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Me — January ’20 Monthly Update

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This one will be a bit different because, in addition to the normal monthly update, I’m going to introduce the changes I’m making to my life to make 2020 the best year it can be. Let’s waste no time.

The Monthly Update Topic Order™: blog, writing plans, work, school, D&D, video games, reading/listening, and other things.

I will tentatively be changing the blog schedule to twice a week: Wednesdays and Sundays. I say tentatively because I may come to realize I’m asking too much of myself—only time will tell. I will also introduce a self imposed rule that I cannot publish two blog posts in a row that cover the same subject (referring to “Me”, “Review”, “Stories”, etc). This will force me to think of a new post if the only thing that’s on my mind is work, or me being lonely, or whatever it happens to be. I feel like there’s no point in having a blog if I feel like the only thing I have to say is “life sucks” in different ways once a week. However, this is another reason I might not be able to do twice a week. We’ll see.

Writing has been going well. The passion project has been making concrete plans on the road to Patreon, and so far I am very excited and optimistic with our trajectory. The second draft of the Lisa Stenton screenplay has been done for a while now, and I have no plans to edit it at the moment. I’m shelving it for now because putting more time into it at my current state is not helpful. Meanwhile my second short story anthology is still on my to-do list, but it is unfortunately getting pushed back by my 2020 resolutions.

Work has been alright. Not much to say about it, though I have been spending the last several days reorganizing and moving all the tables and machines around the shop. I even made a 1:12 scale model so that I can plan ahead and look at different layouts before I commit to anything.

I am done with school! I should be getting my degrees soon, but honestly, I’m just happy to be done, because now I have more time to focus on me. (If only that simply meant “more free time”…) As such, I will be removing “school” off the Monthly Update Topic Order™!

Friday is Session One of my brother’s new adventure, in which I will be debuting my new Drow Shadow Monk. He is DMing this campaign in my world, using characters that have, as of yet, only been mentioned by name. He claims to have an overarching plot that will solidify historic points in history, and I am both terrified and excited to see what he means. After he’s done (he only plans for this to be a couple of months), I will once again don the mantle of DM to tell the second half of the Knights of Fire’s story! I don’t expect that to start until June, to be honest, but only time will tell.

I have had little time for video games. As of right now, I am exclusively playing World of Warcraft, with a single Heroes of the Storm or Magic: The Gathering match if I only have 20-40 minutes to spare for something. Lately I’ve been turning on autopilot and farming gold, because I’ve been too tired to do anything else.

I haven’t been reading or listening to anything lately, but that’s mostly because Critical Role is still on it’s holiday break. I’m hyped to start watching the stream again this Thursday!

Alright: 2020 changes. It boils down to one thing that manifests in two ways. And for once, I’m very basic with my resolution.

I’m going to try harder to give myself an appearance I am proud of.

That is to say, I’m eating food, for one. These past several months I’ve been taking a nap at work for lunch because it was cheaper than buying/preparing food, but I realize that’s not healthy. So, for as much as it hurts my wallet, I’ve been buying things like meal bars and protein shakes and stocking up my bag when I go to work. I also got an app to track what I’m eating every day and what I should be eating to put on weight. I’d like to put on 20-30 pounds, and I think I need to be actively working out in order to achieve that result in a way I like. I don’t have the money for a gym membership and my house is full of people, so being self conscious makes working out hard, but I’m fitting it in where I can.

Lastly, I’ve been framing my actions in terms of what the “Ideal Kasey” would do, and I’m trying as best as my willpower will allow me to achieve it. I’m also keeping track of everything I do and how I feel, even more than I did last year. If I felt like I was productive, I mark that down. If I took a nap, I mark it. I’m tracking my weight every morning and when I wake up. I’m hoping to sync all of these stats with each other once I have some data so that I can maybe come to some conclusions, but it will be a couple months before I can start to do things like that.

So far, 2020 has yielded exactly 0 depressive episodes, and though not every day has been stellar, I’m content with how things are going so far.

I hope you’re all having similar experiences, and despite the upcoming struggles, you and I will overcome them.

Life — Learning From the Fire

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This sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen often. A lot of people I know are talking about how tragic the fire is and how life shouldn’t be this way, but I think it’s worth looking at things in its opposite.

It’s much easier to remember history by its tragedies rather than the miracles (you can point to my own blog as an example of this: I never once mentioned Katie Bouman’s team that created the black hole picture!), but by the look of things, the world used to be much worse. Sure, the world could stand to be a lot better, but let’s look at things in a positive light today. 100 years ago we were just getting out of one of the worst wars humanity had ever known, and was just a few steps away from entering one that would rival it.

Not too long ago, monuments and landmarks were being destroyed left and right, not to mention the millions of lives that were suddenly lost.

When a single building being on fire is international news, as important as that building may be, we have reason to be thankful for the relative peacefulness our modern day has provided us.

Beyond this, death (as the case may be), is a natural part of life. All things must end, and if the Notre Dame Cathedral is left in a state where it can’t be restored (which would honestly surprise me), then that doesn’t diminish the fact that there is still an endless supply of art, history, and culture in Paris alone.

