03. Spring Cleaning
Good afternoon readers, and happy Saturday!
These next few weeks, I will be doing my best to organize things on the site and get all my navigations fully linked out the way I want them. That will involve a lot of digging back into old work and linking to things I’ve nearly forgotten about, so please bear with me as I work through this.
On the writing front, Stephen (my husband, for those who don’t know) and I have come up with a really fun new subclass idea for Barbarians in DnD 5E inspired by Grog Strongjaw from Critical Role’s first campaign. Highly recommend if you haven’t seen, and their Amazon series The Legend of Vox Machina is also excellent if you’re not quite up to the time investment of thousands of hours of actual-play. Grog is the party’s goliath barbarian, and he has an arc where he discovers - more admits to himself, I suppose - that he finds his strength in his friends more than anything he is capable of alone. This inspired me to go down that line of thinking mechanics-wise - how could a barbarian, who normally serves the tank and DPS roles in an adventuring party, also serve a support role? How could one not only derive their strength from their compatriots, but also return that strength to them in boons and buffs? So we’ve got some ideas cooking around that we need to balance out level-wise, but it’s going to be called Path of the Protector, and we hope to put it out later this year!
I also just finished another fantastic season writing for ChompTalk, covering Gator Gymnastics. I made my return to in-person postseason coverage this year, for the first time since 2019, and joined Florida in Pittsburgh for their Regional Championship, where they qualified to Nationals. I’ll be sharing a litany of coverage here from that event and the rest of the season, from livetweets and liveblogs to interviews and more - setting up my 2023 gymnastics coverage page is top of my list today.
Last but not least, I wanted to give a quick update on my family projects. I made some quality progress in collecting recipes for the cookbook in the last two years, but a lot of things got put on hold when we bought our house and started our new jobs all in the same four-month span about a year ago, and pretty much all my family projects fell into that category. We’ve had a year in the house now and we still haven’t done all the redecorating or renovating we’d like to do, but I’m hoping that I’ll have some time soon to pull at least one of those projects back into play. I’m crossing my fingers that my graphic designer sister-in-law will come spend some time with us either this summer or during the holidays and help me figure out the page layout, so that I have a clearer vision of how to move forward with the cookbook, at the very least.
That’s all the updates I have for you today! Thanks for hanging out, and I look forward to sharing again with you soon. -CEMF
