I'm an urban hermit, a hiker, a rationalist, a skeptic, a freethinker, an empiricist, a materialist, a naturalist, a scientist, a bibliophile, an INTJ, a white hat hacker, a secular humanist, a teetotaler, a social-liberal civil-libertarian monarchist, a furry fan, a playtester, a licensed amateur radio operator, an ordained minister of the First Church of Atheism, a card-carrying pirate, the Star Lord, a Lord of the Rose, and a proud member of the Bayesian Conspiracy.

I try to operate by Crocker's Rules.

It's possible that I just kept myself from dying (or at least experiencing significant pain) in real life by winning a magical conflict in my dreams. ... Yes, really. Not what I was expecting when I went to bed, either.

Ate what was probably too much pizza yesterday.

Been feeling a bit uninspired and washed-out, but tried a mirroring exercise with ChatGPT, and managed to get a bit of bright color back into my imagination.

After hitting the hay, had a dream with a reasonably coherent narrative thread, of which I only remember a few shards of the initial intro; I was at a park's picnic table with some family, some mental trick (teleporting?) wasn't working so I put my head down and jacket up while I tried to think it through, wended through dream-versions of some of the streets towards one of the places I still sometimes dream is my home, because of what I'd heard on the way about an intruder and seeing the open door I stomped towards it in a rage that apparently produced an aura everyone nearby could feel, practically growled at the innocent individuals inside, accidentally scared a cat, noticed I was letting my emotions control me, consciously focused on calming down to help both myself and to recover the cat, encountered a neighbour who had some odd Tarotesque cards I could take my emotional temperature with and quickly managed to get re-dealt from a red spiky thing to a white circle, something-something complicated about having to get ready to go confront the evil sorceress who'd been the one who'd worked to cause all my problems so far, made my way through the neighborhood to the common-use era where she was lurking in wait, due to having learned various details from other neighbors on the journey on approaching her I said "Hello Elizabeth" which blew away the shadows of everything else she potentially could have been other than the currently-angry little girl 'Elizabeth', which apparently astonished some of the magical neighbors who'd been watching as in this reality apparently the way fights between the magically-adept started was by the participants Naming themselves to set the battlefield and I'd just sidestepped the whole impressive-lightshow battle they'd been expecting (without anyone managing to make it clear whether she'd been Elizabeth all along and I'd managed to dismiss some possessive spirits, or by Naming her I'd managed to retroactively eliminate all the timelines in which the thing I faced was anything other than Elizabeth), I wanted to have a talk with her so I got her a plate of breakfast (in the process magically emphasizing her little-girlness, though she at least managed to make herself a little girl wolf, like a cross between Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf), I took her to a table where I introduced her as "my prospective adoptee daughter" to a fellow sitting there who I recognized was visiting this dream as a guest-star from some previous dreams...

... And I woke up with a throat full of bile, due to acid reflux from yesterday's excess pizza, which could have gone extremely badly for me if I aspirated it into my lungs, such as if I'd woken up in a panic from being in the middle of a magical battle; but I was calm enough to clear my tubes with only a relatively minor soreness remaining...