Friday, the 10th of April, 2026.
Since I’m almost certainly going to be very busy tomorrow and Sunday, I figured another post this evening was in order. Besides, it feels like two days have passed, hasn’t it? For some reason, as I type out this intro, before the D&D session starts, my hands are shaking rapidly. I haven’t the faintest idea why. I decided to contribute to the potluck for once. I brought baked penne in a spicy tomato cream sauce with onion and spinach, along with some veggie straws. Out of politeness, I’m not partaking until the DM arrives. I’ve been tempted to reach out to Kerry recently to rebuild bridges, but I asked Marcus for advice; Marcus prudently invoked the eternal words of Rosa Parks, saying, “No.” I greatly appreciate his words of caution.
Sunday, the 12th of April, 2026.
I was right, I’ve been kept busy.
Friday’s “A Thousand Years of Jade” session went quite well. This recap will be abridged compared to my usual write-ups, but when we last left off:
… The guns of the Nichiben soldiers are trained on the colossal heap of mangled metal bathing in blood. Slowly, gently, a small man in saffron robes rises above the wreck, sitting on air in a lotus pose. Golden lightning bolts crack like whips about him, and he burns so brilliantly that the surrounding air dims.
The DM wasn’t expecting us to actually destroy the Crimson Sun, so we leveled up at the end of last session. But in-game, our characters had about thirty seconds before the spider karakuri blipped back into reality, so we decided the best course of action would be getting out of Dodge. The rest of the party rushed around trying to conjure up an escape plan while Jiaming moved to try and mog the soldiers flooding into the warehouse that they wouldn’t open fire on us. Despite his voice thrumming with power as he Commanded the soldiers to grovel, and despite him casually blasting holy lightning at everything in a 90′ radius (purely cosmetic, mind you, but darn if it ain’t a vibe), the soldiers were less intimidated by all of that and more by the copper-scaled, winged dragon we (well, Dante, Goog, and Shengshi) conjured through Hemocraft. As the party made their way upon the dragon or upon Bai Long, Jiaming covered the escape by dive bombing the soldiers and the general with the flaming long trick from a few sessions ago, causing severe burn wounds and some guns to misfire, before joining the party riding upon the Hurricane Beast Bingqilin (冰麒麟, and yes it’s a lame pun on 冰淇淋), which has since gained the ability to fly.
We’re flying west when a flight of five Nichiben fighters in a W formation approaches from behind. After some thrilling aeronautics and pyrotechnics, Evelynn is able to animate the planes and bid them to crash into each other, just as we’re flying back over the Pass into Osmanthia proper. Our ultimate goal is to head to the territory controlled by Yulan’s family, but we make a layover at Mt. Hua since the Reds have a base there, and my Sect’s monastery sits near the summit. Scramble got promoted to Marshal of the Eighth Army by the leader of the Union of Workers, a fellow Tabaxi (I immediately got the pun). Bai Long transformed into a dragon, and, since Game Recognizes Game™, Jiaming gave him the Jade Dragon statue before flying up to the peak, making the minmaxing power-gamer in me very sad. Regardless, Bai Long received a vision from the Jade Emperor and the late, great Cricket. We still need to assemble the last two statues, or keep them from the Tangle Sutra and co.
Speaking of which, when Jiaming reaches the Huashan Sect Monastery, he finds it abandoned. The sect elder is there, though, which is mad sus, and Jiaming quickly realizes that the “elder” has been replaced by a shapeshifting spirit of the Tangle Sutra. They trashed the place- deliberately, exploiting feng shui to pollute the flow of qi. Thankfully, though, they played themselves through demonic gu cultivation, the sacred treasures of Mount Hua were under a lock which could only be opened by the righteous. It was trivial for Jiaming to claim them and to become the new Elder of the Sect. His jian got an upgrade; it’s now a +2 Full Moon Plum Blossom Luck Jian of Flying. Unfortunately (from a powergaming perspective), but I didn’t get any charges of Wish, SAD! At least one of the people I spared and directed towards the Mount finally made it, one of the bandits from when the campaign was starting up. The DM said we’re getting eight weeks of downtime (in-game) between this session and the next, so I’m gonna use mine to take the bandit as a disciple and train him in righteous cultivation and in the teachings of the Awakened One. Out of game, we need a cleric since Muyang’s player can’t make the new time, so a cleric we shall have (albeit a low-level one). After the session, we watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones into the early morning.
