And Finally, Games

 Alright, Happy New Year everyone. May it be better than DumpsterFire2020. Here is my games stuff, which required more graphics! First, the completed 2020 overall report:

But just counting games isn't enough, we need to do now many different games and all that! So yes, 

But of those plays, we have different games as well as games that were new to me this year:

And, here is how I did with my 10X10, which is a thing some baord gamers do to try to get some games played ten times. I failed badly:

And finally, here is the most played games of 2020:

Yup. I spent quite a bit of time on this, lol. But it was fun. I got the maple vectors from Boardgamegeek, btw.

Comics 2020!

 

I read a lot of comics this year! Probably a record, although 2017 came close:

I think last year I closed out my file at Happy Harbour, which resulted in an immense monthly savings- comics are expensive- and more of a focus on Marvel Unlimited. I still have a pile of floppies I need to read but for the most part I am doggedly trying to read every Marvel Universe comic ever. Just 50,000 more to go! So I will need to live another century, please. Most years I was pretty scattershot, reading a Fantastic Four here, an X-Men there, now an Amazing Spider-Man, and what about the Hulk what is he up to... but this year I decided to try and get all the comics synced up in time. That will be an ongoing project, as all the previous years' random issue-hopping left me with a bit of a mess. But I have Avengers, Iron Man and Captain America synced up in 1968:

Captain America actually started with issue #100, which was a name change from Strange Tales, I think. I didn't read too many of those. The early Lee/Kirby stuff is a little harder to read, stock plots and not much characterization, but later Thor stuff by Kirby sans Lee is absolutely amazing. He was definitely the King.

Have Some More!

 I know, this is only of interest to me. But it is very interesting to me! Here's the updated chart with movies and workouts added. With movies I started including completed seasons of TV shows in the number, but probably started doing that in 2018, which might explain why 2017 is so low compared to everything else. And I am assuming we will finish our Lord of the Rings marathon tonight and tomorrow that we started last night. Tradition. 

Of course this pandemic year we probably all watched more movies than normal, just not at the theatre. Oh, and I counted watching official concert YouTubes from bands like Metallica and Gojira. Those were greatly appreciated as well in a year with no live shows. Gojira's show at Red Rocks especially was amazing, like on another world. Which is a good Gojira joke if you know.

My workouts would have been really exceptional this year but when Ahsoka came I stopped dead, pretty much. Worked out once since she arrived. Hopefully that will change in the new year. My Apple Watch recorded all our walks (including walks to school) as workouts so it is very happy with me, but I am not counting those. But I did record my outside run KM total- 163.88 kms! Pretty good. I also did a lot of running on my treadmill but that's in miles and I don't know what that means.

InfoGraphstravaganza!!

 

Alright time to show my true nerd colours. I made an infographic! Two, actually. Both by copying exactly what Nick says, of Logos By Nick. That guy has taught me so much. He's like Yoda. 

Yeah so I've been keeping track of a bunch of stuff over the years in a notebook. Actually I have many notebooks, each for different purposes. One notebook I originally started keeping track of which comics I'd read, kind of with an eye to making sure I was getting my money's worth out of my Marvel Unlimited subscription. From there it was easy to start keeping track of other stuff too, and nothing is funner to me than writing in my notebooks so. Sadly, my original notebook was lost so although I would have had data going back to 2011 I think, we are instead limited to 2017. Oh well! Makes making the infographic easier. And to be clear, I don't actually expect anyone else in the world to care about this. I just like geeking out and making these has been both fun and informative.

2020 is kind of an anomalous year, for all the reasons we are only too well aware of. Even so, my National Geographic-reading has gone way off the chart, as you can see with this infographic here (I am pretending I am giving a presentation to the board of directors of my life lol)

A major reason was actually not that I was unemployed, but rather, in the time before I was laid off I was able to read a ton of back issues I had laying around at my Grandma's house while at work. Going to work on the  bus but also sitting there in a shovel, waiting for the coal trucks to return. I think one night I had one or two trucks, got maybe 8 loads all night, and read two whole issues of NG in between. Since being laid off my numbers dropped back down to like 2018-levels. Even so, I recommend the board buy stock in NGC. Just kidding I don't know anything about stocks.

Books are a steadier statistic, as we turn our attention now to this:

I guess I'm a pretty slow reader. 2017 was a good year, though! I no longer recall why lol. I can say that last year my favourite book was unquestionably Gideon the Ninth, which I loved so much I reread it this year prior to diving into the sequel, Harrow the Ninth. It is possible I named my CX-3 after Harrowhark. It is also possible I will need a whole nother infographic to keep track of the number of times I read both books, as well as the third coming in 2021.

I know, there are still a few days left in 2020. But at the rate I read now, with Ahsoka taking up a lot of tie, I am confidant this number won't change. But that is why I left the other fields blank for now. Over the next few days I'll fill some of those in. Exciting! Tell your friends! This might be what finally makes me go viral!!!! 

 

All The Ends of The World I've Known

Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction

Look out at the night sky and you'll see

A Christmas Star atop this awful year

that was the end of the world, again

It was another conjunction of planets

that heralded my first end of the world

back when I was five years old and

which I can find no evidence for, now

But my dad's friend said it was so and 

I believed him- you would have too-

with his moustache and doberman pinscher

and a telescope he got from a Sears catalogue

He said all nine planets were about to align

and that sadly, this would destabilize the gravity

of the entire Solar System, and you can see how

the Earth therefore is doomed, utterly doomed

My dad said it was fine and I didn't need to worry

But what kid ever heeded that advice?

So I looked out at the night sky

and waited for the end of the world

Eventually nothing happened and we moved on

to the next inevitable end of the world

of which there was no shortage in the era

of acid rain, ozone holes, Chernobyl and Reagan

The end of the Cold War was so close but we thought 

it was actually much closer and that it would end

in nuclear fire today, or tomorrow at the latest

No one expected the Iron Curtain to fall like it did

Y2K came and went, and 911 was bad

But we weathered it and 2008 and even

the Mayan Calendar reared its head in 2012

And the lesson is, eventually nothing happens

I passed this lesson on to my kids not quite a year ago

when we kept hearing about this novel coronavirus 

Don't worry, I said, eventually nothing happens

and we will forget about this and life will go on

And damn, if that wasn't the worst advice 

I've ever given as a dad. I beg forgiveness-

All the ends of the world I've known 

didn't prepare me for this one, or the next.

