Social Necromancy

 A Christian friend once told me that ouija boards don't hook you up with the dead, that you're really talking to the demons that clung to them in life. I don't know if that's, like, official doctrine, but it seems like a logical extrapolation. Anyway, the point is, it's the same with social media. You're not talking to your friends; you're talking to their demons.

Chili Chatter

Update 11/16/2020: My opinions on the various pepper flake blends have changed some, but I'm not gonna go back over all of them except to say that Asian Reds is now my all-purpose go-to and Sweet Heat is really good when you grind it up.

 

I love hot peppers. To the right, there's a picture of some habanero bits that I dried in a toaster oven with sugar and salt. Habanero is about the limit of my heat tolerance. Despite their deliciousness, I usually only eat habanero peppers straight up when I want to shock myself out of a funk. 

Okay, here's where I start sounding like a shill because mostly I'm blathering on about some stuff I bought from this one place, Flatiron Pepper Company.

There were several that looked good, so I ordered a bunch: Four Pepper Blend, Sweet Heat, Hatch Valley Green, Asian Reds, and Smoke Show. The Four Pepper Blend (Arbol, Ghost, Habanero, Jalapeno) is probably the one I'd buy if I had to pick one. It's got a nice heat level and plenty of flavor. I could see using this in place of any of the others. That's not to say they're all the same, just that this one would do even when one of the others would be a better fit.

 

I was really pleased with Smoke Show (Chipotle, Smoked Ghost, Carolina Reaper) as well. As the name suggests, it's made with smoked peppers and the flavor definitely comes through. It's also the hottest of the ones I got. I think it's the hottest one they have except for "I Can't Feel My Face."

Yes, there's one called I Can't Feel My Face (Carolina Reaper, Ghost, Scorpion, Habanero). I keep looking at it and thinking I should order this and try it but, remember what I said about habaneros? That's the mildest pepper in this mix. The Scoville ranking is over 750k. I'm willing to admit that I have limits.

I was a little disappointed with Sweet Heat (Scotch Bonnet, Ancho, Red Bell). I mean, I knew it would be mild, but it's really too mild. The heat gets completely lost in anything I add it to. That might be okay, but the flavor does too. It has a nice flavor. Sweet, in case you hadn't guessed. It tastes good when I just chew it up by itself. Gnawing on a spoonful of pepper flakes isn't really what I'm looking for in a dining experience, though. Maybe someone with a more, whatchacallit, discerning palette would be better able to appreciate this.

Likewise Hatch Valley Green (Big Jim, Sandia, Jalapeno, Habanero), although in some ways I have the reverse complaint. It's got about the heat level I expected for Sweet Heat, but I'm not wowed by the flavor. I dunno. I'm still experimenting with all of these, so maybe I'll find some other uses that make it shine. Right now I'm mostly mixing it with one of the others, which is also what I'm doing with Sweet Heat.

 

I use Asian Reds (Gochugaru, Thai Chile, Ghost, Tien Tsin) for pretty much the stuff I imagined I'd use Sweet Heat for. It's not as sweet, but it goes with the same kind of things and has a respectable burn. I even put it on otherwise plain buttered toast for breakfast. Or, you know, whenever. And of course I put it on Chinese food. Restaurants around here have to worry about pasty mid-westerners (as opposed to pasty southerners like me) going all Karen because their Kung Pao has more bite than a poblano, so they tend to go extremely light on the spices. This stuff is the cure.

I guess that wasn't too shill-ish. I did have a few criticisms, after all. BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! I've got this coupon link they gave me. You can use it to get $5 off an order, and then I get a coupon if you use it.

Try Nihilism

Last weekend would have been Gen Con if not for the plague. I wasn't going this year anyway, so I didn't care, but most of my friends were bummed. Tom even resolved to come up with a "hoot" to fill the void. Once everybody agreed to have it in Point Pleasant, West Virginia (home of the Mothman) I was on board too.

My original plan was to do a Mothman-inspired adventure I had run at Gen Con a few years back, but a request for D&D inspired me to finally try out the 5e Adventures in Middle Earth rules. This was a last minute switch, so I went with one of the adventures in the Bree-Land Region Guide instead of making up my own. That area has always been one of my favorites.

Tom and I got to Point Pleasant on Wednesday, snapped a picture of the statue, confirmed that the Lowe Hotel (right across the street) really was closed, and proceeded to turn our room at the Quality Inn into a walk-in fridge. Tom did Tom stuff while I read through the adventure and crammed as many of the Middle Earth rules back into my brain as I could.

Whatever

I'm just not feeling the bloggery lately, so here's some random social media bits from sort of recently.

That's my fuzzy man. Some call him Captain Scrappy:

Speckle sizing up a potential adversary:

There's a house somewhere under all that:

Couple o' Things

"There are two things in life you should always binge on: horror flicks and Wild Turkey."
--Joe Bob Briggs

It's been a while since I did a blog and I don't feel like writing up anything serious, so here's a bunch of random updates.

I've been working at home since everything shut down for the plague and I love it. I can be in my own little space with my cats and all the stuff I like to have around me. I don't even goof off much. If anything, I'm a little more productive than usual. Maybe it's because I don't feel guilty about it if I've gone to the trouble to get polished up and slog my way out there, but I do if I'm at home and not getting stuff done. And "social distancing" is my default setting anyway. I'm gonna be sad when I have to go back. That doesn't mean I want people to keep getting sick, of course. Well, except maybe these dumbass quarantine protesters. Those assholes can go anytime.

