Blogaday 2009 Wrap-up

Another Blogaday ends. Time for the wordy wrap-up!

• This year, I did 61 days instead of the previous 30. I have gone into this before with about 2 weeks of semi-prepared content with the expectation that I'd get back to the rest of it later. This time, those 2 weeks were 25% of the total content instead of 50%, so mid-November left me with some head scratching.
  
• The head scratching point is where the magic happens. Not saying that was the best content, but that's where I have to start thinking and stop coasting.
• "Start thinking and stop coasting" should be tattooed on my arm or something.
• Will Rogers used to write a daily newspaper column. He wrote it daily, in the field, and he made it funny. For most other humans, an essay a day is hard work. After my realization that I'm not built up to write an original piece of polished thought every day, I started posting pithy stuff, some that could have just been Twitter fodder. That was okay too.
• I still prefer essays here.
  
• It's actually not hard to think up something to put on a blog every day. I'm walking around thinking alla time. What's hard is noting that something I'm thinking could be put on a blog. The blog has to occupy a balcony seat in your head. I imagine there's a list of things in your head that you compare new experiences to, that you use to contextualize experience. A blog just has to make it onto that list.
• I missed a day in late November again. One of these years I'm going to try not to miss a day.

I'm also trying to top last year's post count, so I'll probably post more in December. It's Advent again, and Art Shop is this Friday -- come by if you're in Philadelphia! -- so I'll have things to talk about. Peace out, blogaday bitches.

Movies November 2009

Samurai Champloo, disc 1
I started watching this on Cartoon Network a few years ago, but never made time for it. The interplay of the late Edo period setting and hip hop is still pretty neat! It distracts me that the English voice for Mugen is the same guy who did Spike in Cowboy Bebop. The voice is too strongly associated with that one character for my ear to just let it slide into another one.

Scrubs, season 1, disc 1
I decided to rewatch this to learn. It's still funny! But what interests me more is how in-your-face the A-B-C plots are for each episode. I rarely notice when TV shows shift plots and acts, because I'm taking it in rather than studying it. But Scrubs just has really obvious set-ups and twists. Normally, obvious is bad, but this time I don't mean obvious = predictable or boring. It's just that when one of these bones of the show happens, it's sticking out of the flesh. Helpful!

Samurai Champloo, disc 2
This story is filling out nicely, and showing more intriguing Japanese history. The sex is strange here, because it's all sit-com sex, i.e., it never happens because of untimely turns of event. Plus Fuu is supposedly 15 years old, but drawn and sexualized older. And even though there was no age of consent in Tokugawa-era Japan, the modern context they made these stories in and the modern U.S. urban anachronisms they include confuse me as I try to figure out whether they're saying something about sex, or just titillating. Regardless of all that, I still dig it.

Samurai Champloo, disc 3
Ditto.

G.I. Joe: Season 1.1: Disc 1
Part research, part nostalgia. It's pretty bad for art, but ok for a 10-year-old's action-adventure fare, even today.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Fun movie! It's a weird adaption, taking a children's book and making it a story about middle age. But that's Wes Anderson for you. It's no Royal Tenenbaums, but I can love it for what it is just fine.

Return of the King (extended)
Good times with my awesome LotR-loving wife.

Once you condense a mote of wisdom into an aphorism, it becomes more ornamental than instructive.

Yeah, I bought stuff

In case you were wondering.

Buy Nothing Day 2009

I haven't decided yet whether I'll participate in BND this year, but I'll promote it here like I do every year.

I 've heard that In This Economy, you need to take advantage of every sale, and retailers will be giving babies away with every purchase, and you don't want to miss that. Hell, I saw one major retailer who claimed to be open today, on Thanksgiving, to try to pick up a few more dollars.

And I don't know who you are, maybe you have a real need, and if you do, friend, go buy something tomorrow.

But if you're closer to my situation, you could stand to take a day and think about the stuff you already have in your life. New stuff will neither improve your condition, nor make your relatives love you more.

The act is only symbolic, but symbols have power when you give it to them. And you're probably going to give that power to some symbol. Why not make it a symbol you choose instead?

You haven't lived until...

Certain phrases trip the neuron set in my head that starts my teeth to grind. One of them is this intellectually poor man's version of the simpler, more urbane, "I recommend...".