 I'm pretty excited- my proof for Volume 1 of The Ursus Verses arrives tomorrow! I'll be honest- there were some red flags in their system when they set up the file and told me how it looked. But I did the best I could, with the tools I have. Hopefully it looks fine- something I can be proud of. I'm nervous too, and it was way worse earlier today when I was sure I'd made the hugest tactical error I could make.

See this die? I made it! By doing exactly everything Nick does in a Logos By Nick tutorial. But even so, pretty proud!

I had no idea you could do this stuff without artistic skill. I'm not being falsely modest- even artists who have immense skill wouldn't actually have to use that skill to create this! It's amazing, really, and maybe every school kid knows this already but for me I am amazed. I just want to increase my competency at InkScape, to help with future volumes and different stuff. So I thought why not be productive while I learned:

Ok, so, the trees aren't mine, I didn't make them. I got them at Vecteezy where you can use tons of stuff for free with attribution. But the xmas balls are mine- again made by following Nick step-by-step. Though I added the amateurish meeple in the middle and the thing that holds the hook. It's a worker placement spot! Pallas and I designed a boardgame years ago, and it has sat on our game shelf ever since, where we occasionally take it out and playtest it. The board was just ugly ugly sketches by me, so I decided to use my newfound skills as well as existing assets to make some nicer art. In game prototyping you don't want to get too fancy with the art, since it is never final, and should a publisher pick it up, they will change everything anyway. So all I want is a playable prototype that doesn't look like ... well, like I drew it.

Fun right? I went to print it out and this was the alarming result:

I knew InkScape had issues with CMYK, (printers need a CMYK colour profile rather than the RGB profile of screens, since print doesn't quite have the same range of colour as pixels) but I didn't expect it to be this bad! No big deal, right? Except... I created the cover for my chapbook in InkScape! What horror awaits me tomorrow when the proof gets here? I felt that knot in my stomach, and even though they said it looked alright and they could work with it, I had a doubt. Urg! But proofs exist for this very reason- to correct problems before the print run is made and you are stuck with it forever.

Still, though, that little guy yanking on my guts wouldn't shut up. I tweeted the two pics above, sort of to show how much I have to learn, not to complain or anything, and an InkScape programmer saw it and replied with some helpful advice and to also say, basically, "looks like you're out of blue ink, dude" and sure enough, he was right. Lol. The new page looks way better.

Alright. Worry Guy is silent. Excited again!

How to make a chapbook and destroy the universe

"The first transport is away. The first transport is away!"

Except in my case it is the first Volume. And there are no rebel pilots to cheer me on and also try to draw AT-AT fire heroically upon themselves. But that's ok, Ahsoka is snorting in her sleep so that is all the applause I need...

I have sent the files for The Ursus Verses Volume 1 away to the printer. If all goes well- and I've already had to do a second try for the text pdf- I should have the shipment in late January. Which gives me just over a month to learn how to make an online store! This whole "making a chapbook" thing has been one steep learning curve after another. Learning mountain, more like. And this post today will be a design diary, sort of like boardgame designers do on boardgamegeek.com all the time. Those are really cool, I think. Hopefully it will be helpful to anyone embarking on a similar project.

In the beginning, there was ignorance. No light whatsoever. I didn't even know what a chapbook was! I was freshly laid off from my coal-mining job I'd had my entire adult life, basically. Because of the pandemic, Michelle and I decided I would not look for another job for a while, so I would be able to stay home in case of school shutdowns and so forth. As a bonus, I was going to do a bit more writing and submit to some lit mags and anthologies if I came across any. Pretty low-key, really. 

One of the email writing newsletters I subscribe to has quarterly contests- flash fiction, poetry, short stories, you know, writerly bread and butter. Back in late September I think they had a contest for chapbooks. I'd heard of them, but didn't really know what they were. Essentially- short, usually self-published collections of poetry or fiction, maybe 25-40 pages. I may not be a novelist, but I definitely have 25-40 pages of poetry and short fiction laying around! Several 25-40 pages worth, in fact. 

I decided to do it! Not the contest, since you needed to actually send a finished product. But I decided to make a chapbook. Several, eventually, but one to start with. The Ursus Verses Volume 1 would focus on the early years of this very blog. Poems and flash fiction and some short stories. I compiled the contents together, a nice mixture I felt of fun stuff. Other than the focus on earlier works (though I did wind up including more recent stuff too), if there was any unifying theme it would be monsters. Lots of monsters. Fun monsters, to be sure. Bears and monsters. They always say to write the book you want to read! I definitely did that.

What order should it all go in, though? That was kind of fun, I did more of a board game designer thing and wrote each title on a scrap of paper. Then I colour-coded them. A pink line along the top if it was a poem. Brown stripe on the left if it was about bears, purple on the right if it was monsters. Etc etc, then I ordered them in a way so that there was a good progression and variety. I think it turned out ok! 

So I opened up Word, the one piece of software I know how to use! Or, wait, why is it all different. I don't understand... why is this not the same as Word 97?? Arghhh!!!!! I literally couldn't even insert a new page at the end of my document, that's how clueless I was. It has been years since I'd even used a computer, my iMac died in 2016 and I just used my iPad and iPhone ever since. Borrowed Michelle's MacBook Air and yeah. I had to relearn how to use frickin' Word. See? You're almost certainly ahead of me in the process if you can insert a blank page in a document. You got this!

Eventually I figured that out, and I wrote an introduction as well as back matter that talked about the genesis of each piece. And that was all it took to make the inside of the chapbook! Took me a while, because I did a lot of editing and even some major rewriting for Swampy Joe and the Plasma Dragon. I'll say... a month? Maybe not quite? In the meantime I had asked on Twitter how to make a chapbook, and River Selkie!! Yes, that River Selkie, aka Denise Ganley, now host of the Heart-Shaped Books podcast, and old- old-school friend of the blog, told me about Vellum.

Listen, friends, Vellum isn't cheap. And it's Mac-only. I thought long and hard but I did finally pull the trigger. Super easy for generating ebooks, which I did in no time after doing the included tutorial. Here is the result of that, a great first step. But my main goal was always a print version.

I only got the ebook version of Vellum, though for a bit more money you can also get the version that generates print editions. I was going to get that version, but this whole time I had also been asking questions and making phone calls and doing my homework. This is what I found- if you want to do print on demand, from a company like Ingram Spark, then the print book version of Vellum should be more than adequate. But I got a referral for a printing company from a local literary magazine, and I called them, and they had never heard of Vellum. Not a good sign. Maybe it still could have done the job, but I didn't want to risk it. They recommended Adobe InDesign, the industry standard, to create a single-page pdf. 

