orrynemrys

Sin City Excursion Day 2

My only regret about the first day in Vegas is that we didn’t head over to Fremont after dark. There’s a section of the original downtown Las Vegas area that we’ve seen on television, with street performers and a large, colorful, light-up canopy overhead, that I would love to experience. Given that we were pretty exhausted by then – remember, Vegas is two hours earlier than we are in Kansas – we didn’t make it over there until the next morning.

Fremont was still pretty cool. Plenty of folks haunting the stretch of road, and we found a decent breakfast (I had chicken and waffles, and it was damned filling). Stopped at a souvenir shop and picked up some LV merch for me and my lady wife back home. After we’d had enough, we caught an uber to the north end of the strip to check out the Mandalay and the Luxor.

I had it in mind to locate the shark aquarium at the Mandalay, but I didn’t find any signage for it by the time we transitioned over to the next hotel. The Luxor was a marvel: built inside a pyramid structure, the guest rooms lined the inner walls with 30 stories of balconies overlooking the interior, which housed some pretty cool exhibits. And of course, there was a fun Egyptian theme throughout, with some very big statues.

After cruising outside and past the front doors of Excalibur, I proposed that we check out the local Meow Wolf exhibit, Omega Mart. I’d read a bunch about their Convergence Station installation in Denver when we lived close enough to check it out, but I’d never had the cash to take the family up to see it. But this was the perfect opportunity to see what the fuss was all about, and my brother had talked up Omega Mart quite a bit.

It was… I mean… wow.

Omega Mart is a bizarre. otherworldly supermarket full of items some futuristic extradimensional scientists developed to emulate similar markets of our modern society. And it was weird, in all the right ways. The level of detail was absolutely bonkers, from items like Mammoth Chunks and Emergency Clams to P-2000 Cracker Spackle, complete with ingredient lists and existential peril. But the fund doesn’t stop there! Through the freezers you find a tunnel to a whole factory of strange machines and a miasma of interdimensional mishaps. Much of the exhibit is interactive, and as VIPs we were provided an employee scan card that laid out some of the strange mystery at the heart of the operation.

It was crazy, and we had a fantastic time.

Lunch was at a German place called Hofbrauhaus. It was pricey, but let’s just say it was kind of a religious experience. And of course, I bought a huge ass beer mug with the logo on the side.

That evening we prepped ourselves for the main event: Penn & Teller at the Rio. It was hard not to be almost giddy about it, and when planning the trip I had purchased us tickets in the fourth row almost dead center. Not only were they ridiculously good seats, but I wanted Joe to have a chance at being pulled up for a trick or something (he wasn’t, but they did pull a lot of folks from the audience so it felt like a solid move). On the way in they had a jazz duo over on the side stage, and I grabbed a pretty awesome shot of the bass player…

No regrets, my friends. No regrets.

Penn and Teller are definitely aging. This is their 50th year performing together, and their on-stage chemistry and dedication to putting on an excellent, energetic show have not wavered in the slightest. The time just flew by, and I’d been sitting in that seat for about two hours when the house lights went up. And of course, I grabbed a souvenir on the way out.

Sleep that night did not come easy. The next morning was the flight home, and I was amused to find that the Vegas airport is virtually its own little casino. We had to walk by a score of restaurants, shops, pubs, and snack vendors on our way to the plane, and I even grabbed a quick bite from a Nathan’s Hot Dog vendor.

Happy to be home, but nothing but great memories from this adventure.

Sin City Excursion Day 1

There is much to say about my recent vacay. I’m home now, having elected not to write about it while on the trip, and I’m completely wrung out.

On Wednesday morning, my friend Joe and I boarded a direct flight from Wichita to the shiny city of Las Vegas, Nevada. While I had lived in a desert for a while a few years back, I knew that life in the San Luis Valley at around 7,000 feet would do nothing to prepare me for suddenly disembarking into the dry Vegas heat. I wore a hat. Despite suspicious looks from TSA agents, it was a good plan.