A brief list of behaviors Internet tells me I haven't lived until I've done:

• eaten beefaroni with a hello kitty spork
• been to the Mayan Beach Gardens
• eaten a "Bacon Explosion"
• seen a 3 yr old sing ABBA
• felt your way along a jungle path in utter darkness, rounding a corner and spotting a pack of hyenas in a pool of light twenty yards away, with no apparent fence between you.
• witnessed a gargantum fireworks display set to Bee Gees (Staying Alive), MJ, U2 and The Prodigy
• LARPed*
• exsperanced pantanal**
• caught one of those high hard ones
• screwed a Catholic girl
• tried to explain arcane primary procedures and nominating rules to an eleven-year-old watching his first Democratic National Convention on C-Span
• shaked your ass of to house music in Barcelona!

Oh my wasteland of an existence.

*I've done this one, and can say with authority that its absence doesn't bar you from life.
** Totally true.

Why does the future still suck?

Spent two hours working on a Web site tonight, and nothing to show for it so far. But perseverance is key in these sorts of things, I hear. Must... have... operative... site... before... Art Shop....

Yo Mon

I watched the first disc of the G.I. Joe cartoon season 1 (1983) this weekend, and the primary thing I'm left with is the theme song played over and over in my head, except instead of the brass and strings of the original theme song, it's played with a steel drum that sounds slightly synthesized, like someone sampled it into a Moog.

I don't have time to expound on this, but yes, it is maddening.

Thunderstruck

I just realized this morning that I Wish I Were a Little Bar of Soap and If You're Happy and You Know It are the same tune.

Happy birthday, Meredith!

Today is the day we celebrate my wife's birth! I love my wife (seen here with Abraham Lincoln). She is kind to me, and works hard at our marriage, which is one good reason things go well between us -- underwater, she's paddling like a duck.

Here are some more things to know about her:

• Meredith loves warmth, and hates cold, even more than I do.
• She loves our dogs.
• She likes order and symmetry. She likes making it, and a lack of it bothers her.
• She likes assembling things: furniture, puzzles, equations.
• She dyed her hair purple earlier this year, and it looked great. I love it when she tries new things.
• She likes babies. Anybody's babies.
• She's going to quit her job in February, and that will be such a huge adventure.
• She is so liminal right now, and it is so exciting to be next to her while she's doing it.

Happy birthday, baby.

Anticipating Advent

Advent is coming up again in a couple weeks. Last year, as you may recall, I decided I didn't have much faith, and that Jesus didn't seem to be doing much for me. Not that it's Jesus's job to "do things" for me, but I hit that same old wall of feeling fine, but essentially alone, footprints in the sand be damned.

I decided not to stress out about it, and just keep showing up. As a result, this year has been pretty unspiritual, but not wracking. I've gone to church events and participated, sometimes wholeheartedly, sometimes skeptically. But there was still the nag in my head that I didn't get it. And I didn't feel like banging my head to try.

So I didn't. I didn't even think about it most of the time. I just kept showing up, but I'd drop out of things that felt false.

I don't think anything has been resolved, as such. However, I do find myself rested, willing to try again.

Sort of. Once or twice, I've been tempted to think along worn lines, and it's interesting how quickly I recoil, like I found a snake in my bedroll. That gives me the most confidence that I'm headed somewhere real. My built-in bullshit detector is firing.

There is a divine aspect to detecting and rejecting bullshit. God is the arbiter of reality; bullshit is not of God. When something feels fake, it is good and right to find it and excise it.

I've been reading a book by David Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself, which addresses some of the same ideas.

Here's another idea in the book I've been playing with: Benner recommends a meditation where you imagine things about Jesus. You read a passage from the Bible where Jesus is doing something, and you just imagine details into the scene. Details about Jesus. The point is to imagine some personality and life into guy who is supposed to be the incarnation of God, but often comes up as a cryptic weirdo.

Since you can only imagine what you already know, I 'm wary of the line where that you start imposing your own limitations on Jesus. But I can trust that the Holy Spirit is riding herd on the exercise, and keeps me from wandering off.

So I did that every day last week. Some days more vividly that others. No epiphanies, but it did help me to feel like Jesus was realer, closer, and that's what I'm after. Intellectually, I'll continue to have questions, but if I can find a feeling of trust, of humanity... well, that's what I've been missing, isn't it?

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when Advent trundles by this year. I'm hoping for something imaginative.

Further adventures in junk

Ever since I found the box of cameras, I've been more conscious of finding stuff on Wednesday walks. And I haven't had any great finds since. I have noticed other people on the job though.

Reflections:

1) There are pros out here. Other people have been at it longer, are better at it, and plain care more than I do. I see beat-up trucks cruising the streets piled with scrap metal and random stuff in the back. I see beat-down looking older people with roly carts looking for cans and bottles to turn in. This is what these people DO. I'm amazed I find anything at all with them on the circuit.