The easiest thing at that point would have been to sign up for Adobe Creative Suite or whatever it's called, but the monthly subscription fee is a little more than this unemployed coal miner was ready to pay. If you can afford it, however, I would say do it. But I chose the Open Source route, and it worked out ok. In fact, as I was writing this post I got the email from the printing company that my pdf was usable so yay! I made it with Scribus.

In the meantime there are all these little details you need to do as you go along, for example you probably need an ISBN, which for Canadians is super easy. I don't know about anyone else, though, but I suspect it is universally easy. Canadians, go here to sign up and apply for your numbers. It's free! But getting a barcode is not free, and you will have to decide if you want one or not.

Also, for the ebook version I just Worded up a logo with one of the included fonts, and well, you can definitely tell that's what I did. Since I intend to make multiple volumes, I decided to commission a logo from a professional. In fact at first I reached out to an Indigenous maker, since that sort of representation is important to me, but I don't know if there was a communication breakdown or what but they ghosted me. So I got a Twitter mutual to make one for me. I love it! And since it's a vector file I can change the colour for each volume, or use it on promotional materials, maybe even make an enamel pin from it at some point. Up to you if you want to make that investment, it will likely be one of your more significant costs, though.

Yeah, so, Scribus. Free. Powerful. Not user friendly. I googled a YouTube tutorial and I was off to the races. I recommend this one, by M.K. Williams. Though I think I will use automatic text boxes next time! I watched it once through, took notes, then opened Scribus and watched it again and just did everything she did. But always I have these little ideas I want to do that aren't covered by the tutorials, but I figured it out, because the tutorial gives you enough knowledge to explore. Prior to watching it I didn't even know how to open a document.

In the meantime my logo file had come, and I had to design my book cover! I'm really lucky in that, years and years ago I had commissioned several artists to make me art for this blog, and so I just secured permission to use those assets for a for-profit chapbook. You will have to decide how you want to go about it for your cover, maybe you make your own, or use stock photos, or commission an artist. Again, that will be a significant expense, but very worth it.

Industry standard is Adobe Illustrator, but I used InkScape and I really like it. Same thing, couldn't even open the file until I sat down and watched some tutorials. Basically this channel, Logos By Nick,  taught me everything I need to know just from watching a bunch of his videos. So good! Fun even. I had no idea, I always thought you had to be a good artist to do this stuff. 

Took some experimenting and getting feedback from friends, but I got my cover. You need to know your page count, and paper weight to determine how thick your spine is, and add that to double the page size to make your wraparound cover image. For me, I needed seven elements: title logo, cover art, my name on the front. Title and name and little Volume number indicator on the spine, and then some back cover art and a blurb. You don't even need that if you don't want! 

I think that's it! Took two solid months and a little bit, and if all goes well I should get the books late January. In the meantime I've been making great progress on Volume 2!

My next step is to set up an online store. Again, I'll be starting from scratch.... I think I'll take a moment to rest first though. We got a puppy and Naia had to do two weeks of homeschooling when her classmate had a positive covid test during all this, and so yeah, I'm tired! 

Any questions just ask in the comments or find me on Twitter @NathanWaddell1 

For that matter, if, after reading this post, you decide it all sounds like too much work, well, I am for hire, depending on your needs. Get in touch. 

And if you want to preorder a copy of The Ursus Verses Volume 1 let me know as well. I'll put you on a list or something. 

I guess we didn't destroy the universe after all. Sorry! Next time. Making the store will probably destroy my universe anyway.

 One thing this pandemic has been good for has been all these collaborations between homebound musicians, and the livestreams and stuff they do. In fact, I finished a story last week that was based on an idea I've had for years, but the concept of remote performances and livestreams and stuff turned out to be the spark needed to really give it life. Not sure what I'm going to do with that story, yet. I'd like to submit it  to some of the magazines I like, but it doesn't fit super neatly into any category. Science fiction I guess, or well....fantasy? Contemporary fantasy? I dunno, it's just uncanny. It's about heavy metal and kaiju, kind of. It's really fun, though, if I do say so myself. I'll let you know if it ever finds a home.

In the meantime, I've been meaning to make a list of cool covers and whatever else that I've enjoyed and/or been meaning to take the time to watch. One of the earliest ones directly attributable to the pandemic that I saw was this fantastic performance of Godzilla by Blue Öyster Cult.

Larkin Poe are amazing, and they have put out a lot of great performing from home videos, like this one, but really just watch every single one of their videos.

Scott Ian and Charlie Benante have been very active as well, teaming up together as Anthrax and S.O.D. of course but also separately with everyone from Sepultura (who have produced a great quarantine series for their new album Quarta, called Sepulquarta) to DMC for some fun jams. I really liked this King of Rock medley

DMC also shows up in this - I need more synonyms for awesome fantastic etc etc- killer rendition of We Care A Lot by like everyone ever. Except for Billy Gould!  Love it!

One of my faves- this cover of Holy Wars...The Punishment Due by members of Mastodon, Revocation and Dethklok.

Now I have some stuff I haven't watched yet but want to drop the links to come back to later:

Metallica covering Alice In Chain's Would? but can't find an official link. Search later!

Vicky Psarakis, Falling Away From Me.

Khemmis, Come Out and Play

I can't believe I didn't dust off this old blog last year when The Mandalorian premiered! That show is like everything I ever wanted in Star Wars. I did take the above photo for my Instagram about this time last year. It definitely seemed like Filoni and Favreau's philosophy was to make a show as if they were playing with their old Star Wars figures. This week's episode was amazing- maybe the best? I dunno, I have like a top ten already and there have only been 13 or 14 episodes. But I don't want to talk too much about them- people on Facebook on Twitter just can't help themselves it seems, they gotta spoil shit. Well, not me. 

Can't wait for next week! 

I love learning about subspecies of bears. You'd think I would have heard of all of them by now but I still run into new ones. Quick shameless plug, but relevant - my story "The Winged Whale" in Volume 1 of The Ursus Verses is about one such subspecies, despite what the title might lead you to believe.

Pictured above, though, is a photo of an ad. I had to make it at least a little artsy to try to avoid copyright infringement and what not. I mean who takes pictures of ads right? But Canon's "Wildlife As Canon Sees It" is a legendary ad campaign that has run in every issue of National Geographic since 1982. This particular edition was in the April 1992 issue. (I'm still reading all the back issues I can, when I have time.) Back in 1992 they weren't even sure if the Gobi Bear was an actual subspecies or not. I see now on Wikipedia that it is recognized as such- Ursus arctos gobiensis.

