My latest column: Salad Days
My latest boardgame review is about a game that is fast becoming a favorite: Mage Knight.

I enjoy anime, and now and again I’ll binge-watch a bunch on Netflix. I’ve noticed that a lot of anime seems to share some similar themes, which is why I wrote this generic anime theme song:

“You have a special magic power,
And other people have one too…
They try to kill you but you manage to defeat them,
Because they’re not as cool as youuuuuuu…
You have a special magic power,
You have a special magic power,
Love is hiding in the shadows.”

So yeah, that’s like, 50% of anime. And then another 30% is just light relationship silliness. But the remaining 20% has some fascinating and lovely stuff. I recently finished watching Attack On Titan, which although it certainly lacks for closure, is a compelling story with an abnormal theme and kept me on my toes. I think my favorite anime of late has been Death Note — I actually first read a volume of the manga, and found it so intriguing that I immediately went and watched the whole run of the anime on Netflix.

Starting a new monthly comedy open mic tomorrow night at our local coffee house; hopefully it goes well.

Where to begin? I haven’t posted in a while, so let me start with the usual gaming updates: I played some boardgames, especially an old favorite called Goa, and also reviewed a number of new games including two that I especially enjoyed (Johari, Villainy). I also wrote many humor columns including two that I especially enjoyed (Terrifying Bear Danger Rating: A Fear Chart, Bard-Mitzvah: A Shakespearean Travelogue). And I played various video games, including two that I especially enjoyed (Wasteland2, Jade Empire).

I also performed poetry at a few different locations, comedy at a few different locations, and just last night, went to see a comedy performance by Hari Kondabolu. I was chatting with the strangers at my table, a couple from Northampton, and we wondered if one of the reasons people got excited by Kondabolu is that he brings a new edginess; half a century ago it was edgey to swear in your act, or to talk about religion. Nowadays such is commonplace on the comedy scene, but harshly calling out racial privilege repeatedly amidst your comedy act may be the new edgey. (Yes, such may be commonplace in certain small circles, but edgey has always been saying on stage to a wide mainstream audience what you’d normally just say among your friends but not in a room full of strangers.)

Anyway, listening to him talk about such things — and talk about the importance of talking about such things — has prompted me to re-post here a more private journal entry I made a few weeks ago. It is not, alas, funny, but perhaps you will find it worth reading nonetheless:

***

“The Clueless White Guy Chronicles”
or “Epiphanies of the Obvious”
or “Intellectual Knowledge versus Emotional Knowledge”
or “Sometimes Issues Are Sufficiently Large That It’s Hard to Choose a Single Title”

Perhaps some of you are familiar with a video game called Skyrim. I played the hell out of that game, well over 100 hours. A year or two ago, I recall having dinner with two friends of mine, M and Z, as I explained that Skyrim had been a bit of a weird experience for me insofar as my character received continuous random hatred from a majority of the NPCs in the entire game.

I’m playing as an Elf, but most of the people in the world are not Elves. They are Nords. And you start out the game imprisoned by this imperial alliance trying to kill you, and then you’re rescued by a group of rebels fighting the imperials, but it turns out that the rebels think Skyrim is for Nords and they tend to dislike Elves. So of the two opposing sides, it seems like neither really cares about you. And then you can just be walking into a random town, and people will start insulting you because you’re an Elf.

And there’s this one group of NPC heroes who are supposed to be the “good guys” in the game, but their main hero was someone on record as wanting to kill all the elves. And basically, across all of Tamriel, everyone is looking down on me or being a jerk to me for no reason and I don’t want to get in fights in town unnecessarily but it’s hard to just sit there and take non-stop insults and ill-mannered treatment from the entire gameworld, and if I respond in kind it starts a fight, and the town guards show up with a bias against me just because I’m an Elf even though the other guy started the fight. I explained to my friends that this was really frustrating and demoralizing to feel constantly harassed just based on your race.

“Yes, how interesting that must be for you,” my friends said, mockingly, “and how nice to experience that in a video game.”

