(no subject)

It has been a pretty decent vacation! I have...done very little of consequence, which *should* mean that I am returning to the "real world" feeling very well rested and rejuvenated and stuff, and might actually mean that I feel Stressed Out by all the stuff I didn't get done.

(grading. All the grading I didn't get done. And some evidence for my licensure thing. Everything else is probably fine regardless of done-ness.)

The major timesinks were "taskmaster" "neopets" and "board games" and honestly? I feel pretty great about all three of those! I finished series 14 UK of Taskmaster and watched all of series 3 EnZed, I played just..._heaps_ of Neopets, and these last few days especially have been very focused on board games.

I am perhaps getting better at Cat in the Box (a quantum trick taking game, of which I have a copy and will be able to play back home with people who like the idea of quantum trick taking!). I am not getting better at 7Wonders: Architects, but honestly it's light/random enough that I don't mind. I am getting ??? at Space Base, which has so many things going on that I don't think I'll ever get ~better~ but it is plenty enjoyable and I should remember that if I meet other people who play it.

(By "neopets" I _technically_ mean a different website which seeks to recreate early-2000s era Neopets, and succeeds in a just lovely fashion. I have been playing games and buying stuff and earning way _way_ too much money by accident and generally just having a very nice time of things! I will have to play it less intensely once I am back to the real world and the day job and stuff, but I think this will be a nice part of my next several months!)

I have _not_ been keeping up with Dreamwidth, which I slightly regret --I frequently let it slip during vacations. I will try and catch back up before too long, but more likely I'm just going to have missed a big chunk of entries from the last ten days of the year.

I also have not been keeping up with Dicember, despite having every single entry already written and the pictures already chosen. Oops. In my defense, everything for it is on the work computer, and I haven't been arsed to open that very much this week. I will go post all of those as soon as I'm done with these words.

Socializing-wise, it's been a little weird today, wearing my mask _all damn day_ but we've reached the point in the New Years Party where people are no longer Definitely Testing when/before they arrive at the house. When I could keep track of that, I was willing to unmask, but now...alas! Mostly it's just irritating vis-a-vis foodtime, since I would like to be able to eat meals without having to wander out to the backyard and sitting forlornly by myself with my mystery novel, no wait, that part actually rocks, nevermind.

(I have been _slowly_ reading my way through the complete Lord Peter Wimsey books. I started with the few random ones I owned before Thanksgiving, and have since obtained all of them from the library, and am filling in the blanks, in order. I think I'm on my fifth book of twelve or so? I'm having a jolly good time with it, even if I'm not reading particularly quickly.)

I'm also occasionally reading bits of No Stone Unturned, which is a book about forensic investigation. It's...It's a little pro-cop, which is the perpetual problem with being into true crime, but the ~real life~ mystery aspect of it is cool as hell! So far I have learned that burying humans can fuck up the magnetic fields (!) in the ground (!!) because dirt is magnetically aligned with the earth or something like that (!!!!!!).

Tomorrow I will have to pack, and possibly create a box to be mailed back to me in Boston, rather than just carrying everything in my bags. There's this truly giant LEGO set I got, you understand, because sometimes my father really enjoys giving in to my ridiculous requests!

Also, since I don't think I've mentioned it yet, I'm up to *six* sets of dice acquired for Chrimbomas, one of which I swapped for with Wicked Auntie Robin. (She offered me just the pale pinkish-purple d20 --a perfect Robin colour!-- and then when I mentioned I prefer sets, said she'd swap me the rest of the set for a set of mine. I absolutely cannot resist that sort of invitation from someone I love, especially since one of the sets I brought with me was a flower-filled set from Dead Eye and that is _absolutely_ something my fabby femme Wicked Auntie needed!

Alright, it's very late. Gonna go do a bunch of Dicember posts and sleep. Maybe tomorrow I will do a more thorough year-end retrospective or whatever. Ta!

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 24: Lab Dice!

Dicember Day24
Orange and Teal Lab Dice
(Obtained 2021 12, made by Chessex)



Interestingly, despite that I have been Very Into Dice for basically my whole life, very few of my pretties have been gifted to me. The vast majority of them are sets I've bought for myself at various points. Which is part of why this set is so special --mom picked them out for me, and put them in my stocking at Christmas!

