Chris Amann - Storyteller

I don't really know where this one came from. It just sort of rapidly evolved from a stray thought I had and the rest is history. I honestly don't want to say too much about it because I enjoyed this one and don't want to spoil the twist.

Emett’s Villainous Plans Daisy plopped onto Emett’s bed. “Now that I’ve explained the entire saga, what’ve you been doing lately?”

I took a break to watch the snow fall at work since I was already pretty out of it only a couple hours after getting my COVID booster and was struck by a few thoughts as I watched maskless people pause to bundle up against the chilly walk to their car.

Sensible Precautions In A Wisconsin Winter It is snowing as I write this. It is not the first snow of the season–that came after Thanksgiving, falling after midnight in a powdery coating that lingered for days, even through warmth and…

A recent patch to Baldur's Gate 3 (it came out the day I wrote this) caught me by surprise since I'm pretty far removed from any means of hearing about it nowadays, but the notes have reignited my passion for the game. I'm excited to what has changed!

Back To Baldur’s Gate 3 Again Larian, the studio behind the incredibly popular and much-nominated-for-game-awards Baldur’s Gate 3, released a new major patch to the game today (well, a week ago today). There’s a who…

About a decade after I meant to, I've finally read the original (well, the colored versions of the original) Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and I've got a lot of thoughts about them. Which I'm sharing because I'd feel bad writing about my burnout again.

This Is About The Scott Pilgrim Graphic Novels And Definitely Not About Burnout After last week’s post about the end of National Novel Writing Month and my goals for maintaining my writing habits going forward, I feel kinda bad writing about my continued deep and abiding…

As is tradition, here are some reflections on my latest game of Heart: The City Beneath. We've wrapped up our second full capital-S Session and while I have plenty to improve on for next time, I'm also plenty excited for what we've got brewing!

When It All Falls Out In Heart: The City Beneath In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game…

I spent more time than I expected during my recent Thanksgiving vacation playing Wildermyth. Turns out all I needed was some time to break a few of my negative associations with it thanks to how much I played it to escape last winter...

Still Having A Wild Time In Wildermyth After most of a year away from the game, I’ve returned to playing Wildermyth. My return from this extended absence was prompted by the group of people that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons…

Today's flash fiction is inspired by my own somewhat paranoid habits around preserving my data. All of my data (the stuff on my PC) exists in at least three places. Everything I create exists in at least four. No matter what, I will never lose my work.

Backup Your Backups Lin tapped on the keyboard. She didn’t expect the melted computer to boot, but she felt obligated to try.

After a long but still nice few days, I am ready to just collapse in a heap and rest while slowly working my way through my giant pile of leftovers and definitely not ignoring everything in my fridge to eat giant bowls of popcorn instead.

Reflections In Post-Holiday Silence After just over three full days of hosting (about seventy-three hours), my siblings have left and I am alone in my apartment except for the occasional quiet cheeps of my bird, Fidget, who is both m…

I've been thinking a lot about digital systems, lately, and my place in them. Where I am, what I do, what it costs me, and what I'm comfortable with... I don't like being exploited to generate money, but I don't think Google Reviews is ever paying out.

Consenting To Being A Part Of A Digital System I’ve been thinking about the various systems of the world around me, mostly digital, and my place in them. For instance, under a different name (a username), I’m one of Google’s t…

As National Novel Writing Month comes to a close, I reflect on what has been possibly the most tumultuous NaNoWriMo I've ever experienced despite how absolutely fine and dandy my writing process has been this month. Everything else in my life is to blame.

The End Of National Novel Writing Month 2023 Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people workin…

While my body might be aching from how much cleaning I did last weekend (well, on the day I wrote this, anyway), my mind is feeling refreshed and buoyed since I spent all that time listening to some fun music by the band/artist Bug Hunter!

