(no subject)

Yesterday, I started a Buffy fic and a historical RPF story (how could I resist Eleanor of Aquitaine?). I want to work on two prompts today, too, because doing that is the only way I'll manage 31 prompts over the course of the month.

I'm tweaking my Yuletide sign up, trying to make sure that my requests and DNWs are clear and that everything I'm offering is actually a thing I'll enjoy writing. That last bit is hard because it's hard for me to guess what will be fun until I see the request and start really thinking about what I could write.

I think that, at this point, the cold I thought I was over is back. At least, that makes more sense than that I'm still having such massive problems with allergies.

I'm debating trying to go downtown to mail my absentee ballot (we're out of stamps). I've got time, but I also want the dratted thing gone. Then again, the bus I'm likely to take into town stops at city hall. I could just walk into the building and deliver my ballot that way. I'd still need to go and buy stamps, though.

My to-do list is mostly things that are going to take considerable mental effort and/or time, and I very much don't want to deal with any of them, so I've been dealing with things like dishes and laundry that require no brain whatsoever because I've been doing them for decades.

(no subject)

Here's a crowd-sourceable thing-- For the game I'm running at UCon, I want all of the player characters to be playable as whatever gender the player prefers, but I also need to label the characters somehow. Names help with that.

The last couple of years, I've run games where I could just make up names, but this game is SF and set either in our solar system or in one colonized by folks from Earth. (Scott says I need to pull from The Expanse and/or Firefly.)

The characters are crew on a recently commissioned rescue ship, and I'm considering just labeling the characters by role and letting the players name them. I'm also considering just giving them family names, but then I have to decide ancestry/nationality and such, and I kind of feel like that should be up to the players, too, since it won't change anything I'm setting up (basically a space rescue with as many complications as it takes to fill the time. I'm making a list, and some of them will get more complicated the longer they're put off).

I could also use personal names that are gender neutral in the US or offer each person two somewhat similar personal name options, one US feminine and one US masculine. I used to do that when I wrote LARPs in the 90s, but I was also dealing with too many characters with complicated interrelationships for me to consider letting anyone go unnamed.

What do you all think?