I always find it useful to google the species Canon highlights in their ads, especially as I read back issues from a couple of decades ago. Where are they now, kind of. How many are left, to be blunt. It's not as depressing as you might guess, though it's rarely encouraging, either. So in 1992, the best estimate was about 40-60 surviving individuals. The wikipedia article cited a number of 30 from a study in 2007. And this site- which is awesome by the way, just discovered it now- guesses a population of about 40 right now. Which isn't awesome. Inbreeding alone is probably going to doom this subspecies.

 Ahsoka is here! Busy day, very tiring, but very awesome. Here's some pics, hopefully I can get some sleep tonight- the only thing she hasn't really taken to is crate training. She batted 1.000 for potty training though!

 

A current picture of my nightstand. I thought not working would give me some time to catch up on my reading but the pile just keeps getting bigger. The stars have aligned somewhat this past week, however, and I have finished reading a bunch of books in rapid succession. At least for me. You know how on Overdrive if you're reading a book and it expires it just goes away? Finally got a bunch of those books back that I was already mostly finished. Anyways. What follows is a list of the books I've read this month, but before I forget I made The Ursus Verses available for Overdrive collections, so if you have an Overdrive account through your local library could you take a few minutes to recommend it to them? That would mean a lot to me, thank you.

Ok. The books.

First up, The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman. Birds are dinosaurs, right? Old news though. They are also geniuses. This book explains how. I have a newfound respect for Chickadees but also a newfound disrespect for sparrows. Go away sparrows! 

1990 was one of the best years ever, as far as I'm concerned. Many of my favourite albums of all time came out that year. Happens to all of us when we are 15 or 16, yeah? But in my beloved genre of heavy metal it is widely acknowledged that many of the genre's best offerings came out that year. Persistence of Time. Seasons in the Abyss. And Rust In Peace. Absolute masterpiece. Masterpeace. Anyways Dave Mustaine put out a book about the making of this seminal Megadeth album. Every metalhead knows Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica for being a junkie but I had no idea he only just got clean right when they went to record RIP. He was such a mess it's kind of amazing Rust is even coherent let alone the absolute monster it is. But him and Dave Ellefson did manage to get cleaned up and the rest is history. If you're not a metalhead this won't be of any interest to you whatsoever. 

I really like N.K. Jemisin. Her book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was excellent, so I was glad to read the sequel, The Broken Kingdoms. Quite a different book than the first one, but still really engaging. I think there's yet a third book, and of course then I can tackle her other series. I also read her book about New York City earlier this year. She's the best.

Another series I enjoy has been Theodora Goss' Athena Club uh, I always forget the actual series name. Started off with The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter and the third one, that I just read, is The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl. The series is about the daughters of all the famous Victorian-era monsters. Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein and so forth. Sherlock Holmes is in it- though he is not the star. Good books! I first discovered Goss in an anthology- a short story that I enjoyed so much that I immediately looked her up on Twitter and discovered her first book was coming out. I wish I could now remember what the short story was! I'd love to reread it.

One day earlier this year a package arrived in the mail, unlooked for- always the best kind! My brother-in-law's family, so Pallas and Naia's cousins, had sent us a book they really enjoyed. We had just outgrown our habit of reading aloud to the kids every night- we now read together but each their own book. I think my brother and sister-in-law read it to their kids that way. It's called The Green Ember. It's about rabbits, and is slightly easier to read than Watership Down, a book I read as an adult and had a hard time with. It was really dark, as I recall. The Green Ember is not as dark, though certainly has that fairy tale non aversion to violence, if that's fair to say.

Alright gotta go get some reading in. Ahsoka arrives tomorrow! 

 

 I haven't gone anywhere in forever but it's been an eventful few days. I mean, sort of. It's about to be, that's for sure.

First, online stuff. I signed up for a MOOC today out of my Alma Mater, the good old University of Alberta. It's called Indigenous Canada. Maybe you've seen Dan Levy tweet about it. It's really good so far. Some years ago I took what we wound up affectionately calling the #superMOOC which was about gender and sexuality in comic books, and that was really valuable and interesting. Indigenous representation, respect and reconciliation is something I'm very interested in and have been for a while, so this seems like kind of the bare minimum of something I should do before I go much further in writing Indigenous characters while not appropriating or being otherwise inappropriate.

Another very cool thing that came along at just the right time for me was a quote I got from one of the most recent episodes of Brené Brown's podcast, Unlocking Us- the one with wrier Gabby Rivera. I could just write the quote out but I think you should listen for yourself. It will jump out at you if you are a writer. And if you aren't or don't have the time or whatever multitude  of other reasons, leave a comment and I will tell you in the comments. It gave me life today.

What else. I got a professional logo made for The Ursus Verses, which is something I was waiting on before going ahead with the print edition. The logo I made in Word was alright just to get something out there but for a print version I knew I needed something professional. I'm quite pleased with it and stay tuned I am sure I will show it to you soon. Also leave a comment if you want to preorder the print version of volume 1 of The Ursus Verses, available already in ebook format on Amazon and Kobo. 

And I've said it on social media all over the place so this probably isn't news but I just realized I never said anything on the blog- on Friday we are getting a bear cub! Well, a puppy that looks just like a bear cub. Her name is Ahsoka and here is a picture because omg she is the cutest thing ever. I love her! Can't wait until Friday.

"If your story is about what your story is about, you're in trouble."

 -Robert McKee, paraphrased

I'm writing a story that's pure fun. Getting back to the joy of writing, for me. It's essentially a kaiju story, but hopefully one that's never been done before. It's also a love letter to heavy metal and is all about kick-ass women kicking ass. Among other things.  But at its heart, it is about fighting a monster. 

And that's really it. I realized the main characters don't really grow or change, or have any conflict amongst themselves.... they just start out kicking ass and end up kicking asser. 

The only real challenge for me as a writer has been figuring out how to manifest a giant robot using nothing but the awesome power of heavy metal! I tried googling that but it wasn't as informative as I would have liked. 

So as I write I'm also editing and adding stuff in, that's what we do, right? Write! Right! I think if I add just a touch of a character flaw that can be worked through, and maybe a minor interpersonal conflict, it will be a stronger story. I hope so! I freely admit that characterization has never been my strongest suit as a writer, though of course I'm working on it and hopefully getting better all the time.