Reflecting On Bug Hunter’s Discography About two months ago, I wrote about a new album by an artist I’d first heard of long ago and then somehow lost track of for years (twice, even, thanks to the weird way the internet works). Th…

Today's post is about an odd day I had at work last week and the way I amused myself while doing an otherwise boring, repetitive task that I got assigned because no one else wanted to do it. Turns out AMAs are fun to do when you're craving attention.

The Drudgery Of My Job Is A Metaphor For My Life Yesterday (well, yesterday from the day I wrote this a bit over a week and a half ago because of holiday blog displacement and me trying to bank some writing before I’m hosting people), I spe…

I was having trouble coming up with a story, so I found a prompt for a microblogging challenge over on Cohost. The prompt of the day I wrote this was "crying in public" and I just thought of times I cried in public until I found one worth writing about.

Crying At The Puppy Parade As Dean watched the puppy parade move across campus, he felt his eyes begin to well up with tears. He heaved a watery sigh as he pulled out a small packet of tissues and wiped at his eyes. As he tu…

Well, this might be the longest critical essay I've ever written for fun. I just love Scavengers Reign so much! There's so much there to think and write about! I might even have another (much shorter) one of these essays in me for next week...

Human Interaction With The Environment In Scavengers Reign Spoiler Warning for Scavenger’s Reign. I’m going to be going into detail about the plot and major events of the show in most paragraphs except the one immediately after this one (to hop…

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm taking a day to rest, but I've got some links to some sources of escapism for those of you regretting your decisions to indulge in a classic "Miserable Family Holiday." Don't forget, though, that colonialism is fu***ng awful.

Happy Thanksgiving! I’m taking the day off to spend time with my siblings and, aside from cooking a huge meal, take a break for a day. So, instead of a full post, I’ve got some suggestions for people looki…

I'm still fighting burnout as I try to juggle my responsibilities, my time as a host for this Thanksgiving week, and my writing. I really hope things calm down in my life, eventually, because it has been a year of this s**t at this point and I need rest.

Riding The Coattails Of One Very Productive Day As NaNoWriMo Wraps Its Third Quarter Well, it’s almost midnight the day before this post is due to go up and I’m only now writing it because I forgot, until this moment, that I actually needed to write something for tomorr…

My players planned a heist in Heart: The City Beneath and, thanks to some fun fallouts, I was able to point out that we chose the horror game, not the heist game. Now my players are battling the realest monsters of them all: Corporate Stooges!

Corporate Takeovers And Vibe Shifts In My Game Of Heart: The City Beneath In the latest session of Heart: The City Beneath that I ran with my every-other-Sunday group, they completed their first full delve (well, technically second, but the first one had training wheels …

I really love the "local heroism" focus of Spider-Man: Miles Morales since that has always been what Spider-Man is about to me. Getting to play an entire game that balance it with larger plot events was an absolute treat. I'd definitely recommend it.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales Is A Huge Improvement On A Great Game Just a quick Spoiler Warning that there will be some details about the plot of Spider-Man: Miles Morales in the latter half of paragraph four, but I really just wanted to get a pet peeve off my che…

Today's post is inspired by an intrusive thought, my incredibly dry skin (thanks to the combination of a new medication and the colder weather), and something I head a coworker say when he was being incredibly pedantic about something dumb.

The Itch Lennard lifted one carefully trimmed fingernail to his neck and dragged it across the skin. The scrape shuddered through his body, briefly offering reprieve from the drone of his coworker who had l…

I used to wonder why my cell phone never appeared in my dreams. Now I wonder if it's been in them all this time but I never recognized it because it so closely mirrored the way my own thoughts show up in my dreams when they're outside of me.

Cell Phone Thoughts I used to wonder why I never saw my cell phone in my dreams, or why I never even thought about it while dreaming. Then I was grateful, since it meant I could escape it’s constant presence in …

I watched all of Scavengers Reign in the course of three days and you should do it too. Every glowing praise you've heard about the show is true, at least in spirit if not in fact (I don't know what you've read). It's definitely worth your time.