At this point I should probably mention that my friends M and Z are of Filipino and Iranian descent, respectively. And so for them, a constant casual racism is not so much an anomalous feature of a particularly involved video game, but an all-too-familiar feature of the world. This kind of thing is very old news to half of the country. Now obviously I know this intellectually, but I’m guessing I’m not the only white person who ever found that experiencing racism for a few dozen hours in a video game (even though it’s obviously nothing like dealing with it in real life) makes you understand it in a different way than merely knowing it exists intellectually.

Last week I was thinking about all of that because I had a similar epiphany of the obvious. I’d been binge-watching movies on Netflix, and my recent selections had included a number of films like Shaft, Django Unchained, Harlem Nights, &c. And after a half-dozen films I found myself automatically suspicious of and/or ill-disposed towards any white people who appeared on-screen. I knew they were not to be trusted, and the counter-example of Django’s partner did not change my overall perception. He was “one of the good ones” who was “not like all those other white folks”, and I still knew that I could presume random white guy was probably up to no good, not just a friendly innocent black guy.

My brain did that after two days of movie binge on a very small particular subset of movies in the world. So what happens to the brains of society at large after decades of representation in the other direction? Again, this is in no way a new observation, having been experienced by, pronounced, and written upon by countless people (including many of my friends) for decades. But while I’ve always known intellectually that media representations of minorities are an important problem, it was still a moment for me last week where I said, “Wow, look at the kind of effect I experience on my perception.”

So that is a thing about which I have been thinking lately. And I debated a bit whether to post this where people could see it, both because a) The world is not desperately in need of another white guy’s opinions on race, and b) I’m pretty sure I do not come off looking too bright by saying “Hai guyz, did you know racism is really a thing?” when this is painfully obvious to many people who will read this and less painful but still obvious to most of the rest of you. But I guess that’s what invisible privilege is: The luxury to not think about racial issues, or at best to acknowledge intellectually that they exist but not have to experience or deal with them. So since I have that luxury, I guess literally the least I could do is to mention it, even though it does not make me look great.

So, in only a few weeks, the annual WordxWord spoken word festival will hit Pittsfield, and as always, it promises to be a fantastic event. Also free, through the magic of generous grants. So if you will or can be in the Berkshires from Aug. 17-23, you should check out some of the amazing performances going on — and I’m not just saying that because I’m in the poetry slam semi-finals.*

Before that, though,  I have some freelance work to do. I’m currently working for Mtelegence, a company designing entertaining and engaging programs to help students struggling with literacy. So, my job is to come up with creative ways to help make the world a better place. This has set the bar pretty high for my ideal jobs. My other ideal job, of course, is getting paid to write my books, hence the pair of query letters I sent out to agents last night. I managed to change my template salutation from “Dear AgentFace McGee” to the correct name for each of the two I sent so far, but I figure it’s only a matter of time before I forget when sending one.

Excitingly**, I had a short poem published online in Rogue Particles magazine. Seriously, it’s quite short. Go read it, and then feel free to poke around the site for other people’s interesting stuff too.

Otherwise, things continue much the same. While my neighborhood may be in constant celebration mode, I more quietly aged another year recently, which I celebrated by walking to Jack’s and buying myself a hamburger. Gaming continues, and while my most recent review is of a new game called Bedpans&Broomsticks, the game we’ve played most recently is oddly*** the Kingdom Hearts CCG.

There’s a temptation to write my next column about the situation in the Middle East, but I think making it humorous may be difficult. Still, can’t go worse than my stand-up about mass shootings, right?

*I’m saying it because I’m contractually obligated. Kidding! It seriously is a great festival, and you should go.

**Excitingly for me, that is. Your own level of excitement may very depending on your enjoyment of the poem. Consult your doctor for details. Offer not valid in all states.

***Odd because it’s rare I play boardgames based on videogames. Or any non-Magic CCG, really.

I don’t mean like angry with a side of meatballs. I just mean that as a humor writer, sometimes my reactions to things end up being odd. The latest example is a Christmas tree lighting in my town, which was scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving. Those who know me know I don’t like Christmas decorations to begin with, but I find them absolutely unconscionable before Thanksgiving. It’s part of The War On Thanksgiving*, which I wrote about this week.