The books in the photo have been helpful to me, though it's actually been quite a while since I read them, and I could benefit from a reread of a few of them. Bossk was flabbergasted about the Seven Basic Plots one- as far as he's concerned the only plot that matters is Bossk Gets Bounty.

Are you working on a story? Have any writing weaknesses you're working on?

 4 1/2 Writing Lessons Learned from the Boardgame Design Realm

On Instagram I finally changed my bio away from coal-mining stuff. It now says "Boardgamer. Also a writer." Little bit of modesty maybe in putting writing second, but boardgames is a huge love of mine. I spend as much time as I can get away with playing games, and when I can't I'm still consuming bg-related media, especially podcasts. I dipped a toe in the boardgame designer space though only as, at best, a tertiary hobby. Writing is the thing I am best at so I am choosing to focus on that. But, here are some lessons I've gleaned from over there that I think translates pretty well to the writing life, since both are, after all, about creativity.

1. Rapid Iteration: the doctrine in bg-design is to prototype rapidly. Have an idea? Cobble something together out of lint and whatever other odds and ends you have laying around and get something to the table, just to see if the idea is any fun and worth pursuing. Doesn't have to be pretty- in fact, making it pretty is a waste of time at this point in the process. I have a story in 40 Below Volume 2 that I wrote in one sitting and that didn't require any revision. I know, right? Why can't it always be so easy? I want it to be, but waiting for that to happen is actually hindrance, and I've started just writing a fast first draft by hand in a notebook, not worrying about making it polished at all. This tells you right away if you have a story worth working on. And it counts as writing, I think. Maybe even the most important kind of writing. 

2. Playtesting. There's this one podcast I listen to, the Board Game Design Lab, where if you made a drinking game out of every time they say "playtesting"you would die of alcohol poisoning in like five minutes. Playtesting means getting as many people as possible to play your (now much more polished) prototype so they can give you feedback, including feedback such as 'This game really sucks!'. Once you have a working draft get as many beta-readers and proofreaders as possible before sending it away. This is kind of tricky though, since reading someone's unfinal work isn't a huge priority for a lot of people. In playtesting it's the same problem so the advice is be a generous playtester so that you aren't always saying "hey try my game I gotta go bye!" Offer to read other writers' work. But offer good feedback too, which is a whole skill all on its own, for sure.

3. Play a Lot of Games: this is the best homework ever. Heck yeah I'll play a lot of games to learn about how to make them! The parallel is obvious- read widely. Read lots. Just read. It will make you a better writer. When I was a kid and read The Lord of the Rings for the first time, I immediately wrote my first stab at a fantasy story- it was about these creatures (that looked just like the mystics from The Dark Crystal which I also loved) who had.... ten rings.... and they had to . . . you know. . . probably destroy the rings so the dark lord . . . of course it was crap. Read read read and not just the same type of thing you love already, branch out and read stuff you wouldn't otherwise be interested in. It all goes into your mental cauldron and the soup that comes out is yum and unique to you.

4. Steal, copy, pillage and plunder. In boardgames, there are only so many gameplay mechanics, and though innovation does happen, it is completely acceptable to design a worker placement game about vikings even though there are already a ton of worker placement games about vikings. Maybe replace Vikings with zombies. But you take from here and you take from there and remix it and now it's new. This is ok in the bg industry. 

BUT

4 1/2 Make sure the best part of your game isn't something you stole from another game: Don't just reskin a game and sell it. Plagiarism is bad. As in my example with the ten-ring mystic creatures, simple regurgitation isn't cool. Add something new, something unique to bring to your story. You have a unique voice, and I want to hear it! This advice I can attribute directly to JB Howell, whose game Reavers of Midgard (a worker placement game about vikings!) is pictured below.

 Just went live on Kobo as well. 

 My plan, when I was laid off, was to write more, and submit more. I've had some success getting published, so I thought I would try to build up a solid writerly resume that way, piece by piece. And indeed I do still submit stuff, but back in September I learned about chapbooks and realized they were kind of the perfect medium for what I do. I'm not a novelist, after all. Maybe one day but not now. But I have a nice big catalogue of work that stretches back the entire life of this blog, 18 years, and then some. Which is a long-winded way of introducing my first chapbook, available right now on Amazon!  With plans to diversify into the other ebook markets and also do a print run. And I know I can do at least three more of these just with material that already exists, and hopefully even six volumes eventually. The writerly resume I want! Much of the writing was first published here, though not all of it. Anyways check it out!

This Halloween

I love my local library, Edmonton Public. Since the pandemic started I haven't been to a branch in person but thanks to Twitter and their email newsletter I've been able to keep up a little with what they're doing. Can't wait to visit the newly reopened and renovated Stanley A. Milner main branch when I get a chance. I signed up for this Zoom meeting that was all about Twine, which I didn't know anything about but I've found signing up for these sorts of things is almost always valuable. Twine is pretty cool, at its simplest it is a way to make choose your own adventure stories fairly easily. Not understanding this, I got to work making a branching poem on multiple sheets of paper before I even investigated how to use Twine. Turns out if I had just gone to Twinery in the first place I could have saved a few trees. Now my next trick is to figure out how to embed it here, and maybe I figured it out. Hopefully. Well, you won't see this if I manage it, but as I type this I am on my third attempt! I'm sure it will work this time: 

 Did it work?

 NO! *%$*&#@$^&(*&**%##^^&*&*(^$; (cartoon swearing because I never swear in real life) 

Ok fine, here is a link to the google page I made but I wanted to embed it right here in this post.

 The poem itself is not a masterpiece at all- it's terrible and I don't mind admitting it. I just wanted to have something to bring to the workshop, and to gain hands-on experience. But it will work as my Halloween story for this year!

I tried embedding it using the html iframe function. If you know how to do this please let me know. It seemed simple enough but yet. 

 Another significant milestone for me- and I almost didn't notice. I was telling a story to my family about staying in a men's shelter back on  my cross-Canada hitch-hiking trip, and Pallas asked me how old I was when I did it. 

"I was 23," I said. "And that was 23 years ago."

Kind of blew my mind. I realize it's not anything most people would care about but on this one little tiny corner of the internet I get to decide what gets talked about! Definitely one of the adventures in my life that has shaped who I am.

