All Things From My Brain

Here’s what’s on my mind…

The cat mafia?

12:30 AM, August 18th.

So. I’m all tucked away in bed, but Ronan isn’t settling down. He’s pacing back-and-forth, up and down the stairs and this signals to me that he probably needs to go outside. Never mind that we already went outside before I got into bed. So I untucked myself and headed downstairs to let Ronan out.

I do my usual thing which is to stand out on the back porch while he does his business. This is mostly so he won’t spend the next half an hour out there looking for the “perfect place to do his business“. Out of the corner of my eye, I see something floating in his water dish. I fish my phone out of my pocket and hit the flashlight.

There’s a dead bird floating in his water dish.

A lot of things go through my mind at that moment. Why is there a dead bird floating in his water dish? How did a dead bird get into his water dish? Did the bird somehow drown? Was it some sort of bird suicide? Was there a bird turf war happening that I didn’t know about and this was one of the casualties? Was it a warning from the bird mafia?

Or, even worse, the cat mafia?

These are just the highlights of what was going through my head. Then it dawned on me. I have to clean this up. I really have to clean this up. This is no longer just a water dish with a dead bird in it, it’s a petri dish. Who knows what kind of weird diseases that bird may have been carrying and now it’s floating in this water.

I have to disinfect everything.

I have to take care of the dead bird.

I am going to need gloves.

So, I get some gloves and I take the water dish off into the corner of the yard and I drain off the water. Well, most of the water. Then I dump what’s left, including the dead bird into the trashcan. Now I have to take the water dish inside and scrub it.

Which I do using antibacterial dish soap. A lot of dish soap. Lot scrubbing. I get it all clean and then I clean it again because I’m me. And I’m slightly freaking out.

Meanwhile, Ronan has no idea what’s going on and is happily pooping. Dogs. It could’ve been worse. He could’ve noticed the dead bird before I did. I don’t even wanna think about that. It’ll make me puke.

So I get the dish cleaned up, hopefully disinfected, refill it with water and return it to the back porch. At which point Ronan comes running up and is ready to come back inside.

Now I have to tuck myself in bed and try to get my brain to shut down enough that I can go to sleep.

Which is really difficult to do when you are worried that the bird mafia or the cat mafia have sent you a warning…

August 18, 2025
Catching up on Bosch

Spoilers for Bosch, Bosch: Legacy and even Ballard – so if you don’t want to know any spoilers about those shows, move along… Move along…

I watched each of the seven seasons of Bosch as they dropped on Amazon Prime. I liked it quite a bit. Came into it ‘clean’, in that I have never read any of the books it’s based on. I have considered reading those books now, but haven’t yet gone down that very deep rabbit hole.

When they did the spin-off, Bosch: Legacy, I gave it a shot. But they launched that show on FreeVee, a new streamer that included ads. I managed to get through the first season, but it was difficult.

The ads drove me insane.

I hate ads. Whenever I jump onto a streaming platform, I pay the extra bit for no ads – something that wasn’t even a thing just a couple years ago. ALL of them were add-free.

The leap to ads on streaming platforms is 100% pure greed. It shows a deep disregard for WHY people moved to streaming in the first place. Well, one of the most important reasons.

The newbie streaming platforms all wanted a piece of the Netflix pie, but they didn’t want to give up any pieces of their broadcast pies. Netflix works because you can watch an entire season of a show at a go and do so without ads*. When you add an episode a week and fill it with ads, that doesn’t work. It pisses people off.

It pissed me off.

So, I left Bosch: Legacy on a cliffhanger, with Maddy kidnapped and Harry losing his shit.

I remember being sad when the news dropped that Bosch: Legacy was cancelled. Especially after reading that the cast and crew didn’t know until after they’d completed filming – which seems to be a thing now. A sad thing. A messed up thing. See: Star Trek Discovery.

Next, I saw a trailer I wasn’t expecting at all for a new Bosch spin-off called ‘Ballard’. This one starred Maggie Q, who has been an absolute powerhouse of an actress, IMHO, in everything she’s done. Which meant I wanted to watch that show. But I had to get caught up, first.

The new and infuriating thing streamers do now is to show you ads on your ad-free tier. It is even more greedy than the bullshit greedy ads-tier they are already charging people for. There have already been lawsuits about that and apparently, the courts sided with the streamers.

Wheee.

So while I wanted to catch up on Bosch: Legacy so I could be a completist and go into Ballard knowing the continuity of everything, I was not looking forward to having to wade through FreeVee again.

Much to my delight, Legacy moved back to Prime and the only ads were the stupid ones they show before the episode starts – which, sometimes, you can skip.