Day One began as an exploration of our immediate environs. The purpose of our journey was to spend an evening with Penn & Teller – a new experience for us both! But more about that later. The show was slated for the following evening, so we had all of Wednesday to soak up a little bit of Vegas. While Joe had visited the city a few time with his family when he was younger, I got the impression this was his first time as an independent adult with money to burn. And this was my very first sojourn to Sin City. I wanted to experience it a little.

I’ve often thought about how easy it is to be jaded by travel in the 21st century. My generation grew up with huge colorful representation of nearly every nook and cranny of our planet shoveled our way through screens at the cinema, on television, and so on and so forth – particularly cities that function as characters of their own in a lot of places. While I’ve had precious little opportunity to visit any major metropolitan culture centers more than a few hours from home over the course of my life, I’ve spent hours and hours of my life in New York, LA, Miama, Boston, Paris, Tokyo, London, Chicago, Washington D.C,. Seattle, New Orleans, San Francisco – and yes, Las Vegas! Fighting crime, setting the record straight, pulling off clever heists, saving the day, falling in love, winning one for the underdogs, getting rich, making poor real estate decisions, avenging loved ones… so many of these stories are drenched with life on the streets of a distant city, often interspersed with aerial shots of familiar skylines.

But if you travel a lot, you probably get it… being there, boots on the ground, breathing the air, hearing the sounds of the city, really experiencing it is a whole different thing. And it’s a powerful reminder that what we have experienced through media, while pretty freaking amazing, is not the same experience. I’m a sensate at heart – knowing our world requires us to live in it, to be part of it.

And yes, I’m aware that the same argument exists for everything outside of the city, and believe it or not I feel largely the same way about everything else. But for now, we’re talking about Vegas.

The view down at the other tower from our room on the 31st floor.

We checked in at the Rio (because that’s the hotel P&T have called their home for more than 20 years), and then we hit the strip. But not like you’d think. We decided to hoof it over to the strip, which was nearly a mile from the hotel. Everything looks bigger in Vegas, by the way, so be aware of distances before you head anywhere on foot. We figured out the illusion during the Uber ride from the airport, but we still wanted to try the hike over and see what we could see. Also, I’d asked our driver for a lunch recommendation, so we had kind of a destination in mind.

We trotted around the south end of Caesar’s Palace and headed north on Las Vegas Blvd. Every twist and turn on our path yielded yet another eye-catching wonder, and I was absolutely drawn in. I tried not to shout that I was a tourist by taking pictures every seven or eight steps, but I got quite a few. And to be honest, I don’t think I recognized a single thing I saw all weekend from TV… not that I could remember, anyway. There were a few places I wanted to see in person and didn’t – like the fountains at the Bellagio – but I wasn’t too torn up about it since that wasn’t the point of the excursion.

Canal Shoppes at the Venetian. The “sky” is painted.

Our lunch destination was the Grand Lux Cafe at the Canal Shoppes at the Venetian, a charming stroll through an old world shopping center complete with bridges, balconies, and gondola rides. Lunch was lovely; I had a roast turkey and brie on a hard roll with cranberries, arugula, and a dressing I don’t quite recall the name of.

After lunch, we caught a Lyft back to the hotel and took a breather, after which we hit the casino. This was only the second time in my life I’ve actually set foot in a casino, and the first, of course, in Las Vegas. The games at the Rio stretch throughout much the length of the hotel, where you will also find numerous shops, eateries, bars, and theaters. While I did not win big, I did fly back with a little house money in my pocket, and my compatriot for the weekend more than doubled his money (and pretty much paid for his half of the trip, I daresay). I watched him play craps for a while, winning other people ridiculous chunks of change with his rolls (thus adding to his own winnings when they tossed him $100 chips to stay in and keep rolling). Not having that kind of money to blow, I stuck to slot machines.

I learned something there. I had never actually had an interest in slot machines, and often mused at the weird obsession I’ve witnessed in folks who do. Last December, I had my first abbreviated casino experience when my brother took me to the one in Dodge City for dinner, and I was mesmerized by the energy of the place. The lights, the mild cacophony, and just the vibe of it was kind of thrilling. It didn’t make me want to feed cash into the machines around me or anything, but it definitely reoriented some of my perspective on the phenomenon. So now, hanging out in Vegas with time to kill and at least a little money I could afford to lose, it seemed almost irresponsible not to try it out.