The Lab Dice line, from Chessex, are various shorter-run experiments they do. They come in test tubes, as both a fun display method, and to indicate their experimental nature. And I don't know if all of them have this quality, but this set in particular has a noticeably heavier *weight* than most dice of the same size. It feels fully luxurious to experience this weight and roll these dice! I'm not sure if the difference is resin-vs-acrylic or what, but it is delightful!

In addition, they're a _very_ me shade of orange. I'm a sucker for a good green in dice (and have _many_ variations to prove it) but finding suitable oranges tends to be a little harder. These are sheer elegance in their simplicity, a good bright colour, a satisfying weight, and an excellent display mechanism!



~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 25: Dwarven Stones

Dicember Day 25
Dwarven Stones Hematite Dice
(obtained in high school or earlier so like...2004? From Crystal Caste)

It is embarrassing writing this entry, because I discovered I actually had the entirely wrong company name here! Since corrected in my spreadsheet and above, but gosh I felt like a dweeb trying to search these up. Anyways.



These are the first high end luxury dice I ever bought. These are the dice that I coveted for years, that I thought about frequently, that I ultimately decided to drop a *huge* amount of my fourteen year old self's wallet on that one year at Origins.

Because I was _definitely_ a polished rocks kid. I am...still kindof a polished rocks adult (only now that I'm grown and witchy they're ~crystals~ instead), and so dice made of actual polished gemstones *blew my tiny mind*. I saw them in the pages of Knights of the Dinner Table and went "IT MUST BE MINE!"¹

And now I am grown! I can blow my paycheck on fancy stone and glass and crystal dice any time I want! I can have so many ~exquisite~ high end dice! I can...but honestly, eh. It turns out that through careful study of different mediums, I'm a plastic girl at heart². Which is not to say that I haven't spent...a lot of money on sets of fancy hand-made artisanal luxury dice. Just that they're fancy resin or acrylic these days, rather than hematite.

That being said, as part of writing this entry I did a wee bit of googling around and while I can't actually access the Crystal Caste site at work³ it looks like the ~vast price~ I paid was in the range of like...$25. Nowadays it'd be $30. If I actually wanted to grab a set of the Tiger's Eye (my canonical favourite stone) and make past!Kat insatiably jealous, it is much more in my reach than I thought. That's...that's dangerous and cool to know.

Also it turns out I can just search for a website in the Wayback machine and that's not blocked at school, so dumbass "hacking" wins again against the forces of evil (the school IT department, all of whom are quite nice and I like a lot except the dweebus in charge who somehow has a disproportionate amount of power over my work quality of life)!

((Also, it's not clear from the photo above, but they are TINY! They're your standard "small" size of dice, and very very pretty!))

~Sor
MOOP!

1: This mis-reference is intentional and imo, very funny.

2: This mis-gender is not intentional but my brain refuses to rewrite the sentence, so there we go, apparently one of the rare instances of me deciding to have a gender is right now as I talk about dice material types.

3: "games" sites are blocked, which means I used to be able to play any flash game in the world by googling it with the phrase "unblocked" and means that resources for the Game Theory unit I used to teach were often unavailable. Firewalls are great! (Dice sites are about 50-50 blocked or not)

Also, lest you side-eye me for doing dice related frivoloties on the clock, my kids are currently taking a test, I can't help them anyways, shuddup.

Dicember Day 26: Shirley Temple Dice

Dicember Day 26
Shirley Temple Dice.
(Obtained 2021 01, made by Legendary Pants)



The Shirley Temple is my favourite drink by a goodly margin --it's sweet, just a little fancy, and usually dirt cheap. I've been known to double fist them whenever possible, and I make them for anyone who asks at Pinewoods. So when I encountered the "wine dice" kickstarter, I was sorta indifferent until I saw these as a stretch goal. (okay, and the Absinthe, I'll talk about those later¹).

They turned out even better than expected because, and I cannot emphasize my glee at this fact enough, the reddish-pink swirled inside them looks rather horrifyingly like flesh. The fact that the sweet-n-innocent drink for kids playacting grownup actually looks to be a dismembered human, but also glittery, is choice and made them easily (and unexpectedly!) my favourite of the six wine dice sets I received.

The wine dice in general are merely okay. I got a whole bunch of different sets relatively cheap due to the kickstarter, and was interested to find that the size is not super consistent between them --as much as a few millimeters off between different sets. The cost reflects that level of imperfection --$14 for an eleven-die set is a pretty decent price-- and I think they've got a nice smooth feel to them. The colours are quite sharp across the board, and they are extremely evocative of the drinks they were trying to portray.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Ah! I wrote this note before I had finished writing all the entries, when things were still a little bit in flux! Later might be considerably so, in other words. Like, next year's Dicember maybe?

