Assuming everything goes according to plan, Winterim 2023 will see me and a score of kids playing, dissecting, and creating our own board games. It’s going to be good--at least, I hope it will--and I’ve been prepping for it for a few months already. I’ve purchased a lot of games on the school’s dime: Too Many Bones, Wingspan, Carcassonne, The Big Book of Madness, Azul, Mysterium, Marvel United, and a handful more. Part of the class is to talk about the history of board games. There’s a pretty great video by the Shut Up & Sit Down guys (one of the preeminent board game reviewers on YouTube) that takes about an hour to watch and gives a good overview. However, I wanted to have something a bit more substantial. I often want some sort of book read before the Winterim starts (for my dinosaur Winterim, for example, I had them read Raptor Red; for the fantasy Winterim, I had them read Elantris), so I set out to see if there was an accessible and worthwhile look at the history of board games. I found It’s All A Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan by Tristan Donovan. And what do you know? My local library had a copy. I picked it up at the beginning of the summer, picking at it as the mercury climbed. Donovan has an easy and approachable style that weaves through the key points and puts in context a lot of pieces (pun, as always, intended) that I hadn’t thought of before. Additionally, he includes a lot of the connective tissues of how one game inspires another, responds to it, or fails to catch the imagination of the masses yet opens up pathways to future inventions. It’s really fascinating, and I enjoyed my time in the book overall. A couple of points really stood out to me. The first one comes from my own sensitivity towards public perception of video games. I’ve been a gamer all my life, and while I’ve had a healthy love of board games, most of my adult life’s entertainment has been in the digital realm. There’s a pretty obvious reason for this: You don’t have to coordinate time, schedules, or energy levels with other humans to get to play (most) video games. I can plop myself down on the couch and away I go. My wife enjoys board games, too, but a lot of her downtime is spent at the sewing machine. So while board games have always been in our home and we’ve waxed and waned on different titles, video games have held a place of primacy since the beginning. Because of that sensitivity, there’s always a raising of hackles when the idea of “video games are bad for you” starts cropping up. A recent study indicates that one’s well-being is not necessarily negatively affected by video game playing, with a caveat that compulsive or addictive playing makes for a noteworthy exception. While it’s important that we continue to do research into this new medium, I have to admit that the stigma around video games, particularly their influence in increasing violence in participants, has always left me a bit uncertain. I do believe that what you absorb through media can affect you--it’s why I think there needs to be more diversity in the genders, races, and situations that are depicted on all of our screens everywhere. Positive representation really does make a difference. And yet, there are loads of examples in Donovan’s book that explain how board games have led to real violence. He talks about how the crossword puzzle was invented back in 1913 (originally called Word-Cross, but, due to a negligent error, turned into Cross-Word). A decade later, finishing the crossword puzzles had become so addictive to some that it strained relationships. Some took their puzzle-solving way too seriously. In 1923 one Chicago woman filed for divorce because her husband stopped going to work so he could focus on his crosswords. The following year a man shot his wife because she refused to help him with a particularly vexing crossword. (139) From Monopoly’s original intention (a critique and condemnation of the rapacious greed of landlords) to the Japanese game go and how it’s influenced AI development and neural networks, It’s All A Game provides wonderful stories, fascinating anecdotes, and worthwhile glimpses into the histories that have created so much of the world that we live in. And that’s the other thing that I really took from this book: Each game on my shelf has a story behind it. And while most of what I play right now isn’t in the book, each one could have been added in without any real detriment to the overall thesis. Every game I have had some motivation in making it (probably profit for a lot of them, though I know for certain that isn’t the case for all of them), and every game that I have tried to make likewise came from a place of desire. Though I’ve only three or four games in different stages of development, each one came from a desire at a certain time in my life. (Example: During 2020’s Harry Potter Winterim, before the world ended, I wanted to try to make a game based on Quidditch that utilized the idea of height--not a 2D game, but one with a vertical ability, too.) The last thing that stood out to me was the eerie explanations of the roots to the game Pandemic. The book, written in 2017, has a couple of chilling paragraphs as Donovan looks at the global response to SARS in 2003. He writes, The world watched on [at China’s response to the virus], wondering if this was the start of a terrifying global pandemic similar to the 1918 influenza outbreak that claimed the lives of at least fifty million people. […] The SARS outbreak infected several thousand people and killed more than seven hundred, but the rapid global response saved the world from an epidemic that could have been much, much worse. (225) Yeah. It’s kind of creepy to read that.
