Ever since I moved into the hotel, I've felt about watching television too late at night because I know from personal experience that sound carries. When I watch something after 10pm or so, I've turned it down low, which means I miss things. And that's been a big pain especially when it comes to Critical Role since it doesn't even start airing until 10pm, so if I want to watch live then I end up missing things because I have to keep it quiet unless I want to be an asshole.

As I mentioned in my most recent Critical Role post, though, I finally figured out an alternative that seems to be working well. It doesn't work for anything that I'm watching on the hotel's cable, but since most of what I'm watching in the evening/night is streaming, that means I use my Fire Stick. And my Fire Stick has the ability to connect to Bluetooth devices. Such as the ear buds that I usually keep in my purse for when I'm out and about, which I realized earlier in the week.

And, well, it's working great. The last few nights I've been able to watch movies late at night without accidentally disturbing anyone in the rooms next to me or above me. The video is playing on the shiny new TV that the hotel gave me, but the audio is entirely in my ears and not bothering anyone else nearby. For example, right now I'm finishing up watching The Martian, but it's essentially silent in my room because the sound's playing on my ear buds.

Now if only I had thought to do something like this ages ago...

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

What can I say? There's been a lot of Critical Role related things happening this week thanks to NYCC. This post is about the adorably hilarious (and not at all safe for work) summary of the first three seasons of The Legend of Vox Machina that they released. In song format. Sung by Grog.

Oh, they've finally released the trailer for the first season of The Mighty Nein! And it looks amazingly good!

I've gotta admit, I'm very curious to see what they end up doing for this series. While I love CR2, the fact that the pandemic happened in the middle of it and they had to unexpectedly take a multiple month hiatus really caused some disconnect in the campaign itself. They've already said they're reworking some plot-related things for the animated series, and I'm really hoping that will fix some of the campaign's weaknesses because the story itself is amazing.

I really wonder what they're going to do with the release schedule. For The Legend of Vox Machina, it's had twelve episodes per season and they've released it in four batches of three episodes each over the course of a month. This series is going to have hour long episodes instead of half hour ones, so I really wonder A. how many episodes the season will be and B. if they'll release it one episode a week.

My suspicion is that it will be eight episodes released weekly, since that's what Amazon does for other hour-long shows like The Rings of Power. We'll have to wait for them to officially confirm it, though.

Assignments just went out for the Dragon Age Poly Exchange, and I've got to admit that I'm very excited about my assignment(s) for this one.

As is the case for most single fandom exchanges, I offered Any and offered to take multiple initial assignments if needed for matching purposes, so I had no idea whatsoever what I would get. That said? My muse is definitely interested after reading the prompts that I was given, although some of them are very much not relationships that I ever would have considered myself.

I'm very curious to see just what I end up writing.

Since the universe has made it clear that I have no control whatsoever when it comes to my actual life, I decided to focus on one of my virtual ones instead for a while.

I've never really stopped playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons since it was released in 2020, but the last few years I've mostly been logging on for 10-15 minutes each day to do my "dailies" and talk to my villagers since all of my collections are already at 100%. Since it's October, though, I decided to not only put out all of my (many) fall and Halloween decorations but also change some things up as well.

I'm not done yet, but I definitely spent a few hours last night and this morning curled up on my bed with the cats as I changed up some cliffs and rivers, dug up some flowers, planted new ones, moved some trees, etc. all while putting out enough pumpkin-related decor that every single one of my villagers commented on it.

Does it change much in the grand scheme of things? No, not really. But, you know, if I can't keep my actual life from imploding on me regularly, I can at least control the world of my tiny little digital island.

Campaign 4 of Critical Role starts tonight, and I'm going to do my best to actually watch it live despite the general insanity going on in my life right now. The one positive about sleeping like crap the last few nights is that my sleep schedule is a bit of a mess, which means I've been staying up late all week (which in turn explains why I've been getting not-enough-sleep all week in addition to the tossing and turning once I do fall asleep).

Since I have a headache again today, I took an extra hour for lunch and got an almost two hour nap in. I'm hoping that I can convince my body to nap for another hour or two after work. If I can get a nap in, it should help me be a bit more awake while watching the episode since it doesn't start until 10pm my time and will probably be at least 3-4 hours.

I usually do liveposting over on Bluesky, but I think that I'm going to try to type up a post about the episode for Dreamwidth as well (and, if possible, try to do that every week). We'll see how it goes? I can't remember the last time that I did regular posts about something that I was watching. Once upon a time, I used to do it regularly for a bunch of shows, but I stopped around the time that I started using Twitter and transitioned to shorter but more constant livetweeting instead as typing up a post takes a lot more mental work.