The story I told the kids was about staying in a men's shelter in I think Ajax, Ontario. Somewhere close to Toronto anyway. I was just there one night after a day of thumbing so I needed to find a place to stay and someone mentioned a "men's hostel" nearby. Sounded good to me so off I went. Turns out yeah it was a homeless shelter. They had room though so I registered to stay there for the night. I was fully prepared to pay for my berth but in fact I was informed otherwise.

"In the morning come here and we will give you your three dollars for staying here."

"Um, no, I don't need three dollars."

"We have to give it to you."

"No thanks, I don't need it. But that's very nice of you."

"Sir, it's the law. You have to take it."

That  made the girls laugh, and when I was a kid of 23 I thought it was pretty hilarious myself. With an additional 23 years of experience and wisdom I see now how this funny law of requiring each guest at a homeless shelter to receive $3 from the government would need to have a system of checks and balances and budgetary whathaveyou to protect unscrupulous people from taking advantage of it. And I'm not talking about the guests. 

Anyways I just gave my toonie and a loonie to one of the guys there that I met and befriended. I think he was able to use it along with his own allowance to buy a pack of smokes. Once it was mine I was free to do with it what I wanted, and once it was his, ditto!

 Happy bloggiversary to me! Hard to believe this little blog is now old enough to drink, at least here in Alberta. I haven't been advertising the fact that I'm more or less active again, because the world has changed a lot in the past 18 years. There's not really a blogosphere anymore. Not in the same way. Social media kind of killed that off. The several year gap in this very blog is a symptom of that for sure.

Regardless, 18 years is pretty impressive. Makes you miss 2002, especially in this cursed year of 2020. This is a good time to announce, to not really anyone in particular, that I've been working on a series of chapbooks which encompass a lot of the creative writing I used to do as well some of the stuff I've since done elsewhere. First volume is coming along nicely. I'll just publish them myself and get them out there. Be a good writing resume and something I can point to and say, I made that. Took 18 years goddammit but I did it.

Cheers!

 I discovered that helicarriers were real! More or less. First a quick history in pictures as to what a helicarrier really looks like- the MCU version was super cool but the comic version was more heli less carrier. Here it is in its first appearance as depicted by the King, Jack Kirby:

And how it looked when I was more familiar with it in the late 70s/early 80s:

Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were both WWII vets and would have been familiar with the pre-war rigid airships. I was reading a National Geographic today that had an article about the USS Macon, an American Navy airship. A lead zeppelin, sort of. The damnedest thing was, it carried a complement of five biplanes, little Spitfighters that were stored inside but were deployed by a hook. They had to latch onto the hook to "land" as well! Somehow I was unaware of this fact my whole life. Pretty neat. It only lasted two years and then it crashed into the ocean where it lays still. They've located the remains as well as a few of the Spitfires. Too deep and damaged to salvage, as far as I know. The article was from 1992 so maybe since then they've brought it up but I really doubt it. Click here to go to the wikipedia article, it's pretty cool. I always thought the helicarrier was one of the more outlandish flights of fancy Stan Lee and Jack Kirby took but maybe they really took a flight on an airship, or saw one.

Pilars of the Earth

A friend of mine lent me the game Pillars of the Earth. I've never read the book, but Michelle has, and I was always interested in the board game based on it. Even the fact that they made a game based on this thick tome of historical fiction about (presumably) building a cathedral is pretty fascinating don't you think?

I played it once solo to learn the rules, then played it once with Pallas and once today with Michelle. Both of them liked it, and I really like it too. It's got a beautiful board with some beautiful components, and it's a worker placement game with some different takes on the whole worker mechanic, so it's pretty much exactly what I look for in a game.

It's pretty simple really. Six rounds, broken into two main phases. First phase you draft some cards- either you send a certain number of workers (you have a bunch) to one of three resource areas in exchange for a certain number of resource cubes, or you pay some gold to buy another craftsperson which you take into your hand. Maximum hand number of these crafters is five. They are what convert your resources into victory points later on.

The second phase is where it gets interesting- each player has a number of master workers in a bag, and each worker is drawn blind from the bag one by one. The first worker drawn has the option to either pay 7 gold (a lot) to place their worker on the board, or pass. Either way the next worker drawn from the bag, even if it's the same colour as the previously drawn one, has the same opportunity, only this time it only costs 6 gold. This goes all the way down and if everyone passes, then all workers still left can be placed for free in the order they were first drawn. This is quite unique to my experience and a lot of fun as it makes for some hard and interesting decisions.

The board has a bunch of places that offer differing benefits, as in all worker placements. The trick is to pick the one that gets you the most points, and of course your opponents are blocking you and forcing you to think fast to change tactics. After each round another piece of the cathedral is placed, and at the end of the game you have a cool little wooden cathedral in the middle of the board.

This game isn't super new, and I described it to Pallas as "it's like they heard about worker placement games and only had a vague idea of what those are and designed a cool game based on their conceptions." Which I totally dig. It does stuff I haven't seen in other wp games. It's fun! But if I'm honest I was a little disappointed that the big wooden cathedral, the biggest hook in the game, is really just a glorified round tracker. After each round you add a piece. That's it. And the thing is, there are three other round trackers built into the game already- the craftsperson cards, the favour cards and the event cards all double as ways to keep track of the rounds.

This has the unfortunate effect of turning the big wooden pieces into a gimmick. I really hate to say that, because this is a really fun game! I thought players would maybe work together to gather the necessary resources to build each piece, with maybe points for the player who contributes the most or penalties to those who don't, as in the constructed markets in Euphoria (the game I discussed in the previous post). I almost thought about designing my own variant where this is what you do, but that is a little ambitious and beyond my skills, so I didn't. I wonder if anyone has?

The other day on Twitter someone started a good discussion by calling out some prominent board game YouTubers who had taken it upon themselves to "fix" Elizabeth Hargrave's new game Mariposas. Which I have and have played twice now. I really like it. You play a bunch of Monarch butterflies who have to migrate from Michoacan up to Canada and back, picking up resources and card sets along the way. It's really hard- collecting sets to get points is not always possible while also meeting the other goals and requirements of the game. So RandomDude decided to make a rule where something something something. I dunno. He made it easier anyways.

So, on the one hand, if you buy a game, you have every right to house rule and do whatever you want with it. You bought it. Bonk each other on the head with the board and smash each other in the face with the box for all I care. 

On the other hand, doing this with your platform of thousands and implying you know better than the designer is a little ... I can see where this raises eyebrows. Especially when Elizabeth Hargrave, award-winning designer of the massively huge game Wingspan, has had to face all kinds of misogynistic passive aggressiveness and aggressive aggressiveness just for being a woman in the board game design world. 