Um. Now I get it.

I didn’t feel particularly brainwashed or anything, but I suddenly understood how the experience could be compelling. How sitting down at a machine, feeding $20 into the slot, and hitting a button for 20 minutes full of small wins and losses is just, well… fun. In a way I hadn’t anticipated, it really wasn’t a waste of my time or money because I was enjoying all the little dopamine hits from the way the machine responds and strings you along. Later that evening, after we’d grabbed some authentic cheesesteak sandwiches (complete with cheese whiz – and wow! who’d have expected that to be so good!?), Joe sat next to me and lost $20 of his own. But he wasn’t exactly hurtin’ at this point, yo?

It wasn’t even hard to fall asleep that night, which isn’t always easy on a hotel bed.

Savage Space

A couple months back, when the world was young and new, I had occasion – at my brother’s behest – to start a backup campaign for weeks when a couple of my players were unavailable. With her fibro, Kansas is something of a plague for Miss Jonikka, which makes her frequently unequal to sitting at her computer in an upright position for any period of time after work. And Brian is pretty much living at the epicenter of chaos with his job and recent move. So… yeah. Seemed like a reasonable request.

When I first started running Savage Worlds games back in the days of yore, before the Mayans tried to kill us all with diminishing numeration, I allowed my players to select our first adventure from a collection of available scenarios. Perhaps they were just in tune with my predilections, but they picked the space horror game. And that’s what we did.

With 3 of my 4 players now being fairly new to the game outside of some convention one-shots, I thought I’d go back to that well and pick something with a similar vibe. I sifted through my published adventures from the PEG Kickstarters and found Moon at the Edge of Oblivion. While I had to find ways to play up the horror element, the tense sci-fi adventure had a pretty solid premise that I felt would be easy to knock out in a couple of sessions. Which they did.

As always, I looked for opportunities to tie the episodic scenario into a big picture development, and the answer essentially fell into my lap. The principal foil in the scenario was an AI that was malingering in a derelict cruise ship. And my brother had been canny enough to provide us with a robotic PC. So naturally, when he happened to be the last person to interact with the ship’s systems, I had the AI jump into his system.

Last week we had a chance to revisit these characters, and I selected yet another published scenario – a one-sheet for The Last Parsec setting called Ghosts in the Machine – and parted it out a bit to fit my theme. We finished it up last night, and toward the end of the mission the AI made itself known to the PC who had been kind enough to bring it along and helped them – with strong encouragement, as it happens – escape the mine. And of course, it copied itself to the local system so it could hack into the alien tech that was taking the facility apart and use it for undisclosed chicanery.

While the horror elements were still pretty light, the players are now starting to imagine the possibilities of setting this rogue AI loose with a bunch of powerful new toys. At this point, it pretty much writes itself.

What I find intriguing is that this wasn’t the direction I had intended to go with game at the outset. The first scenario took place near a black hole, and I was going to introduce some seemingly supernatural BS to make everyone jumpy… but the vibe of that mission wasn’t really lending itself to that effect, and so I followed my players’ lead. Now I’m working with a far less mysterious villain, but I’ll go with the alien technology angle to give it some terrifying twists and turns.

I honestly haven’t put a ton of thought into it. It is, after all, a backup game that will only hit the table on occasion. Which is why I’ve used published scenarios thus far. But I, too, am starting to imagine the possibilities… and my imagination is informed by decades of scaring the pants off of players.

At this point, I have quite a collection.

Sojourn

I’m a smidge on the exhausted side. The good kind of exhausted, where you feel like the languishment is validated. Where you feel accomplished.

I took my daughter to Dodge with me yesterday to get her first tattoo. There was no question that we’d be making the trip to see her Uncle Brendon, and I think it was his recent move back to Kansas that cemented the plan in her mind. It wasn’t a big hairy deal – a small piece of art on her arm representing her bond with her kitty cat, who is pretty much the closest thing to a grandchild Jonikka and I are ever likely to have. And it was fun.

