The Man in the Iron (Lung) Mask

First, just to get this out of the way, I'd wanted to get you all your reward pages and the usual Saturday stuff for tomorrow, but I just need a few days to breathe here. The DM problem has turned this back into a 7-day a week job, and after four weeks of that I'm kinda beat.

But I've attached two things to this. First is what was going to be the Q&A for February, which is actually an FAQ that will get posted on the site some time soon, just answering some of the many questions related to how thing have been changing thanks to the events of the past year (here, that is; I'm way to busy to deal with you, COVID, you can just f*** right off! Bring about the end of the world on your time, not mine!). Since many of you have asked me these questions, I figured it was close enough to qualify. Plus you get answer that aren't filled with a whole lot of "ums" and dead air.

The other thing I've attached is a little something I've been working on for the past five years. Rise and Fall of the Comic Empire was rewarding for me because it was nice to see something I was passionate about connect with others, and while I didn't think there was anything to further add, it got me thinking about a similar nineties event, the rise of card games. I'd been looking at doing it as a whole for quite a while, fiddling with it in my spare time. What can I say, sometimes the thing that relaxes me after a long day of work is more work. After five years of fiddling with it, I decided to focus it on Magic, there's a dearth of useful material in enough areas that having them as a kind of side story on occasion seemed more appropriate than giving them center stage for large periods of time. Plus, frankly, it would require delving into Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon cards, because it would have a gaping hole without them, and I just don't have any interest in that direction. 

I was going to start releasing this once it was done, I want to do a more complex editing job on this one than my typical series like this. But I thought, since you're not getting anything for a few days, the audio of the first part might be something fun to have. The series is tentatively called The Time of Wizards, with this part being the first one, the Age of Antiquity. I've made it like RaFotCE in that you don't need to be experienced with Magic The Gathering to be able to follow things.

I took a break today for lunch out with my wife, we'd just been hit by a blizzard yesterday. Took longer to get dug out than I thought, but the owner of the local pizza place offered to stay open past 1PM for us to dine in when my wife and I arrived. My wife, though, immediately took her mask off, so I asked her to keep it on until the drinks arrived, that's the way it is in Wisconsin, otherwise the restaurant is at risk of being forced to close, and the owner had just done us a solid, at the very least it'd be rude. She complained that her mask was wet because snow had fallen into her pocket while we were digging out the car, so I offered to wear hers and she could take mine - if one of us had it, the other was going to get it anyway.

That's when I realized what a horrible idea this was. My wife's mask was like trying to breathe through a cigarette filter, it was just saturated with the fumes of a thousand coffin nails she'd burned through, apparently she hadn't washed it.... ever. After about thirty seconds I was thinking the disease couldn't be worse than this. I have scarred lungs from a case of pneumonia and can't be around cigarette smoke, and while the fumes don't physically harm me like smoke does I can't tolerate how awful they now smell, and every breathe was like it now. And the worst part was the mask was barely damp. I'd have taken one soaking wet and kept in a refrigerator, I'd have at least considered one that had been peed on, as an alternative to this. Oof. When our drinks finally came I handed it back to her (well, okay, threw it at her) and asked why I was wasting money on food she clearly couldn't taste if she could wear that for long periods of time and be fine. 

Now I have to go, my relaxing day is starting with me trying to track down one of the cats. Like a velociraptor the little punk has figured out how to open a door with a handle on it and has escaped out the back. Twerp. At least he could use that intelligence to start uploading videos to DM for me.