Sharp Dressed Dyke

We spent most of Shabbat at the hospital with Laila hooked up to an EEG, trying to see if we could find more about the increase of seizures she's been having lately.

The good news: She's...not actually having seizures? Even though sashagee texted me at 4 a.m. that she had had a seizure, and even though the neurology nurses who came in to check up on her when sashagee pushed the button also thought that, the review of the EEG showed none of the characteristic brain activity of a seizure.

The bad news: Now we don't know what is going on. Even the attending physician mentioned that the video seemed very similar to a seizure, though it could also be that Laila was just having night terrors (which we know she has). But that led sashagee to ask how we tell between a seizure and a night terror, and the doctor didn't really have an answer for that.

We'll probably have to go in for a longer EEG where we start drawing down her medication and see if anything triggers an actual seizure. It's possible that none of her recent "seizures" were actually seizures and her increased medication isn't necessary, but it'll take more testing to tell that.

Took Laila to Hebrew school yesterday, and afterwards we went to the Ravenswood Artwalk, which had been in the phone calendar for months but which I had totally forgotten about until I saw a poster that it was that weekend. sashagee drove down and met us nearby, and we walked along and looked at the booths. We didn't go into any of the studios to look at the art, since we thought that Laila wouldn't have a good time just being inside while I held her and we looked at art (or listened to music or whatever), so we just stayed outside, got some food at the food trucks--I got a brisket sando, sashagee got mac and cheese, and we got Laila some empanadas. We asked her which one she wanted and she said "beef" and when we told her we'd get her a beef one but which other one did she want, she said..."Beef."

We got her a beef and a sweet corn one. She barely ate any, but at Hebrew School she had three mikans, a handful of grapes, half an apple, and some pomegranate seeds already so I'm not surprised she wasn't that hungry. She'll probably eat the rest at dinner anyway.

The reason I'm making this post, though, is because when we got back from all of that the internet was down. Alright, fine, I called in and they said there was an outage, but I can tether things through my phone, so I tethered my iPad to my phone and played games with Laila. And then I called at 3 p.m., and at 5:30 p.m., and then after sashagee left for a birthday party at 6:30 p.m. the internet was still down. I told Laila that the TV was broken and she accepted it, especially when we were still able to watch Bluey on the tethered iPad, and I put her to bed and went to bed early. At 9:30 p.m. the internet was still out, but at least at that point when I called the support person told me that the problem was a cut fiberoptic line and that's why it was taking so long to fix.

At 11:30 p.m., before I called again, I decided to get on the wifi and found that it worked. I went and checked on Laila and she had fallen out of her bed onto the squishmallow on the floor and was still fast asleep. I picked her up, put her back into bed, kissed her on the forehead, and went to sleep.

So last week I wrote about how I was trying to decide between running a game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and between running an OSR-derived game called Tales of Argosa. And I have to come to a conclusion, which is of course to do neither of those. To explain, a while back I heard about something called Dolmenwood, an OSR setting based on the fee, though not necessary the exact stories from, old British myths and legends. It's a giant forest, once ruled by an ancient faerie called the Cold Prince, now ruled by humans--or at least, humans claim dominion over the wood. There are still parts of it that have never felt the tramp of mortal feet, and parts of it where faerie lords still claim demesne and do not suffer humans to enter. It has a monotheistic human church that replaced the older religion that worshipped the wood gods, except among those of the peasants that still leave out offerings at the bases of oak trees at Midsummer and Midwinter. It has a corrupted unicorn called the Nag-lord that rules a portion of the wood, and is an obvious reference to the Black Goat of the Woods to the point that the peasants straight-up call it "Ol' Shub." It has playable fae elves (immortal, innately magical, capricious), talking magical fae cats called grimalkin, strange forest natives called mosslings, talking goat-people called breggles (from their own name for themselves, hregl) who are basically equal to humans and hold some noble titles under the Duke of Brackenwold, fae goblins who don't live in squalor and murder travelers, they just lie and cheat and set up markets and can turn invisible, but they can't use their powers on you or cheat you if you invite them into your house and they accept your invitation...I love it.

There's even a dungeon synth album, and I sure love dungeon synth so I've already bought that too.

I don't love using OSR D&D to run it, though. This kind of setting seems tailor-made for me to use WFRP, so my current project is converting over the mechanics to WFRP. Fortunately, since it's standard OSR and based on the Old-School Essentials ruleset, there's really no complicated mechanics at all. It's your standard 3d6 in order, pick your class, gain one power per level kind of deal, so all of that slots pretty well into the WFRP paradigm. Dolmenwood doesn't have dangerous magic but I think it would be better with dangerous magic so that doesn't bother me either.

The one thing I need to change is advancement. WFRP famously has the career system, where you start as a rag-picker or a roadwarden or a bravo or a fisherman or a rat-catcher (with a small but vicious dog) and then advance through into cat burglers, engineers, duelists, scholars, and wizard lords. This is both great for verisimilitude (it grounds all characters in the world) and awful for verisimilitude (a classic complaint was how many wandering vagabonds decided to become assassins purely to pick that sweet +2 Attacks). It's the most recognizable part of the system and I have a bit of a problem in that I have never really liked it, to the point that when I ran it I replaced the system with the more free-form one based on Aptitudes from the Warhammer 40K game Only War, though even there, there was some friction (aaron.hosek picked Aptitudes that he was later pretty annoyed about picking when he saw the experience costs for the talents he wanted).

