Dickens of a Blog

Find Me @ The Doug Alone Solo Roleplay Blog

The Doug Alone Solo Roleplay Blog is my current project and I am having a lot of { creative | silly | thoughtful | stressful } fun. It's my current "home on the web" and a place where I get to be creative and expressive

I talk about solo roleplaying. I play at techniques and develop my skills. I share advice, actual plays of several varied campaigns, and generally have a good old time being as much DOUG as I can be while talking about goofy fantasy worlds and navigating apocalypses decided by dice rolls, gamemaster emulators, and an entire stack of random tables, oracles, and book.

Even if you do not know what I could possibly mean, it might be fun to check. Where to start, here's a quick breakdown of the current threads/campaigns:

• The Bloody Hands is the campaign that started the blog and is the story of a 30ish investigator in a world trying to claw itself back from tragedy. Channeling TV shows from the 90s and 00s, it is sort of a paranoid investigative aetherpunk story that allows me to play at solo play at its core while having fun slowly growing a mythos.
• The Bleak + The Pearl is about the final days of a great empire (humans, dwarves, goblins, elves, etc all worked together rather any one fantasy species being the "good ones") as the remnants of the empire face extinction due to two great natural forces ("Becoming" and "Being") that power two contintents. The former reshapes and warps people. The latter emphasizes what they are and creates a great primal landscape. Four adventurers risk their very being to travel The Bleak, a place where "Becoming" shifts and mutates everyone, to try and save The Lighthouse, an ancient technology that offers salvation.
• Eustace Delmont is geeky, good-hearted guy in 1996 Lower Alabama—along the Gulf Coast—who gets caught up in a mystery about an old strange local inn, town shenanigans, and falling in love.

There is also the now finished short campaign about Gareth Hendrix, a young and stressed-out werewolf having to navigate the issues and truths of his pack while locals mistake spotting his dad in the woods as a new bigfoot legend. It was short, fairly experimental, and is strange but complete.

What the Heck Happened to Doug?!

Current Update: November 29, 2024

Up through 2016, this blog had multiple updates a week. In the summer of 2016, due to reasons, this blog suddenly went to zero updates and has never been revived. This had two side effects: a) the people who were finding my blog suddenly saw a stop of updates around the time a lot of the then recent updates had been a bit fraught and b) a few details that were best kind of temporary ended up getting enshrined into the front page for months and then years.

What were the reasons? That's a bit complicated but it comes down primarily to three:

• The first and real-est one was the blog was in need of a major rewrite to its back-end to better support HTTPS and mobile data. Because this blog was largely hand-coded, this meant I had a very daunting task. I worked out a variety of solutions and had the start of a new entire blog back-end but it would have required absolute months of repair work or starting over and I was not in a space to accomplish this. There were hundreds of pages built up already: some important and good and some less important and/or in need of deep repair.
• I was partially not in a space to accomplish this because of the variety of deeply poor personal decisions that had been going down that summer. I got through periods where I do not feel like sharing a lot of things and after a while that period had gone on so long that
• Several very positive life changes were occuring that were hard to encapsulate, somewhat entangled with the above, and a stopping spot to sit down and go "HEY EVERYONE!" never occurred.

What were those positive changes? Well, not all were exactly positive but here is a quick summary of many of the major things I would have been talking about a lot if Dickens of a Blog was still current when they happened:

Towards the end of Summer 2016, Kaz and I realized they were pregnant.

March 2017, our daughter—Barbara Philosophia Bolden—was born.

May 2017, Unfortunately, Kaz's mom died relatively young due to an unexpected complication related to an illness.

Over the next couple of years, Kaz began their transition and became a lot more statisfied in their gender identity.

2017 - 2020, Overall work satisfaction and hobbies were good and fulfilling. New gaming. New photography. Poetry took one hell of a nose-dive but overall life quality was good.

2020, COVID-19 occurred.

Summer 2020, Cinderella, our cat of 17-years, grew sick and died. Even without COVID it likely would have been soon but COVID made it harder to get her the care she needed but she lived relatively comfortable her last few months.

Later in 2020, My mom died not due to COVID but because of some health issues 100% exacerbated due to COVID.

2021-2022, We transitioned to more active lifestyles after COVID: getting out more, trying to work back in some more travel.

May 2022, while hiking near Chattanooga, TN, I fell and slammed my leg into some fairly hard stone and ruptured my tendon, destroyed my knee, tore muscles, etc. It took a decent amount of surgery, months of bed-rest, and a lot of physical therapy to get me back to walking again. I still walk through the use of two walking sticks and will never really be able to move unassisted to a degree.

2022, Kaz's dad died due to cancer and complications and the aftermath was pretty rough dealing with finances and such.

