Nothing Personal, Just A Meta Set

Nothing personal, just a meta set…

saturday d&d tip: if you’re bummed out by all the cancellations and having to stay home (and maybe not getting to play), make yourself feel better by making a new character, like a cowboy-themed barbarian! 

And tomorrow when you’re bored again, maybe draw a picture of them. 

And the day after that you can make them a cowboy friend! 

and the day after that, envision their lives when they spend a long day steering cattle on the range and settle down by the fireside, gazing up at the stars above! 

And then the next day they continue their trek into a little bustling frontier town and have a run-in in the local saloon where the sheriff mistakes the cowboy friend for Hangin’ John, a hustler and a wanted man for the murder of Jim Coffin. The sheriff tries to lock the cowboy friend in prison but when they resist, the friend is shot in the saloon.

Your cowboy barbarian cradles their partner’s limp body, begging them to hold on. They rise with a cold look and a bloodstained shirt and challenge the sheriff to a gunfight, middle of town, high noon. The sheriff tries to bluff his way out but your cowboy won’t back down now. They’ve forgotten the five hundred head of cattle picketed outside town. All they can think of is revenge. 

They down a sarsaparilla and head out into the dusty main street, the sun burning hot overhead.

The sheriff might’ve been a good shot, but your cowboy barbarian’s the fastest draw in the West.

And the day after that, make yourself feel better by making a new character!

i think a big thing that disconcerts adults about learning new skills is that learning as an adult means you are very aware of how bad you are at the beginning in a way children aren’t.

i picked up the saxophone when i was 11 and played until i was about 17. by the end of it i was first chair in our highest ensemble, a district honor band player, etc. but at the beginning – and this is important – i was bad. for the first year or so, i had no rhythm, i couldn’t make my tongue line up with my fingers, i was consistently sharp, etc. etc. other kids actually made fun of me for my lack of skill.

but 11 year old me didn’t care. 11 year old me practiced, but she also thought that being able to play the pink panther made her incredible (i shudder in retrospect). i mean, i was aware i wasn’t a master, but my skill level didn’t deter me from wailing out those notes in a way that i’m sure had my band director questioning his career decisions.

right now, i’m trying to pick up the guitar. it’s a very different instrument from the saxophone, and i struggle a lot with things like strumming patterns and barre chords. and sometimes i don’t want to play, because i know i’m bad at guitar. and sometimes i beat myself up when stumbling through a poor acoustic rendition of Everybody Wants to Rule the World because it’s not how i want it to sound. and it’s made even more frustrating because i can navigate the saxophone so smoothly.

but then i remember that i have to think like a kid. i might not be the best at guitar by any stretch of the imagination, but every little bit of progress is still progress. humility is a big part of learning, but if you treat a practice session like your own private concert, it becomes so much more fun, even if you’re bad like i am.  when you’re first picking up a skill, whether it be an instrument, or a language, or a fine art, no one is expecting you to be the yo yo ma of that thing. forget about how little you know about the skill and think instead about how much you have to learn – that’s fun! do your best!!

🐻.

If nothing else I'm sending a message to every writer out there: you never ever need to doubt yourself again, you never need to worry you'll never be good enough, you never need to worry if you should be writing at all, because literal paid professionals of a well-known cult hit genre show on actual television were given the chance to wrap the show up satisfyingly and instead they created a rushed, disjointed, OOC, regressive, boring, just plain bad pile of garbage... I mean those people were paid to do that... please never doubt again that you deserve to create. If they get to do it then so do You

my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.