Life, Survival, and A Strange New World In Scavengers Reign Every so often, I find some new bit of media that feels so unlike everything else I’ve seen that it fills me with wonder. When I was a kid, it was Lord of the Rings and Narnia. The Legend of …

I dozed off three times while writing this. Thank goodness I had time this morning to do some editing so it wasn't a garbled mess. I think I might have pushed myself too far, this time, but I'm so close to my vacation that I'm trying to just keep going.

We’re Halfway Through National Novel Writing Month Well, now I’m two weeks into National Novel Writing Month and while my work days aren’t as incredibly hectic and busy as they were during the first week and a half of November, the rest…

I've mentioned before how tired I am of bloated movies and sci-fi or fantasy stories with twice as many pages as they needed, but I don't think that this sort of endless extension is why I've never gotten into Marvel comics despite my love for Spider-Man.

Appreciating Brevity In Media Via The Local Superhero, Spider-Man I spent almost all of my free time last weekend playing Spider-Man: Remastered (originally for the PS4) and then Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I actually 100-percented SM:R (though there’s techn…

Don't think about the title too much. I sure didn't. More than a little though, I'll admit, since I figured I needed at least a little bit of incredibly stretched humor to accompany this rather dour blog post. I'm too tired to do it any better, though.

I Fell Into A Burnout String That’s Dire I am writing this on the sixth day of November and I am already so incredibly burned out that I’m considering taking time away from work already. Well, not “already” since I haven…

Today's flash fiction is inspired by a mix of events. One was something I read online that had absolutely nothing to do with the theme of today's flash fiction. One was my own sleep paralysis event. The last one was the thought that kept me up last night.

Sleep Paralysis Robyn’s mind drifted to the surface of consciousness. Something heavy was draped over them. Unfortunately, since they slept on their side, they couldn’t see what it was. They couldn’t turn to look,…

My Heart: The City Beneath group has finally begun their descent into the massive, horrible pit known far and wide as "The Rotting Heart" (to make good on our own worldbuilding and include the system's terminology). Things went off the rails immediately.

The First Descent Into The Rotting Heart One of the things that got me through this past week of exhaustingly busy days at work was thinking about my game of Heart: The City Beneath. I admittedly did not have much time to let my mind sit …

Really starting to burn myself out with all of these days that only aren't more then 12 hours long because I refuse to do more than 12 consecutive hours of work without at least a decent break to rest somewhere in there. I'm so incredibly tired.

Work/Life Balance Means Spending 12 Hours At Work, Right? As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, work has been staggeringly busy. I haven’t even had time to think about my organization project this past week since every single day has been over ele…

One week into NaNoWriMo and I'm further behind than I've been any year other than the one where I gave up a couple days in since I didn't have the energy to write and hunt for a job at the same time. I can still catch up, though, once things calm down.

National Novel Writing Month Update: One Week Later Well, it’s been rough. I was INCREDIBLY optimistic about the course this month would take and I think I hit my daily writing target only once so far, let alone my daily secondary target of ge…

As stupid as writing a blurb seems at this point of the night when I'm as utterly exhausted as I am, I'm really, truly glad that I decided to let myself work a little bit harder than I'd planned because, otherwise, I wouldn't have written anything today.

The Write Way To End An Exhausting Day One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is that, sometimes, pushing yourself a little bit harder than you think you should, taking one more step after you decided you& #8…

I was lucky enough to play three tabletop games in the past week, and this post is about the two that I played in. Both of them were very different, but they both exemplified two styles of gameplay that I enjoy a lot. I got everything I could have wanted.

I Played So Many Tabletop Games Last Week Last week was a pretty active week for me, in terms of tabletop gaming. Three of four possible games happened and I enjoyed each of them in incredibly different ways. While I’ll save my rumin…

Today's flash fiction was inspired by a late night spend wandering around my office building, in a section that had been remodeled since the last time I'd been there, looking for my friend's office. It was mighty creepy up there, in the dark.