It’s a four-hour drive from Manhattan, so I wanted to make the trip worth it. After we got the ink, we stopped at the brewery for a bite to eat and then made our way back to my brother’s place to try setting up my new recording rig for his drum kit. We were just dialing in mics and testing the system, seeing how things sounded in the room, and getting some presets saved in my software… but it was worth the trip. Next time I go down – hopefully here in just a couple weeks – it’ll be to lay down some tracks on a couple of songs.

The journey to which I allude in my title, however, is not the trip to Dodge City, but rather the work on the current album.

Fans of the Tuesday Nite Blues Band know that we released our debut album in 2011, played a few shows to support it, and then kinda disappeared. It was a difficult time, and letting go wasn’t easy… I continue to be so very proud of that album. Between the composition, the performances, and the production work, it is easily the best-sounding musical project I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with. And it still sounds great today.

Over the years that followed, my focus shifted away from writing songs. I penned my first novel, which I published in 2018. I focused on work and family and education, dealt with a medical event that consumed the better part of a year, and then the world ground to a halt for a bit in 2020. You probably know why. And it was in that space that I finally found the drive to start writing music again.

The new album currently has 13 tracks in various phases of production. A couple of them are songs dating back to earlier years in my musical journey, but most of them were penned in the last five years. I’ve explored life in the wake of the pandemic, love, loss, the trials of getting older… it’s all in there. And once again, calling it a “blues” album would be disingenuous. We’re likely to indulge in some rebranding before we start sharing anything.

So here’s a funny thing. In the old days, when you recorded a band, you started with drums. Everything else needed to be laid on that foundation so the rhythm and timing elements could be matched up while layering other instruments. And many drummers, while excellently expressive and full of the right energy, are not necessarily the most reliable timekeepers. Songs might speed up and slow down as the energy of the song changes. Which, by the way, is fine.

As a matter of fact, a goodly number of classic compositions in rock ‘n roll history will defy a metronome more adamantly than you would guess.

My brother, however, has damned near perfect timing and rarely pushes or drags the tempo. This gives me the opportunity to lay down other parts first, recorded to a click. It’s a very liberating process, in that I can layer instruments and work on arrangements on my own time, and we were able to work on arrangements while we still lived 1500 miles apart. I have several arrangements with some scratch percussion recorded on his electric kit, but now its time for the real enchilada.

So this month we start laying down real drums on the album, coinciding with Bonnie’s vocal sessions and some additional piano and strings. It’s been nearly five years since I penned the bluesy rock track Nobody’s Home. In the years that followed, I laid down guitars and sent it to Drew for some quality BASS, shared it with Bonnie so we could workshop vocal arrangements, Anne to help me find the soul of the song with the piano in their parlor, and Brendon to lay down some rudimentary percussion. Now it’ll be one of the very first songs we wrap.

And then to Bullet Ride to see what we need to do to actually make it sound like it deserves.

And still I hesitate
Afraid to break the silence of my soul.
I know, this conversation’s getting old.
But if I take these reins
And break these chains
And make a change
My story will be told…

Yeah. It’s good.

A Shadow in the Mind

“May you live a thousand years…”

A blessing, not a curse. I remember having to look that up. Like… the sentiment seems generous on the surface, but you hardly have to spelunk very far to find potential subtext. Despite the superficial well-wishing generally borrowed by the phrase, precious few of us see even a century of life, and far too few of us even half that.

Thus, it seems imperative that I find a way to contextualize the first half-century of my life. My 50th birthday approaches in something like 11 days, and while I frequently watch my birthdays pass with little more than a friendly nod on the way by and seldom any significant fanfare, it seems incumbent upon me that this particular milestone be recognized.

I have surprisingly few regrets attached to this period of my life. My achievements include a fair number of things that bring me joy: loving wife and children, quality friends, artistic accomplishments, self-respect. Even a legacy of sorts in my hometown. Lots of good memories. I’ve managed to learn from most of my failures and avoided doing folks wrong wherever possible. I’ve taken care of others because it’s the right thing to do, and I’ve made an effort to love freely and without reservation.

I’ve come up short here and there. I’ve shifted careers three or four times and never reached high enough to satisfy the specter of my father’s perceived expectations (not a real thing, I know). I’ve remonstrated with myself over the education of my children. Like many people my age, I’ve breezed through a few relationships that I could have handled better. I’ve leaned heavily on my collaborators to try to more powerfully ignore my own shortcomings.