When I was younger I really didn't like class/level systems because they were unrealistic and they constrained player choice and all the usual reasons, but now that I'm older I recognize that analysis paralysis is a thing and class systems provide an easy way to distill a series of options down into limited set of choice--it's easier to pick Fighter and have all the stuff that makes you good at combat happen automatically than having to scan a list of 3000 Feats and pick ones that help while avoiding traps like Toughness. That's usually seen as one of the pros of the OSR, the lack of fiddly bits and endless "build options" and "character optimization." But while I'm not a fan of character optimization, I really like build options a lot.

However, the Warhammer 40K game Dark Heresy had a different system that I'm planning on stealing. Dark Heresy had a class/level system, but it was one with a lot of choice involved. You'd pick a class like Assassin or Guardsman or Imperial Psyker and as you gain experience you advance up in levels, but the difference is that what you gain isn't fixed. Each level has a list of possible advancements you can buy, as you gain more levels (and thus more experience with your character), the range of advancements expands but at a rate that increasing system mastery allows you to handle, or at least that's the hope. I'll just need to use the Dark Heresy careers as a guideline when I make fantasy versions like Magician and Warrior and Thief. Some of these are easy--Dark Heresy's Scum converts to Thief nearly 1 to 1--and some are a bit harder, like converting the Imperial Psyker over to the Magician, but I think the general framework splits the difference nicely. And Dark Heresy enemies aren't so mechanically complicated that it would be hard to convert OSR monsters over either.

I think this has potential.

The wife of the hummus-seller at the market told us that Laila was so cute after Laila said "bye bye" to her yesterday, and as we walked away she said, "May G-d protect her from the evils of the world."

You're right, madame. I pray for that too.

Laila has been a bit of a terror lately. Bringing back behavior that's been totally gone for a while, like putting random things in her mouth, deliberately not listening, that kind of thing. On the one hand, it's a hopeful sign of her normal childhood development that she'll wait until I say "last warning, Laila" before she gets her feet off the dining room table or whatever I'm asking her to do, but on the other hand it's a lot. It's driving sashagee kind of bananas lately, partially because she's also sick (again). Laila spent a big chunk of time yesterday in her room and got her new dolls taken away, because she would do the little kid thing of "Now that I am released from punishment, I'm going to immediately do the thing you told me not to do, because you're not the boss of me!" Except, of course, we are the boss of her and back to her room she would go. She's been better today but still pushing boundaries. The dolls she just got are put up until she stops putting things in her mouth after she put one of the definitely-small-enough-to-choke-on doll-sized cups in her mouth, and she's not getting them back today.

Laila is enjoying school a lot, at least as far as we can tell. There's only been one day where she hasn't been happy to go to school, and it have just been because she didn't want to leave the house. Once we actually got the schoolbag on and got out and on the road, she wanted to run over the school just like she always does. We did have a brief chat with the teachers during the open-house they held recently, where her teachers said that Laila has a hard time answering the questions that they ask her. She's more talkative, but still has some trouble.

A few days ago I suddenly came down with some kind of stomach bug. It's mostly gone away now but I occasionally get stomach pangs out of nowhere, and when I asked sashagee about it, her opinion was that maybe I shouldn't be eating so many uncooked vegetables. Since we get a CSA box, a lot of my lunches are just cheese, raw vegetables with hummus, and bread with labneh or something like that. I supposed I am getting old enough that my digestive system maybe can't handle literally everything I throw at it anymore. On the other hand, I had more raw vegetables for lunch today, so we'll see if it happens again. I'm not looking forward to the extra time I would need to cook all the vegetables I eat.

Charlie Kirk shot in Utah, died.

It's easy to look at this and say, oh look, the dude who spent his whole life sowing the wind has reaped the whirlwind. And you're honestly not wrong to say that, but the kind of country where people get shot at during a speaking event at a university campus is not really a good country to live in, it's the kind of country we have historically issued travel advisories about. I think it'll be more useful to look at the reaction to this vs. the reaction to the Michigan state reps who were assassinated in their homes, because I suspect it will be very different.

Also, as the reaction to the Minneapolis school shooter (and basically every shooting back to and including Sandy Hook) shows, literally nothing can happen that will make the right engage in a good-faith argument about gun violence, so this won't either.

America thinks of a civil war as two sides in different uniforms lining up and shooting each other, because that's what our civil war is like, but that's not what most civil wars are. I expect our civil war to be more like the Troubles--constantly low grade violence to the point that you never feel entirely safe. There are no frontlines, the battlefield sudden appears in ordinary neighborhoods and bars and train stations and then vanishes as the ambulance siren gets closer.

Also, on a personal note, Kirk had a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. They don't deserve life without a father.