The Cracked Mug v 2.0

[erikavonkaiser]

Now that I've ranted and railed

Saturday equivalent!

It's been nice, so far. I slept in a bit, took Baby on a nice long walk (to the library and back to return that book I didn't care for, actually), and am about to walk to the corner store to pick up some coffee and a few other random things before I engage gremlin mode. I made a character sheet for Merillian because there's shenanigans afoot in D&D and I need a back-up character just in case (Rex has uhhhhhh made some decisions), and that was super fun but actually took a solid hour at least because holy shit!!! wizards!!! wizards and their many options!!!! leveling up a Fighter is SO EASY because it's like "now you punch better, congrats :)" but ten levels of nerd magic was a lot to meticulously go through. Merillian also has some homebrew stuff going on since he is, uh, a fish monster. Not even a Triton, but a transmutated sun elf who is now a combination eel-frog-shark.

I love my dumb angsty son

Okay! Lemme go run to the corner store real quick before it starts to get dark and then I think I'll chill out with some Final Fantasy mayhaps mayhaps

or actually I might dig back into ESO, I haven't played for a while because I've been busy but I wanna do more Hermaeus Mora content

[erikavonkaiser]

well I was in a good mood until a man was gross to me in the grocery store and now I want to scrub off all my skin and perish

[erikavonkaiser]

I played a bit of FF14 with Greggo last night but then crashed super hard around like 8:00, so rather than fight it I decided to just vibe until bedtime and ended up watching a deep sea documentary with Baby Dog.

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I live a wild and crazy life, I know

[erikavonkaiser]

okay!

agenda!

rn I'm gonna eat a food and doot around on video games a bit more, and then:

1) go on a run
2) probably take Baby Dog on her afternoon walkies once I get cleaned up from that
3) make sure D&D stuff is ready to go for later
4) work on writing until D&D time

oh and while I eat my food I have a few quick grown-up things to do, like put in another Chewy order and make sure my bills are paid and blah blah blah

[erikavonkaiser]

sorry I've not even started on the details yet but the difference between my old Merillian reference and the new one is already giving me joy

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(either way he's a haunted fucking lad tho)

[erikavonkaiser]

D&D went great! here's my notes from the session with zero other context

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After D&D I played some video games with the fam and we even streamed so Sophie could watch. It was a good weekend!

Today is my Monday equivalent but I'm still trying to take Sunday as a general rest day, so today I worked more on the Merillian reference, did a load of laundry (which I put away before Baby had a chance to nest it, for once), and cleaned up on the apartment. Tomorrow I have a vet appointment to get Baby's nails trimmed (I don't normally outsource this but her vet insurance plan comes with one free nail trim a year so, why not) and then I think I'll get a full run of groceries as well. I have another weekend event that requires some preparation on my end -- oh! I should clean the car tomorrow or the day after, lemme add that to my to-do list. It's a bit skrunkly from two weeks of harsh winter weather and then a Milwaukee trip, so it could use a vacuum and a run through the car wash before I potentially drive people around Chicago.

(idk if I mentioned it but the weekend event is Greggo, Sam, and Masque are coming down to Chicago! we got an AirBnB and are gonna hang out, it will be good times; in a perfect world I would not have two large social AirBnB events back-to-back like this but the timing just ended up that way, and at least this one is only a thirty minute drive instead of all the way in Milwaukee during a snowstorm

also I'm not REALLY complaining, it's great to have friends and people I want to spend time with, I'm just a fragile himbo)

h'okay I've got about 45 minutes of dick around time before I have to leave for work so I think I'll watch some YouTube and work on my drawing some more

[erikavonkaiser]

Polish Folklore and Myth by Joanne Asala, Alice Wadowski-Bak
Five stars

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I enjoyed this! It's a short read, maybe a bit over 100 pages w/ big text and illustrations, but I wanted some base familiarization with the topic and it was a great overview. The themes are definitely: being rude is the worst crime, if you suffer and suffer and suffer you will eventually be rewarded, do NOT fuck around with the fey, and sometimes people who die deserve it.

It was also interesting to see Slavic versions of myths I'm familiar with, for instance there's a variant on the Hades and Persephone tale where Demeter is "The Flower Queen," Hades is a dragon, and in the end the princess (Persephone) splits her time willingly between her mother and the prince who saved her. The text even specifies she and the prince live happily ever after despite having to be apart for half the year, so we love that for them. In this story the Hades character is a straightforward villain who is bested and the Persephone expy actually has a surprising amount of agency. I found this extra hilarious because for a while parts of the internet were obsessed with "feminist" retellings of this story, most of which ended up turning Demeter into a shrieking harpy and/or made Hades' abduction of Persephone either consensual in the first place or she falls in love with him after the fact. Turns out hundreds of years ago eastern Europeans just added in some dragons and let Persephone choose her own ending and it's already way better than what a bunch of bland people on tumblr were cooking up!

#books2024

[erikavonkaiser]

oh and there's a variant of what I know as usually being a story about selkies:

A man sees a wolf monster take off its skin and transform into a beautiful woman; while the She-Wolf slumbers he steals her skin and hides it and says she must marry him. They live for many years together and even have two children who the She-Wolf loves and nurtures. One day one of the children lets the man know that the chest which contains the wolf skin is unlocked, but the man isn't worried because the She-Wolf loves him and their life together. The She-Wolf lovingly squeezes his hand and---

lmao just kidding she puts her skin back on and kills the everliving shit out of him and then runs off into the forest

The fate of her children is left ambiguous, although after telling Sophie about it we decided this set-up would fucking rule as a D&D character backstory (having a character who is the child or one of the children left behind after your She-Wolf mother killed your shitty dad and fucked off into the woods)

[erikavonkaiser]

one of my favorite things is when people realize barnacles are not little rock growths and are, in fact, an entire creature with a frankly terrifying amount of anatomy inside their protective shell

[Fetian]

I am somehow not surprised that multiple cultures have independently come up with 'What if that animal took off its skin and there was a pretty girl under there'