So, yeah. This book is great. I really enjoyed it and I look forward to assigning it to my students. I will have to tell them that they aren’t required to read the chapter entitled “Sex in a Box” that talks about how Twister came to be and what games it inspired. While it doesn’t go into anything shockingly explicit, it’s not really the direction that I want to take the class. (Obviously, students will likely still read that chapter, but it won’t be assigned.) You could give it a whirl. Kind of like board games, it’s a lot of fun. That steady march of time is both reassuring and frustrating, I'd say. Years do, indeed, end and sometimes it's a good riddance. The past two years--since March 2020--have been a pretty low-point for me. There are global reasons for that, which most everyone knows and understands, as well as personal reasons. (If you weren't aware of my wife's battle with cancer, you can read my thoughts on it here.) The ending of 2021 has not been any easier, as familial strife has riven the peace.
Not only that, but my personal goal of writing at least half a million words annually continued its meteoric descent into the ground. With my recent obsession of painting miniatures, making (and playing) board games, and occasionally reading something that I'm supposed to, I have purposefully pulled myself away from writing. For a while there, I would sit in the loft of my kids' parkour gym and write for an hour in one of my notebooks while they learned how to do cartwheels and freak out about doing backflips. Lately, however, the errands and responsibilities of being a chauffer dad eroded those chances. Then there's been sickness in the family that prevented us from going to practice, so that hour of writing time evaporated. Of course, I could have found more times to write. I just…didn't care. I don't know that I'll ever 100% stop writing, but I'm definitely burning out on the desire. It's hard to say this "aloud", since all I've ever wanted to do, for as long as I can remember, is to write books. Like years, dreams eventually end. We have to wake up and face the realities of the day. And so I guess I'm finally waking up to this reality: I don't have it in me to be a writer. My skin's too thin, resolve's too weak, my desire's too tepid…whatever it might be, I guess this is my way of tapping out. I'm hoping that by trying to convince myself that I no longer have a goal of being a writer, of somehow providing for my family's needs via the written word, I will be able to rekindle an interest in writing. This is something that I tried to teach my students when I was a creative writing teacher: You have to understand what your goal really is as a writer. Is it to write? Is it to world build? Is it to edit and tidy up and fix broken parts? Is it to invent something new? Is it to share stories with friends and families and maybe some randos on the internet? Is it to simply say, "I wrote a book"? Is it to get a book out somehow, regardless of how? Is it to have your book sitting on the shelf, surrounded by your alphabetical peers? There are lots of different ways of being a writer, and all of them are equally valid. For me, I wanted that last one: I wanted to be a traditionally published author. That was my goal, that was my plan. And, like it has done for so many millions of others--billions of others, perhaps--COVID has taken that from me. Not only are my chances of finding an agent and getting the book sold diminishing daily (not even counting the fact that I haven't sent out a query in over a year), but the market is getting more crowded while readers are thinner on the ground than ever before. (According to a 2019 finding, almost an entire quarter of the adult population of the United States doesn't even read one book annually.) And while there's plenty of nuance to sus out about that issue, the main point is that the competition for books is harsher than it's ever been. And of all the words I can use to describe myself, "competitive" isn't one of them. I'm not interested in besting others. So there isn't a really strong drive to try to get myself into a position where I could achieve what I'm after. It's been really rough on me as I've been fiddling with this problem. I tried NaNoWriMo this past year and gave up halfway through the month. The vivid colors of writing have faded, as it were, and I couldn't find the emotional and mental energy I needed to put my butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard for it anymore. Part of that was my own lack of passion. The last time I was really excited by one of my own stories was 2018. That's almost four years in the past now; that's a long time to not be truly motivated by a desire to tell stories. You can't draw from a well that's dry, after all. I've stumbled along for the past few years, hoping that it was just a rough patch or a phase or some other issue. Then COVID hit and my life crumbled at the edges; then the breast cancer arrived and fractured my life at the core. Raising a teenager, trying to convince myself that I still love teaching, battling my own depression, watching my wife struggle in ways that I can't help with…it all took its toll on my creative acuity and the once-sharp blade of storytelling desire dulled. I don't know what could possibly whet it, either. I feel a touch of remorse at this, as if I'm letting someone down by saying, "I'm done." Does