2) One man's trash does not automatically make another man's treasure. Seeing value is a matter of experience and opportunity -- that goes for garbage or stocks. Today I found a bunch of ball Christmas ornaments someone was throwing out. That's not going to be very interesting to professional scrappers, but it's just the sort of thing I plan to glue eyes to and try to sell in a couple of weeks.

3) Stay easy. I've been looking for more big, sexy scores like the vintage Apple computers I found. If I had been focused on that, I'd have missed the fun I picked up today. Not every day will be great, but the wider your definition of "great" is, the more likely you are to have one.

Interesting times for D und D

Last week, Goodman Games announced that they will start selling 3rd edition D&D stuff again. I am so far out of the loop these days I need binoculars to make out that there even is a loop anymore. But even from here I can see the sparks this thing is throwing off.

Goodman Games basically exists because of the Open Gaming License (OGL), which let outside publishers freely make D&D-compatible game products. It started with their weirdest product, Broncosaurus Rex, combining dinosaurs, science-fiction, the wild west, and the Civil War into one wonderful mashup that screamed, "Now I can publish my secret home campaign for reals!"

Things quickly got more commercial, and Mr. Goodman has made a nice little company out of the whole deal.

Goodman Games was maybe the first and definitely the loudest independent publisher to jump on the official 4e bandwagon. They proclaimed they were all in before the paperwork was done explaining exactly what "all in" meant.

But when the paperwork did come down, it said that official 4e publishers had to not produce any 3e stuff, and couldn't use the official "3e compatible" logo anymore (seen at right). Which meant that anything with the logo printed on it either had to get sold quick, junked, or covered with a sticker.

For most publishers, this meant, "sold quick, and junk the leftovers."

I don't know anybody's sales numbers for 4th edition-compatible products, although Mr. Goodman himself flashed around some comments earlier this year pronouncing the sales were good enough considering the market (my words, not his). However, I humbly submit that if 4e sales were all that great, Goodman Games wouldn't be reprinting old material.

If you thought sales of recent product were sufficient, if you thought they were going to be strong, you wouldn't go back to offering old product. You would invest in more new stuff. Yet one of the most successful independent publishers, who was ready to burn his boats a couple years ago, just refitted and relaunched the fleet. A fleet that potentially competes with his latest offerings.

From a symbolic standpoint, this is kind of a slap for 4e. From a reading-between-the-lines standpoint, this means that nobody except Wizards is making good money on it. And I wouldn't bet on Wizards, frankly. In fact, professionally speaking, I haven't.

Fjurthermore at 467

Bet you'd thought I'd forgotten about good old Fjurthermore, huh? Huh?

Well, maybe for just a while. But every couple of weeks I check in on it, and Meredith checks in on it, and the yeti hideaway grows bit by bit.

The place has grown large enough to require a police department now, but crime is kept very low thanks to vigilant volunteer abominable snowmen and women.

The best Fjurthermore has ever done in the rankings is 89th, and currently, it's at 95th. It's sort of interesting to be right on the neglect threshold.

Want to stop by and add to the population? Then click here!

Affiliated

I'm an Amazon affiliate now. When I mention various purchasable media here, I'll be including links to buy the thing on Amazon.

To many bloggers, this is a Duh-level decision. But I have always quietly deemed QT an ad-free zone. This blog was about writing down things I think, and would serve no other master. So I had to consider the decision to commercialize it via any third party. (Pushing my own stuff is fair game.)

I decided to do it based on a few factors. Amazon links are:

• unobtrusive
• substantively informational in addition to commercial
• testing grounds for my bid to become Internet Famous

I have to imagine pretty hard to see how this could become a problem. But just in case it does, I declare now that I will try to sell out as little as possible, and to be up front about it when I do.

Now go! Go and click on yesterday's board game links, and from there, commence all your Christmas shopping at Amazon in one purchase, without closing your browser window, within 24 hours of first click-through.

Today was a great day

Today was so full, I'm technically writing this on Sunday.

The important thing is that we went to some friends' house tonight, M and I had dinner with Jason and Kim (and Kim's brother, and their kids), and then a bunch of people came over for board games. I am blessed and happy to have such giving friends* and a loving wife.

Also, I kicked ass at Dominion and Power Grid, and Meredith won her game of Pandemic. High fives all around!



*And not just in Philadelphia. I have great friends all over. If you're my friend, then thanks, man (or lady)! You've probably been a better friend to me than I've been back, particularly if you're Monte and I haven't called you back even though you've called me twice now, and what is my problem anyway? Anyway, thanks, friend.