Legacy was fantastic. Loved Harry the PI and Maddy the officer. Loved Mo and his troubles with the FBI. Loved Honey and her bid to be the new DA of Los Angeles. They built up a strong cast of characters and compelling stories. I even loved seeing Crate and Barrel running around in Hawaiian shirts.

On top of that, they managed to truly surprise and shock me with a season 3 death I was NOT expecting at all.

It did not deserve cancellation. Reading up on that, it looks like it was all about costs for cast and crew. And you can see the writers, cast and crew had absolutely no idea they were being cancelled in the open plot threads left unresolved.

Which is sad.

I didn’t even know I’d finished the last episode until the auto-play started Ballard episode 1. I was all, “Wait – what?” and had to check. I had that moment of, “But… what about…?” meaning the plot holes. That is gonna bother my brain for a bit before something else knocks it out of there. It’s clear they were setting up some stuff for season 4.

After a short period of mourning, I returned to Ballard episode 1. Introduced in the final episodes of Legacy, Ballard felt like Harry Bosch with long hair. They had that trope where they’re always outsiders, but also have tons of friends, and are right about their suspicions and investigative work, and no one listens to them and then they’re proven right by solving the case despite all the other cops fighting them every step of the way and people still don’t listen to them, but, hey – it’s ok, we’re all mostly friends, good job but don’t pull this shit again or -shakes fist-.

It’s a thing.

From Legacy to Ballard, she changed a bit (not 100% – she was still the outsider, but even more so). There’s an inciting event off screen that changes her and further strains her relationships within the LAPD. Maggie Q plays her very closed off, which is understandable once you learn about that inciting event – an attempted assault by a fellow officer who is cleared of wrongdoing. That makes it difficult for her to trust people.

The show follows Ballard and her team as they try to solve various cold cases. It’s good. Really good. I’m hoping it gets more seasons.

Bosch shows up several times and it’s good and doesn’t overshadow Ballard or her team or cases – which is difficult to pull off most of the time. I’m thinking about when there were crossovers in the various Arrowverse shows. Those always felt like the non-main characters got shoved to the side. When Harry shows up in Ballard, it didn’t feel like that. It felt natural. I liked that.

Someone told me Harry is gonna show up in Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer soonish, which is cool. (If you didn’t know, the two characters are half-brothers, sharing the same father.)

All in all, we got 10 seasons of Bosch. All good television, IMHO. Well worth your time. And in looking up the books, seems like Titus Welliver has even narrated a few of the audiobooks.

May have to check those out…

*yes, Netflix now has an ad-supported tier, which is total bullshit.

July 17, 2025
Pathfinder and reigniting my creativity

I’ve been trying to remember the first time I played D&D. Definitely the 80’s, so, probably – 1986 or 1987. My friend Tom brought the Red Box over along with these little black and white booklets he had and said, “I want to play this game. I can’t figure it out. You’re smart. Figure it out so we can play.”

So, I did, and we did. For years until our little group of friends went in different directions.

Fast forward to around 2014/2015 and I hadn’t played a tabletop RPG in well over a decade. My friend JT asked me if I’d be interested in joining a group he was getting started. I said yes and that was my first introduction to the Pathfinder First Edition ruleset.

Through the Functional Nerds podcast, I also met one of the people working at Paizo who sent me their version of the Red Box (Beginner’s Box) and I was blown away by how well it was put together and took you through learning the game from both Player and GM perspectives.

In short, I was hooked.

I played Pathfinder for a little while before that group morphed into something else and playing other games, usually board and card games. Then I wanted to run some games myself, and did for my girlfriend and her friend at the time. Even went so far as to setup my basement as a gaming space and buying a fancy gaming table when it popped up on Kickstarter.

Which is right about the time my life blew up. My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, that girlfriend and I split up, my time and money slowly slid into taking care of mom and before I knew it, my fancy kickstarter gaming table was gathering dust in the basement.

Let’s fast forward again to just a couple of years ago as of this writing. My friend Giles reached out and asked if I would be interested in being a player in a new D&D 5E campaign he was about to start.

Hells. Yes.

My frustration with D&D was immediate. My eyesight is not what it used to be. I remembered having PDF’s of all my Pathfinder, Dresden Files and Savage Worlds rule books on my iPad. Figured I’d go grab the 5E rule books. Found out they didn’t exist. Instead, you had to subscribe to something called D&D Beyond and buy the books there and use that site to view or access the books. Blergh.

I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted them as PDF’s on my iPad. I thought I was missing something and kept looking around. Nope. No legal way to have the PDF versions of the books. (I mention this because people pirate those books, which I refuse to do.)