And again, if RandomDude was just saying "this is too hard so I made it easier for me lol lol I'm terrible at games" I would be the first one to give a thumbsup emoji. You do you! Have fun! But this RandomDude (who is not just some random dude at all but one of the biggest BG personalities) has a history of blundering into these sorts of gendered "controversies" (for want of a better term, these are hardly scandals on the scale of separating children from their parents in ICE concentration camps) and claiming innocent ignorance.  "Oh I didn't realize I was being a dick! Teach me better I want to learn!!" I'm less inclined lately to pardon ignorance when your google bar is just right over there. 

But I do wish we were actively building the cathedral in Pillars of the Earth.

Euphoria is one of my favourite games, and certainly one of my most photogenic. It's a bit of a tough one to teach, though. I kind of had a good spiel (this is a funny pun for boardgamers) down for it but I also haven't had much opportunity to practice it on anyone since this whole rigamarole so. Pallas and Michelle both enjoy it though. Last night I played it solo which is something I don't mind doing occasionally.  

Stonemaier games almost always come with a solo variant using something they call Automatically Factory, which I have tried for Euphoria but honestly, with worker placement games I am almost always just as happy to just play two different colours and see what happens. I guess that takes away from the competitiveness of it, which is kind of the point of playing games, but I honestly just like the feeling of helping to build up this utopia.

Euphoria's tagline is "Build a Better Utopia" but one of the things I love about the game is that's sort of disingenuous, as you come to realize when you look at all the fluff text that really you're kind of a force for not good in this world. It's a dystopia and you are trying to be in charge of it, sort of. It's subtle and perhaps a touch unclear which is partly why it is difficult to teach. Ultimately you're just trying to be the first to place your ten stars, which is just game speak for accomplish any ten things that score. 

Broadly speaking there's four different factions on the board, three ground based and one up in the clouds. Each offers certain resources and commodities which you collect and trade in whatever ways you see fit to help you get closer to victory. Maybe you want to collect some gold bars (the gold bar resources you get are beautiful heavy bricks) to help build a market. That gets you a star, and if someone else didn't help, they don't get a star, and also they have now a penalty that applies to them until they can find a way to place a star.

And you do all this not with worker meeples as in many other games (that happy fellow above is a miner meeple not controlled by any single player) but with dice. Dice are your workers, and their different values determine what they can do for you. And if the total value of your dice is too high, that means your workers are too smart and one of them runs away. Lol. I'm not trying to teach you the game, just give you some flavour for it. Anyways it's all interconnected and strategic. And so fun! Michelle beats me every time. One reason why I like playing against myself, but even there last night I lost against myself. But I also won I guess.

 It's Read In Week which in normal years means people from the community come to schools and read to the kids. This being 2020 we do it all by google meets and such. But I did get to zoom into Naia's grade 4 class today. Same thing, in normal years usually we'd've already gnet to Meet The Teachers night and the girls would have excitedly shown us their classrooms and all the projects they're working on. So yeah, even by zoom (google meet sorry) it was cool to see her class and even her teacher. Everyone wearing masks. I read the story from a couple weeks ago, Curse of the Dad Joke, at Naia's request, as well as a poem originally posted here back in .... 2003? Long time ago. The F.A.F.A.F. (I was going to try to link to it but apparently the permalink are not really working anymore. It's ok, I'm working on something more better.)

Tomorrow I'm zooming into Pallas' class and I will read my short story Dams which was printed in a local anthology but has never been online. I originally wrote that quite some time ago, too. Been going over a lot of my old writing, seeing which of it holds up. Salvaging some of it, anyway.

Ever heard of Twine? It sounds vaguely familiar from listening to CBC's Spark. Got my EPL newsletter today and they have some sort of zoom thing involving writing something on Twine, so I signed up. Might as well, right? I have the time. I think it's just writing stories with hypertext. A few years ago for Mother's Day I wrote Michelle a whole Choose Your Own Adventure story - I even downloaded a template with the red border and got the girls to draw the cover. It was fun- aliens come and kidnap Pallas and Naia and Michelle has to use her ingenuity and kickassness to get them back. That was just a one-off but it was fun to write the various pathways.

 I've really hit a good stride this week, I think, with my "work" days. I hit on a project idea for myself- maybe last Friday? which has really energized me. I won't say anything about it for now. It's fun for me though. I've tried different things with a workspace and coffee and all that to hit just the right paramters. If you know you know and you probably do. Today I even tried standing up to do some typing, and that was good though when Michelle's laptop (that I've been using, all my other tech is dead or close to it) battery ran down I sat back down. 

I didn't go for a run, which has also been huge for creativity, but I did go for a lunchtime walk over to the pond not far from my house. It's been a lovely September so being outside has been amazing. I watched the Canada geese and some loonish looking things which I don't think are loons. Hey why don't I post some pics since this has apparently been a bird blog lately lol. Actually Naia and I also went to the same park to throw a football around today after supper and we saw three bluejays too, which I tried to photograph but didn't really get any good shots. 

My point though, beyond the birds, is this has been a really good time for me, now two months into my layoff. I don't believe in fate or destiny at all but I am where I am "meant" to be. I don't like that word since it implies we have purpose and all that. Let me say, I'm where I'm optimized to be. Perfectly adapted for this situation we find ourselves in. Not to tempt fate (which lucky for me doesn't exist!) with the virus still out there but yeah. I am happy. How are you?

 I was walking Pallas over to  a nearby park and we saw that same bird I mentioned last week, got a slightly better picture of it but the crucial identifying feature isn't shown, though we clearly saw it. A red patch on her head! Easy enough to google that and the result was Hairy Woodpecker.  I know these are hardly exotic birds but they're a big deal for me in my nondescript Edmonton backyard!

Stonemaier Games announced the second Wingspan expansion today! Quite a striking box art, as with all the Wingspan art. I'm excited for this since it was my trip to New Zealand that really opened my eyes to how cool birds are. I'll never forget Been looking out the window of Wedge and saying, "There's a parrot out there."

I had no idea there were parrots in New Zealand. Where are parrots from? I'm not super sure. What even are parrots? Anyways the kea is the world's only alpine parrot and I can't wait to see its card in Wingspan. Hopefully it's special power is to open your backpack and steal all your food! Here's my photo of that kea from sixteen years ago (!):

Hmm. Well since the last time I was super active on this blog my Flickr account was essentially taken hostage- they wanted fifty bucks or all my photos but a thousand would be deleted forever. So I just deleted them myself- I save them to various places but I can't find my Kea anywhere. Oh well it wasn't a great photo or anything. But it was mine.

