Washing away the dirt

I haven’t spoken much about religious or spiritual matters here, focusing instead on popular culture and politics.

But I am a religious and spiritual person: I’m a practicing witch, meaning I worship nature and different deities, and use spells to connect with them and to affect change within the world.

Today, for the first time in a long time, I felt drawn to my craft in more than a rote way, and crafted a spell to sever ties with a person who abused me in the past, to end a spell I had cast on them in the hopes of preventing them from doing future harm.

Warning: below the Read More is a story about sexual assault.

Fey Touched, a D&D 5e homebrew origin for sorcerers

My next offering to D&D homebrew was supposed to be the half-elf variant I’ve created, but I’m still working on getting a good balance between human, elf, and half-elf abilities. The half-elf variant started out as the result of a specific historical event in my homebrew campaign, so I’m also trying to strip out the specifics to make a version that can work in any campaign setting.

So instead of a race variant, this time I present an origin for the Sorcerer class: Fey Touched.

On being “smart” and mental illness

The frustrating thing about mental illness is, even when you know what’s going on – when you have a diagnosis, and a slightly-better-than-a-layperson’s understanding of psychology and neurochemistry, and a treatment plan – you can still be thrown for a loop. Even when you know that the voices in your head are just in your head, or that the thousands of things you’re worried are going to happen are almost certainly not going to happen, or that disappointing some random stranger is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things, sometimes you can just slip up and do a thing because your brain was like !!?!?!?!? and your mind went “Yep, that seems reasonable and not at all insane, let’s do that.”

To Vox Machina, a toast

The finale of Vox Machina’s adventures aired today…7pm on Thursday for them, noon on Friday the 13th for me.

Critical Role isn’t over: there will be a series of one-shots over the next few weeks, and then in the New Year the gang will start back with a whole new campaign, set in the same world but a couple of decades down the line. They’re not gone forever. It’s not over.

It still felt like my heart got curb-stomped.

Spoilers for episode 115 of Critical Role below the “read more”.