I Am The Warrior?
It’s funny. I have all these irons in the fire - shopping two novels, writing another one, plus writing new short stories, poems, and a graphic novel, plus maintaining this web site and ANOTHER web site that has yet to be unveiled, plus raising two kids, wooing a potential new client, and finishing various house projects and all the housework that needs to be done.
All that, and all I can think about is what I’m going to do tomorrow.
Yeah, so here’s the deal. Tomorrow I’m getting up at about 5 a.m. (on a Saturday morning! GROAN!), taking a quick shower and shaving my head to the skin again. Then I’m driving two hours into the north Georgia mountains where I’ll suit up, paint my head red, and start running on THIS obstacle course.
Naturally, I have to blame somebody for this bit of foolishness, and today I blame my awesome friend Jeff Jarvis.
Jeff has been doing the Warrior Dash for a couple of years with his brother and several of his friends. Being a guy who kinda digs running, and a guy who kinda digs partying, I gravitated toward participating in the Warrior Dash myself. Last year I wanted to do it, but the timing wasn’t right and I missed out. This year, I’m in. Me, Jeff, our friend Jimmy, and several hundred other “warriors” are set to run, sweat, crawl, climb, and hurdle ourselves through water, mud, and fire.
It’s occupying a lot of my bandwidth - enough so that I figured if I was going to write a post for this site today, it’d have to be about tomorrow’s impending adventures. So that’s what you’re getting.
As a final note, I found out that I could actually use my “Dash” in a charitable fashion, so I hooked up with St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and dedicated my run to raising money for sick kids. If you’re reading this and helping sick kids is something YOU’D be interested in, here’s a link to my St. Jude’s site. Click through and donate. I’m thinking about writing a follow-up to this post letting you know how the Dash went, as well as saying a big thank you to everybody who donated.
Thanks ahead of time. Wish me luck.
Telemarketing Tirade
It’s one of those things we deal with in America - the possibility that sometime, as you’re sitting down to enjoy dinner with your family, the phone is going to ring. And if you answer it during the dinner hour, there’s a HIGH probability that it’s some kind of survey or solicitation.
I get them on my land line all the time, and because I don’t have caller ID on the land line (I only maintain said line out of a specific need, and since AT&T sucks, I’m not gonna pay them anything extra for anything extra), I’ve pretty much started to ignore that particular phone. Besides, anyone who needs to talk to me knows to call my cell phone, which is on 24/7, and is usually located somewhere within reach. (If you call me at 3 a.m. like Daigle did once, you better be funny drunk, in jail, or in labor.)
Yesterday I got FOUR solicitation calls on my CELL phone. This has never happened before. Now, I DO have caller ID on my cell, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in this case, since I answer calls from unknown numbers anyway. In the past, an unknown number either meant a friend or family was calling me from a different phone, or it meant a potential client was calling with a job. I HAVE to take those calls - they’re my bread and butter.
Anyway, yesterday, four times. I was excited every time, because I need some client work. Then I was pissed every time. I have a LOT of minutes on my calling plan, but still - every single one of those calls chewed into them a little bit. And they wasted my time.
Now, before you say anything, I know about www.donotcall.gov. And the first point of this post is to share its existence with anybody out there who DOESN’T know about it.
My land line is registered there and has been for 9 years. By the way, that doesn’t keep solicitations from happening, because you can still get calls from charities, political organizations, and telephone surveyors - and believe me, companies will disguise themselves as such to get at you. Still, I can’t imagine how many calls we’d get if we didn’t have that phone number registered.
I THOUGHT that my cell phone need not be registered because some law prohibited telemarketers from calling you on a line where you paid for your minutes. After getting four calls in one day, I called my cell carrier (which is Verizon) and asked about this. SADLY, I WAS MISTAKEN. Cell carriers don’t typically give out your number, and actually work hard to keep your number quiet. Apparently, though, their efforts aren’t foolproof, and your cell number - should it escape your grasp - is fair game.