So, I bought the hardcover Player’s Handbook and used my iPhone to pinch and zoom the things I wanted to read. Seriously – I’m that guy now. Dimly lit restaurants are my fresh hell. I’m totally using the flashlight on my iPhone to see the menu…

You may say, “Just get the D&D Beyond thing!” Nope. Have I mentioned how stubborn I am? I don’t want another freaking subscription. I have more of them than I want now because corporations force them on me and, to quote Picard, “THE LINE MUST BE DRAWN HERE!”

Plus, whenever I am not at home, I use my iPad in offline mode. The PDFs I have on there are actually on there, not in the cloud. I don’t like using wifi that isn’t mine and secured by me – it’s an IT Nerd thing.

Then came the OGL shit. Oy. Then the layoffs at Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) ordered by Hasbro. Then the AI shit, (“We won’t use it!” “Ooops, we used it but we won’t use it again!” “Ooops, you noticed we used it again? Well, this time we PWOMISE we won’t use it.” “What’s that? You saw our ad for AI specialists? Ummm.”) Then more layoffs at WoTC ordered by Hasbro. On and on.

Sigh. My feelings on all of that is another post. Maybe I’ll even write it.

The only good things they’ve (Hasbro/WoTC) done lately are the D&D movie and Baldur’s Gate 3.

So when WoTC launched the new D&D rules last year, I went out and bought Pathfinder 2E Core stuff.

A lot had changed at Paizo since I last looked at their system. The OGL bullshit had them doing a remastered Second Edition, which felt like a great place for me to jump back in. And I was right.

I started listening to Pathfinder actual play podcasts, grabbing up books (they offer PDFs right on their website), and getting their Second Edition Beginner’s Box. Just like the First Edition version, it’s an amazing resource for teaching people Pathfinder 2E. I was blown away.

And I invited some friends to learn and play. We’ve been meeting every other Saturday since, working our way through the Beginner’s Box adventure.

Meanwhile, I have been reading tons of Pathfinder content from Paizo – and there is a LOT of it. I am seriously impressed with the sheer volume they put out. One shot adventures, full campaigns, and something called the Pathfinder Society.

Learning about the Society Organized Play led me to attend my first ever gaming convention – GenghisCon. It was a blast.

To tie it all back to the title of this post, Pathfinder’s got my creative juices flowing again. I’m working on my continuing campaign and what to do when my player’s get out of the Beginner’s Box adventure (they’re almost there). I’m jotting down notes and ideas and writing what comes next, and that’s exciting.

I’m even sharing little bits of Lore and Rules tidbits with my players on a group text I created.

For a long time, I haven’t been able to do much in the creative space of my brain. It’s difficult to explain why. It has to do with grief and loss and pain. Doesn’t help when the world is on fire, either.

But, at least for Pathfinder stuff, it seems to be (finally!) easing up.

And for that, I am quite happy.

March 24, 2025
I don’t like multi-player games, and it turns out, I’m not alone

I’ve always struggled with always online, multi-player console games. Don’t get me wrong, I loved me some World of Warcraft back in the day. But I was also one of the people who suffered from ‘alt-itus’ because I would constantly roll a new, secret character so I could go off and do stuff without people bothering me. Mostly.

On consoles, I’ve always resisted the multi-player game. Growing up, I played Atari, Nintendo, Sega and Playstation games – all of which never went online because there was no online yet. Multi-player at that point meant passing the controller from hand to hand to see which friend could get past the Big Boss or difficult freaking jump (I’m looking at you, Ninja Gaiden. Also at YOU, Castlevania).

There’s something jarring about playing a game and suddenly having someone message you to tell you you suck (Star Wars Battlefront II). Or being forced into a group to complete a section of the game previously unavailable to you (Gotham Knights).

I just want to play the game and relax. It’s difficult for me to do that when the game’s developer is forcing me to socialize. And yes, I realize how bad that sounds – but it’s still true for me.

I prefer solo games where I can immerse myself in the world, the characters, on my own.

Turns out, I’m not alone.

A survey by Midia Research has found that 53% of gamers prefer single-player games. And of that number, 55% are old. Like me.

Even when I played WoW religiously, I detested things like PvP. Mostly because other people were massively better at it than I was or am. Constantly being killed by people who spend the bulk of their time in the massive dungeons collecting better weapons and gear, it turns out, is not fun.

When I play a game – which, let’s be honest, isn’t very often anymore or for a very long time – the last thing I want is to be stressed out and annoyed by the game itself. I’d rather just zone out and not have to worry about whether I’m bringing the team down by not shooting the pew pew pew the right way. Which is why I gravitate to single-player games. A lot.