People have short memories, and I think it’s in events like this that remind us of the pieces of culture that we still have, right next door. You never know if it’s going to be there tomorrow, because something as crazy could happen there, too.

Is it tragic? Yes, of course. But as far as I know nobody was injured, and with today’s technology the building could probably be rebuilt better than it was yesterday in less than a decade.

It astounds me a bit that some people seem to view events like this exactly the same way as terrorist attacks. You see the same things being spouted off: “Our hearts are breaking today in light of recent events that took place this morning/afternoon/evening. Tragedies like this…” and so on. I think treating the destruction of a monument the same way as the deaths of hundreds of people in the same way is incredibly insulting, frankly. And yet, which will history remember more clearly? Hard to say, though it does seem that this sort of freak accident is far more rare than terrorist attacks, unfortunately.

I think days like today are best used reflecting on the past, looking forward to the future, and pressing onward to right wrongs (intentional or not) without taking more time than we need to mourn over what was lost.

One thing I feel modern society has gotten really bad at is learning from mistakes and correcting them. Let the cathedral’s fire (and the subsequent blow against European past and culture) be your excuse to go to your local museums or exhibits. Go explore culture you otherwise would not have! Life goes on.

Me — Feb ’19 Update

Kasey-Rayn 1 Comment

I somehow forgot to post this last week and wrote something else instead. Whoops. In any case, my life hasn’t been terribly interesting the last couple of weeks, so there isn’t a ton to say. I’m happy to report that my mood has finally started to stabilize on the higher end. It was harder to shrug this one off because the last time it got this bad (3 years ago), I changed a lot about myself—I started the blog, changed the way I dressed, and started to write more so that I didn’t feel like I was lying when I told people I was a writer. This time none of that was an option, but over time I’ve been able to breathe a little and bit by bit reclaim myself.

That said, the Monthly Update Topic Order™: blog, writing plans, video games, reading/listening, school, and other things.

I don’t foresee any blog changes in the near future. I like the casual two posts a day. It makes me feel like I’m keeping up without forcing myself to write an insane amount. I do plan on writing about the road trip my siblings and I took to Chicago and back, but I need to go through my pictures and find all the good ones, and that’s going to be a chore because I’m not a picture person. That’s the main thing that keeps me from just writing a Saturday post travel log: I’d want to include pictures but I don’t want to do the work to find them. Either way, expect that soon.

Writing plans. I’m still going through a bit of a rut as far as that goes. I do feel like a piece of myself is missing right now because I still have the stories in my head but I have no willpower to write them. And it’s not like how it used to be where it was just difficult to get started but I’d find my flow. This time I can’t even find the power to even consider writing. It’s hard to explain, but this mental block has been getting stronger and stronger for almost a year now. I will say though: I have to write for one of my classes, and my professor and I have found a workaround to my problem. He gives me a prompt based on the last story I wrote for him, a few random words to incorporate, and a time limit. I have to write as much as I can in one hour based on his prompt and words, and the restrictive nature of that assignment has worked astonishingly well. I do think it requires somebody reading and responding to the work I’m producing, though. This strategy wouldn’t work for stand-alone short stories on the blog.

In the realm of video games, I actually have not been doing much. I’ve been playing Season 16 of Diablo 3, but I’ve pretty much expended the amount of available fun in that realm. Mostly I’ve just been playing really casual games while watching YouTube videos of streamers I enjoy. Hearthstone is a big one, but I’m also playing a simple mobile game and a casual browser game: RWBY: Amity Arena and Flight Rising respectively. The RWBY game is pretty much Clash Royale (basically a card game MOBA). Don’t know if there’s a genre associated with it. Flight Rising is basically Neopets, only you collect dragons instead of random creatures and you play games to get money and collect clothes to dress the dragons up or change their coloring. You can even make custom skins for them using Photoshop, and the game has a lot of community input to game development, which I think is neat.

I haven’t been reading or listening to anything beyond those streams. Critical Role and anything Day9 puts onto YouTube is pretty much the extent of my consumed media right now. That’s all I have to say about that.

School is going well. My intention is that this will be my final semester, to which I will have two AA’s to show for my time. At this point I’m taking exclusively theatre related classes, which is both parts fun and stressful. Another one of my plays is also being produced this semester, but apart from script edits, I’ve decided to take a back seat and let other people put their vision on it.

That’s about it. My Aleor D&D campaign is going great, more updates to come, and the cool collaborative passion project I’ve been a part of the last few months has been a ton of fun, too. This might be the first time I’ve brought it up, but I will definitely speak more of that in the future, as well!

See You in 2019.

Kasey-Rayn 1 Comment

Hello! Yes, I am still alive.

When last we met, back in August, we were sort of floundering and struggling to update on a regular basis. Posts were late, and probably subpar (though I will not bother to go back and read them), but I have news.

I am back. I am currently setting my blog up for the new year. We’ve got lots to talk about, and I’ve got some news on the horizon! When 2019 hits I’ll go back to posting regularly (I’m thinking three, maybe four times a week tops), and with some added regularity, the quality of what I produce will be improved.

See you January 1st!