Except for www.donotcall.gov. So I registered my cell number there last night.
I never understood the logic of cold calls and mail inserts, anyway, but I’m not going to go into that right now, because THAT tirade is long and bothersome, and I want to get to the next point.
And… the next point is to sell you on www.donotcall.gov. If you haven’t registered your phone number - be it land line or cell - on the Do Not Call Registry, you need to do it. Telemarketing ramps up when the economy fluctuates, and we are if anything in a great state of flux. The web site is easy to use, it’s practically instantaneous to get registered (although you have to wait 31 days for the calls to stop), and for the most part it works.
Remember that non-profits, churches, and politicians can still call you, and you can still get called to “participate in a survey”. But - and here’s something I DID NOT know until last night - the web site provides a means for you to file complaints against callers whom you think are in violation of the law. And although the majority of calls that I get SEEM to be legitimately exempt from it, many times I have my doubts. Now I know I can act on my doubts.
For instance, to me this means that, if at the end of a survey the caller tries to sell me something, I can report it.
All those mortgage lending companies? I’m gonna report them unless they’re from a genuine bank, and I seriously doubt many of them are. The ones that tell me that I need to CALL NOW regarding the interest rates on my credit cards? I’m pretty sure they should get reported.
Now, I don’t know what kind of effect reporting these violations will have, and that’s kind of why I’m writing this post. I want everyone that reads it to register his or her phone, and I want you all to help me report these people. Like I said, it’s pretty quick and easy - it takes less time for me to file a complaint against a number than it does to delete all the spam comments this site gets in a given day - and eventually, maybe telemarketing companies will get the point.
And THAT point is this:
No, we really don’t want any.
Alan Huskey Is A Nerd
There’s an insipid country song about being country when country wasn’t cool. Well, despite my misgivings about country EVER being cool, I do feel the sentiment of that song can be universally applied to all sorts of “walks of life”. Take geekdom, for example. My geekdom and that of my friends has become “mainstream” in recent years - basically, marketing experts and people who sell stuff realized that we geeks have a bit of disposable income, so… now you can barely turn around without bumping into something out of our myriad imagined worlds.
How many of you are planning on going to see Avengers this weekend?
Exactly.
The following is a testimonial of geekness from a friend of mine. I can assure you that his tale is similar to many geeks’ and nerds’ tales out there (even mine), so as you read his story, think about the geeks and nerds you know. Was this how it was for them growing up? And you assumed they didn’t have a life. HA!
Apparently, the best revenge (of the nerds!) is living well.
And now, without further ado, Alan Huskey:
I was talking with some friends the other day about the state of gaming, and it got me to thinking. Here were four adult males, all over 30, discussing what used to be a kids’ hobby. How did we get here, and how did we get to where sci fi conventions are covered by major news outlets, and new game releases can achieve “event” status?
I started seriously gaming when I was in high school. More about that in a minute. My real entry to nerd/geekdom was in third grade. I wanted to check out Red Planet by Heinlein from the local bookmobile. (My school did’nt have much of a library, hence the bookmobile.) The librarian told me the book was beyond my level, and I should go get something more appropriate. I refused, and Mom backed me up. (This was the same school that spanked my left hand with a ruler every time I tried to write with it, and punished me when I tried to write in cursive while everyone else was doing rote block letter writing.) After I read it, I was hooked. Badly. In middle school, I discovered The Hobbit. Read that and the Lord of The Rings trilogy within a few weeks. The Silmarillion too. I was on my way.
While living in LA - I was in middle school at the time - I was taken to my first convention ever: SpaceCon 4. It was the Fourth LA Star Trek Convention. 1977. Star Trek actors, people in costumes, props, poster, memorabilia, models, and games, all for sale in a dealers’ room that has acquired mythical status over the years, and in reality was probably no more than 30 or 40 tables at most. I picked up a copy of a pocket game called Star Fleet Battles, by Task Force Games (now called ADB). Took it home and started learning to play with my brother, who was 3 years younger than me. Loved it. I was a HUGE Trek fan, and the starships and space battles were of great interest to me. I thought it was awesome. I still play it today, that is how much impact it had. So now the stage was set. I was an outcast at school, a “nerd”. I read science fiction and fantasy all the time, I played nerdy games, I even fell into the world of Dungeons and Dragons, amidst articles about how dangerous it was to youth, how it was a tool of Satan. (This, among other things, led to a severe dislike of religion, religious dogma, and fanatics who are religious.)
