Blaugust

My son hates old movies, old songs, old anything. If it’s over ten years old, he’ll refuse to have anything to do with it – with certain exceptions. I try to sneak things in, sometimes, but then he’ll catch on. “That’s Led Zeppelin. Not interested.” It’s Millennial nostalgia, really. If it happened before the nineties, it’s the previous generation, and it has nothing to do with him. I guess that’s where the modern desperation for reboots come from. The 90s kids haven’t seen it, so it doesn’t really exist. New to them! ...

It is known that the best bad guys are mirror reflections of the good guys. Batman and the Joker. Superman and Darkseid. Wonder Woman and Cheetah. Captain Marvel* and Black Adam. I imagine the same holds true with the Marvel heroes, but I’m not very familiar with them. They should make some movies, get some publicity. * This is the real and only Captain Marvel. Fight me. The very best villains go beyond the mirror, with goals and dreams all their own, and perhaps knowing them so well, they wouldn’t seem like villains at all. Misguided, but perhaps not beyond redemption. ...

I’m not really sure how to respond to today’s Blaugust Promptapalooza prompt, which is from Solarayo of Ace Asunder: Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche. What even is my “specific niche”? Is gaming a “niche” hobby that I really need to develop interests outside of? Maybe the prompt should have been, “Tell us about the interests you don’t share on your blog”. ...

Sorry, I just spent the last half hour looking for exactly the best song I remembered from Martin Mull which was… perfect for this writing prompt. And that took me down a rabbit hole with Martin jamming with Glen Campbell (awesome!), and then I got to watching more YouTube and now it’s forty minutes until work and I have a blog post to write. I get distracted easily, and today’s prompt, from Nogamara of Battle Stance, is all about that: ...

Using a stock photo with a watermark makes me feel like the Spiffing Brit. I’ve been gaming for a few days and not blogging, so I’ve really fallen behind on Blaugust. Even though I’m not an official participant, I’ve been enjoying reading people’s posts and taking part :-) Anyway, I got stuck on one from last week, “What gets me excited”, but I think I can answer that one, but first, I’m going to talk a little about the ones that I missed. ...

I’m still catching up on the Blaugust “Promptapalooza” prompts that I missed during the clean up after Tropical Storm Isaias. Today’s prompt comes from Stingite over at The Friendly Necromancer, who asks: What skill do you want to improve the most? This is kind of an aspirational question, I guess. Truth is, if you want to build a skill, there’s no better time to start. Just recently on this blog, I was whining about how terrible I was at painting miniatures and dragging my feet on painting the Gloomhaven ones. Commenter Jeromai gave me some good starting tips, and I just went out and painted some minis. They didn’t turn out great, but every time, I learn a little more. ...

This prompt comes at a really good (or bad) time, because I am deep right now into thinking back on the past couple of decades when my life has been lived around and within online gaming, bar the occasional break from it all. SDWeasel at Unidentified Signal Source asks: What’s something you’ve lost along the way that you would love to have back? Spur of the moment? What’s on my mind right now? I’d like to have Brian “Psychochild” Green back. ...

I am not a creative person, and so today’s writing prompt from Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts has me a little stumped: Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation. I am an evangelist for clutter. It drives my boyfriend insane. “Why don’t you organize your books and DVDs so you can find what you’re looking for?” he asks. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I like having happy surprises. During the recent power outage, it was dark, and I took random books off the shelf to read by the LED flashlight of my phone. And I remembered where I was the last time I read them. Greg Egan’s “Schild’s Ladder”, for instance, still had the ticket stub in it for “Ratatouille”. I saw that with my stepmother sometime after my Dad died. I was visiting her up in Deerfield, New Hampshire and sleeping in her trailer out back, and that’s where I left this book, after reading it, before rediscovering it a few months later. ...

Back in sixth grade, first day of science class, the teacher asked us “what is science?” First day, we were supposed to answer that? The paper was blank, the pencil was blunt, and I was just there wracking my brains, trying to figure out what science was. All I could think of when I thought about science were old movies with lots crazy guys in lab coats working with beakers and tubes and bubbling stuff, so I put down “Science is chemistry!” ...

Sorry that I’ve been missing so many days of blogging. I really wanted to do a post every day, but last Tuesday, Tropical Storm Isaias rolled through and cut power to almost a million Connecticut residents, me included. We just got power back yesterday afternoon. Being without power in this 21st century world is weird. I would be reading books by the light of my phone flashlight, washing dishes by hand, bringing all my chargers and portable stuff to work to charge. A work I hadn’t seen since March 13th, the unlucky day we all had to abandon the office because of the pandemic. ...