it undo all of what I've taught students over the years? Am I now a hypocrite for thinking that I don't want to keep pushing? That I'm tired? I don't know the answers to those questions; as Pi says in Life of Pi, "Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?" I can't answer so many of the questions that I've asked myself that it's more than a little maddening. Since COVID struck, I've had to turn to all of my coping mechanisms so often that they've become my living mechanisms. I don't have a way to find balance since everything I'm doing seems to be utilizing every trick I use just to keep moving forward. As a result, the loss of my writing muse rankles even more. I didn't realize that I could only write if things were stable. I thought that it was a deeper part of myself, rather than a fair-weather friend. Yet here we are. I've unofficially left my writing group--a group that stuck together, in one form or another, for over a decade. Another casualty to the coronavirus. I see their posts on Facebook and I can't do more than read what they're talking about. I don't chime in, I don't assert myself. I don't know what to do about any of it. I don't know how to navigate the difficult world that we now live in, one with political fault-lines embedded in the precautions we take, the decisions we make. Do I say to my group, "Hey, I'd love to get together again, but only if y'all are vaccinated!" If I do, whom does that alienate? Why do I even have to wonder about that? These sorts of tumults are another symptom of my writing sickness: I can't get out of my head long enough to become immersed elsewhere. Too much of my brain is clamoring with chaos and there's just no room for that creative space. That isn't to say that I'm not being creative. Most of my word output this month has been as I've written up the rules for a board game. I'm over 10,000 words into the rulebook (which, for obvious reasons, is not what the final draft of the rules would look like) and still enjoying that process. I paint, drum, guitar, and play games. I still do things that I appreciate and scratch a particular itch. It's just…I don't know if I'm ever going to do that with my words again. At the beginning of 2021, I taught a D&D Winterim with a coworker. As is common in almost all of my Winterims, the big assignment of the students is to make their own version of whatever it is that we're studying. When I taught Lord of the Rings, I had the students make the beginnings of their own language. When I taught video game theory, they created a concept of what video game they would like to make, had they the time and expertise. When I taught D&D, they made their own TTRPGs.
I usually find it enjoyable to make a similar product while the students are working. It isn't always very good (my Quidditch game from the Harry Potter Winterim was an interesting, albeit very flawed version of multi-leveled chess), but it's always really fun. Last year…er, rather, eleven months ago…I started making my own version of a TTRPG that was heavily inspired by Bloodborne. (I had finished the game for the second time just a few weeks before and it was big in my brain…still is, as a matter of fact.) I wanted a game that had the same sort of frenetic kind of action, one where the dice rolling happened simultaneously and frequently. I started it off as simply a Bloodborne RPG, using the names of weapons and locations from the video game as my starting point. Eventually, I pushed away from the streets of Yharnam and instead created my own city wallowing in its own destruction, a place called Drimdale. I concocted an interconnected introductory campaign in a single location to help me conceptualize what the game would feel like and play like, only to hit a bit of a roadblock part way through the summer. Maybe, I thought, I'm looking at this from the wrong medium. I started writing a novel set in Drimdale (it was part of my abortive attempt at winning NaNoWriMo this year), I tried to write lore and a catalogue of background information…it just wasn't working. While I really like what I've made, it wasn't gelling as it was supposed to. As the year has worn on, a new hobby emerged: Miniature painting. This is also directly influenced by Bloodborne, as I bought the board game of the video game from a Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately (or not, depending on how I look at it), I "accidentally" bought a good $200 worth of the game--with four expansions on top of the base game. They contain dozens of miniatures of creatures from the game, and I quickly ended up spending several orders of magnitude more on painting the figurines than in playing the game. (I still play it, occasionally, and I have a lot more fun with the painted minis than I do the unpainted ones.) As my hobby time and money started flowing into this new exercise, I picked up a lot of interest in wargames (Warhammer, as cool and robust and deep as it is, can't justifiably fit into my budget--though some of the Age of Sigmar and Necromunda stuff is just so tempting). Nothing was quite right for me, though, despite some really cool looking things. Then, on Black Friday, two things happened: Miniature Market had a massive clearance sale on its Wrath of Kings stock, and Amazon was selling one of the most highly-rated board games of all time, Gloomhaven, for about $80. I had received a $200 Amazon gift card from a student's orthodontist's office (I don't know who the student was, but I'm flattered that they thought of me) that was burning a hole in my pocket. What better way to use some of that unexpected money than buying a new board game that I would likely only end up playing by myself? I'll give another post about Wrath of Kings later (once I've actually managed to, y'know, play it), and this isn't a review about Gloomhaven (which I'm liking mightily). The point is, this all converged in making me want to revisit some of the core mechanics that I made for Drimdale. