ellie

She is truly the female equivalent of Trump and no less sinister. No doubt she would’ve been personally acquainted with Hitler had she been born a century earlier.

She should be behind bars and her “work” should be globally boycotted until it is forgotten.

everyone wants to help a little bit 😌

➡️ Watch this episode of Adventuring Academy on Dropout!

Perhaps the narrative was not the strongest. I feel it could've been excellent if it were a longer campaign with more episodes to fully explore and develop the world and story.

YET, their joy still brings me joy! They all had SO MUCH FUN in the finale! I couldn't help but laugh along!

In my entirely irrelevant opinion, I think that the purpose of their creations is not to craft an absolutely perfect and unassailable masterpiece, it's to have fun with their friends and entertain people whilst sharing the delights of TTRPGs, and yet, Brennan and the entire team involved still craft profound, elaborate and intricate worlds and characters to be explored.

I cannot argue that this season didn't feel as though it lacked the clear direction and satisfying conclusion of the previous campaigns, but it's important to recognise that they do not owe us that.

I thoroughly enjoyed this campaign, but more so for the vicarious experience of the inter-player shenanigans, the occasional gripping character performance, and every single time one of them said something that absolutely broke another player, than the details of the story itself.

That said, I do have high hopes for the new season. that it will focus on the areas in which CCOD was weaker, such as cohesive narrative arc and critical, pivotal narrative stakes.

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now