And if you’re my age, you know… the years just fly by. Fifty years really is a long damn time. It doesn’t feel like it nowadays, but it is. That’s the reason we all say that we’re getting old, or commiserate over feeling older, because it’s kind of a surprise if you’re not paying attention.

Tempus fugit. Time flies.

So how should I celebrate? Because I really think I should. Celebrate, that is. Not just give it the usual companionable nod, but somehow grab it’s sleeve and share a quick drink, at the very least. Many of my friends have already crossed this threshold, and maybe you had similar notions… or maybe you just beheld the befuddled grace of its tactless aerial display as it flew by. No judgment here, right? One thing we know by now… we’re all in this together. And none of us get out alive.

Heh. That’s trite, but still satisfying at some level.

How about… tempus est umbra in mente. Roughly, “time is a shadow in the mind.” Ran across that in a Stephen King novel recently. Stuck with me.

Phase Two

So, today is our final day of clearing and cleaning at the old house. Unsurprisingly, Niera and Jason have been a HUGE help, and we are on target for a fairly easy day today. I am SO ready to be done. There’s a lot left to be managed, what with our new place stacked with boxes and so many items that need a new home, but there’s much less of a deadline on that part. Meanwhile, we’ve settled in with some degree of success, and everyone is adjusting.

I am hoping to find much of the living room here this afternoon so that I can run a game for the house this evening. I miss gaming in person, and my convention appearances have shown me that I’ve grown rusty at some of the skills that are particular to the idiom. Tomorrow will likely be a day of unpacking and sorting, which has in one way or another been much of our life of late, and then Saturday I hope to be running our regular afternoon game. On Sunday, Niera and I are driving down to Dodge City to get Niera’s very first tattoo and lay down some drum tracks for the new album at my brother’s place.

So while things aren’t going to feel “normal” around here for a while, and money is unconscionably tight with the massive change in circumstances (but yay for not supporting two houses for another month!), we fully intend to celebrate life and living and family and art with the fullness of our collective heart as we move forth on the next phase of our grand adventure.

*deep breath*

Let us begin.

Not with a Bang…

I’ve been thinking about this moment for a while. Ever since we learned that my friend Julie was declining and would be leaving us sooner rather than later.

Julie and I had a strained relationship when we were younger, and it was often hard to juxtapose that with the supportive role I wanted to play in my friend Jason’s life. The two of them had been destined to be together, pulled back into each other’s orbit time and again no matter how real life and other relationships kept beating down the proverbial door. And I know that I was one of those roadblocks on more than one occasion.

That being said, Jason is my brother and I would do anything within my power to see him happy. When he and his erstwhile family fell on hard times, my wife and I took them in. Three times, over the years. And my wife never batted an eyebrow nor hesitated even a heartbeat to commit to that support. And over time, as sometimes happens, she and Julie got close. And eventually, after she’d started facing the prospect of her limited mortality, Julie made an effort to repair her relationship with me. It was a friendship hard-won, but all the better for it.

Julie passed away yesterday, surrounded by her loved ones. She had battled the disease that took her life for more than a decade, hanging on with every fiber of her being, and in the end I was a little surprised that she slipped away so quietly. I don’t know why; I didn’t expect her leap from the hospital bed and spit into the face of the inevitable or anything, but I also would have been only marginally surprised if she had tried.

The last few months have been challenging for our family, and we have a lot to take care of in the aftermath. But despite a certain quiet that seems to embrace the whole affair, I didn’t want her passing to go unremarked. At her core, she was a vibrant and intelligent woman, sometimes passionate, sometimes cold. Always complex. She made an inspiring effort to face her mortality with grace and good humour, and at times was even successful. I’ll choose to remember her that way, and ultimately be grateful she was in our lives.

(Oh! And then there was that time I got to marry them!)

Telling Stories About Nothing

I recently watched a video from music and production guru Rick Beato where he discusses the strange course of his life over 62 years and how much it changed in the later years of his life and career. Here’s the video if you’re interested:

One of the more interesting takeaways is the idea that one of his most valuable skill sets at this point in his career is probably his ability to tell stories. He does it a lot. Stories of his life and career and collaborators… he talks about songs and musical constructs like they’re friends or old business partners.