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the flavor and theme of my own board game to stick right, but the modification of my TTRPG ideas into a modular, tile- and dice-based board game is coming along really well. I've created a bunch of small cards, a player mat, the tiles, and a few thousand words of rules. I've even used my 3D printer to give me more tactile, more interesting versions of some of the terrain. (It makes a big difference when you can see a pile of stones and think, Hey, that's a pile of stones, rather than a red cube and think, What is that supposed to be again? Oh yeah. A pile of stones.) Utilizing a lot of the miniatures that I've acquired over the past dozen months--including the stuff that I've 3D printed as well as purchased for Gloomhaven or the Bloodborne Board Game--I've cobbled together a fairly strong prototype. It's far from finished: I want to have five classes with different abilities depending on the gender the player selects, as well as a card system to help mitigate the randomness of the dice-rolling process, and a host of other issues. However, it's basically playable in its reduced form right now. In fact, I played it with my son yesterday. We started at about 12:30 and didn't end until 2:45. I hadn't realized that I'd created a multi-hour experience. More than that, though, is the fact that it was actually fun. I mean, I know that's the point of a board game--of games in general--but this isn't the first time that I've tried creating something like this, only to be severely disappointed in my prototype. Part of what really speaks to me--and, indeed, is the core inspiration for the combat mechanic--is that I get to use a lot of the dice I've collected over the years since I started playing D&D. And by "a lot" I mean that, at the two-player minimum level of play, you need to have approximately 25 dice of different types. There are times when you're holding entire fistfuls of dice and dropping them on the table, then picking through them like a prospector seeking out some golden nuggets. This game was designed for dice-goblins (you know who you are) and fully justifying having spent way too much on plastic polyhedrons throughout the course of one's life. It's also fun because you get to play as your own character, but also as the enemies who challenge your opponent. (It was originally thought of as a co-op game, but that possibility no longer really fits…I think. We'll see.) So your turn involves making life harder for your opponent while struggling to win the game yourself. It means that turns are quick, and you're never long from rolling dice again. And again. And again. The fact that there are still a lot of kinks and bugs to iron out is frustrating only in the sense that it's hard to playtest something solo. My son is a good sport and I think he really enjoys the game…but he's also 11. He has other, more digitally based things to do. So I often find myself sitting on the couch, staring at slips of poorly-trimmed pieces of paper, a notebook with so many contradictory notes scrawled into it that it's essentially incomprehensible, trying to devise what I actually want from a Trap Card, and always thinking…Who's going to play this? That is, of course, the wrong thing to consider at this point. Having almost fully given up on creative writing because I got so enamored of the idea of publishing that almost all desire to write has evaporated, I don't want to accidentally poison my passion for this game by trying to think that it will become more than what it is. Then again, there's a strong motivation in wanting to see one's internal vision become external and tangible. The dream of seeing the game fully realized with artwork, miniatures (original ones, rather than stuff cribbed from other sources), and polished to the point that other people might enjoy it? That's a powerful dream. I've learned, though, that powerful dreams can sometimes overpower reality, and that discrepancy can really hurt. So I'm trying to manage my expectations. Still…it is a lot of fun. Being the Bardolator that I am means that my preferences for Shakespeare's plays runs on a continuum more than a binary. I don't hate any of them, and while I do love some more than others (Richard II and Coriolanus come to mind once the masterpieces have leapt about the list), there are some that I like less well. Titus Andronicus is so bitter, so painful, so dark and depressing that I'm not a really a fan of it. Having seen Cymbeline a couple of weeks ago, I can also say that it was…fine. I'm okay with not experiencing it again for a long time. A Midsummer Night's Dream is also in that category of liking it less well than others, though that comes from exposure more than anything within the play itself. I've seen it performed I don't know how often and had it on my curriculum at least three times. Unlike Hamlet, which is a well deep enough for me to dip into it annually and still not sound it, A Midsummer Night's Dream does not have enough beyond light laughter to really draw me toward it. That isn't to say laughter can't be worthwhile in and of itself; The Comedy of Errors is even