However, if you read that column, you’ll notice that there’s no mention of the tree lighting. I had what I considered a good argument that the mayor is part of the War on Thanksgiving, and we should be lighting a 30-foot turkey instead. But at the last minute, the tree-lighting was postponed for a week due to inclement weather. My reaction should be a positive one, because something I was mildly annoyed about has been fixed, and the tree lighting now won’t be until after Thanksgiving.

But it meant the editor had to cut the final section of my column at the last minute, and I didn’t have time to write a new ending. So here I am, being irritated that the thing I complain about is being fixed.

*Technically, the column’s title is “The War on Thanksgiving returkies”. Because I wrote a similar column last year, so it would be redux, but I replaced the ducks** with turkies.

**I’ll send you a bill for this explanation.

This largely describes how I try to be, as a reviewer. I really like reviewing things, because I feel like I do a good job of objectively laying out pros and cons. My favorite evidence to support this opinion is the fact that numerous times, after writing a boardgame review on BGG, I’ve had people respond to the same review with opposite reads. Someone saying “I agree with all your points, this game was missing the wow factor,” and someone else saying, “I agree with all your points, I love this game.” Or another review where someone replied that the review convinced them to buy the game, and someone else replied that the review convinced them not to buy the game. While I’ve enjoyed reviewing books and restaurants as well, I feel like I especially excel at analyzing games and picking out what people will enjoy or not, and so I really like reviewing them.*

If any of you know much about the review world, or the game world, then you know that there’s a lot of cases where reviewers are pressured to give strong reviews to weak products. This is most obvious in the video game world, where there are stories of all sorts, including a reviewer being fired for being one of the only ones to give a bad review to a game that most players agreed was bad. If it often seems like a reviewer is positive about everything, it may be because there’s the very rational fear that if one gives negative reviews, the review copies will stop coming.

I’m certainly not saying that’s the reason why most companies have stopped sending me review copies of board games — I’m pretty sure my removal** from About.com’s game subsite is the main reason for that –but just to note that many reviewers feel like they have to give only positive reviews. I pride myself on giving fair reviews, which means some of them are glowing, some of them are eviscerating, and most fall somewhere between the two. And I’ll admit, the first time I posted to BoardGameGeek a really scathing review of a boardgame I’d been sent a review copy of, I wondered if I’d stop receiving review copies from that company. So far, that hasn’t happened, even after a few more negative reviews. It’s not that I like being negative about games. It’s that I have to.

That way when I say good things about them, you know you can believe me.

*The games, not the people. I could probably offer objective reviews of people as well, but that seems somehow distasteful.

**A while back, About.com decided to lay off all 72 of their subsite associate editors, so while I don’t take the removal personally, it still was an annoying loss of platform. Sort of like that Super Mario level with the donut blocks that drop.

To be fair, given that the only readily-accessible* option is usually death, it’s always a great time to be alive. But I have to say, I really enjoy living in the era of the free and open Internet. Obviously, previous generations didn’t have Internet at all, and between Verizon and SOPA and various other things threatening Net Neutrality and free access for all, it’s unclear whether the next few generations will share what we have now.

But just a minute ago I was thinking, the old green-eyed monster has reared its ugly head, and I wonder what would best fight it, and after discarding the Yankees**, I settled on a yellow power ring, and a quick search for “yellow power ring green lantern” brought me to the Wikipedia page for Sinestro, and then I link-hopped for a while until I reflected that it’s a glorious time to be alive.

Granted, I also enjoy the Internet because it lets me tell you that my comedy show on Friday went well, and point you to my latest boardgame review (Downfall of Pompeii), and my latest column which is about bus-riding veterans, and hey we’re approaching the holidays so it’s never too early to buy gift copies of From God To Verse.

But basically, I enjoy having the Internet, and so I think it’s a great time*** to be alive.

*Dude, Where’s My DeLorean?

**Who fight the Green Monster.

***2:04am

Smashed my head on a support beam today. And it hurt quite a bit. I knew I should put something cold on it, but our icepack had gone missing, so I was left choosing between bags of frozen berries, frozen corn, and frozen edamame. I went with the edamame, although it does make me wonder if there’s a job as injury sommelier where you could pair frozen foods with injured body parts needing icing.