Editor’s Note: Alan probably still liked playing clerics once in a while, despite this dislike of religious trappings.
Finally, in high school, I made a friend who is still my friend to this day. Eric Henry. He introduced me to war games! We played old Avalon Hill and SPI games; he was even in a game of the month club with SPI, so he got regular copies of new games. ACW, ancient naval battles - we tried everything under the sun. Turns out my favorite was World War 2. This led to me purchasing from the local game shop in Highlands NC, a copy of Squad Leader and its gamettes.
I played Dungeons and Dragons up to the early 1990’s, and really stopped because the whole pen and paper role playing thing was not to my liking any more. (This would not change until I grudgingly tried Everquest.) I had discovered Games Workshop and Warhammer 40,000. More on miniature gaming later, if Will lets me repeat this exercise..
I remember the seriously home-grown looking stuff from those early days. A lot of self published game accessories, before the copyright craze of the 80’s. I remember everyone looking at me funny when I mentioned my hobby. I remember weekends of gaming with little to no sleep, playing Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. Advanced Civilization. The list goes on. Now, it’s all popular. Popular culture embraces geekiness and nerdiness. We have entire networks devoted to the stuff we love. Games are slick and well thought out to the last detail. The stuff we dreamed of, but couldn’t do with the tech of the time, is commonplace and easily done on any PC with a decent printer.
I just know one thing: Being a responsible adult, and having to choose between things I wanted to be popular my whole life, and making sure all of the monthly bills are paid, really sucks. I need to win the lottery, so that I can embrace, fully, my inner nerd.
This Idea I Had
It both surprises and pleases me that after three years of posting at least weekly to this site, I really haven’t run out of ideas. It’s helpful, I think, that I have so many varied and relatable interests that other people genuinely want to read about. I’ve written about politics, alcohol, movies, books, games, myself, writing, religion, music, parenthood, myself, TV, books, poetry, several of my friends, local Atlanta shit, philosophy, history, travel, myself, and… myself. People seem to want to read about it all, and I always have a new idea fomenting. To mix metaphors as thoroughly as any writer ever could: there’s plenty of water under the bridge, yet always something over the horizon.
Plus, there’s dick jokes.
One of my recent hairbrained notions was to let other people write posts for my site. I just stuck it out there a couple of weeks ago (dick joke), and already I have three or four people chomping at the bit (painful), wanting to share stuff that they think you, dear reader who comes to my site, would like to read about. I’ve already got a few submissions, and I’m looking forward to some really interesting tirades/observations/stories/histories/verbal porn from other quarters in the coming weeks.
Two things to say about these upcoming posts:
1) I don’t intend for them to supplant my own rants and raves. I’m gonna keep up my usual pace - in fact, I’ve got an interesting book review, an installment of A War Between States, a political tirade, some convivial nudity, and some interesting game session reports all in the pipeline. Plus some dick jokes.
2) I can already tell that some of the “guest” posts are gonna be of better quality and more interest to you, dear reader, than others. I promise you that I won’t subject you to utter crap - I’ll turn that away at the door and get unfriended on Facebook rather than subject you to shit. That is my solemn vow to you.
Still, there are going to be posts you’re gonna like more than others. If you don’t like a guest post, let me (us!) know. Then suck it up and move on. The next post veyr well might be more to your liking.
Also, you’ll always have me and the dick jokes.
Look for the first guest post tomorrow or Wednesday - the personal history of an erstwhile gamer, an old man reminiscing about the days of chits and hex paper, back before those damned kids started camping on his lawn.