more sparse on the profundity and is still a lot of fun. In fact, I took my entire family, from my eight-year-old up to my teenager, to see the Utah Shakespeare Festival version of that play this summer, and I laughed all the way through. I enjoyed it for what it was, as that's all it's trying to be. Having just finished A Midsummer Night's Dream this afternoon, I find that I'm not much changed in my opinion about it. The fairy magic and Bottom will always be the best parts of this play; the problematic solution to the lovers' quarrel will always stick out to me. The premise, if you've forgotten, is that there are lovers: Hermia and Lysander, who want to get married. Unfortunately, Hermia's dad, Egeus, is a dirtbag who wants Hermia to marry Demetrius. Not only does Hermia not care for Demetrius, but the man has "made love" (1.1.107) to Helena, another young woman of Athens. (It's always important to remember that, despite how many sex jokes and innuendoes Shakespeare puts into his plays, this isn't one of them: To make love is to woo or court a person.) So Helena wants Demetrius who wants Hermia who wants Lysander. The antics of the play really take off when the four lovers head into the woods to escape Egeus' ultimatum that Hermia must marry his preference for her or face death. Because this is a fairytale, the woods are packed with fairies, including the irrepressible Robin Goodfellow (also known as Puck), King Oberon, and Titania. Oberon has his own subplot about laying claim to a changeling child that Titania has in her train of followers--a subplot that's resolved off-stage and related to us in a brief explanation in 4.1--but his main purpose is to get the squabbling lovers (remember, Demetrius wants Hermia) to stop fighting. To that end, he has Puck put a special love potion on the eyes of…the wrong guy. If one wanted to take a more cynical stance on this play, it's really about four horny people who are interested in having sex and which partner they get doesn't matter much. Yes, Hermia (and Helena, though she doesn't demonstrate it as Hermia does) is interested in consummating her relationship with Lysander, but only after getting married. Lysander is much more anxious for their relationship to become more physical, and that becomes parodic when the love juice accidentally lands on his eyes. He falls for Helena, spurns Hermia, and then ends up trying to woo Helena with a surprising level of gusto. Because Demetrius isn't interested in Helena, then changes his tune after he gets some of that Love Potion Number 9 in his face, Helena ends up with two men vying for her attention. Helena is furious at being made the butt of their jokes: Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born? She rightly takes issue with becoming this focus of infatuation, then has to deal with the fury of her best friend, Hermia, who is now being abandoned by Lysander… Look, the interplay of the characters can be a little complicated. It's harder to read than some other plays by the Bard because of the close proximity of the girls' names (Helena and Hermia) and the interchangeability of the men (Lysander and Demetrius both lust after Helena). Many years ago, I had to come up with a mnemonic to help me keep the pairings straight, or else I become hopelessly lost: Both pairs are supposed to have an L and an M in their names. So Lysander and Hermia go together, while Demetrius and Helena are a couple. And that's part of the point, I think, of the play: When it comes to purely physical relationships, the partnering is one of proximity and convenience, not of compatibility. It's a rather cynical take on what it means to fall in love, surely. The play is filled with slapstick, hijinks, and verbal flourishes, but it's all to further this thesis that love is as mercurial as…well, a dream. But that isn't all. (When it's Shakespeare, there's always a bit more than just the surface story.) Yes, there's a big problem with the concept of consent: Egeus will only consent to having Demetrius marry his daughter, Hermia. More alarmingly, Helena--who seems to love Demetrius purely, though she's not too happy about him behaving so unaccountably strange during the second act--ends up with Demetrius by the end, the love potion removed from Lysander's eyes and leaving Demetrius still drugged. We're told in the final scene by Oberon (or perhaps it's simply a song sung--the First Folio doesn't give him these lines specifically) that "So shall all the couples three/Ever true in loving be" (5.2.37-38). The spell, it seems, will always be on Demetrius, shifting his consent from Hermia to Helena. When I think of it that way, I bristle. These meddling fairies have essentially forced Demetrius into a situation that he didn't choose, their manipulation pushing him into a relationship that he didn't want. But I think there's something more to it. There's magic in words--well-wrought words, I should say--and there are many things about which we change our minds. What is it, exactly, that convinces us to change course? There can be a lot of things, from political ideologies to religious dogma to personal experiences, all of which work on us to get us to move. An example that's a bit of a thing right now is how President Nelson, the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has asked that members of the Church get vaccinated and to mask up when social distancing isn't possible. It has caused a kerfuffle, to say the least, as there is a strong anti-mask sentiment among the rank-and-file of members (in my experience, I