Here's a project I'm proud to support- it gets tiring promoting one's self all the time, but it never gets tiring amplifying the awesomeness of other creators. Especially when they are somewhat local. 

Yuka's Way Home by Abigail Roscoe is a beautiful kids' book about reindeer and the Sami. Gorgeously illustrated, I have the Kindle edition and was happy to back the Kickstarter to get a hardcover as well. She's close to hitting her goal, help out if you like! 

I'm also very excited to see what Abigail does next, so I asked her! And she was kind enough to provide this response:

I'm planning to do more books that include indigenous representation and education about key species that need our help, and of course, part of the proceeds of those books will benefit the indigenous communities represented and the species of animal featured.

 I knew I would make mistakes along the way, and that's fine with me- so long as my mistakes cost me and not you! Turns out shipping is a wee bit more expensive than I figured, lol. I used to send tons of letters in the 90s and stamps were 43 cents! So I thought sending a little thin 6X9 book would be maybe two bucks at most. Well, if I have to have a character flaw, naiveté is not the worst one. Anyways, I have made a new PayPal buy it now button that hopefully reflects a bit better. Sadly, I think for most non-Canadians the shipping cost is nearly prohibitive. But nevertheless, I am happy to ship anywhere with these updated shipping costs. I will make a little image here and will probably paste this to the end of all my posts for the time being. Oh! And I added the book up to GoodReads, check it out and give it a rating if you like. 

The Ursus Verses

Canadians! - 8.00 USDAmericans (can only charge one fee for shipping so this higher cost just absorbs the extra cost for shipping to the US) - 16.00 USDWorldwide (Same, to allow for increased postage) - 20.00 USD

And for the Kindle edition, which still has the old cover but where shipping isn't a factor, and it's even cheaper:

 They came! In fact, they came quite a bit earlier than I was anticipating- I was expecting them maybe by the end of this coming week. So that's super cool! I actually discovered the boxes on my veranda when I took Ahsoka out for a walk last night. Maybe they've been there for weeks! Just kidding.

So yeah, I still have to figure out the best way to sell them online, whether with an Etsy shop or Shopify or what have you. So far I've sold a bunch to friends and family and stuff just using interac etransfer and PayPal. That's alright for the first little bit but eventually- and sooner rather than later- I will need something more official. Any recommendations? 

Anyways, I'm pretty proud, happy and excited to finally have a physical copy of The Ursus Verses!

Here's a Throwback Thursday pic- from my trip to New Zealand 16 years ago. We had our annual LOTR viewing over the holidays and it prompted me to pul out my old Location Guidebook for the movies. I don't think this particular locale was used in the movies, though there were certainly similar terrain in some scenes, notably where the Fellowship is first set upon by crebain from Dunland. According to my guidebook, though, that scene was filmed in Kahurangi National Park, near Mt Olympus. My photo was taken, if memory serves, at a place called Kura Tawhiti. Now with Google Maps I can actually look this stuff up.

It's also relevant because we have some concrete news about the Amazon Middle-Earth show, which is now confirmed to be set in the Second Age and deals with the rise of Sauron. Looking forward to that. The early days of this blog were very focused on LOTR stuff, as were the early years of my life. 

 

Some stuff I'm working on now. Drew these icons out of my head, didn't even need any reference ;) but here are some photos from my personal archive to show you how photo-real these icons are! All of these photos were taken by me, in my previous life as a coal miner. You can take the bear out of the mine but you can't take the mine out of the bear or something like that.

 

Boardgames have this much in common with books- you shouldn't judge them by their covers. With boardgames you can go one step further and also add that you shouldn't judge them by their boards. Some games have the ugliest boards ever but are super fun to play, and certainly the reverse is true all too often. Even so I was drawn by the absolutely striking cover image and board art of the upcoming ThunderGryph Kickstarter, Darwin's Journey. Just look at that box! Beautiful. The board is even more so. I got to give it a try last night on TabletopSimulator with some local friends and an Instagram friend from Malaysia- one nice thing about the pandemic is it's taught us how our game groups can be worldwide!

I didn't even realize it was designed by Simone Luciani, a beloved game designer who has made, among others, Grand Austria Hotel and Lorenzo il Magnifico, and co-designed The Voyages of Marco Polo (a game I just received from one of the above game group friends!!! Heart emoji heart emoji how do you make emojis on a computer keyboard <3 ) Grand Austria Hotel is this lovely game where you attract customers to your hotel, hopefully enticing them with your yum food and drinks so that they will stay in your establishment and help you win the game. And you also have to make sure the emperor (of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Probably) is happy with you... All this is done with dice and cards. but manages to make you feel like, yes, you could star in a Wes Anderson movie too!

A quick but necessary digression- I'm fairly new to the online tabletop gaming platforms. I'm also fairly new to being a computer guy at all after four years of not even having a computer and not really noticing. So these platforms are a little tricky to learn and navigate. But the pandemic so you deal, right? A few weeks ago we tried another game on a slightly different platform, and as much as I wanted to love that experience, it was a bust. I won't say the game, since I don't know if it was the game's fault, but I will say it had a similar main mechanic to Grand Austria, but coupled with me learning the digital platform, and it being late (the puppy takes so much out of me) and so forth, I think I would now demand a considerable sum of money before I play that particular game ever again.

But I was willing to give online gaming another try. Just to have social connection with my friends, I was wiling to suffer through the computeriness hassle of learning another game. Whatever game! Just not that last one we tried... and when they suggested Darwin's Journey, which I'd seen in facebook ads and instagram posts, I was hopeful but not too hopeful. And again, there were hiccups but tl;dr, the game was so enjoyable that the friction was easily overcome, whereas with the previous game, it just kicked dirt on the grave, so to speak. Here's a screenshot of the board:

The game is worker placement, my favourite game mechanic, which just means you choose where to go and what to do, but your opponents also have the same freedom so you just sort of do your best. This is already a wordy post so I won't go into too much more detail about that, but Darwin's Journey takes this very common mechanic and does some interesting new things with it. You have to kind of customize your worker, unlocking abilities for each, which determines what they can do. That part is fun and requires some good decision-making. But what wax-seals the deal for me is all the things you do in-game. I love games where you feel like you are doing what the game pretends you are doing. There's always abstraction, but I want to feel like I really am making coffee for this beloved Austrian author at my hotel. And in this game, I want to feel like I really am  Charles Darwin exploring the Galapagos Islands, slowly uncovering evidence for the origin of the species. 

And you do- I think in real life where you're not trying to remember which keys move and which zoom, it will feel much more so, but even on TS, you get the feeling that your boat is following the Beagle, and your little Charles is exploring that island, and studying this species, and mailing reports off to a museum... it kind of makes you wonder if life doesn't change, one might say evolve, incrementally over eons, in response to natural selection! By jove I believe so! 

I'll be honest, even with my science degree and great love for the evolutionary history of this amazing planet, I've never actually read On The Origin of the Species. Maybe if it had a cover with art by Paolo Voto I would! 

The Darwin's Journey Kickstarter goes live tomorrow, go here for more details!