Fanboy Analysis of Geek & Sundry’s Tabletop: Settlers of Catan
I don’t play this version of Settlers of Catan anymore with my REAL GAMER FRIENDS. We only play what we call “vanilla” Settlers when we’re introducing newbies to the gaming hobby. Like Wil Wheaton was doing here. And so I wonder: Wil, do you play the Settlers Cities & Knights version? Because you should know that’s the only way to play this game. Really.
Anyway, here is my John Madden-ish rundown of last week’s episode of Tabletop (see my first post about this cool new internet show here), and this time around I think Wil pretty much summed up their game of Settlers of Catan in one profound sentence: “The Robber is a dick.”
The show gave us a statistic about halfway through the episode that I think anyone wanting to play the game should know: seven, the number that makes the Robber do his thing in Settlers, SHOULD only come up about 18% of the time. But these are dice, and dice are fickle, and in this game the Robber reared his ugly head about 29% of the time. Really, the Robber to me represents a negative play experience, but I see no other way to deal with the unfairness that “7″ spaces on the board would represent. So I deal.
But yeah, he’s a dick. And yeah, we’re assuming the Robber is male.
Besides the proliferation of sevens in this particular game of Settlers, three other things struck me about this episode.
First was Wil’s insistence on making the “wheat on” pun work. I’m not going to say anything else about it; it just stood out….
Next was that, after two episodes, Tabletop obviously has a formula: Wil sits down and plays with one white guy, one Asian guy, and one white woman. I personally look forward to when a black dude plays a game with him (although I’m gonna shake my head while simultaneously laughing if they play something like Betrayal at House on the Hill and the black dude bites it first).
Also, I think Wil ought to reach out to the real gaming community and have a couple of fat guys on the show.
Although what he REALLY needs to do is have someone on the show who will laugh at his jokes about having wood. He made the joke that pretty much every person in my gaming community has made at some point, and it fell flat on his audience of fellow gamers. C’mon. “I’ve got wood for sheep” is one of the funniest lines EVER in the world of gaming. It’s a lot funnier than “wheat on” puns… which I won’t mention.
Finally, I’m gonna disparage James Kyson’s game play. I have NO IDEA how intelligent Kyson is in real life, and maybe he was just acting for this episode, but holy shit he played poorly.
Example #1: Early on, Wil was offering him two bricks for one wheat. The camera aimed at Kyson’s hand and we saw that he had two woods, a brick, a wheat, and a sheep. We’d also just seen that Kyson was lacking roads and was getting cut off by Neil Grayston. Had he traded the wheat away for the two brick, he’d have been able to slap down TWO roads and get out of his corner, AND he’d have had three quarters of what he need to build a Settlement once he was out. You have to build roads early on in Settlers, folks, because you can’t spread out otherwise. Kyson neglected to do this and turned down Wil’s generous offer.
Example #2: He says at the end that Neil Grayston came out of nowhere with the win. “I didn’t see it coming,” he said. Well, the episode was truncated, and we the audience didn’t see everything, but even we saw Grayston get:
An additional Settlement for 1 point.
A City for 2 points.
The Largest Army for 2 points.
And the Longest Road for 2 points.
Seven points, James Kyson. You only need 10. You didn’t see that coming? 
So… Neil Grayston, the “white guy who’s not Wil Wheaton” won. Which is obviously also part of the formula, because LAST episode Sean Plott, “the white guy who’s not Wil Wheaton” won.
I dunno, man.
I’d like to make one more point, which is effectively a final plug for the Cities & Knights variant of this game: A lot of times in games of vanilla Settlers, we found that once you became a clear front-runner the way Neil Grayston did, experienced players simply stopped trading with you. This gets frustrating to the front-runner, AND it pisses off people if you DO break down and trade with the front-runner AKA The Great Satan. Generally speaking, the person who’s in SECOND place has the better shot - he or she is within grasp of the win, and people are more willing to trade with him or her. There’s a lot of these “hang back a bit” games, and they get old after a while.