One trick at a time

I don't like repeating. That's one reason why I fear I'll never make much money off monsters -- once I've made one, I don't want to make another one like it. I'll never be an Ugly Doll maker, because Ugly Dolls, while wonderful, are basic, repetitive. I want to keep trying new things.

Here's a picture of some pattern monsters I've been making. (Most of them still need mouths.) Unlike my regular monsters, I have a pattern, I cut it out, I sew all the pieces together. This was supposed to make monsters faster so I could charge less, and theoretically make it up on volume.

Two competing conclusions come from this:

1) They all have the same basic shape, but they come out looking different anyway, so the differentness is good.
2) They same-basic-shapeness is still sort of boring, so I wind up trying to do different things to keep myself interested, which takes longer, which is bad.

Ultimately, they are faster than one-at-a-time monsters. If I focus, I can bang them out. I'm pleased that I natively prefer craftsmanship to commerce, but seriously brain, let's value commerce a little more highly, ok?

I was at the local Family Dollar store today, and this sign accosted me:


I'm a terrible eater, and even I was horrified to think of trying to make a meal out of the products shown there.

Who you know

Realized that there's a large-ish pool of good-enough writers in the world, of which I am a member.

After that, it's a matter of who you know and who likes you that determines who gives you what work.

There's a whole other stratum of high quality writers who get work according to merit and notoriety and making their own damn luck. But guys like me, it's about who you know.

I've been using this principle for a while to get the work I do get, but my network is small. Feels a little deflating it took me this long to come to that conclusion consciously. Maybe I need to start caring more about Media Bistro.

Update: Media Bistro kind of sucks for Philadelphia residents.

20 years of whut?

I don't remember anything about what happened 20 years ago. This whole Berlin Wall deal everybody's talking about, I remember hearing about it in my first year of college, but it doesn't resonate with me like the news tells me it's supposed to. It was this thing that went on in a place.

What else happened 20 years ago that I forgot?

• The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska
• Tiananmen Square massacre
• Soviet forces pull out of Afghanistan (glad that Afghanistan issue is solved!)
  
• 6.9 earthquake hits San Fransisco

I remember all that stuff, but none of it clearly. It's like I stored it all on a 5 1/4" floppy.

Kiva: complex transactions continue to be complex

Remember a while back when I tried to get you to join my Kiva team? Well you still can, but a story in today's New York Times reveals that the money may not be hand-delivered by trained monkeys riding rhinoeroses straight into the wilderlands as I had hoped!

More likely, it goes to a microfinancer, who then throws our money into a big pile that funds a bunch of people:

Mr. Ogden goes so far as to question Kiva’s role in the lending process. “Kiva’s new documentation explains, if you read it, that Kiva is a connector not of individual lenders to individual donors, but of individual lenders to microfinance institutions,” he said. “If Kiva’s users want to be connected to an individual borrower, Kiva doesn’t do that, and so the big question is, do Kiva’s users want to be connected to a microfinance institution — in which case, why do they need Kiva?”

This is disheartening, because you to like to feel you're giving your $25 straight to Mr. Abubakari to help expand his grocery business, when you're really giving it to Sinapi Aba Trust, who, for all you know, might have given the cash to him six months ago, and now SAT has used your money for some other purpose altogether.

Ultimately, Kiva still appears on the level, and the funding you want to get done is still happening. It just appears to be less direct than the fiction we want to spin. I can live with that. Maybe you can too when you join the Quickstart group and we fund some other charitable microfinance group?

A day of rest from blogging

No, not really. Freelance deadlines, Art Shop in less than a month, and relationships to maintain every day. Doesn't leave a man as much time for blogging as he'd like. I'm selling a few RPG books again on eBay. Perhaps you'd like to look at those?

The Celebrity Normalization Plan

I was thinking about little Blanket Jackson today, about how those kids will basically never have a normal life. I can’t save them.

But there are thousands of celebrities in the world I can help. People who might have had a kernel of normalcy at one point, but now are so far into their loopy celebrity lives that they don’t know...

• Who to trust?
• Who to listen to?
• Who will say things that approximate reality, instead of what they want to hear?

I’m Jeff Quick, and I’d like to talk with you about my groundbreaking new Celebrity Normalization Plan. Here’s how it works:

You are a celebrity, who has realized that your coterie of sycophants won’t help you understand reality.

