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.