I'm going to start my blog with a provocative and dangerous statement:
The internet nowadays sucks.
It is this novel and insightful thesis on which I stake my reason for cobbling this blog together: to carve out a little digital garden for all my ephemeral ill-conceived ideas and idle musings. Like real plants under my care, they shall assuredly beg for the release of death, but instead I am choosing to immortalise them here. It's a place for essays in the original sense of the word[1]: a way to test out ideas by vomiting them into the public, raw and untested. Expect mostly ttrpg stuff, but I may sample a few different flavours of pseudointellectualism from time-to-time.
By way of introduction, I am best summed up as depressed PhD student (excuse the tautology) who, having lost her love of physicsa and forgotten how to make her brain work, is now trying to derive meaning from TTRPGs. God help me.
What are your credentials for starting a TTRPG blog?
Unemployment. Next question.
That is a little flippant, but it's sort of true. My credentials are idly thinking about TTRPGs sometimes. I've not run a game in years. I wrote a silly little Appendix N jam adventure, but I didn't really know what I was doing.
One thing I judge and envy in equal parts in other people is the Audacity with which they approach life. People spew their idle musings onto social media, give their hot takes on topics they've never studied in-depth and put out unfinished art. As an academic and a Brit (derogatory), this is pretty alien to me.
When I was young, I thought that communication should be for the exchange of information. As I grew older, I realised that wasn't really true. More often, communication felt like a kind of social combat where my opponent would try to trap me into revealing opinions for which they would judge me, while I had to proffer information incrementally to manage their reaction.
There's another purpose, though, isn't there: belonging and mutual connection. It is their lack in my life over the past few years which has made this most apparent. This blog is sort of my attempt to be just a smidge more earnest in the pursuit of communication for its own sake.
I'll never entirely shed that sort of ironic, self-effacing detachment that's evident in my register even as I write this. But if nothing else, it's just nice to write.
What's with the name?
This is Raspberry Cat, the stuffed toy my brother and I took with us everywhere as kids:
Since naming my palico Rspbrycat in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate due to its limited character count, the moniker has followed me everywhere.
I considered calling this place Raspberry World, but in the spirit of OSR blogs having silly names, I thought ripple encapsulated what I aim to write: small wavepackets that don't travel far before dissipating. It's also the name of a popular ice cream flavour in the UK, so it makes me smile in that sort of not-quite-funny-but-mildly-amusing way.
Anyway. I think that's enough waffle. 'Til the next one.
Footnotes
In no way does this deserve a footnote, but I'm sort of using this first post as a template for all the little macros I've got. Anyway that's wrong, I still like the bits of physics I find fun, I just rarely get to spend any time working on them! ↩︎