The Friday High Five

Nerdy parties, endless tomorrows, and the emptiness of office work

20th Century Fox

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

My Favorite Thing

A Dungeons & Dragons Birthday Party

I feel a bit self-conscious every time I bring up my D&D game, and not for historical reasons involving wedgies and swirlies. Talking about your D&D campaign feels like talking about your fantasy football team—it’s only really interesting to you. But

Sheila Moeschen

said she loves hearing about it so now you get to, too.

I've lost count exactly but I think the D&D birthday party started about 8 years ago. I wish I'd started sooner. Why do we stop having fun birthday parties when we become adults? There's no good reason for it, just lots of boring and mundane excuses. I don't know about you, but I have quite enough boring and mundane stuff in my life. The birthday party is a chance to bring back a little taste of that childhood magic.

The birthday game involves characters we only use that one time of year. After 8 years of such games, every session feels like a reunion. The Christmas song It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year talks about tales of glories long, long ago, but Christmas has got nothing on a long-running D&D game.

Every year we talk of past adventures as though they happened to us. And in a very real way, they did.

This year was a bit different than past sessions.

My players, through bravery and also foolish recklessness, are the most powerful heroes in the realm. They therefore are being pulled upon by the world to be more than a band of adventurers. So the party split up, semi-retiring from that life, and are now kings and barons and the D&D equivalent of a pope. Like the Avengers, they'll come back together when needed. But for now, the world needs them to put down the sword. They are now fixtures of the world.

This year they rolled up a new set of peasant-adventurers. They fell like Bothans, but in the end, a new set of heroes emerged.

Already looking forward to next year.

Other Things I Enjoyed

The Wire

I forced myself to stop after 6 episodes—because I'm planning on recording a pilot podcast on the first half of season one—but it was so hard! The Wire was made in a pre-streaming, and thus, pre-binge world, but it begs to be consumed with all the speed you can muster. It's such a rich narrative.

I don't want to blow my wad prematurely—is it bad form to “save it for the podcast,” when I don't yet have a podcast?—but I will just say the character work is really well done. Characters who seem one-note at first are revealed to be anything but. I absolutely despised Herc, who appeared to be a stereotypical, ultra-aggressive meathead protected by a badge. Then he acted respectfully toward a grandmother and muddied the waters. He's still a jerk, but it's not so cut-and-dried. And I love it.

McNulty and Greggs though. They're the real ones.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

I got this novel for Christmas and finally started reading it this week. It’s the sort of book I wish I had written, because I could’ve written this. Not exactly, and certainly not as well, but the themes—fate, legacy, love—are ones I think about a lot. And the subject matter is basically Eric 101.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about two kids from completely different backgrounds who bond over a shared love of gaming, and how their lives intertwine and divert across their lifetime. I think—I’m only about 1/3 into the book. But there’s enough jumping around in time and foreshadowing to hint at that being the pattern of their relationship.

The kids start out playing Super Mario Bros. and it goes from there. One of them plays Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a lot of references to things I grew up playing, and have fond memories of. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has all the fun nostalgia of Ready Player One without any of the dystopian stakes. It’s a love story in which gaming is both the background and the foreground.

Not Another D&D Podcast

That's actually the real name of this podcast, which works in a very meta sense because there are approximately a million podcasts of people playing D&D. It still sorta blows my mind because I grew up in the era where only nerds played D&D, and even then we only played in the safety of our basements where we could maintain plausible deniability.

One time in high school I left my 2nd edition player's handbook in the bathroom and my friend—who was a jock—asked about it. I empathically denied it was mine—nah bro, that's my mom’s; she's mad into that nerd shit—and we both knew I was lying. It seems so silly now. But there really was a stigma at the time and that stink didn't wash off.

I like listening to D&D podcasts because my desire to play far outstrips my availability. It's an effective way of scratching that itch and is a hell of a lot cheaper than other peripheral activities like buying more books and minis.

Not Another D&D Podcast is hilarious, and it also resembles the kinds of games I play. If I ever have my own D&D podcast—something I've seriously considered—it would be something like this.

Office Space

Occasionally I grapple with existential doubt brought about by the empty mundanity of office work, where nothing of obvious value is created and the days blend one into the next, a trackless blur that amounts to some kind of life, but never truly feels like living.

That's super nihilistic. Most days I like my day job. But there's no questioning the repetitive sameness is a special kind of madness. It's less Groundhog Day and more Whose Line Is It Anyway—everything's made up and the points don't matter.

Looking for a sense of commiseration, and maybe some answers, I threw on this classic, which turns 25 this year.

Office Space isn't as funny as I remembered. I don't think I laughed once. It remains eminently relatable, though, even in the age of remote work; bosses be bosses. It’s somehow both timeless and an artifact of a different world.

Watching Office Space didn't make me feel any better about my work situation, but it did give me some ideas about things I could write about, and that always perks me up.