With Kim's help, I've been cultivating a shoggoth for the past couple of weeks. Or rather, a from-scratch sourdough starter: Kim saw the comparison in some online fiction, and it feels strangely appropriate. (I'm following instructions in The Bread Bible to make use of the wild yeast and bacteria found on organic flour.) It's been more of a challenge than I expected, but I think it's finally fully active and ready to go.[1] This is pretty cool.
Now that it seems to be going strong, the next step in the instructions is to give it a name. :) It occurs to me that this isn't the first pet shoggoth that I've had: in one college IL game ("They Said It Couldn't Be Done", maybe?), my mad scientist character had a shoggoth named Alice Shiney. I can't remember for the life of me who was playing that character, but she did a great job of role playing (too good, in fact: I was so uncomfortable about her that I just ran away when she was finally attacked). Anyone out there remember who it might have been? Anyway, I'm considering "Alice" as a name, but Kim had pictured it as a male. Any other suggestions?
[1] One difficulty along the way was mold: the proto-starter itself always resisted mold growth, but dried out bits of bready stuff stuck higher up on the sides of the container got moldy a couple of times. I suspect that some sort of penicillin-like effect may have been keeping the starter from rising properly at those times.
Now that it seems to be going strong, the next step in the instructions is to give it a name. :) It occurs to me that this isn't the first pet shoggoth that I've had: in one college IL game ("They Said It Couldn't Be Done", maybe?), my mad scientist character had a shoggoth named Alice Shiney. I can't remember for the life of me who was playing that character, but she did a great job of role playing (too good, in fact: I was so uncomfortable about her that I just ran away when she was finally attacked). Anyone out there remember who it might have been? Anyway, I'm considering "Alice" as a name, but Kim had pictured it as a male. Any other suggestions?
[1] One difficulty along the way was mold: the proto-starter itself always resisted mold growth, but dried out bits of bready stuff stuck higher up on the sides of the container got moldy a couple of times. I suspect that some sort of penicillin-like effect may have been keeping the starter from rising properly at those times.
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