August, My New Enemy

-
I'm usually not one for public moaning about the trials and travails life brings. Usually, I keep my trouble to myself, at least on the internet. But this month deserves mention, if only because it has raised the bar of terrible months. I want you to understand, this is coming from a person who once slept in parks, who has broken both his legs, and has, on several occasions, lost all his friends and have to pack up and move. Even with the above sloppy shit sandwiches in mind, August, oh horrid August, will go down as one of the crappier months I've ever had.

First, Mandy learns that her mother died. I'm not going to claim that as a bad thing for me, but it is hard to watch someone you love in pain. So she has to fly out to her hometown, which is one way or another, gonna cost money.

For the record, most people don't realize just how tough and resilient Mandy is. She has not had an easy life and she's still a genuinely nice person. I know lots of children of privilege who seethe bitterly at every little setback.

Okay, so not but a week after that, my cat dies. So that sucked. Had to get the cat cremated-- again, money.

Mandy gets back from her hometown to learn that while she was away, her unemployment benefits ran out. So while we file an extension, we have two or three weeks with no income. My temp agency doesn't exactly come through with anything for the next few weeks.

Last week, we get an eviction notice from the landlord. He swears we owe 600.00 more than we actually do. After some bickering, he finally admits that he put a check of ours in the wrong column.

The next day, we wake up to find out the power got turned off. Awesome. So yeah, we knew it was late, but the multiple expensive dead things put us painfully behind on everything. We get lucky-- Mandy's unemployment gets reinstated that day. So we can pay off our huge balance--but not anything else.

So day after that, our landlord is back with another eviction notice. I mean, he had it printed out, and it's a silly thing to waste paper. Hey, did you know that in Washington you have three days to pay in full if you get an eviction notice? And if you don't pay in full, if you're even a penny off, you're getting evicted. Tenant laws in this state are shit. You have no protections. Not a one.

Thankfully, Mandy comes to the rescue once again. We sell her car for a whopping 600.00 American pesos. It's enough to keep us from living on someone's couch.

Then, this morning, we woke up to find out the internet is shut off. After the past month, it doesn't even raise my blood pressure (which is well above normal anyway). We might be able to pay it in a week. Maybe not. It's not like I use the internet for, oh, say, everything.

Goodbye, August. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Social Crawl Part 1

-
Image
The Social Crawl is a hex crawl, but for people. Each 'hex' (we'll call them 'marks' because there's some funny convergence on con-artist terminology), each mark is a person of interest and their entourage. The marks are connected to other marks. Think of the nature of the connections as the landscape. You need different gear when adventuring in the mountains, and you need different approaches when trying to contact an estranged lover vs. a hated enemy. Social Crawling is great at: City intrigue games, where there are factions ready to fuck with each other Mysteries about rich people having tea and someone like drinks poison Cults, crime bosses, and political jerkfaces There are two parts here: Building the Social Crawl Running the Social Crawl Both use a different process, and building it is way more in-depth than running it. Building out the map can  take a hot minute, but I've used maps I built in an hour for games that lasted three month...
Read more

Building a Compelling Character

-
Image
Building a character in a World of Darkness game takes about five minutes. Building a character in a World of Darkness game takes about six hours. Usually it’s a superposition of both. Mechanically you can fill out your character sheet in about five minutes. Anyone can learn it and get going right away. But then comes the hard part, where you have to come up with a character that will be interesting enough to bother playing for a few months or years. See, in other games you have some training wheels that make playing a character a little easier. You have levels. It might take three or four levels to figure out who the character is, and what they want. You might never figure it out and just tag along with the rest of the party and have a great time. Nothing wrong with that. Vampire complicates this a bit. In Vampire, you’re dropped into a web of distrust, occult dealings, moral failing, and political fuckery. Every NPC is trying to manipulate you to their own ends, playing y...
Read more

The Social Crawl, Part II

-
Image
Don't let this happen to you! There you are, players sitting across the table from you, like baby birds waiting to gobble your regurgitated brain worms. You spent an hour last night making a Social Crawl map, and you stare at it intently, waiting for inspiration to strike like so much upchucked half-digested meat and silence the player’s incessant cawing. You stare harder. A blood vessel bursts in your brain, rendering you insensate and nearly dead. Your players eat your still warm corpse to absorb the knowledge. They all gain a level. Rules for the GM At its core, a Social Crawl is just a map, but it's a hidden map. People are generally pretty good at mapping out social structures in their head, and part of the challenge of a Social Crawl is figuring out who knows who. And for those people who aren't naturally inclined, knowing there is a consistent map means they can structure the connections and treat it as a puzzle. Locations matter  Each NPC on the Social map l...
Read more