exactly which warehouse I'm talking about for where the party toward the middle of the piece takes place.

...I also have another piece up that is, uh, rated E. Slaying the Dragon (E, 14k words) is about grief and how we recover from it and come back to ourselves. It's set in the same universe as The Road Through the Mountains, though it's obviously not the same characters or set-up, and no familiarity with it is required. ♥


Not much happening. Have thus far been ghosted or rejected by every job I've applied to. I feel mostly okay about that. I have some freelance work lined up for the fall (we're drawing up contracts), so I am perhaps less worried about money coming in than I should be. Still noodling on various and sundry stuff; been dealing with some pretty awful chronic pain things lately so that's taken most of my focus, and I'm trying to like, gently remind myself that I can in fact take this time to simply Be and not worry about, you know. Everything.

One of the things I'm probably going to be tackling in the next few months is working on getting some web presence set up that's not Dreamwidth or Mastodon, since I am going to need to pay for a domain name/hosting anyway as I move my tabletop stuff out of Discord's ecosystem. (Looking, at the moment, at self-hosting one of the Discord alternatives; I have a couple of lovely friends who are helping me learn the ropes of using Yunohost to do this, and I feel very lucky about that.) Mostly sort of annoyed at all of the people popping out of the woodwork to go, "I told you so!" about using Discord, when signing up for it to begin with was something that I had to be strong-armed into, as it was (at the time) the service that required the least amount of compromises for running tabletop the way I do. Even up until earlier this month, when I tried to talk to people about switching, I got met with a lot of pushback. It's never been something that I've particularly wanted to stick with, but the alternatives that were tossed out (mostly Matrix or IRC) were things that I didn't want to use for very specific reasons (Matrix, because the UI is hot garbage and it's extremely difficult to use, and I say that as someone who uses it regularly; IRC because it doesn't have the features/capability that I want for tabletop specifically — not talking about bots so much as having history without relying on a bouncer). The language around alternatives etc has been pretty shame-focused and a lot of "I told you so" re: Discord (which...honestly, some of the worst offenders re: that were very quiet about it, so, no?), and it's just a really nasty reminder of why I use a lot of open-source software myself but don't talk about it very often.

The Discord stuff in particular is really disheartening solely because the best option is something that is out of reach for a lot of people — self-hosting is A). Not cheap, and B). NOT EASY, so seeing everyone turn it into, "you can replace Discord by self-hosting [insert service here]" is like...cool, this is the equivalent of telling someone, "Oh, your insurance won't cover your medication? You can synthesize it yourself at home, here's a really esoteric review paper about it that doesn't fully cover the steps, good luck!" — like.

I am more familiar with some of this stuff than the average person, and the logistics of getting Yunohost and shit set up and using Docker to install things on the VPS is at the very edges of my knowledge. I can follow along well enough to probably get a Mastodon or GoToSocial instance up and running using it (because those have been streamlined for installation using Yunohost), but a lot of the services being tossed out as alternatives don't even have Docker images, so.

We'll see.

Honestly am mostly dreading it because the service I've been looking into most seriously includes a gigantic warning about if you're using Debian for server management, which is what Yunohost, uh, does. So. Cool!

(If you read the above and are going, "what the fuck", congrats! You understand what I mean when I say, "the average user is not prepared to do this".)