should say) and now those who felt that their God-given right to breathe contagions into the air is being challenged by the man they claim has a God-given privilege to guide the Church on Earth. What will convince someone to wear a mask during church meetings? Science hasn't done it for many of them; social pressures likewise seem irrelevant. Fearmongers, grifters, hucksters, and other bad actors have eroded the faith of some members in the reality of the global pandemic. Will they change their minds because President Nelson asks them to? Am I comparing, then, the leader of my church to a magical love potion? Well, to a certain extent, yes. The largest difference is that this masking example still hinges on the consent/choice of those who are struggling with changing their minds, while Demetrius has no say in what happens to him. He doesn't even know why he suddenly can't live without Helena. On the other hand, how did you first fall in love? Was that a conscious choice, one that you made out of a rational weighing of the merits of the object of your affection? Or was it something that just…happened, something that, as Mr. Darcy says of his path toward loving Mrs. Darcy, "I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun"? Perhaps there is little choice in falling in love, which is all that this play is concerned with. For us foolish mortals, however, the choice remains on whether or not we remain in love. So maybe the love potion is the mechanism by which Demetrius falls for Helena; let us pretend that, once that has faded, he chooses to remain with her. Of course, there's a lot more to this play than just the lovers, and the hands-down best would have to be Nick Bottom, a weaver of Athens. He is guileless, charming, foolish, brash, and enthusiastic. He's also incapable of keeping the right words in his mind (when he says "deflowered" instead of "devoured", it leads to really bad connotations about what the lion purportedly does to Thisby) or of remaining dissuaded of what he wants. And what he wants is to perform a farcical play for Theseus and Hippolyta on their wedding day (at night). It is his genuineness that pulls me toward him. He is foolish, yes, but he's authentically so. He bungles most everything, but it does tend to go well despite all of that. And there is--though Bottom certainly doesn't know it--a profundity to the speech he utters upon waking up in the forest, his memories of having the head of a donkey and being wooed by Titania (another victim of the love potion): I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom… (4.1.199-209) His attempt to recreate 1 Corinthians 2:9-10 is delightful, and it points to the simplicity of the man who is trying his best despite not having all his facts straight. It's a brilliant bit of characterization that is in line with everything else we see of Bottom throughout the play entire. It's also rather indicative of the dichotomies, paradoxes, and oxymorons that Shakespeare weaves throughout the play. Okay, so a bit of personal history here: I took one (and only one) Shakespeare class during my college days. Most of the term was spent in rehearsals where I and four other girls were tasked with doing an abridgment of 5.1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As I was the only guy, they (naturally) cast me as Thisby, the female lover who kills herself most tragically for love. So there are parts of this scene that live in my memory, even if I wouldn't be able to perfectly recite the words. This part of the play is absolutely my favorite, as it resides close to my heart. In this scene, Theseus says the line "That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow" (5.1.59), which has stuck with me because of its fundamental paradox. How can you have hot ice? But it isn't just there: We get lots of paradoxes and oxymorons in the speeches of the characters, which adds to the impossibility and dream-like quality of the play itself. In other words, through this constant paradoxical pressure that Shakespeare baked into the poetry, we get a strange sense of a world where impossible things can happen, where our typical boundaries of expectation and reality are bent, twisted, or lost entirely. "So musical a discord," says Hippolyta in 4.1.115, "such sweet thunder." These are not typical--discord does not make music and what thunder savors of sweetness?--and neither is this enchanted wood just outside of Athens. I think that's really cool. There are some other components to this play that I noticed, but I think this has probably gone on long enough. If you haven't watched a Shakespeare play in a long time (or ever), my over-familiarity with it leading me to like it less shouldn't dissuade you from making the choice to give it a try. If you don't like it, just take Robin's advice during the Epilogue: If we shadows have offended, Sitting in my home office, listening to the intermittent chirps of hidden birds and the occasional growl of passing traffic, it's clear that this Sunday morning is vastly different than last Sunday morning. My little sister, Michelle, finally found the right guy a few years back. Last March, in a hasty ceremony done right before the world locked down, she married him. Last week, in a beautiful ceremony done before a small collection of close friends and family, she married him right. That's the broad stroke of it; here are the details… Michelle is the baby of the family, my only sister, and a wonderful human being. She grew up with all of us here in Utah, but now lives in Portland. Originally, she