With Cities & Knights there are several paths to victory AND there are work-arounds for the front-runner, should the trading well dry up. It’s a more complicated game, for sure, but it’s far less tedious in the end game, and the wins are much more satisfying.
Especially if you manage to get your Wheat On.
Did I say that out loud?
Jordan*Con 2012
I’ve been so busy this week preparing for this weekend that I haven’t found the time to post. But now I’m just sitting around waiting for my mom and my aunt to show up (they’re taking the kids this weekend for me), and I have a few minutes. So what the heck, I’ll make a quick post and tell you what I’m up to.
I’m going to Jordan*Con.
It’s a local con dedicated to the memory of fantasy writer Robert Jordan, whose Wheel of Time series is one of the most beloved franchises in recent fantasy history. Had he not bogged down his novels with repetition and unwieldy narrative around book 4 or so, and had he not… died… well, he’d likely be right up there with George R.R. Martin. We might be watching The Wheel of Time on HBO, along with Game of Thrones.
At Jordan*Con, I’ve been invited to do three writer panels - one on independent publishing, one on the advent of e-books, and one on self-marketing. If you know me, then you know I have a lot to say on all three subjects.
Aha! That’s the doorbell. They’re here.
Making The Decision Not To Panic
If you’ve ever wondered - like I have - if you could keep your shit together during some disaster, like a zombie apocalypse or a 2012 end of the world earthquake/tsunami/volcano/flood scenario, then you’ll enjoy where I’m coming from with this little story. After experiencing a few potentially disastrous situations, I’ve discovered something about myself that I’m kinda proud of, and that I hope will hold true should the disasters in question “scale up.”
This past weekend I was at Jekyll Island with the family, just taking a few days away from the city to celebrate Easter and get a much needed rest. Sunday evening I got kid duty, and I decided to take Madeleine, who’s just shy of 10, and Eli, who’s 5, to play putt putt golf. Eli fucking LOVES putt putt.
We played through a few holes, and somewhere around the 11th, I made the mistake of stepping into Eli’s backswing. Now, he’s a little guy, and you don’t need a lot of swing to make a golf ball putter toward a hole 20 feet away. Still, a golf club can be a formidable bludgeon, and even a little swing from a little guy can hurt. He hit me in the hand, and I jumped back and yelled. Eli was immediately scared because he hurt Daddy, but the pain was only momentary (nothing broken or even bruised - just a “warning” pop), and it was my fault for walking into his stroke, so I told him not to worry because Daddy had made the mistake, not him.
All was well. Then, on the 18th hole, MADELEINE walked into Eli’s backswing. She’s not as tall as me, so she didn’t get hit in the hand - she got clocked in the face.
And here’s where it happened.
You would not believe the amount of blood a blow to the face with a golf club will bring forth from a 10-year-old girl. Madeleine immediately started screaming – loud enough to draw a crowd, and loud enough to absolutely terrify her little brother.
Blood flowed through her screams. She held both hands to her face, and both of her palms filled with blood until they overflowed, so that within moments, blood was dropping in small puddles onto the walkway and the golf course. I knelt beside her, and as I worked to calm her and to check her out, blood flowed in rivers down MY hands and arms.
But somewhere in there, just as the fact that my daughter was hurt – potentially very badly - registered in my mind, and just as the blood began to gush, some part of me said to every other part of me: “Being afraid for her will not help her. Being conscious of all that blood will not make it stop. There are logical steps you must follow now as her father, and you must do them all while reassuring her and her brother that everything will be fine. Even if you have to go to the hospital in the next few minutes, you have to follow the steps to that end, and you have to do it calmly.”
I made the split second decision not to panic. Instead, I simply knelt beside her, ignored the blood, and looked into her mouth. I told her I needed to check her teeth to make sure they were intact. I touched each one near the place she’d been hit, looking for broken ones or loose ones. Someone brought me a stack of paper towels and I thanked them, then used the towels to wipe away blood and stop the bleeding. Then I looked for the hole which was causing all the blood.