Curse of the Dad Joke

Naia was throwing bullets. And Pallas was catching kicks like a pro. It was a perfect October afternoon of football in the park. Dad called them in for a huddle and a high five.

 "Great job, girls," he said. "Hi5s all around! I think I need to go home and help Mom with supper though. Before I go, here's a joke for you."

 "No!" Pallas said. "No jokes!" 

"Why did Cinderella get kicked off the football team?"

 Pallas rolled her eyes, but Naia said, "Why?" 

"Because she kept running away from the ball!" 

 The girls groaned and Dad ran home.

 "Let's practice our spirals!" 

Naia headed downfield and Pallas wound up to throw a perfect pass, the ball zipping through the air as if shot from a cannon. But it didn't reach its target!

 Instead it collided midair with some strange flying thing, knocking the strange flying thing out of the air with a ferkluffenish thud. Pallas and Naia ran to the crash site from opposite ends of the field. It was a beautiful woman wearing orange robes and a hat. Pallas extended her hand to help her up. The woman dusted herself off, using the sweepy end of a broom to wipe her feet. 

 "Two things," Naia said. "First, sorry for knocking you out of the sky. And second, are you a witch? Or a fairy???" 

"Yes, I am a witch." The witch looked at the two sisters, seeming to notice them for the first time. 

"I thought witches were green," said Pallas. 

"Witches are whatever colour they want to be," said the witch. Who was green now.

 "Wow!!" 

"Most witches would put a devilish hex on you for knocking them down like that," said the witch. 

“We're very sorry! We were practicing football. You can play with us if you want," Pallas said. 

The witch was climbing onto her broom, with every intention of flying away, but she looked into the eyes of these two small, wicked children, and said, "Football is not really my jam, but you two remind me so much of myself when I was young, so, why not? I will play."

 Football with a witch turned out to be the funnest thing ever, if not really in keeping with any of the rules. Magic spells and flying brooms and perfect spirals opening wormholes in reality. Pallas and Naia were laughing so hard they collapsed in heaps on the ground. The witch had never had so much fun in all her centuries. 

"Thank you, little witchlings. That was amazing. But I need to go. And you know, I still owe you a hex." 

"You're still going to hex us?" Naia asked. 

The witch smiled. "No. Not ever. But I will still cast a hex for you, anything you want. As long as it's wicked and witchy."

 Pallas said, "Ok, we just need to huddle for a minute." She took Naia a short distance and they whispered and conferred as if planning the final play of the Grey Cup.

 "OK," said Pallas, after they returned. "Can you hex our Dad so he doesn't tell Dad jokes anymore?" 

The witch thought about this. "I won't compel your dad to do anything against his will. I am a force for chaos and mischief but I still strongly believe in consent. But I think I know just the thing." She held her hands just so, fingers making claws, and spoke an ancient and forgotten tongue. Witchish, probably. Then she blew both sisters a kiss and climbed on her broom and flew away. 

The girls looked at each other, shrugged, and went home for supper.

 "That was fun!" said Naia.

 The family gathered around the table, eating and talking about their days. Pallas kept sniffing, the crisp October air giving her a runny nose.

 "Hey Pallas," Dad said, "What do you do with a runny nose?" 

Pallas side-eyed Dad. "What?" 

"Catch it before it gets away!" Dad's laugh was abruptly cut off, however, when his nose jumped off his face and started running like a bat out of hell. He shrieked and fell out of his chair. His nose was running all over the board game shelf, knocking over Lego and dice and making a terrible mess. 

Dad slipped and tripped and stepped on Legos and D20s. His nose blew boogers at him! His own nose!

“I can't believe this is happening! I swear I will never tell another Dad joke as long as I live!" 

With that his nose calmly walked back and reattached itself to his face. Dad fainted. 

Naia said, "Enzgurgh smuild!" 

Pallas said, "What does that mean?" 

"It means 'hooray' in Witchish!”

 What's your favourite bird? When I was a kid it was the bald eagle, I liked it so much I even learned its latin name which I still remember, almost forty years later. Haliaeetus leucocephalus. And eagles are still pretty damn cool, but through no fault of their own they also reek of American symbolism. Hmm. I kind of like hummingbirds. I installed a hummingbird feeder earlier this year but I didn't see any- maybe I was too late in the season to attract them, maybe they don't really frequent the area. How does one market to hummingbirds anyway? Mostly I have sparrows. They didn't care for the sunflower seed-heavy feed I put out this year. Usually they gobble the birdseed I put out in less than 24 hours but there's still some of that stuff left. 

Gotten a few different species this year too, which I haven't seen before. Hopefully it's a sign that bird populations in general are more healthy than they've been. Don't be fooled, though. Shifting baseline syndrome is definitely a thing. We tend to think the conditions (ecological conditions like faunal populations) we grew up with are normal, but really they were already in really bad shape, so when we perceive an improvement we are more impressed than we should be, since the actual baseline from whenever you want to measure it, say a hundred years ago or a thousand, was way way higher. There used to be ten billion passenger pigeons a hundred years ago, but now there are zero. Or when I was a kid, bald eagles were relatively rare, having been hurt by DDT and other things, but now they are much more common than in the 80s. But still not at their optimum population.

Anyway, my point was to post some of the pictures of cool birds I've taken this year. I no longer have a DLSR and I usually have to take pics quick before they fly away so I'm not saying these are amazing photos. But it is kind of amazing to me the variety of birds we can get in my neck of the Woods since when I was kid the baseline was basically sparrow and ravens. 

Western Tanager:

House Thrush:

This one just showed up the other day and I don't know what it is. 

And then at work- where I used to work I mean which is still weird to say- we always had a bunch of these flying around. They rarely sat still long enough to get a good look at them but they definitely had a red colouring, but I'm pretty sure they are different than a house thrush:

So yeah. I like birds. Also at work I got to watch a juvenile bald eagle practice flying, with I assume one of its parents supervising. I took some video but the eagle is hard to see, I think I mainly just got the adult. Well, maybe I'll upload it somewhere one of these days. It's a bit of a rigmarole not having my own computer though so not right now. I was going to talk about Wingspan and Mariposas tonight too, but those could really go in their own posts.