I know I have a tendency to slide into the bottomless abyss of humorless joyless pooptacularity.
So I stopped dissecting with MS Paint the Otto Wirsching Dance of Death woodcut I wanted to modify as the cover for my upcoming rollout of the new, improved, and expanded Lost Lush: Reloaded.
And I used the poor man's Photoshop to stick googly eyes on it:
Not only does this imply the wacky hi-jinks that are likely to ensue in this adventure, it burps up a black humor streaked with potential pathos. The idiot noble on a bender which the PCs are searching for is one insult away from inciting the put-upon proles to barbecue him in a brutal neo-pagan revolutionary rite.
I tried putting googly eyes on everyone in the picture, but that was too much. My own kid, the Princess of Excess, said if everyone was googly, it was like no-one was googly. No true visual impact. A wise 8-year-old.
Speaking of the kidlet, I lashed out and bought the 2014 version of the boardgame Dungeon! I wanted to get something we could play together as a family.
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| THAT one. Pic swiped from Amazon.com |
Kidlet is waaaay too interested in video games like Roblox, and watching loud, hyperactive teenagers play Roblox games on Youtube: "Hey, FELLAHS! WassUP?" These kinds of entertainment feed off her negative emotions and ADHD, like some kind of Star Trek: The Original Series entity.
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| Like from "The Naked Time" or.... |
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| Pics from Memory-Alpha.fandom.com |
So anyway, I would really like to get my kid playing tabletop D&D, boardgames, or anything unrelated to the accursed iPad.
Did Dungeon! do the trick? Yes, for a while. Then ADHD overcame attention span. But we've tried two times so far and we'll try playing it again sometime soon. Still, there's the nagging feeling, "Dungeon! is fine but when will she be ready to play the real thing, ie. Holmes Basic?"
Earlier this year I took her to see the band KISS on their End of the Road Tour. We sat around a long time in the arena, then watched the opening act - a speed painter- then sat around an interminable length of time before a voice boomed out: "YOU WANT THE BEST? YOU GOT THE BEST!" and then "Detroit Rock City" busted out and there were fireworks. It was cool for that song, but then my kid was saying, "I hope you're not mad, Daddy, but I want to go home..." I wasn't mad at all. She had lost the earplugs I gave her during the rock-and-roll speed painter, and so I had given her mine, but the high volume of KISS reverberating in the craptastic tin can acoustics of the Target Center was making her kid's body physically sick. I had brought fully-over-the-ear headphones for her to further protect her ears, but the music was buffeting her sternum and guts. Besides, I was feeling the loss of my own pair of earplugs.
But even from the beginning of the evening, an unspoken pissed-off grumbling kept echoing off the inside of my skull:"I wish I could have taken her to see Gwar instead, and not in a basketball stadium." So anyway, Dungeon! is a better substitute for D&D with families than KISS is for Gwar, but you'll still wish everyone was able to play D&D.
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| The most un-rock-n-roll $20 souvenir EVER! I drink coffee out of it, and my kid drinks milk out of it with a straw and blows bubbles. |