As it turned out, her teeth were fine – she’d simply gashed the inside of her lip.
So there was never any need to panic. In fact, I worried more about Eli blaming himself than I did about Madeleine’s injury (I took care of that, too).
Still, even if there had been something worse – if Madeleine HAD shattered her teeth or needed stitches or something like that, I’m pretty sure I would have taken the same calm, logical approach. And this isn’t the first time I’ve had to go into myself and turn on the cool blue logic. I’ve watched my wife have two grand mal seizures - I simply moved her away from furniture and held her until she was done. I’ve seen a finger severed (not mine), seen a compound fracture as it happened (again, not me). Through it all, I remained calm. I was the one who called 911 and was able to get the injured person to a hospital. And I’m pretty sure I could do it again and again and again.
I only have two concerns. One is how I’d handle things were I the injured party - although I was pretty calm when I broke my jaw, and that hurt like a motherfucker. My other concern is how being half asleep or drunk might affect my ability to keep it cool.
Ultimately, though, I’m pretty pleased. I know how to keep my head.
Which could come in handy when that hidden meteor crashes into the Earth in December.
A Fanboy’s Analysis of Geek & Sundry’s Tabletop: Small World
Seems like every month brings my geekhood further and further into the mainstream - some of the best TV shows on right now are a geek’s wet dream: The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc. This year will see the release of movies like The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The motherfucking Hobbit - all geek fodder to the extreme.
Geek tech, geek culture, geek literature - all are moving more and more into the spotlight, out of the esoteric and into the fore. The only thing that pisses me off about it is that it waited until I was in my 30s to go in that direction. I wasn’t all that cool until I became an old man.
And now there’s an entire internet channel that gives itself totally to all things geek: YouTube and Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry.
In particular, I find myself drawn to the “TV show” called Tabletop - Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day’s brainchild, wherein Wil has a group of “celebrity” guest stars play him in a board game. The inaugural game for episode one of Tabletop was Small World, a Days of Wonder game and a perennial favorite of my gaming group, so naturally, I HAD to watch the show. And then, when it was done, I HAD to write this - an analysis of everybody’s gameplay, and a brief review of the game itself.
I personally see myself as sort of a geeky John Madden, giving post-game commentary. YOU might be saying, “Jeez - only some sort of geeky fanboy would do an analysis of a BOARD game, breaking it down blow by blow like that.”
Well, no shit. Look at the title of this post, why dontcha?
So anyway - Wil does a fine job of succinctly summing up the Small World rules. I fucking wish I had graphics and terminology bubbles floating around me whenever I tried to teach people how to play board games. Every person I’ve taught, with the exception of the Holley brothers, thinks I do a great job teaching games. But when I think of all the time and the strain on my voice that I could have saved had I had quality TV production backing me up….
Small World, by the way, is an excellent game - actually simple in its rules, but comparatively complex and immersive in its strategy and execution. If you’re into gaming and you haven’t tried it, or if you’re thinking about branching out beyond Monopoly and Scattergories, check it out. It’s great.
And now, here’s my blow by blow commentary on Tabletop, Episode One: Small World.
1) On the show, the first player up turned out to be Jenna Busch. Not to be confused with THE Jenna Bush, though at first I myself missed the extra c in her last name. THIS Jenna is a popular and prolific geekdom writer, and I would assume because of her proclivities that she’s really smart - smarter, in fact, than THE Jenna Bush. Judging by her opening move in Small World, though, I’m more hesitant to give her that credit.
First, she chose a combo called the Hill Sorcerors. And why did she choose the Hill Sorcerors? Was it because they’re a great combo that could potentially score her a bunch of points? No. She chose them because she played magic-users a lot in the role-playing games that she likes.
Now, I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt with her choice. After all, this was supposedly her first time playing Small World, and she was going first, so she had to choose her opening combo SOMEHOW. I’m also willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on her opening play - she came in on the board on the side closest to her, something admittedly difficult for newbies to resist, but something you must resist if you’re going to play this game competitively.