Giara visited Philly yesterday, which was pleasant. I showed her around University City, we explored a graveyard, and we watched some bad movies. The first was Sorceress (dir. Jack Hill as Brian Stuart, 1982), in Giara’s words, the worst movie she ever saw. Worse than Napoleon, even. Sorceress is an unbelievably camp sword & sorcery trainwreck that ticks off all of the boxes: a nonsensical plot, unlikable characters, the production values of a school play, etc. It’s not the late Roger Corman’s finest production, by any means. The film’s setting was interesting (not as a compliment); it seemed to be set roughly in India on the border between the Bronze and Iron Ages (a gag is that the Viking™ character’s sword is made of newfangled iron), but this is a movie which plays fast and loose with the details (such as the driving force of the plot: the Evil™ sorcerer Traigon needing to sacrifice his firstborn, but not just killing both twin daughters when he had the chance). The morality in this movie is fascinatingly myopic. To provide an example and spoil a bad movie from Reagan’s first term, part of the Evil™ ritual that the BBEG wants to do involves sacrificing virgins™ in addition to the whole “kill your kid” thing. Fairly cliche given genre conventions and all that. Well, he raises an army of the dead to fight for him, but after he gets beaten, the zombies proceed to drag the virgins off to an unseen doom. But because they aren’t main characters, it’s played for laughs, and our “heroes” are more focused on how the Barbarian Prince™ in the party now has the two twins (played by Playmates Leigh and Lynette Harris in performances as wooden as a forest) as his lovers.
Oh, speaking of which, the actresses would be involved in legal trouble with the IRS over “gifts” from their sugar daddy; see United States v. Conley, 942 F.2d 1125 (7th Cir. 1991). It was determined that the gifts were not income and couldn’t be taxed as such. The more you know.
The other film we watched was Decadent Evil (dir. Charles Band, 2005), a vampire film which I’m pretty sure was made to write off trips to the gentleman’s club as a business expense. According to Wikipedia, this movie was made in six days, and it shows. The production values are slightly better than in Sorceress, being comparable to the reenactments in a History Channel documentary pre-Ancient Aliens/Pawn Stars, or perhaps a mid-budget music video for a goth act that never took off. But this is largely due to the film’s limited scope and short 70-minute runtime. Not that the runtime’s a mercy: the pacing is so wack that it drags on and on. The film has about as many gratuitous depictions of nudity as you’d expect for one about vampire strippers; this, too, is boring. Side note, the vampire hunter is a little person, and I’m honestly surprised they waited until the climax to start making jokes about his height. Remarkable display of restraint from Mr. Band, who directed, wrote, and produced this piece of trash. I think Sorceress is more interesting (derogatory), honestly, despite both films being of about equal quality (also derogatory).
Last night, my sleep was interrupted with alarming frequency. I usually think Hemingway was full of crap, but here, brevity is best: food poisoning. When I could sleep, though, I dreamt vividly:
Tower
Against the wine-dark sky
Rolling and churning
Like a pot boiling over
A gnarled bolt of white-blue flame
Descends from on high
In an instant
Striking a few stones loose
From the middle of a high pillar
Atop the pillar they dance
A graceful, gliding
Careless pirouette
A few more stones fall
Crashing upon the ashen plain
Another, then another
Tumbling down
The top begins to tilt
The dance ecstatic
Frenzied leaping as the floor
Falls through
Babel laid low
Bartering, begging
Pleading and bleating
Bitter words spit forth
Through scattered tongues
Bugles wail a dirge
Teeth gnash, tears turn to salt
Then to dust
Then acrid silence
Save for whispers
Invectives on the winds
Around the lonely tell
This morning, I was feeling much better (deo-freaking-gratias), and I went to the Kline Cup. It’s an opening statement competition, and this is the first one. I was one of the later signups, and they got the case materials to me yesterday evening, but given the circumstances, I couldn’t look them over until half an hour before the competition. Despite this, I put up a decent showing, although I didn’t advance to the finals. The hypo was suspiciously similar to the plot of Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975, adapting Benchley, 1974), and RJ said that rewatching it probably would have been a good idea to put oneself in the right headspace. It was and is a lovely day, and after I post this, I intend to go out into the courtyard to work.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 