Metamorphosis

Also! Also!

Don't forget to buy cleolinda's The Annotated Movies In Fifteen Minutes¹ on Lulu.com! Three Harry Potter recaps² with a metric crapload³ of footnotes, explaining certain jokes, thought processes, origins of various tropes, and way more.

Made of Fail is mentioned a few times, and myself (by name!) at least once, so I'd be honor-bound to advertise this even if I didn't really want to⁴.

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1. wizards


2. Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, Half-Blood Prince


3. As opposed to the Imperial Standard Crapload, which only registers the weight instead of mass. To be fair, this only makes a difference if you go to the moon.


4. Which I TOTALLY DO because it is AWESOME.

My stutter is back.

A lot of people have asked me what I'm talking about. They hadn't noticed my stutter before, they didn't know what I was referring to, etc. For them, and the rest of you, I should probably explain.

I used to stutter. A lot. I don't know when it started but it lasted all the way through high school and probably a little bit past it. This was a case of "brain working faster than the mouth"¹, as many stutters are, and not in fact a side-effect from living in Derry.

The stutter itself is less of a difficulty in pronouncing words (though a little bit of that is evident if you really look) than it is more a difficulty in choosing words themselves. Listeners of the podcast will notice in some episodes I have trouble actually speaking, even when reading off a pre-written segment (such as Noel's last e-mail to the show³). It comes and goes, and always has; it's actually not so much "The Stutter is Back" as it is "The Stutter Won't Go Away".

During high school - Melissa can attest to this - it was so bad that Older Sister kept calling me Rain Man⁴. There were times I could barely make myself say anything, let alone what I wanted to say.

Time and patience has helped. Many of you might notice that I tend to speak slowly and carefully, and that I kind of stumble over words when I get excited. This is the byproduct of The Stutter. I try to keep control over it at all times, but when I'm enthused or anxious or worried or stressed out, control slips, and I start fumbling.

The problem, though, is that ever since the most recent time I lost control, I haven't been able to get it back. It's not very noticeable unless you're looking for it (or unless you're Jillian, who did notice but didn't mention it until I brought it up a few days ago), but it's been worrying me. What if it never goes away? What if it gets worse?

I know, I know, I shouldn't worry too much, but consider this.

• I'm trying to break into broadcasting now. Passively, true, but it won't remain passive for long.


• I'm already hard to understand on Made of Fail. We've nearly hit the Two Hundred Listeners mark (*cheer*), and it's already been made clear that you all love Dayna more than myself. What'll happen if I drive all of 'em away?


• I've been working half-heartedly on a stand-up comedy routine that I might take to an amateur night or two.⁵ Yes, I know that Lewis Black stutters through most of his most famous routines, but I'm not Lewis Black. Hell, half the reason people listen to him is for when he goes psycho on-stage and starts losing vocabulary left and right.


• Every job I've had, at some point or another, I've been praised for my Professional Telephone Voice, which can very easily become Professional Announcer Voice. This voice can lead some customers to believe that I am a machine (You can tell by the following: "*pause* ...oh, I'm sorry, you're an actual person? I was waiting for you to tell me what buttons to press!") or cause the daughters of managers to comment on my apparent auditory attractiveness. (This actually happened: "Kevin, I just want to tell you that when you transferred my daughter over, the first thing she said was 'Who's the new guy with the sexy voice?'" I am not making this up.)

The reason this is a problem is that I'm stuttering through the most simple telephone duties that a mailroom clerk can have.⁶ It's starting to affect my job now.

Jillian says it's stress, that it'll go away on its own. It's been a couple weeks now, though, and I don't know what to do.

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1. It's a long story. I was doing sixth-grade science in first grade and then got moved up a grade and et cetera.²


2. Okay, not that long.


3. Dayna: "Redo those lines, you stutter all the way through Hare Krishna."


4. My father suggested to me once, as a rebuttal, that I respond with "At least I was never put into an institution, unlike some I could care to mention." My father got a Look from my mother about that, and the matter was never again raised. It did the trick, though.


5. Local Open Mic Nights, at least to start with. No way am I going to leap into the "Amateur Wednesdays at Second City"-end of the pool first time out.


6. "Hi, this is Kevin from the mailroom, extension [number]. We've recieved a [floral delivery/personal package/fruit basket/Cheese-a-saurus Rex costume] and are holding it for you down here in the mailroom. Please come pick it up at your earliest convenience. If you have any questions, please call us back at extension [number] and we will be more than happy to assist you further. Thank you!"

I am now going to go into the various revisions I made to the core D&D rules. I used Edition 3.5, since that was the revision that I had available to me, and basically said to my players, "Anything that's in the books is fair game." Races, classes, weaponry, gods, spells; I had no need to remove any of that. Mostly because this was my first time DMing - and my first time playing, for that matter - and I didn't trust myself to make something imbalanced.

( House Rules )


Part I: The World
Part II: House Rules
Part III: The Current Setting

1. There are three basic Attack Bonus progressions in D&D; each class follows one of them. Fighters, Paladins, and Barbarians share a path that I arbitrarily called "Good".


2. Likewise, Save Bonuses have two basic progressions.