March 2023, Kaz and I, after 20 years of living in an apartment, finally bought a house and spent the first couple of months learning fun things like "Renovated houses sometimes flood due to unforeseen plumbing issues". We have spent the past year and half getting a lot better at being home owners.

At the start of 2024, I stopped smoking for the most part. I still smoke a pipe once a...week, month...not frequently. I have stopped smoking cigarettes. It is nice. Now I just need to work on losing weight.

That pretty much sums up the major beats. Barbara is awesome. Kaz is awesome. My life is not the absolute best and took some major changes (the death of all of Barbara's grandparents in essentially a five year span has an impact) but I am truly, deeply happy. We have three new cats. We handle things as a family. I have no idea what the next eight years might bring but I am willing and ready to find out.

Ok, now time to delete several posts that should never have been on the front page for this long while leaving the "I, This Thinking Thing" which was, in retrospect, an amazing coda to end the first several-year-run of Dickens of a Blog. Will Dickens of a Blog ever return? Don't know. I honestly don't. It is more likely that I will go through and delete posts and links rather than add new ones until I am ready to relaunch the whole thing but that is ok...

It was a wonderful part of my life but my life and its very many details are largely "offline," now. I rant to my cats rather than online. It is all good.

BLOT: (15 Aug 2016 - 08:37:22 PM)

A video to commemorate the anniversary of "I, This Thinking Thing"

On July 29, 2015, I wrote a poem: "I, This Thinking Thing". It was the first poem I had written in years. There were many reasons for me writing it, then. I had started talking about poetry with a friend. I had decided to try writing again. I had...feelings...I had to process. Since then, this past year, I have written a few dozen strong poems, meaning poems I readily claim as my own, and rewritten a number of my older poems into stronger versions. In something like an honor of that, I wanted to commemorate the poem that began the trend with a video.

Before I get to the video and that process, let's take a moment to look at something I wrote when I first posted the poem:

And now the video...

When I decided to make the video, it took me a couple of weeks to realize what I wanted to do for it. The first idea was simply to sit outside and record myself reading it as is. The second idea was to take an image of the poem as a whole, and then to pan-and-zoom along the image as I read it out, possibly faded out with my reading of it visible behind. That eventually lead to the idea of a Prezi where I would make the poem into a complex shape being navigated as I read it. That proved more complicated, and more "gimmicky" than I wanted, so I decided instead to make "I, This Thinking Thing" in Google Sheets, which I could then record in a way similar to the Prezi version, but with different sorts of tricks.

Along the way, certain ideas presented themselves, ways to add a visual layer to the poetry. I won't spoil all of the tricks, both those in the poem itself and in the video of it, but here are eight to get you started.

1. In morse code, the letter "i" is represented by two dots, note the profusion of colons, ":," in the poem.
2. In the video, the letter's "i" and "u", as well as words representing "i" and "you" (in various ways) are represented by different fonts and colors. This is used in weird ways in places. I'll leave you to find all of them.
3. The poem combines my undergraduate majors - astrophysics and philosophy - by referencing cogito ergo sum and including a imagery about stars and space.
4. "between hello and goodbye" are formatted in the stylings of The House of Leaves. In that book, words meaning house are in blue, while words meaning the minotaur and struck out words are in red. Note, there is another trick on that slide.
5. The word "color" in "a mandala without color" is not only an irony, but a mild tribute to my friend Kelsey, matching the sort of colors she used while working with me at the Salmon Library. She is not the only person to get a shout-out in the poem.
6. As fitting for a poem inspired in part by I and Thou, there are bits of biblical and mythical imagery, such as "a dreaming clay". The strangest is a reference to the line et in arcadia ego [meaning in paradise, death existed]. Except I have replaced arcadia with imago, both a reference to a stage in an insect's life and to the image (or phenomenon) of things. It also allowed me to make a reference to both Wallace Stevens - "Imago, Imago, Imago" - and Laird Barron - "The Imago Sequence".
7. The strange vocals of the reading was accomplished by speaking loudly but calmly into a mike capable of recording directional sound held closely to my mouth, so my voice was recorded multiple times in a single take, and then I normalized it and processed it through noise reduction to create a strange warble where the voices were processed into a single voice.
8. The poem ends with the opening line, a reference to Finnegan's Wake, but also ends with an ampersand, implying that the poem goes on indefinitely and you are only witnessing a small part of it.

There are a number of glitches with the poem and its reading. One of letters i is in the wrong font. Due to Google's attempt to turn three periods into an ellipses, you get weird font twitches in the series of four-on-four periods. You can hear the clicking of the slides in several places. I also intended one of the letters i to be the square-root of negative one. But, all in all, the flaws are part of the whole. And, in the slideshow glitches, I have corrected them in the version shared above.

So, enjoy my strange reading of my strange poem, "I, This Thinking Thing," (which I might note has been rewritten slightly for this version, and I consider the corrections to make this the definitive version.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2016