I was hoping this injury might get me writing my book, because my friend Tom had mentioned a neurological condition where people with head injuries start writing a lot. Alas, no such luck. But I suppose in a way I’m lucky it didn’t work out, otherwise there would be the temptation to give myself a concussion whenever I needed motivation. So I’m glad that my (still painful) head injury didn’t make me write anything.*

Previous to smashing my head, I wrote this column about marriage.

*Aside from this blogpost.**

**A discussion with Tom last week confirmed the opinion that my blogging last decade was more entertaining. I am going to try returning more to the form of random blather, and less self-promotion***, since the people who read my blog seem to prefer it.

***Buy my books!

Yes, I know, I should be assembling a more proper Holiday Gift Guide like I did in 2010 so you can buy stuff from my friends. But between empty Etsy storefronts and my own laziness, all I’ll do is point you to that link, rather than try to compile a new list for this year. By next year, there will be enough new products made by friends that I will make a new list. I promise.

Meanwhile, there are worse places to start for holiday gifts than my own books. You can click on the big heading above that says “Books” in fancy font (or HERE), and see summaries of all five. The newest, It Happened In Rhode Island, was officially released at the beginning of this month. It is a series of true stories about historical events that happened in Rhode Island.* These range temporally from the first settlers before the state was officially founded, to last year. They also range in seriousness from a Titanic-like tragedy, to Bob Dylan swapping his acoustic guitar for an electric one.

Naturally, my four other books remain available for purchase. From God To Verse is a line-by-line rhyming translation of the first five books of the Torah/Bible, making it a perfect holiday gift for your religious friends. Rhode Island Curiosities is not only filled with weird people, places, and things to see around Rhode Island, but also sprinkled with limericks and bad pun photo captions. Think You’re The Only One is a collection of sixty-odd profiles of odd groups, a perfect book to adorn your bathroom reading rack. And Shards is my first novel**, about a programmer turned artist, his comedian friend, and begins on an up note.

Anyway, enough hawking of my writing and asking you to pay for it. My columns I give you for free, so here’s last week’s impassioned plea to help defend America from The War On Thanksgiving. And this week I discuss the Hostess with the Leastess.

On the boardgame front, playing lots of new boardgames has taken a backseat to playing the classics overflowing my shelves, while I’m trying to improve the design of the game I’m working on, “Legend of the Cipher”***. It’s been a lifelong goal to design a game, and this one is pretty fun to play, so I hope sometime next year it will be ready to share with the world.

*(“My word,” you exclaim, “I would never have expected that from the title!”)

**And technically, only novel. But don’t let that cheapen it for you.

***I met the LotC team when they were showing off an early version of the game at PAX East. A bit of my cipher may have been caught on film at that point, but I’m not proud enough of it to link to that. Anyway, the important part is, now I’m on the team, and there’s no I in team, although there is an I in blathering.

Or technically, Last Day In May Day!

It’s been an interesting month, with some good things, and various unfortunate events.* I did a lot of editing on the projects I was working on in April. The good news is that I can now add Fodor’s Travel Guides to the list of places for which I have written reviews, and I should have my next book about Rhode Island coming out before the end of the year.

Due to aforementioned unfortunate events, we’ve had very little gaming, although I expect that to change quite a bit in June. And the other bad news is that in spite of now having two fancy microphones thanks to the generosity of others, I can get neither of them to actually record without static on my computer. Which, now that I have finished my most recent editing commitments and have free time again, is becoming an issue. The answer may be that I just try to make some progress on doing things, and then record somewhere else if I have to.

Meanwhile, there’s still comedy. I am not only writing columns for posterity, but most recently wrote a column about what it’s like to write a joke. Which I’ve been thinking about because in addition to attending the occasional comedy open mic, I’m performing at the PAVE Chocolate Festival at the end of June, hosted by Rick Conety. It’s a family-friendly show, which means I can’t do any of my Rick Santorum jokes**. And while RBIT doesn’t seem to appear much in North County these days, we may have a few shows coming up at the Freightyard Pub on second Fridays. This, in combination with the first Thursday comedy open mic at Public, and the fourth Friday poetry slam at the Local, means it’s pretty easy to get out there and see me say ridiculous things, if that appeals to you.

*Life’s gifts have lately been lemony, and even a bit snicket.