Dicember Day 27: Copper and Green Swirl(s)

Dicember Day 27
Copper and Green Swirl "Bullfrog" and "Emerald Vale"
(Both obtained 2021 02, Bullfrog from Beholder's Gaze and Emerald Vale from Ice Cream Dice)

I have a problem.

Wait shit no, I've used that as a lead-in to an entry before. So now I have two problems: That I'm not a creative writer, and that sometimes I, er, accidentally get duplicates.



In my defense, it is a VERY PRETTY set! Sets. Two very pretty sets! But as it turns out, like with many manufactured items, copies abound. I know in many cases, it's because a lot of dice sellers sell wholesale dice from bulk manufacturers as well as their own unique designs. That may have been so with this doubling --although the two sets are subtly different if you look closely!



In my spreadsheet, they are labeled as a matte set and a translucent set. There's also the matter of luster on the numbers --one set is numbered in a glittery silver, the other in a sleek grey. Also in my spreadsheet there is a note, for both: "may be switched". I posted an order photo from when I received the Ice Cream Dice ones though, and I think through careful study I can identify that it's the more matte and grey ones.

(My spreadsheet is not meant to be infallible though. Certainly, I don't have price data for anything pre-2020, and I have discovered a delicious flaw in the "buy mystery sets from multiple shops and then let other people put them into my dailies calendar for me" plan, which is, er, I don't recognize this beautiful mystery set, and there are multiple options for where it arrived from. I do the best I can with what I have!)

((Also, fun fact, in that photo linked in twitter, all three of those sets were originally written up, in the time before posting. Then I decided that having _four_ Ice Cream Dice sets is maybe a lot, even though I am pretty fond of them, and swapped the Caramel Apple for the wee pumpkin coloured we saw previously. Creating this series of posts has been an ADVENTURE, let me tell you!))

(((Third and final fun fact, part of the problem was that these were purchased before I had started the dice spreadsheet. Part of why I have the spreadsheet is to try and keep track of what dice I do already have, especially since there are some I have not yet earned and so can't go look at whenever I want! I think I've only failed once since --I'm pretty sure there are two separate sets of cool looking blood-spattered dice in my "to be earned" pile, each from a different company.)))

( Separate pictures here under the cut )

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 28: Pombabies

Dicember Day 28
Dismembered Babies Dice.
(Obtained 2021 09, made by AngryPomDice)

So you may have seen the cursed image of the SpaghettiOs Dice --a glorious gory red with the iconic rings, good enough to eat, yet horrifyingly polyhedral. That classic set was made originally by AngryPomDice, and I do not own it, alas. About a year ago, they got into grad school and gave up the dice-making trade (for at least a while) and I'm very happy for their personal growth, but damn, their designs were _so glorious and weird_.

Enter the Dismembered Babies dice



According to my notes, this is the most expensive set of seven dice I own, and I have ZERO REGRETS ABOUT THAT FACT! Just look't'em! They're full of baby heads and also baby bodies! They are kitschy and weird and such an absolutely great idea.

Also I love that little teardrop shaped d4. It is I believe unique among my dice, and I find it far more readable than the classic tetrahedron¹. I've got the etsy shop bookmarked for the future, for the just in case, for the "okay but I could give my baby sister dice filled with kraft macaroni and cheese".

And in the meantime, if I need to roll babies, I can. How perfect!



~Sor
MOOP!

1: Nerd note: I actually debated whether to say tetrahedron or caltrop, because either would be sufficiently nerdy but how did I want y'all to think of me?

Dicember Day 29: The Originals

Dicember Day 29
Chort and Paula's Wedding Dice.
(Obtained 2001. Manufacturer: Unknown, probably Chessex)



These are it. This hodgepodge of eight, unassuming, mismatched polyhedrals is where everything begins.

It was September 22, 2001, and Chort and Paula¹ were getting married. For favours, there were little origami boxes one could choose between. "Almonds for the traditional". "Bulbs for the gardeners". "Chocolate for everyone else".

And "dice for the gamers".

I was twelve years old, and I greedily grabbed two little boxes --one with a matched black d20, d12, d8, and d4. The other had a mismatched black and red d10 and d%, and two blue and yellow d6s. Eight dice. Don't really go together, but there's one of every kind. Mine, all mine.