was going to marry her fiancé, Jeremy, on my birthday back in April of 2020. As we all know, having a wedding during the early days of the pandemic were a no-no, so she had to postpone the celebration for over a year. The plus side to this was that, by waiting until June of 2021, all of her family was able to get the vaccine and travel in (presumed, comparative) safety. I'm really glad that it worked out the way it did, because if she'd tried to do it in, say, October, I don't know if I'd have been able to attend. Anyway, the trip was short and sweet: Gayle and I flew out to Oregon with my immediate family (my older brother and his girlfriend, my younger brother and his wife, and my parents) on Saturday. We ate a delicious lunch at a barbeque place, which was a bit strange for me and Gayle: We haven't dined in any restaurant in over a year. Fortunately, Portland was still taking the pandemic seriously, so the restaurant was not crowded, there were plenty of spaces between tables, and the servers all wore masks. That helped calm my covid-nerves, albeit only a little. (The issue here is pretty complicated, so I'm not going to go into why I felt--and still feel--that way.) After eating, we piled into the two not-at-all-what-we-ordered rental vehicles (my dad had to drive an eye-wateringly blue pickup truck, while my brother drove a clown-car compact called a Chevy Spark), dropped off our things at a hotel, and then met up with the purpose of our trip. We got to see Michelle and Jeremy's beautiful home--one that had been built about a century ago--and enjoy the rich verdure of Portland. We left Utah when it was broiling in the mid-nineties; we never peaked over seventy degrees while in Oregon, which meant that the evening was cool and pleasant. We met Jeremy's family--brother, sister-in-law, and parents--and enjoyed a pizza dinner with my aunt from New York, too. Lyra, Michelle's enormous bundle of dog energy, frolicked joyfully in the park. We spent an enjoyable evening at Michelle's house, playing games, eating smores, and choking on smoke from the firepit in their backyard. It did strike me as odd that I was indoors, masks off, and acting as if all was right in the world while knowing that things weren't as picturesque as they felt. Fortunately, my oldest son--the one with a severe heart condition that put him at high risk with covid--had just received his second dose of the vaccine the day before. Though he wasn't there with us, it made me feel better to know that he would soon be safe enough to engage in activities like these again. Sunday morning arrived, and with it the many differences between that day and this. We left our Comfort Inn and headed to the New Deal Café where we had a delicious and filling breakfast. We ate outside while the typically temperamental Portland weather teased and threatened us with rain. Fortunately, the wet held off while we ate. The next stop was Powell's Bookstore in the heart of Portland. Those who know me well know that a bookstore of Powell's size and stature is more exciting and enjoyable for me than going to a theme park. Because of covid restrictions, we had to queue outside for a few minutes until we were allowed into the store. It was a magical place, I'm not going to lie. I immediately set out to find their literature criticism section where I looked at all of their Shakespeare-related offerings. They had one entire section dedicated to his plays and another to criticisms, history, and contemporary thought on the Bard. Incredible. I also wandered through the comics, roleplaying games, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and history sections, drinking in the ambiance and reveling in the sheer quantity of book nerdery going on about me. I ended up buying some books that I will get next Sunday, as they are the Father's Day presents my children will give me. I also bought a couple of books that I gave to the newlyweds (who were also alreadyweds, but whatever) and an annotated collection of H.P. Lovecraft's works. Once they pulled me (an hour earlier than anticipated, I might add) from Powell's, we hit the road again, striking out toward the vineyard where the wedding would be held later that day. The drive was pleasant--I read from my book and enjoyed the scenery--and, soon enough, we had arrived at Youngberg Hill. We settled into our rooms, with Gayle immediately snuggling into a nap, and then passed the afternoon with gentle conversation. My aunt and older brother did a wine tasting while looking out over the beautiful countryside; my younger brother and dad and I enjoyed the company. As five o'clock prowled closer, we all got ready. Gayle put on the wig composed of her own hair and the resplendent blue dress she had made for the occasion. I wore a tie. Because the bride and groom are Jewish and having a Jewish wedding, I also put on one of the provided kippah (which I always called a yarmulke) which I wore throughout the night. About ten minutes before the beginning of the ceremony, the Oregonian weather kicked in. The rain came down in fits and starts at first, so we went ahead and gathered on the folding chairs outside. The rabbi who officiated performed a beautiful ceremony…only for the rain to really come down just as the two were declared officially married. As one, we scrambled to bring the ceremony inside the nearby pavilion, where the two recited vows to each other, I read a poem by Khalil Gibran--per Michelle's request--and we all relished the beauty of what was happening. Once the glass was broken beneath Jeremy's