I pondered this for a bit, and I realized that it really is central to his appeal. I enjoy his channel and return and again and again; even when I’m only tangentially interested in the content of a video, I’ll tune in.

Now I’ve long understood how personality drives entertainment. My first career was in radio, and the bulk of it involved putting people on the air and providing them the tools and support they needed for success. In that environment it’s impossible to miss the fact that the only real difference between one radio show or another, most of the time, was in the personalit(ies) that drove the program. As a podcaster over the years I’ve relied on the same mechanism – I’m not saying a whole of things that listeners can’t find elsewhere, but I say it in my own way.

I tell stories.

As the years have slipped by, however, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with the stories I tell. As an interviewer, I always prided myself on being able to find “true” moments in a conversation, particularly by disrupting a person’s ability to rely on rehearsed and regurgitated answers. Not excessively, of course; you’re not going to get a lot of interviews if you routinely make people uncomfortable. But now I find that so many of my stories are the same. They’re starting to feel rehearsed and uninspired.

Is that because I’m not creating new experiences worth talking about? Is it because my perspective on life and my hobbies and interests no longer evolves with enough grit to create new context?

Does getting older mean having less to say?

How often have you visited with an elder just to hear them share the same story you’ve heard before. I think we often dismiss this as their inability to remember that you’ve already heard it. But what if it’s just that we have a habit of telling ourselves and the people around us stories all our lives, and that as we get older the stories become more inflexible? We literally have less to say?

Unless we continue to push ourselves to have new experiences.

The real obstacle there is that getting older invariably means having less energy to devote to the exploration. Rick mentions in the video above that he started his YouTube channel in 2016. He would have been 54 at the time, launching into a new adventure with very little idea what he was getting into. And that he’s so glad he did it then, because he doesn’t know that he’d have the energy to pull it off if he started at 62.

I turned 49 recently. Sometimes I still feel young – particularly if I’m not calling attention to aches and pains with any sort of locomotion – and sometimes quite the opposite. I still love so many of the things that I do: writing and running RPGs, writing songs, working on my next novel. You know… telling stories. It gets harder and harder. I still read a lot, absorb TV and movies, and listen to music and podcasts… to get inspiration. To learn from those stories. Trying to perfect the craft of telling a story.

But how important is the art of storytelling if you have nothing new to say?

I don’t have an answer. Yet. Here’s a picture of my cat.

Maslow’s Beard

I find myself wondering if Maslow ever grew a beard.

In 1943, noted psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a groundbreaking paper humbly entitled A Theory of Human Motivation. (I’d link it here, but it’s not an overstatement to insinuate that the original paper could easily cure insomnia, and there are so many places online where you can review the important bits.) In this paper, Maslow explores his now infamous Hierarchy of Needs, easily graphed as a pyramid. Like so.

Essentially, Maslow postulated that a healthy human has various needs that can be arranged in a simple hierarchy, and that foundational needs must be met before a person can effectively explore items at higher levels. It’s notable, in fact, that every level of the pyramid below the top are what Maslow referred to as “deficiency needs,” indicating that meeting these needs does not in itself create a strong sense of accomplishment (arguable, obviously) but that their omission inevitably creates anxiety and distress (less arguable). Clever, right?

Over the past several years, I have noticed some unexpected trends in my life. When the Pandemic hit and many of us were forced out of the workplace, some turned isolation into opportunity: going back to school, picking up a new project or hobby, learning more about sourdough than anyone really needs to know, and so forth. I was no exception… I determined during this time that I would further my education and set out to earn a Master’s degree. That was rewarding, though by the time I was finishing up my courses I was once again struggling to balance a full-time job, school, homeschooling my youngest, and engaging with my hobbies, interests, and other business ventures.

During the Pandemic, I had time. Way too much time. And I assumed that I would parlay that into other achievements. Shadow of the Spire was published in 2018, and now six years later I still don’t have a completed draft of the sequel. I started penning songs for a new album, but lacked the momentum to get them produced. I started new podcasts and assumed I’d be crafting all sorts of cool content for my community… and I quickly started falling behind and my podcast schedule fell apart in my hands like broken pieces of pottery.

