Lost In the Middle of Somewhere

Since shortly after lockdown began I’ve been maintaining a community well-being altar with prayers for the health and protection of those whose names are in the cauldron at the center. While I lit candles nearly daily for a couple of years, these days it’s more like several days a week.

You are still welcome to request your name put in the cauldron. All I require is a clear identifier that points to YOU, and consent!

I wonder if old wooden matches can be repurposed as tea light wicks for beeswax? (Update: No, that doesn't work.)

Update as of April 2024: Still going several days a week!

Update Sept 2024: Just added Archangel Michael to the display (a paper drawing I made myself). It's being a hard month so the candles are nearly daily right now. I should probably take the altar down, clean the counter, and set it back up sometime...

Update Sept 2025: Still going, at least once a week!

64 or lower

65-67

68-69

70-72

73 or higher

No preference

In Fahrenheit I prefer 70ish.

going to have to explain

this culture someday.

A rarely seen, highly endangered Andean mountain cat and her kitten in Santiago, Chile. Bottom right: older kittens following their mother through the snow. These small felines have long, thickly ringed tails and plush coats with a striking marbled pattern, handy for traversing the chilly, wind-swept ridges of the Andes.

One of South America's rarest felines, the Andean mountain cat is traditionally considered a sacred animal by indigenous Aymara and Quechua people.

The other day I was surfing the internet and I found this specialized painting colour wheel, it shows how real paint colours relate to each other. 

Outside: the purest/brightest colours.

Inside: naturally muted or earthy colors, like browns and ochres.

The Center: dark neutral tones used for mixing shadows.

The Lines: the lines connect colors that are opposites, if you mix them you neutralize the tone creating clean grays or browns instead of muddy puddles.

I want to share this with you because I think it is really illustrative!

Familiar name, Familiar name, species classification, Familiar name... Is there a reason we decided to not to just call that one a Starling - or point out that they're mimics that make a wide variety of sounds? 🤨

That's probably true of many of these, huh? I wonder what other sounds they make? 🤔

Why does a Shoebill sound like a movie Gatling gun? Do we use Shoebills for the Foley?? 😬 OMG Quetzals are adorable! 😲

Oh that's where those sounds come from! Kookaburras and Loons! Gosh, so many games and movies use those to define environments they probably aren't even in, huh? 😲

Yep, that sure is a Mourning dove! Ahh the familiar call of cat food... Mourning doves are dumb as posts. 😏 Wait, "Moming dove!?" Maybe that's just really terrible kerning. Or maybe it was terrible kerning where they saw the name before, and they reproduced the error? 🤯

*Blink* That sound has been coming from Humming birds this whole time and I never knew it was them! 😲

Why do you ask?

[image description]

Is that anything?

One of the dirty secrets of tabletop RPG design is that setting per se is almost entirely meaningless from a rules perspective. The rules have opinions about what player characters do; the setting only matters insofar as it imposes descriptive constraints on the answer to that question. That's how self-proclaimed "universal" RPGs get away with it: they're just as opinionated as any other game about what sorts of shenanigans player characters ought to be getting up to, but they take care to provide a game-mechanical model of those shenanigans that's compatible with a wide variety of settings.

(On the flip side, it's also how you end up with a lot of really shitty licensed RPGs. The fact that a given set of rules can construct a game-mechanical model of the characters and setting of a particular piece of media doesn't inherently mean that those rules have anything interesting to say about what those characters spend their time doing. I could very easily construct the cast of Pride and Prejudice in D&D, but the player-facing affordances of D&D's rules would never produce Darcy's proposal!)

As a 2e AD&D kid, I can't help but adore the Forgotten Realms, but I don't miss the rule set at all. (If I never have to ask what my THAC0 is ever again, it'll be too soon.)