I’ve known about Dungeons and Dragons (DND) for a long time. Both of my parents played the game when they were young. I grew up playing it as well. It was one of the reasons I took an interest in video games and card games at such an early age. It also got me interested in reading fantasy, yet around high school, I stopped playing. I was attending a small Christian school at the time. None of my friends played. Parents were busy. Life got in the way. Fast forward to today. I can say I’m coming off close to a year and a half of playing DND again and now two months of dungeon mastering (DMing) as well.
In the past eight weeks, I’ve launched two separate campaigns with my family as players. One is pirate-themed and the other is using the Tyranny of Dragons module. Both are loads of fun and require a surprising amount of work. Additionally, I’ve probably DMd a half-dozen one-shots in this time. That experience has been interesting as well, coming with its own set of challenges.
I’ve found the counterweight to Florida, and it’s Minnesota of all places! The video above dives into the full list, but the long story short is that Democrats had a slim majority and used it to enact dozens of laws that will meaningfully alter millions of people’s lives for the better. This past legislative session in Minnesota will be a shining example of how power is won and then utilized. The breadth of what the legislature covered is staggering, strengthening unions, making healthcare more affordable, investing in their public school system, raising wages for workers across many industries, creating a free lunch program for every student, standing up for Uber and Lyft drivers, legalizing weed, making the state a sanctuary for trans people needing care, and much more.
The number of demands to censor books in libraries nearly doubled last year, according to the American Library Association (ALA). “A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021. Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.” The Top 13 Most Challenged Books of 2022 according to the ALA included Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Flamer by Mike Curato among others. The most cited reason for a challenge to these books was that they were either claimed to be sexually explicit or that they contained LGBTQIA+ content.
I have been reading the complete collection of H.P. Lovecraft. From the way things are going, it might be the only book I read this year. Nevertheless, I’ve been really enjoying it. I love his worldbuilding, his themes, and the motifs that keep popping up in all of his tales. So, I decided to write a short story inspired by his work. Let me know what you think. I have no doubt I’ll be writing more stories like this in the future.