You see, the key strategy to Small World is to maximize your limited number of unit tokens. Jenna started with nine. Not many. But there were a couple of places where she could have come onto the board and potentially gotten five points or more on her opening move. She didn’t do that. In fact, she conquered nary a hill, which were available, and would have given her extra points. She conquered two mountains instead.
Of course, maybe Wil failed to explain to Jenna the difference between a hill and a mountain.
2) Next up came Sean Plott, strategy commentator on a number of online games, known on the internets as Day(9). Sean’s funny - I hope Wil and Felicia have him back - but apparently he is also mildly retarded. He grabbed the Giants, a race that thrives on exploiting a position on mountain spaces, and he took exactly ZERO mountain spaces in his opening ploy.
And why at this point was everyone avoiding taking the cheapest available race/power combo - the Forest Halflings? They’re REALLY GOOD opening game.
3) Next up, Grant Imahara, of Mythbuster’s fame. Grant DID choose a great race and power combo, and with it he had a whopping NINE point opening turn. HOWEVER, the show failed to explain how much it costs to get races that are deep in the selection list. Grant’s Pillaging Orcs were five deep, so he technically only netted four points on his turn. Sean’s Giant’s were only one deep, and he scored eight points on his turn, so he netted seven. Better play. Even for a mildly retarded guy.
4) Wil Wheaton himself went next. Wil may know the game well, but the Forest Halflings would have given him potentially nine points at NO cost. His 12-point turn cost him two (net 10), and he only got seven dwarves to play with (just like Snow White, only without a prince to save him when the dwarves failed), and his “Wealthiness” (you gotta watch the episode to understand) was a one-time shot, so the lead he established with his opening move was tenuous.
5) Here’s an observation of something I found amusing: In between rounds, in those cutaway shots so popular in shows like this (and Ghosthunters and Mythbusters and American Pickers and Pawn Stars) Jenna said Wil was “very helpful to newbies like me.” Bullshit. If that were true, he would have told you how retarded your opening move was. And he would have explained to you the difference between a mountain and a hill.
6) Also in between rounds, Grant went on and on about how he beat up Sean the first round, and that he hoped it didn’t come back to haunt him later. Well, dude, of course it will. This is Small World. Revenge is NEVER cold - it’s always steaming hot, like fresh shit. Just you wait.
7) Fortunately, as time went by, the players seemed to be getting the hang of it - Jenna’s Dragon Master Tritons worked well. She played them well, and Wil even seemed ready to give her some good advice at one point - in a roundabout sort of way. Sean accidentally stumbled into a great situation with his Heroic Ghouls. And then Jenna uncovered at the very end the AMAZING combo of the Berserk Amazons. If only someone had access to that power combo before - it’s a game-winner.
Since the episode was edited, I’m left, of course, wondering how long that combo sat on the table like the Forest Halflings did, waiting for some retard to pick it.
8 ) I’m not gonna tell you who won. I want YOU to be as surprised as the people playing were, and if I told you, you’d be less inclined to go watch Tabletop next week - and I think it DESERVES to be watched. And commented on.
Instead, I’ll leave you with these three final observations.
9) People piled up on Grant at the end of the game. Imagine that.
10) The episode was only 30 minutes long. Be prepared. Small World, though relatively short compared to many board games, still has a play time of about an hour and a half. If you’re playing it and your game goes longer than the 30 minutes Wil’s did, you’ll now know why.
11) At the 21:07 mark, Wil called Grant the “barefoot Kenyan guy”, and I had to pause for a second to check whether I was wearing shoes. Because see, if I had been playing, I’d have annihilated them.
I would have been the barefoot KENYON guy.