My very first dice.

Oh, I'd definitely _handled_ dice before. I don't remember for sure when Da started the roleplaying game for the three of us kids, but it was well earlier than that. We'd just...grabbed dice out of the peanut tin my parents kept theirs in, a mix of colours and styles (and worn-smooth and waxy!). But I'd never had dice that were _mine_. That I didn't have to put away at the end of the session, that I didn't have to share with Shannon or Alys.

These dice are old enough to drink. They've been in my dicebag for two thirds of my life. They did not spend very long as the _only_, but they are the _first_ and that is important to me. And these days, they travel in a slightly bigger set, with my firsts of other sizes --d5, d7, d16. I usually have a couple of d2s in there as well. I really ought to get a d3.



Dice for the gamers. I suppose that's me!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: There is no way to write this entry without touching on the damnable tragic fact that Paula died of cancer several years ago, and it is an awful thing. She was a woman of joy and adventure and music and enthusiasm, and in addition to the dice from her wedding, I have a stone from her collection that sits on my altar in her memory and her blessing. Sometimes the world is so so utterly unfair.

At least now her and ShadowCaptain can dance together again. I don't necessarily do the whole ~heaven~ thing, but...but I believe that the spirits can still be dancing.

Dicember Day 30: Cobalt Cosmos

Dicember Day 30
Dice 51: Cobalt Cosmos
(Obtained 2022 03 from Foam Brain Games)

What if dice...but FROM SPACE?!!

This is a question that has been asked many (many!) times by many different dicemakers. What if you had dice that looked like a galaxy? What if you had dice full of stars? What if you had a full 14 piece set of dice to represent major astronomical bodies within our tiny solar system? (this is not something I own yet, but it is On The List.)

What if you had dice inspired by aliens and area 51, and also what if they were made of cool heavy metal and meant to invoke golden age science fiction and shining spaceships and otherplanetary cities?

That's the question Foam Brain Games asked --and quite nicely answered!-- with their Dice 51 kickstarter.



These dice have a wonderfully peculiar shape to them, especially the d6 and d12. For the d12, I find it a little irritating --shaping the faces as kites instead of pentagons makes it more difficult to quickly visually distinguish from the d10-- but I *love* the space-station-shaped d6 with its long cylinder body.

I'm not much for metal dice in general, but I'm very glad to have picked up a few sets of these when they went up on kickstarter. Not only are the colours just so good, but these really do feel like display pieces, even more than some of my favourite sparkly plastics. Dice...in...SPAAAAACE!

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 31 - Pride Flag!

Dicember Day 31
Pride Flag Dice
(Obtained 2021 10, from Foam Brain Games)

I came up with the idea for this project back in August. My original goal was to take a ton of photos during the summer (check!) and write all the entries well before December actually started. And you know, I got close! I wrote all but ten pre December (and look, a 66% is not a good grade but it is a passing grade) and a bunch more through the first week of December. But my original goal was to write all the entries *before* I randomized what die would be what day, which I didn't quite manage to do.

Subsequently, I am writing this entry on December 7th, and I know for a fact that it will be the Last Day Of Dicember, the entry that runs on December 31st. Part of me feels like I should try and do something extra special with it? Certainly, in just a week of posting, I have been very pleased by the number of people in my life who have made nice comments about the project¹. I'm glad y'all like it! It's been a _lot_ of fun for me, and I will try very hard to do it again next year with more of my vast hoard!

So, here we go. The last set for this year:



Have I said I don't like inclusions? Yeah, a couple times. Have I _meant_ it? It sure doesn't seem like I have! Or maybe it's just that they're so ubiquitous that a modern dice collector can't get away from them.

But this set, like most of my favourites, benefits from having an inclusion that is less a specific object and more an abstraction. The pride stripes in here are meant to invoke a flag, but they don't really need to waste time looking exactly like a little rectangular flag. They're rather more successful as a riot of colour and happiness and, well, pride!

I like colours. I like symbolism (especially vexillological symbols). I like queer shit. I like dice. Pride flag dice are all these things and I like it very much!

Thanks for letting me show you my toys this month. I hope you have an excellent 2023.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Including Lauradi's incredibly charming "okay, but is there a game where you actually need to use ALL the different sizes of dice" to which my answer wasn't, and should've been, "let me tell you about Dice Farmer (click through to the subsequent five or so comics).