Jaune Chat's Life, the Universe, and Everything

So, over a year ago my husband invited a couple of his co-workers over to learn D&D, and we've been playing roughly every two weeks. However, despite this reasonably steady schedule (with occasional off-weeks due to other obligations), every single time he has to send out an e-mail reminder to ask, "Are we gaming this week?"

This is because Hubby and both co-workers work at a company where the work availability can be erratic, and both of the co-workers have been asked to stay late, come in early, or take extra shifts. It's honestly not that great a company, but the hours are flexible and its near everyone's house, so they've all stayed on working there. This means that sometimes no one will give a definite answer on whether or not they're going to come to the game, which I am running, until very late in the week. Sometimes the evening before. Sometimes the morning of. It was quite bad a number of months ago, and while they have gotten a little better with their timing, we still shouldn't have to beg them by e-mail every week.

Now, both seem to be having fun, but Hubby did start them on a fairly complicated system (his personal favorite, D&D 3.5), and neither have bothered to read the rulebook cover-to-cover (a must, in my opinion, to get a good firm grasp of the rules, along with to actual play). I have subtly and not-so-subtly hinted that perhaps we could try another system that is less demanding, like D&D 5e (the most recent edition, reasonably similar to 3.5 but far more streamlined) or Cypher System (far less rules, far more role-playing), but Hubby stubbornly resists because he says he, "doesn't want to confuse them" and "wants them to be comfortable with the rules." What he really wants is basically a captive group that only uses his favorite system, because our old group (who has since moved away) stopped using 3.5 when other systems became available, and he refused to learn anything else. He doesn't see any irony or contradiction in this.

I'd like to at least bring in a few more players, so when these two co-workers can't give me an answer as to whether or not they'll show up, we'd at least have a few more people so we could still have a game. But one of the two co-workers is socially awkward and shy and doesn't want to "look stupid" in front of other people. I've been told that if we get other people, she'll probably stop showing up. When it looked like she was going to take a second job that would preclude her from gaming, suddenly Hubby was willing to consider other people for the group. But as soon as the second job fell through for our shy player, he dropped the idea entirely.

I try to draw her out during the game, and she knows by now that I don't bite, but she's more into the combat side of things than the role-playing side. That isn't a bad thing, some players are like that, but despite me trying to direct questions at her, she mostly just sits around until combat happens. It's very frustrating for me as a Dungeon Master, mostly because my old group was much more proactive and all excellent role-players.

Now Hubby would like to try to get some longer gaming sessions with this little group, because normally our sessions barely top two hours. A normal average session is at least four hours, if not more. He'd like to do it on my weekend off, on Friday or Sunday (my Saturday is already claimed by my old group, whom I game with online). When he sent the e-mail out, I did warn them that I was going to need a definitive answer by Tuesday morning if we were gaming on Friday (due to how my days off work and what time I'd need for game prep), or Friday morning if we were gaming on Sunday (again, I need prep time for a long session).

I got a vague e-mail about, "Oh I'd prefer Friday, but the other person will probably want Sunday." Tuesday has come and gone without any further communication, so I'm just going to rule Friday out now for gaming. If I can't get an answer in a timely fashion for Sunday, then I will cancel that too.

Hubby wants to go out for a movie on Friday (apparently he thinks no one will ask for gaming at the last minute this time), but I may have to put the kibosh on that. With gaming on Saturday and Sunday, and my nocturnal schedule because of my night shifts, that means I already have to get up at either work times or earlier on both of those days. If I have to get up early on Friday as well, I will scream. Whenever I end up doing that, I'll end up taking overly-long naps in the middle of the night to just try to make up the huge amounts of sleep that I'm losing. Effectively I will only have a few hours of actual free time if that happens, and that will make me a very cranky person. I want to get some personal stuff done this weekend: writing, updating some online games, watching my TV shows, and that's hard if I can't plan anything in advance.

In summary, I'd like to get more people and more responsible people in the last face-to-face game I have left going on without having to be held hostage by the fragile ego of one player, the collective idiocy of their place of employment, and any of their inability to e-mail me in a timely fashion!

Minor rant to be filed under "first world problems" - My husband purchased a new computer for me for a Christmas/birthday gift. I was quite pleased to receive it, because while my 5-year-old computer is still okay, no laptop lasts forever and I'd rather have things set up before anything happens to the current one.
However, I haven't yet unboxed the new computer or set it up, because that will require several hours of dedicated attention and I really wanted to use my current free time to take care of several writing projects.

Tonight is part of my weekend off, and we spent several hours together taking careful inventory of our DVD collection. (Hang on, this will become relevant to the computer thing in a bit.) Yes, it's a bit behind the cutting edge of viewing technology, but we aren't subscribed to all the various streaming organizations yet, and when the Internet decides to take a crap on us, at least we can still watch our stories. Hubby likes to take advantage of various deals throughout the holiday shopping season to catch up on expanding our library. To keep things organized, we have separated our films into categories like a movie store, and then alphabetize within that category. Then everything is entered into a spreadsheet with primary (and sometimes secondary and tertiary) tags. (For those keeping score at home, our categories are: Superhero, Sci-Fi, TV, Drama, Animated, Action, Horror, Comedy, Musicals (both musical movies like Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge as well as live band performances), and Sports. We're thinking of further categories like War and Rom-Coms to more easily find things according to our tastes.)