All Together Now
They say that writing is a lonely profession, and “they” have a point. Although I wouldn’t say that I’m lonely per se when I’m writing - just that I’m alone. Even when I’m at my desk and I have children milling under my feet with their Matchbox cars and Legos. Even when I’m at a bar, esconced in a bar stool with pen and paper in hand. Wherever I am and whoever’s around, I’m typically alone in my head (and if I’m not then I can’t write, because of the distractions). But lonely? No.
Right now, alone, I have a number of projects working. I’ve started not one, not two, but three novels in the past months - and yes, two of them are coming along quite nicely. I also have a short story that I’ve been struggling with since October that’s almost done, and three longish poems that have seen a lot of false starts. I’m also editing a bunch of old stuff, I have my client work (although it’s becoming more and more scarce), and there’s this web site. A lot to keep me busy all by my lonesome.
I don’t think writing should exist in a vacuum, however. At least not my writing. To that end, I’m in the process of sending a bunch of my existing material off to various contests and publishers, all in the hopes that something I wrote will drift ashore someplace nice and be able to set up camp. It’s tough out there - there’s a lot of noise that you have to rise above, and there’s a certain level of resistance to outsiders, i.e. people who exist outside of academia and the “traditional” publishing industry. Sometimes I regret my decision to leave academia and New York. But I can’t go back, not really, not now.
To further get out of the vacuum of my own thoughts, I have you - my audience - and I have social media, which has transformed the world, for better or worse.
In recent months, I’ve also become a big fan of collaboration. Although I love writing - I need to write, kind of like I need to breathe - it’s something I have to do alone, and I don’t always want to be, or act, alone. So I’ve been working with others. As we speak, I have several collaborative irons in the fire.
1) I’ve handed over a bunch of my poetry to a musician friend of mine who’s going to use some of my work as lyrics for her songs.
2) I’ve begun working with a friend, Michael Collins, on a graphic novel - the idea for which I’ve had since 1992. Off and on, I’ve floundered around for an artist who could realize my story, and I think I’ve finally found my guy.
3) Michael’s also working on the graphics for a game I’ve designed. The game design itself is almost there, and to that end, it’s been a real pleasure playtesting it with a whole bunch of my friends: Jay, Jim, Mike, Kristoff, Pierre, Erekh, Brad, Rob, Jeff, Caleb, Eddie, Scott, Tony, Garand, Richard, Lyman, and especially Roberto Arguedas, who gave me a new direction to take the game when the old one was hitting a snag.
The trouble with this game is that it’s based on a popular property, so to make it the way I’d like to make it would require the acquisition of a specific license. I’m hoping to make the best game I can, and then to shop it to various gaming companies who might have the wherewithal to get that license. If that doesn’t happen, or if the game mechanic appeals to a smaller company who can’t afford the license, I suppose I’ll have to repurpose the game to an original story framework. I can do that. I have stories in my head.
4) I’m hitting the Con circuit - baby steps - doing panels with other writers on a variety of subjects. My first outing will be JordanCon here in Atlanta next month. Hopefully, I’ll score more such panels as the months go by.
5) I’m working with a friend who’s quietly trying to break into becoming a publisher. With the advent of ebooks and online marketing and distribution, his overhead is minimal, so he’s willing to take a chance on me. Already, he’s backing my collection of horror short stories, and he’s looking to add other “acts” to his repetoire.
6) With his help, and the help of my incredible editor, Beth, I’ll soon have a novel published in ebook format. I’m launching a web site in the next week or so to market the book, and I’m working with my wife, Aida, on the design and execution of that site.
7) I’ve engaged four artists to work with me on a portion of the novel’s site. What they’re going to do for me is a surprise. First, I’ll announce that the site is live, then I’ll tell you what they’re doing.
8) I’m still working with a whole cast of voice “talent” on my podcast novel, A War Between States, which you can experience/read by clicking on the navigation to it over there on the right.
9) Finally, and if I haven’t said it enough, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Jason Snape, the artist and graphic designer who illustrated both of my short story collections. Jason, man, I have a brand, and it’s all thanks to you.
So you see, writing is an occupation that you have to do by yourself. Sometimes. But it’s never lonely.