A review of several days

On Tuesday I am sure I did more things than I remember but the things I remember include doing scans of wikipedia and looking up various forms of vampire, deciding on several to play with depending on how things went with the game that evening, and then closing the tabs, which have since become unfindable, to my massive bafflement. (I can find some of what I read, but not the others, which was irritating when I wanted to look up strengths and weaknesses of the one that the party wound up attacking, heh.)

Ran my game for the first time since, apparently, July, in which the party actually managed to kill the vampire I was expecting them to chase around and have to go do research about through a combination of lateral thinking and sheer implausible luck. (Having the tank roll low on a roll-low-for-success system on all attacks, blocks, and dodges, and high on all damage rolls, turned out to be very effective once he got a spell on him that let him hurt the thing; before the spell went on he was just performing Dances With Eldritch Bears and nobody was hurting anyone.) A wind spirit the party is acquainted with turned up as they were burning the body and said, "Oh, I'm late!" and dropped two plot bombs: one, apparent vampire plague is coming and two, the tank's father who walked mysteriously into the haunted spooky forest some years ago is either alive or at least accessible as someone to talk to and concerned about vampires. Like you might be, if you live next to a haunted forest.

Yesterday I am also sure I did things during the day. What they might be? That is unclear. In the evening I had an RE planning meeting for the teaching-via-Minecraft that starts this evening, in which I put magazines into magazine holders for purposes of putting my office in order. After the meeting I popped into the server and did some construction layouts for setting up a little order so that the whole project would not immediately dissolve into chaos - the kids have collectively rejected the template on grounds of profound blandness and a desire to do appropriate buildings for each of the religions being studied rather than wedge everything into an ugly modern building, so I laid out 50x50ish zoning plots for them to work with.

I continued to participate in the cultural event of blaseball, the eldritch fanart generator, by producing fanart, which is the other thing I did yesterday.

Then I slept very badly, and now I have to figure out how to make dinner by fiveish so that I am available at six to educationally play Minecraft.

Updates on the dependency hell: The enrockening is complete. We need the electrician to come back and put the lights on by the front door and also the doorbell, which has an owl on it, and has thus pacified ER's desire to carve owls into the granite front step.

The office is 100% functional aside from the part where the internet craps out randomly and lags to pieces. I have put my magazines in magazine boxes. Today, a box of sufficient size to entertain a child arrived containing ... the archival box for my 1911 Temple of Dendera book which has no cover and is in poor condition. We have all eyed the giant box warily (and Robin has failed to solve the Law of Boxes problem with it, it is slightly too tall for him to feel comfortable jumping into), and I have put together the archival box and put the elderly, infirm book in it. Over time, the rest of the furniture will migrate up and be sorted.

KJ's plague doctor mask arrived.

I have a lot more icons for forms of aggravation than happiness

I should probably do something about that.

Today in splorts: so I have been slowly increasing the number of blaseball-related accounts I follow to make a higher density of my twitter feed composed of eldritch fanart generation content, and at some point I got a message from one of the ones I followed saaying "my manager wanted me to say em hotep to you in this the smallest of worlds", which gave me a certain amount of "...?" so I mentioned it to ardaniel, an eldritch being of certain superpowers, who tracked down a tweet from that account's player that said, more or less, "Bwahaha the indie Kemetic who was a huge influence on me when I started out is now following my blaseball RP account."

I shall have to make some of my art be of that character just because, which should be fun because fanonically she is a four-armed silvery serpentine vampire dragon with an obsession with tea and theft. (Okay, to be fair the vampirism and larceny are canon, not fanon.)

I also managed some support of another behind-the-scenes player in the fanbase, because blaseball cares, and he successfully tagged in the TransCrowdFund so I hope that helps him out more than I could on my own.

Today in religious education: it was our first session of ChUUrchcraft. We had a zoom meeting and then combined it with logging into the server for 100% glorious chaos. First of all, the older kids who are helping run this program had gotten in and planted a bunch of flowers that apparently eat CPU and lining every path they made over a 150x230 block zone meant that every so often someone would actually interact with a plant and the server would fall over. Once the problem was debugged, L (the kid who had caused the problem) logged in solo to fix it, to general razzing.

Then we split up into groups. Now, I am the one instructor with actual Minecraft experience of note. Of the other adults, one is the server guy who has some experience, but on his son's account; one is the other adult in that family; one is an engineer who bought an account to help out but had to have WASD navigation explained to him, let alone all of the everything that is Minecraft. By the end of the session, when he examined his measley row of blocks and compared it to the mosque team, he first asked if copy-paste was possible, and then ordered the team lead K to get her own account because he was not going to flail around at this nonsense alone, another adult needed to be in here to be laughed at by the 10-to-13-year-olds, she wasn't going to get out of being embarrassed so easily.

The kids were having a great time. Some of the kids who were having a great time were having a productive time - the mosque team got a really nice looking building shell started. KJ and I were working on a Hindu temple and I found some reference material for us to run with. Most of the rest of the kids wound up congregating around the Christianity district. They built probably eight or so different Pride flags outside the fence and then, rather than build outlines, proceeded to dig through to the bottom of the world and out the other side, and occasionally plummeted to their deaths while cackling gloriously about their portal to hell. (And teasing Q, one of the kids, about how do you manage to die in creative.)

A good time was had by all.