Categorizing everything means first taking all new DVDs and slotting them into the appropriate spots, sometimes having to get creative because some special edition DVDs, in particular the large box sets for TV series, are too large for our DVD-specific shelves. It means some items are on top of the shelves or set off in specific larger slots. To double-check what we have versus what needs to be entered, Hubby checks the database while I read off everything one by one. This also lets us check if anything has changed category, is out of order, or is missing. Sometimes we realize we don't have a season of a show because it hasn't been on sale, or we realize a DVD has gone wandering off. It's a very long process, very tedious, and slightly painful for me because the shelves run from above my head all the way to the floor, and the only way to read the lower ones is to sit on the floor. (I'm quite fat, so getting up again is a pain in the ass.)

After all of that, all I wanted to do was go sit down at my old, functioning computer and tend to several writing projects I had going. I had promised someone I'd beta her fic, which requires a lot of concentration, and I needed to write some risque scenes in other fics I was writing, which honestly requires privacy. Hubby knows I write explicit fanfic (and he doesn't mind at all), but I just don't feel comfortable writing about throbbing rods in front of him.

So I sit down, barely get a page into my betaing project, when he wanders into my den and sees the new laptop, sitting safely in its box, well out of the way. He wonders why I haven't taken it out or set it up yet, and pulls it out and has me plug it in. The new computer has Cortana, which starts talking. Loudly. It needs about 85 pieces of specific information from me, right in the moment. My responses to Hubby get more and more terse, my tone more irritated, because I cannot concentrate with Cortana bellowing for answers and Hubby asking the same.

I asked Hubby to take Cortana elsewhere, gave him my basic setup information, and told him to have at it. I came out of the den ten minutes later just to dash to the bathroom and he was like, "Oh, good, I need you to..." and had another fifteen questions that needed to be answered from Cortana. No. Just no. A quick bathroom break doesn't mean I am at a damn stopping point, it means I just need to pee so I can get back to what I was doing!

This is why I hadn't done the damn setup before now. Because it required 85 specific things from me, and I needed to commit several dedicated hours to doing that. I didn't want to dedicate time to computer setup after spending 2.5 hours updating that DVD database, I wanted a break and to get some writing done. The hours in which I have free time in which I am rested, alert, and motivated are rare and precious to me.

I am pleased he was feeling helpful, but he doesn't always seem to realize how I get when I'm concentrating. When I'm facing a Word document, it's like being in a book; I am not to be bugged. When I have headphones in, I'm not to be bugged. Start talking when I'm wearing my earbuds and it's, "What?!" followed by me hitting the pause button, listening to whatever is said, then going back to what I was doing. Only to have the same thing repeated a few moments later. Sweetie, I need all the information at once, not piecemeal. I am not surfing Facebook or BBC News with you, so I do not need every single reaction to these stories as you're reading them. Wait until you build up some information, catch me between tasks (or at least only interrupt me once), and then you can get my reactions all at once.

Every time someone interrupts me when I've already devoted my concentration, the longer everything will take. My responses to you will be curt, my attitude unpleasant, and I won't be giving you anything more than 10% of my attention. I can't get back to my original task until I'm done with you, which means that original task gets pushed back later and later. Some days I have an extremely tight schedule (I work nights, so sometimes I have my time between waking up and going out the door timed and scheduled very precisely) and any deviation from that means either something isn't getting done or I will be making it up by cutting it out of my sleep hours later. This is why sometimes I average 4 hours of sleep a day during working days.

What I need is one of those MMORPG indicators that show a person doesn't want to be spoken to. Or one of those things from Sims which indicate someone's mood when you try to talk to them. Then I could make it turn red when I'm not ready to communicate.

This small rave/rant will contain spoilers for the first season of the Blacklist and the pilot of Forever. But in short, why do shows with interesting premises seem to focus all their attention on single characters and forget things like logic, procedure, and law? ( Spoilers ahoy! Also some gruesome medical descriptions. )

Or, where Jaune Chat needs to rant about her household, her husband, an unequal division of labor, and just Go To the Damn Doctor, Sweetie.

( It should not be this hard )

Ooooo.... kay.

So... something just happened that was not good. I'd like to talk about it.

( Talking about original fiction writer's club and hubby's strange reaction. )

So, in December I posted what I had intended to be the final chapter of a series I had started waaaaaaay back in 2006. I got some good comments on it, some great responses from people who'd been with me during the main writing of the long story of the series for two years. And then I got some other responses.

( Lemme rant... )

Aren't weekends supposed to be relaxing? This has not been. At all.

It's not like anything hugely bad happened, just many smaller moderately bad or upsetting things that have combined to create a very bad feeling in my stomach.

( Work Meetings of Awkwardness, Dungeons and Dragons Sessions From Hell, and Home Carpentry Projects of Doom )

Comments are great things. For those fic writers here on LJ, comments are often our lifeblood. They give us a reason to keep writing, encouragement that we're on the right track, and just let us know that in the whole wide world, someone else finds our efforts worthy of notice. For a lot of us, that's all we want. And a comment is far more meaningful than a simple kudos or "like" vote. But let me discuss a couple different kinds of comments that invite more discussion. Specifically the concrit comment and the "but you're not a telepath!" comment.

( Commentary about commenting )