Cubicle Fields Forever Darryl rose and left his office. He paced past the dark cubicles and down a dim hallway, looking for the one coworker he knew would be around this late. Greta usually visited him but, today, he tho…

In today's entry in my long list of critical analysis-style blog post essays, I'm writing about Fullmetal Alchemist (plus the Brotherhood anime) and the depiction of a facist, authoritarian government in it. The topic has been on my mind a lot, lately.

Digging Into The Subtext Of Fullmetal Alchemist Very recently, out of a desire to have something to do that didn’t require any input or attention from me (well, and to continue teaching Crunchyroll what kinds of stuff I liked), I started w…

Today's post is about one of the oddest things to happen to me. It definitely isn't the strangest, but it is so unlikely and interconnected that I'm still marveling at it days later. Who knew listening to podcasts while playing Pokémon could be therapy?

Getting Attached To A Shiny Pokémon Because Of A Sad Story As I’ve been slowly working my way through the Pokémon Violet DLC, I’ve been listening to a wide variety of podcasts. I finished working through the entire Patreon catalogue of Friends …

Today is the start of National Novel Writing Month and I'm going to try participating. Honestly, the real challenge for this month will be giving up if I realize that I'm pushing myself too hard since I'm garbage at giving up on things.

National Novel Writing Month 2023 Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo as I’ll be calling it in the rest of the post) and I only just decided I was going to definitely participate yesterday (wh…

Vox Machina Season 2 was rated 18+ for enough episodes that anyone following the guidelines for "age-appropriate" viewing should probably just skip all the 16+ episodes as well. It was incredibly violent and gruesome, but a much cleaner story.

Vox Machina Season 2 Is As Violently Messy As This Post Is Meandering After many months of waiting (I promised to watch with a friend and I do my best to keep my word when I’ve got the choice), I finally watched Season 2 of Vox Machina. These twelve episodes, c…

I watched Nimona again, this time with a friend, and while the movie-watching experience was everything I could have hoped for the second time around, talking about the movie after the fact left a lot to be desired, through no fault of my friend.

Returning To Nimona With Some Company Along For The Ride Over the weekend, I visited a friend for her birthday and the two of us caught up on some streaming stuff that she was behind on. I was also behind on some of it, on account of having promised to w…

Today's flash fiction entry was inspired by watching a coworker labor long after the lights had gone out for the day, the two of us the only ones still present that late into an evening, as we both worked on separate things no one else cared about.

Decorating A Haunted Office He hangs the decoration, a scrap of white with a face facsimile adorning the lumpy top, and then shifts his ladder five feet to hang another. They do not match his vision, but they match his wallet…

I'm looking forward to hosting some people for US Thanksgiving this year and really enjoying how my current apartment is handling the cold weather. It really seems like this winter will be much more pleasant than the last few, even outside my apartment.

Finding Comfort In The Cool Fall Weather So far, the cooler seasons are off to a great start for me, personally. I’ve not only learned that my apartment can get a decent enough cross-breeze if the wind is coming from the right direc…

I was incredibly optimistic about being able to practice restraint last week and that has really not borne out. It's for a wide mix of reasons, none of them particularly bad, but I'm so incredibly tired today that I had to take breaks while writing this.

So Much For Restraint At Work… It has been a week and a half since my boss told me I could take my side “research” project and work on it more actively. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to really do that sinc…

I've finally gotten into the latest Pokémon Violet DLC and, so far, the most notable feature is how many shiny Pokémon I've run into when I'm not specifically hunting for them. I did, of course, immediately try to avoid the plot. It's a habit, these days.

The Return of Pokémon Violet: It’s Shiny Time After several delays due to life chaos and the general distraction of other video games, I’ve begun playing through the first chunk of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet DLC. It felt a little odd, return…