You leave them behind and come live at my house for an intensive two-week training course in how real people live their lives. We’ll cover:

• Budgeting
• Conversation
• Parking
• Reasonable clothing options
• Making your own meals
• Not getting what you want all the time
• Responding well to criticism
• Manners
• And much, MUCH MORE!
  

You may be wondering, "Jeff, why should I join your CNP instead of the thousands, perhaps millions of other normal people in the world who can help me?"

The answer may surprise you... I am not normal. I've never been normal, nor have I received any formal degrees or normalcy certifications.

What I do have is a lifetime studying normal people -- how they live, how they talk to each other, how they behave in public. And after a life of study, I have developed a totally convincing approximation of normality! I'm so seemingly ordinary that many of my closest friends would tell you that I am "normal."

I can do it for you too!

Get in touch with me through the following address: CNP +@+ q u i c k t h i n k i n g . n e t (please remove all spaces and plus signs before you send—this is actually fairly normal) and I'll get you started on the road to normalcy. Just imagine:

• Having realistic expectations
• Drinking in moderation
  
• Keeping romantic matters private

The normal life can be yours with my revolutionary Celebrity Normalization Plan!

Email today!

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

I'm beginning to think that a large part of a life well lived is learning the disparate set of tricks that circumvents your specific set of neuroses.

To do: Stay busy

I've got some freelance I need to be finishing, and I'm coming off a cold, but goddammit, today was the day my professional-painter next-door-neighbor had an open spot, and it wasn't raining, and it wasn't too cold, so today was the day he and I waterproofed the stucco on the side of our house.

Tonight I was seriously going to get something done, but tonight is the night that my friend with the new house and the brand new 2-weeks-early baby needs staples pulled because the floor sander comes on Friday and he doesn't have as much time to pull staples as he thought he would, and man, listen, regular Wednesday night Bible study is just going to get done later. My wife is taking them dinner, and I am about to go help pull staples out of the floor.

Other friends and acquaintances of mine are having problems which I will not go into here, and to the best of my limited ability, I am helping. I am being helped and I am helping.

Being busy is ok business. I like sloth, but basically busy is better. Jeff out.

Adult anxiety dream

You know that one dream where you show up for the final exam, and realize you haven't gone to class all semester and you're freaked out?

I had one of those a couple days ago, only with Art Shop. I dreamed I was setting up my booth, and I had almost nothing to sell.

As of now, at t-minus one month I've got:

• 7 big monsters done, 2 without faces.
• 2 mini monsters mostly done, with another 1 in process.
• 0 hats done, with 1 in process.
• 0 tetris magnet sets done, but all of them in process.
• 1 pillow done, 1 in process, raw materials for 2 more.
• probably 6 or 7 googly-eyed items done, with an unknown number coming. Depends on how many interesting objects I find in the trash in the next month.
  

The goal this year is to diversify offerings, both in product and price spread. Informal polling reveals that hats will likely be the big seller.

I'm not sure what conclusions I'll be able to draw. Realistically, I'm on schedule to have enough stuff done. I'm usually only comfortable though if I'm ahead of schedule. Tonight: magnets!

Review: Beasts of Burden

Let's get my bias out of the way: I like stories with talking animals. I was predisposed to like Beasts of Burden. I don't like scary stories, so I usually don't like horror comics.

But when I saw issue number 2 on sale at the comic store, with Evan Dorkin as writer, and Jill Thompson as illustrator, I immediately went to the back issue bin to find number 1. Bought them both, love them both.

The premise: A group of dogs and a cat band together to be the occultic protectors of a small town.

The review: Dorkin and Thompson do such a wonderful job of pulling you in. The characters are funny, and they have clear personalities based on their breeds, like a war movie. The art is a pleasant watercolor. There's banter, and then the horror clicks on. You can see the formula, but it's still so fresh.

Issue 1 was sort of weird, featuring a rain of frogs. A corgie. A character dies. Issue 2 was fantastically macabre. I was totally suckered by the horror of that story. I still think about it.

You can read the short stories where these characters debuted online at the Dark Horse Comics site. It's worth a few minutes to read.

you can also read the first 10 pages of issue 1 at the Dark Horse site.

Then go buy the comic to support this great thing.

Phil 'er up

I am willfully a Johnny-come-lately Phillies fan.

I care when a Philly team is doing well, and nod politely the rest of the time. This strikes me as just good citizenship.

This World Series makes it frustrating to be any kind of Phillies fan. Most of the Yankees' runs seem to be the Phillies' faults. Meanwhile, the Phillies are knocking balls out of the park, just not when any runners are on base. That's happened twice tonight (bottom of the eighth now.)