These projects and ambitions have waxed and waned over the last four years, and its easy to track that trend and put it into perspective. Because even when I have time to focus on things that presumably drive me, the energy, inspiration, and conviction just aren’t there. And that trend coincides neatly with another trackable phenomenon…

We’ve been through some difficult terrain in recent years. The Pandemic left us adrift for a while. Our savings gone, our retirement expended. Friends relying on us for any assistance we could provide. My mother passed, and we pulled up stakes a couple times trying to reorient our lives. Whenever our circumstances created undue stress on our lives – financially, socially, medically, what have you – my initiative became a casualty. It’s so clear in hindsight, but in the midst of the muck it was just impossible to see the picture very clearly. Frustration ensued.

I can see now that even partial solutions were ineffective. We could navigate a financial crisis with no realistic expectation that the same shit wasn’t just around the proverbial corner. Health issues inevitably crop up as you get older, particularly when navigating so much stress. We would make plans to orient our lives toward specific goals and repeatedly find ourselves failing at even the simplest benchmarks.

So anyway… I find it interesting that the difference between a well-groomed beard and a wild-eyed madman with a shrub on his chin is often just a couple days of not really caring very much. And as I get ready for my next job interview, the beard becomes an enormously important point of focus. I have several tools and implements at my disposal – combs, clippers, blades, salve, oil, special shampoo, et cetera – and it all explodes into action when the time is right. I’m hiding a double chin, but never hiding the real me, right? Sure, everything else needs to be in order as well, but people really do look at your face.

So many psychologists from the olden days never wore beards. I suddenly wonder if they could really be trusted to understand my problems, you know?

Kickstarter: Sanity Check

The TsunamiCon Kickstarter is always a bit of a nailbiter, and this year has been no different. The campaign closes tomorrow evening, and I am very concerned.

As Kickstarters go, it can be a weird one to run. With a more traditional product, the promotional ramp-up is kind of self-sustaining. You reveal details about the product, discuss new ideas and the production process, provide rewards that engage your community at different levels. And of course offer stretch goals that add cool additional value to the product once you’ve blasted through your funding goals.

Promoting an event, of course, is a little more direct, and your demographic necessarily includes almost entirely people who can be on site at the appointed time. The discovery process is focused largely on more localized geography, and the event itself is pretty well established. I’m promoting the same things every year, with the opportunity to push those boundaries (i.e. renting additional facilities, staffing events, and booking guests) requiring funding far outside our realistic expectations.

So I spend a lot of time focusing on what we do at the con: gaming and game-related activities, a vibrant marketplace for geeks and gamers, panels and live entertainment, and so on. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a strange animal, a game con… as organizers we don’t really provide most of the content; that comes from the community of game masters, vendors, volunteers, and so forth. Basically, we rent out a big space, hang up banners, organize a small army of volunteers, put together a game library for attendees to check out, book some entertainment and guests when we can, handle licensing and liability issues for a large event, help GMs and organizers find their audience and places at the con, field a ton of questions from the community, and rake in dozens of dollars.

And we do all that because it’s fun. And it is! It’s enormously satisfying, and I spend a good chunk of every year laying down all the prep work for the event. And the team hits the ground running that Friday morning and no one really sleeps for the three days. Giving yourself to a project like this, which means so much to so many people in our community, is a gift.

But I hate this part. So many amazing people turn out to help fund the convention by buying tickets early and grabbing vendor booths, sponsorships and merch… but the cost of doing business is high. We’re at 77% of goal at this exact moment – which means we still need to raise 23% of our entire minimum capital requirement in the next 35 hours.

Like I said… nailbiter.

As always, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of our current backers, to everyone who’s bought in to the con already, to everyone who has taken pains to spread the message. Pledges continue to trickle in, and that’s on you.

The worrying, the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, the no sleeping through the night and struggling to stay focused during the workday while this drama plays out… that’s on me.

Also, my cat got out of the house last night and hasn’t come back. Of course.