Welcome to BMac's Nonsense

Hey there. I'm Brian MacDonald, and this is the place where I keep stuff that I want to be on the web, but is too big for including on socials. It's a blog site, in other words.

If you came here looking for professional or serious stuff, you're in the wrong place. These links lead to more official resources about me.

What's going on here?

I'm verbose. This is a known flaw, known to myself and anyone who's talked to me for more than a few minutes. I often record my thoughts and memories in written form. I'm also fond of "projects," meaning that if I become interested in woozles, I probably won't be happy until I collect all the woozles and write down some thoughts about each. ADHD symptom? Seems likely. At some point, I look at my woozles document and think, "Oh, gosh, that's 100 pages long now." And once I noticed that I had lengthy writing on multiple different topics, I thought I'd put them on a web site, where at least they might persist in some form or be useful to others.

Doctor Who Tabletop RPG Adventures

I like Doctor Who. Like, a lot. A lot a lot. I also like tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). There have been attempts at a Doctor Who RPG in the past, but they've faded out over time. The latest attempt is Doctor Who the Roleplaying Game from Cubicle 7. I stumbled upon it in the fall of 2023, just as the second edition was coming out. I have a weekly RPG group who is often open to trying new things, and which includes some fans of the show, and everybody else is polite and humors me. After running an initial adventure from the rulebook, I started coming up with my own, and I really enjoyed the writing. I'm putting them here in case anybody else wants to run some adventures.

Big Finish Pocket Reviews

As I mentioned, I'm a huge Doctor Who fan, and have been since the 1980s. But Doctor Who isn't always around, and these days, you get ten episodes and then a two-year pause. Fortunately, Big Finish is there to fill the gaps with audio dramas. They've got full-length, full-cast audio dramas created by amazing writers and directors, some of whom have worked on the TV show, and as many former actors from the show as they can convince to sit in front of a microphone. They're audio stories, sure, but they've got the feel of real Doctor Who, both the classic and the modern series.

When I say Big Finish is there to "fill the gaps," I really mean "stuff as many stories as possible into every possible crack, no matter how small." They've been doing their thing since 1999, which has resulted in a massive library of stories. Although Big Finish doesn't restrict themselves to one era or a specific release order, a few years back I decided to listen to as much of the library as I could, in the order the stories take place in the Doctor's personal timeline, or as close as I could determine. Things...got a little out of hand. And of course I had to write down my thoughts, briefly (for me), and that's what you'll find here.

Roller Coaster Journal

One of my other unusual hobbies is riding roller coasters. There's a whole community of "coaster enthusiasts" (what we call ourselves) who love to compare and contrast, collect experiences, and rank things. Oh, do we love to rank things. Rankings are always in flux, so I won't subject you to mine. However, I do like to keep a journal of coasters I've ridden and parks I've visited, because it helps with my later recall.

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