And probably always will.

November 5, 2024
I’ve Never Bought Star Trek Shows – Until Now
I have always loved Star Trek. Kirk, Spock and McCoy were among my babysitters as a child. My mom would plop me down in front of the TV and reruns of TOS were part of the programming I’d watch, after Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Mister Rogers, etc.

The movies came along and only helped to grow my love for Star Trek. Then, one day, I was perusing a local book store and discovered there were novels with original stories about the crew of the Enterprise, and I was hooked. And also poor. But now I knew they existed, I would have them.

My mom was a bartender at the time, and told her patrons about her son the bookworm who loved Star Trek. One of those patrons began bringing in boxes of books for me. Mostly Star Trek, but there were some others in there, too. I read every Star Trek book he gave me. I also saved up and bought new ones when I could.

I mention this because I really loved Star Trek. Still do.

Then came Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Holy crap.

Huge fan. And I prepped by saving up and buying a VCR and some blank tapes. Then I recorded every episode so I could rewatch them whenever I wanted. I tried to do the same with Deep Space Nine, but, as with so many of the stations carrying that show, my local channel often preempted the show for sports or other programming, so I’d get the last 20-30 minutes of golf or something, and then the last 30-40 minutes of DS9 with zero context. It was annoying.

At this point, my grandmother gifted me a thing – Time Life Video had a subscription for The Next Generation. Two episodes a month in ‘high quality VHS’ for like $30 a month or something stupid. I was grateful for the gift, but I thought it was ridiculously overpriced.

This would be a trend with all things Star Trek shows moving forward.

When my grandmother cancelled that subscription, I was not upset. I considered continuing it on my own, but the tapes look up a LOT of room and I found I didn’t watch them very often. Plus, I had the entire series recorded on my own VHS tapes, and I barely ever watched them, too.

As time went on, I had a complete series run of TNG and Voyager, but not DS9 or Enterprise – the latter because I just couldn’t get into the prequel series.

When DVD became a thing, I saw they would release a season of TOS and it was ridiculously priced (IMHO) at like $120 (I feel like it was that high? Maybe it wasn’t?). Meanwhile, new series like Buffy, Angel, Lost, etc, were $30 for a season. The disparity was insane and as much as I loved Star Trek, I couldn’t imagine spending that much money on a single season of any show.

Sadly, things didn’t get much better. As they released more of the shows to DVD, the prices – especially for TOS – were ridiculously high. I’d see them and shake my head. I was a MASSIVE DVD buyer. I spent way too much money at Best Buy. I loved having seasons and fulls series on DVD because I was a repeat watcher. I could and did put something on as background noise while I did other things. I also tended to not watch shows as they aired, preferring to binge a season on DVD once it was released rather than waiting week after week for new episodes to air.

I was Netflix before Netflix existed.

But the cost of Star Trek shows priced me out of purchasing them.

And it irked me.

It felt like price gouging. As if they (Paramount/Viacom/CBS) figured they had this limited resource and were going to squeeze every drop of profit from it they could. And they did.

Fast forward to the Paramount+ era of Trek. Discovery, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy, Picard – all amazing shows. And while I did pay to watch them, I still wasn’t buying them.

Until the streaming wars ended (IMHO) and Netflix emerged as the winner (again, IMHO) and platforms like Paramount+, HBOMax, etc, started freaking out and dropping shows left and right, pushing them to Netflix for licensing, and, in the case of Paramount, started looking at selling out completely in the name of profits.

The idea that WarnerBrothers, who have completely and utterly gutted DC Comics and consistently put out worse and worse movies based on those iconic characters, could own Star Trek, terrified me. It still terrifies me.

So for the first time in my life, I went out and bought Star Trek shows on BluRay. Specifically:
- Lower Decks seasons 1-4
- Discovery’s complete series run
- Picard’s complete series run
- Strange New Worlds seasons 1 & 2
- TOS’ complete series run
This is how I found out neither Voyager or Deep Space Nine are on BluRay. Because they haven’t been upscaled to HD, and probably won’t be. Which suuuucks. And is a post / rant for another day. Enterprise is in HD on BluRay, but, I can’t… I just didn’t get into it.

Anyway. Now I own them and I feel good about it. If something happens with Paramount – and the odds are, it will – I at least have those shows on physical media.

Which is kind of becoming a thing with me again…

More on that later. Probably.
September 9, 2024
Meet Ronan

A lot happened in the past few years. My mom passed. My brother passed. My cat passed, to name just a few.