I hate to admit it, but I kind of like the company I work for, now. I'm really impressed by the way the way they're handling all this plague stuff and, I don't know, it's just something I'm glad to be a part of, I guess. 

Funny thing, though: I'm getting less done on The Nameless Way. I think I had adapted myself to doing my little writing-breaks at work, which would then bump it up to the surface in my head so I'd work from home. I guess I need to work out a new way to keep myself on schedule. I did fill out the playlist and change a few things, which might not have been the best use of my time, but it was fun. Similarly, I've been collecting and scanning old bits that I still had from the game on which the book is based. This isn't exactly the highest priority thing right now, but it will have an eventual use because I'm planning to have "digital extras" section for stuff like old maps and character sheets and things.

I've done a lot of video-chat gaming. The Defenders campaign is still running, although I've just been writing up some notes instead of posting detailed session logs. I've played in some of Tom & Curt's Scrap Pile follow-up and some Spacers and Charlie even ran a Birds of Prey adventure. Well, the Birds of Prey setup, anyway. The field team consisted of Artemis (my character, based on the cartoon version) and Black Cat (yes, from Marvel -- we know).

Back when I first started drinking, I tried gin and didn't like it. More recently, I tried it again and loved it. I guess back in the day I wasn't enough of a boozehound to notice anything beyond the sting of alcohol. I've been picking it up more often now. I'm still way into bourbon, though. It's just a mood thing. White Claw is pretty nice when I don't want to risk getting drunk, too.

Tweets (Most Recent to Oldest):

• I hate ghosts that make people do shit like find the body or solve the murder or whatever. Deal with your own issues, ghost; it's not like you have anything better to do.
• None of the people I've seen tweet-calling for revolution would be of any use if it really happened.
• I just read that "OK" is just as correct as "okay," maybe more correct because it came first, so I guess nothing really matters to me anymore.
• I decided I wanted to see what's up with those Friday the 13th movies tonight. I never realized that you don't even see the iconic hockey mask on Jason until more than halfway into the third movie.
• I wonder who's gonna be the first to release a horror movie called "Shelter in Place."

Child of Fire

Remember me talking about the Blackridge setting and the series of short novels I had in mind for it? No? That's okay. I was thinking about it the other day and rattled this out. If you want to find out a little more, click that link and scroll down past this post.

Prologue

Lyssa checked the clock for the first time since‭… ‬okay,‭ ‬thirty seconds ago.‭ ‬The storm was almost here.‭ ‬She adjusted Professor Gathright's expensive lens array and looked at the sky.‭ ‬Glowing green and red wisps were already sliding across the horizon.‭ ‬In the grooves of the carved circle and its inscribed triangle,‭ ‬orange salt flickered with more than reflected light.

The crystal lenses lit up as the solar flare illuminated more and more of the sky. The electric lights around her surged with the induced current. One of them popped but the others, chosen with this phenomenon in mind, held up. Lyssa made some adjustments to the array and watched the triangle.

She gasped as a pale blue, almost invisible, flame sprang up from the concrete floor inside the triangle, rising to a height of six feet before thickening to a foot or so in diameter. Much as she wanted to see this, much as she trusted the work she and Professor Gathright had done, she had never really expected it to work. The fire shifted to a deeper blue and tightened into a human-like shape.

Electricity arced from surface to surface. Lyssa could feel the charge tingling in her skin and lifting her hair. The lights flared and faded, but they were unnecessary now. The fiery figure in the triangle grew unbearably bright. Before she had to avert her eyes, Lyssa saw its head tilt back, as if it were looking up through the lenses.

Something grabbed her head and turned her face irresistibly back to the shape of fire. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to raise her hands to cover them, but her arms wouldn't move. The light burned through her lids, first red, then white. She begged. She sobbed. She screamed.

When the phantom hands released her, Lyssa collapsed into darkness.

BASHCon 2020

Had a great time at BASHCon this year. We missed out on gaming with Jerry because he put his Friday game in the system and a ton of people signed up for it. Tom and I would have been late anyway, so maybe it was for the best. The rest of us just arranged to get together for private games because convention registration was a mess.

Chili's was good, met Liam's friend Max, conversation, all that. Tom canceled his Saturday morning game on Saturday morning, which made his upcoming award ceremony even better.

All the usual stuff: vendors, auction, the always-awesome Phoenica restaurant, the cool student center. I got some loot and Tom surprised me with a t-shirt.

 

Cory ran Feast of Legends, an RPG designed by Wendy's as some sort of bizarre marketing scheme. The menu puns are hilariously corny. We had fun being all stupid and corporate the whole time. Cory hammed it up just right.

My Gangbusters game started off normal enough, with a gang of whiskey runners trying to find out how a rival gang was suddenly getting so much cheap, high-quality booze. Then it started getting weird, with a whole town coming out at night to search for bits of something in the grass, then screaming like pod people upon seeing an outsider spying on them. Then it was all monsters and slime and a meteor and a creepy old lady talking to metal box which she called, "mother." Tom has a bit more about it in his blog.

I always wanted to do a surprise session like this, because there's one thing about horror games that always gets lost because the players know they're in a horror game. If people were really exposed to freaky supernatural stuff, they would keep looking for another explanation. Part of the horror is the inability to accept it. And it worked, which is good because now they'll always see it coming, even when it's not, so this was my only shot.

At the El Vaquero after-party, Jerry and I presented Tom with his Quitters' Club award.