**If your family isn’t politically homogenized, it’s possible that vulgarity and sex is more family-friendly than incisive political analysis. Which set of jokes is going to cause more tension in the car ride home?

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, so I figured I may as well get my thoughts down. The short version is: I am hard-wired for media scarcity, and we now live in a time of media abundance. Here follows the long version:

A decent analogy is probably food. There is often a difference between the way people approach food, depending on whether they are used to abundance or scarcity. There are people (myself included) who save and re-use their teabags, because it would be wasteful not to do so, and there is at least two cups of tea in there! And there are people who do not, because why put up with extra hassle and a weak cup of tea to save ten cents! There are people who will want to save even small amounts as leftovers, and there are people who will leave half-finished plates at restaurants and not stoop to a doggie bag.

Speaking of half-finished plates, some people will stop half-way through if they aren’t particularly enjoying the food, and toss it. Other people (me) will finish a mediocre dinner, because it would be a waste not to. Some people when presented with a plate of four foods, will start in immediately on eating the one that most appeals to them. Other people (again, me) may start with the less appealing food under the time-honored principle of “save the best for last”.

However, if you are at an all-you-can-eat buffet, such actions are madness. You should eat the best first, because if you like it there is more best to be had. There’s no reason to start with things you might not enjoy. And if you do have a small serving of something, and don’t like it, stop after a single bite and get something else. There is abundance! Buffets are tricky and dangerous for those used to being perpetually hungry, as the glutton can easily over-eat. In a place of abundance, it is better to be a buffet gourmet, and eat the most delicious food, rather than simply the most food.

I am a media glutton in a world of abundance.

Video games, like teabags, I would save and re-use, having played through the original Final Fantasy more times than I can remember. It would be unthinkable in my youth not to clear my RPG plate of sidequests, let alone quit an RPG half-way through just because I thought it was only mediocre. And I always saved the best for last — when I first bought Final Fantasy and Faxanadu, I started with Faxanadu because I knew Final Fantasy was the game I was most excited about.

But the modern world is an all-you-can-eat media buffet. My shelf of console games has at least half a dozen games I was excited about that I have not even started, and two dozen more I got on sale that might be good. My Steam account has two dozen titles I really want to play, and another five dozen I might try. I began by playing the “maybe” games, saving the best for last, until my partner convinced me this was preposterous.

As usual, she was entirely correct. In a world of media abundance, settling for mediocre makes no sense. Rather, I should start right in on the best, because when I finish it, there will be more best available. Likewise, rather than running the optional post-game 100-floor dungeon to squeeze everything out of one game, I should simply move on to the next game. And if I try a game and find it mediocre, rather than slogging onwards, I should just pick up the next game. (Note that these are all formulated as “should” rather than “do”.)

And it’s not just video games. You’re reading this on the Internet, which means you have an abundance of things to browse. I have Netflix, an abundance of things to watch. Libraries are an abundance of things to read. I have over 200 boardgames, an abundance to play. We live in a world of media abundance, and there are certain behaviors more appropriate for this world than a world of scarcity and media conservation.

But old habits die hard. My partner can walk away from a movie she’s not enjoying after a half-hour. I still feel compelled to finish the movie. I still greedily devour borrowed media (books, movies, games, etc.) that may disappear soon, even if more appetizing media sits upon my own shelf, because I have the idea of scarcity. And while I no longer start off with the games I think I won’t like, if I have three new games I think I will really like, I still save my favorite for last.

It’s a difficult mental shift. For anyone who lived in poverty for a time, some of those habits stay with you even if you now earn a big salary. And media is no different. I know, intellectually, that we live in an all-you-can-eat media buffet, that more new media is produced every year than I could consume in a lifetime, and that I need never worry about running out of media again. But we are what we have lived through, and forged by a time of media scarcity*, I am still unfit for this world of abundance. Hopefully I can start to shift from glutton to gourmet, and realize that I can’t consume all the media, so the best thing I can do is figure out which I will most enjoy.

*(In a way, it’s insane to call my childhood “scarcity”, because I grew up with TV and a library, which is a cornucopia of media abundance. But with regards to movies and video games, there was a scarcity of what I possessed. And certainly I now have an embarrassment of abundance.)