Many of them aren’t monetized, they don’t keep well, not appealing enough for the bother of cultivating them. Salmon berries, huckleberries, thimble berries. We have black and blue berries, too. But you don’t see most of our local berries in the grocery store.

One of my most precious memories with my beloved was our earliest hike together. They didn’t grow up native to the area and exclaimed in alarm when they saw me reach casually toward a bush to pick a berry as we walked by.

“You can’t just eat berries! What if it’s poisonous?!”

“It’s not,” I said, puzzled. “I guess there’s some poisonous berries around here but I don’t eat those ones, it’s really easy to tell.”

“Those are safe to eat?”

I laughed and popped it into my mouth only to immediately realize it was horribly unripe. Salmon berries come in two colors you see, orange and red.

I’d mistaken an unripe red berry for a ripe orange one. It had felt soft enough to be ripe but it was so bitter it hurt. So an instant after asserting it was safe to eat I opened my mouth with a “bleh” to let it fall back out.

“They- they’re not poisonous it just wasn’t ripe,” I insisted.

My beloved looked skeptical but scanned the bush and plucked another berry to me. “Try this one.”

The sun shone beautifully through the dappled tree canopy, illuminating the gleaming berry in their hand, a perfect snapshot of a romantic summer moment. I took the berry, my fingers brushing their palm to bring the little fruit up to my lips while looking into their smiling eyes.

I had to spit it out.

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

And the sweet perfect mother of the story comes to the riverbank, sees that all her children drowned, and starts crying so bitterly that angels overhear her, and the angels say to each other, "she does not deserve this, this woman has never done anything wrong in her life, this should not have happened to her", and feeling great pity for her, bring her children back to life, and after that they always listened to their mother and lived happily ever after.

And the storyteller's children, who at this point are familiar with the concept that these stories are supposed to have some sort of a moral or lesson in them, interject to point out that their mother hasn't always done everything perfectly, she isn't always sweet, curses a lot, and as a matter of fact loses her shit at her kids all the time. She isn't like the mother of the story at all.

We got told to build a level 17 character for this one shot, most of the other folks had previous Dude Squad characters to resurrect. But I didn’t really want to play a straight martial class. In my heart, spellcasters are my true class, and I didn’t really have a strong idea of what kind of character to make.

So I approached the DM and said, “Hey, I have this idea to play a character that pretends to be a martial class but is actually a magic caster?” My girlfriends character is an aasimar who thinks he’s Thor and my backstory was that after meeting him and falling for him she decided to invest heavily in deceptive magic so as not to alienate him.

And my DM. Loved it. So he helped me build an extremely custom character. Two levels in Hexblade warlock gave her a good weapon and the ability to cast disguise self pretty much nonstop to appear buffer than she actually was.

Then there was four levels in Stone sorcerer in order to get 4 sorcery points, the ability to use those points to cast using Subtle Spell and no one could tell she’s casting, and to buff her AC.

Finally there was 11 Bladesong wizard levels in order to get some attack bonuses, even more AC, extra attacks, and the ability to burn spells to take less damage.

So the whole time I was burning spell slots to recharge my sorcery points every time I cast things like Haste and Spider Climb and use my Bladesong powers. We busted through walls and smashed our way through puzzles. We lied and said my character was a Barbarian/Monk so they didn’t bat and eye when she ran on walls with spider climb, but no one noticed when even after dashing she “held onto the stone wall” without any kind of check.

The final battle: the goblin wizard boss we were fighting had cast invulnerability on himself and had our friend mind controlled. So I’m trying to cover for not attacking as I try to dispel his invulnerability. I can no longer run on walls, or make the jumps my party is making on floating platforms over a spike pit so I try to use my actions on other helpful things like tying ropes for friends in the pit. I manage to dispel the magic on our friend but I burned almost all my spells trying to secretly dispel the boss’ spell and finally we just ended up grappling and suffocating him then pummeling him to death.

But at the last moment as we’re running out of this horrible goblin mansion I’m running down a wall and my friends are climbing down. The building says there’s 6 seconds left and my very injured love interest is not gonna make it so my character shouted “Fuckfuckfuck!” Ran over and cast dimension door to bring them both to safety. (Two people got left in the blast but both survived cause Dude Power). Then I critically failed my deception about how I had used magic and came clean and everyone lost their shit when they heard what we’d done. Her final confession, after dropping her buff disguise self, was, “When I met Kathor I really liked him and he freakin’ hates magic so I just kinda figured out how to hide that I was castin’ magic cause I though we might go to pound town.”

i’m ending a program that i likely will not pursue a career in

the general state of the economy and job market

*gestures at the geopolitics of the world*

i don’t believe in or value corporate culture/inane capitalist jobs

SO. 🫵🏻 you! tell me if you like your job & what you do for work in the tags