To say I have been suffering through depression and grief feels like a huge understatement.

Needing something to get me out of my funk, I decided to adopt a new pet about a year after Shadow, my cat, passed. I considered a dog and a cat, or a pair of doggos, did some research into local shelters and essentially went window shopping on the web. Nothing really caught my eye.

Except, I kept seeing this Border Collie. The photo was adorable (no, I don’t have it). The description on him, not so much. It mentioned he had issues with separation anxiety, and I’d had a dog many years ago with similar issues who destroyed my furniture one day while I was at work. So. I kept scrolling past this puppy as I was window shopping.

I made up my mind, and a list of pups to visit, and headed to the shelter – the Denver Dumb Friends League.

At the shelter, I found out they had some rules about how many pets you can see on a visit and it was likely I would only get to visit with one pup. All the pups on my list were visiting with prospective families, so I walked around the kennels to make a new list.

Ronan – he had a different name and I would change it to Ronan later – wasn’t in his kennel. There were a LOT of pitbulls. I had a bad experience with a pit in an apartment complex I lived in for a couple years. Something about me set him on edge and he would get super aggressive anytime I was around, which set me on edge when this huge dog would come barreling at me like a bullet, barking and snarling. So. No pit for me.

I made few passes through the kennels and eventually asked about Ronan. A volunteer told me he got a lot of visits, but due to his anxiety issues, no one wanted to adopt him. He was in with another family already, having gotten out of a visit a few mins before, and this family would most likely adopt him. So, I walked through again looking for a pup. And again, there were a lot of pits but not much else.

When I made my way back up to the front, the volunteer said the family had passed on Ronan – again due to his anxiety issues, and asked if I would be interested in a visit.

I said yes.

Had to wait a bit while they took him for a walk and let him burn off some excess energy.

When we got into the little room together, it was love at first sight. For me. He was pretty interested in not being in the room. But he did come to me, play with me, let me pet him, and when I asked him if he wanted to come home with me, he got this happy look on his face.

I was hooked.

They explained his issues to me. Separation anxiety and crate anxiety (he hated being put in a crate, and managed to destroy one to get out of it) were the major ones. When we got home, he followed me everywhere. I couldn’t close the bathroom door, for example, because he would start whining and then throwing himself against the door, scratching at it to get in.

But I noticed immediately he was stupid crazy smart, and sneaky (he stole bananas off the kitchen counter and took them off to chew on). He was also a hoover when it came to food, as if he were afraid it would be taken away from him if he didn’t eat it immediately. That has mostly gone away, which is wonderful. I did eventually have to get him a slow feeder.

I worked with him, walked him, tried to get some normality to his life. But I couldn’t leave him alone without him freaking the fuck out. So at first, my vet gave me meds to calm him down while I was gone and it did work. Essentially, it made him stoned out of his brain so he didn’t really care if I was gone or not. I didn’t like that. I explored some alternative options including things like marijuana chews but they didn’t seem to have any effect on him at all.

So I researched separation anxiety in dogs and found some training programs. Signed up for one and began training Ronan not to freak out when he’s alone, how to settle and know it’s going to be okay. Part of that is a routine I go through before leaving – loudly grabbing/jingling my keys, turning on a radio, grabbing my wallet, etc, and then leaving out the same door each time. And coming back through that same door.

In the year and change since, he’s calmed down so much people who met him in the beginning comment on the changes in him today. He’s chilled out.

That’s not to say he’s not still a total adorkable spaz – because he is. He makes me laugh my butt off every single day. And I really needed that.

We have healed each other in a lot of ways, which is amazing.

So. Meet Ronan. A 3-year old (as of June, 2024) Border Collie who has absolutely changed my life for the better.

September 5, 2024
Starting Over

So. A little while ago, I unpublished everything on this site.

Why?

I decided it was time to start over, start fresh.

I began this site in March of 2008. A lot has happened since then, and I’m not the same person I used to be. I’d like to think I’ve evolved.

The last 10 years, in particular, have been hard. Really hard. Not only has that changed me, it’s changed my writing – when I manage to write. There’s definitely a mental block there and I’m working through it as best I can. Which is why you haven’t seen anything from me on that front in a while.

But, I’ve got a sort-of plan percolating as the words start to flow again and hope to push new things out again soon.

Until then, I’m relaunching this site to help get me into the habit of writing again.

No clue if anyone will see it, or if people even read blogs anymore, but I hope they do. If not, well, then, it’ll still help me get words out the door again.

Welcome back.

Note about the picture: This is me in 2021. I took this photo on a walk through a Colorado State Park.

September 3, 2024