foot, the couple went out for some beautiful pictures. The rain had--predictably--stopped during the ceremony, but the upshot was, a beautiful rainbow grew out of the gray skies, allowing for some really remarkable wedding photos. After the pictures were done, we went into the pavilion again to enjoy the meal, the speeches about the lovely couple, and socializing with others. I'm not a particularly extroverted person. In fact, I don't really like parties or social gatherings, especially with people that I don't know. I'm much like Mr. Darcy in that way… Still, it was, for the most part, a wonderful dining experience, getting to know Jeremy's family and friends a bit. Once the meal was out of the way, a dance was had, and then the party really started. Michelle and her friends liquored up very well, frolicked for a good few hours, and then at last said good night. It was an exhausting but fulfilling day, and I only got choked up, like, twice. It was a memorable, wonderful experience. We spent the night in the Youngberg Hill's mansion, enjoyed a delicious breakfast there, and then set off for the airport. The flight home was even less eventful than the flight there. I read more of my book, dozed, and enjoyed the ginger ale (the only reason to fly). Home from the trip, we stopped at Gayle's parents' house, where the boys were being tended. We spent the evening with them, trying (and failing) to get our seven-year-old's tooth out of his face. We then went home to an empty house. The next morning--far earlier than I would normally want--we had an appointment for Gayle's radiation therapy. She also got a hormone-suppression shot, which was painful for her. That Tuesday afternoon, we went up to Salt Lake City, dressed up in Gayle's costumes as Mr. and Mrs. Darcy for afternoon tea at the Grand American Hotel. (This was a long-anticipated experience, one that I had set up for Gayle's big Christmas present.) I've never been to the Grand American, and so I made the mistake of prowling through the parking garage, trying to find the best place to park. I ended up putting us on the farthest-from-our-destination spot possible. Still, we arrived with enough time to get to the Lobby Lounge and begin a ninety minute experience. I can still almost taste that delicious tea…wow. It was really good. Plus the food was delightful. We took some pictures there at the hotel, then went to the Red Butte Gardens nearby, where we continued to cosplay as Regency-era aristocracy. We bumped into some tourists from Philadelphia who wanted our pictures. It was fun to make people smile with Gayle's costumes again. It's…been a while since we could do that.
Originally, we were going to stay the night at Anniversary Inn, but a mix-up in reservations put us back on the road home. We went to the fine-dining restaurant attached to Evermore Park, Vanders Keep, and had another fantastic meal. It really was delicious, and the ambiance was a lot of fun. If you're interested in that sort of thing, I'd really recommend Vanders Keep restaurant. It's a bit more expensive than I normally do, but it's worth going at least once. In our case, I imagine that it'll become part of Gayle's birthday celebrations for as long as the restaurant exists. Anyway, all of this is to say that today is a quiet Sunday at home, made remarkable only by the fact that it's the last time that we're planning on having sacrament meeting in our own domicile. Next Sunday will be (we're assuming) the first time that we return to a church meeting since March 2020. I have a lot of complicated feelings that I'll try to process over the next week as that approaches, but right now, I'm simply trying to appreciate just how different this week is from last week. Thinking about Michelle's smiles and how happy we were out in Oregon still fills me with a fuzzy sense of completeness and happiness. I'm not one who believes that we can only understand things through opposites, but I do think that contrasts can be illuminating. And I can't think of a way to pass the day that's more different from now than what we had then. It was a different kind of Sunday, but one that I hope will live in my memories for a long time to come. I have completed the catalogue of FromSoftware games (yes, they have games from before the Souls series…I'm not talking about that).
This is no small accomplishment. When I first heard of Dark Souls, I was living in my townhouse, had only two kids, and thought, Nah, I'll pass. I don't want to play the hardest games of all time. Now I've not only beaten that game, I've invested hundreds of dollars into other FromSoftware titles and related items. I have a Bloodborne Hunter figurine on my desk; Bloodborne-based board games (technically, one is a card game and the other is a board game); Bloodborne comics and artbook; Volume 1 of a book of essays about Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II (with plans to buy Volume 2 shortly); and countless hours watching lore-analysis videos, playthrough tips, art contests related to the FromSoftware library, and more. I also listen to a couple of podcasts about the games every once in a while. I've written a handful of essays about the different titles, and even gone so far as to use Bloodborne as the basis for both an ambitious project of novellas (which I'm still sitting at about halfway through), but also the inspiration for my own tabletop RPG. These games have really made a difference in my life. And it's not like this is a long-term love-affair. I tried playing Bloodborne a couple of times before it stuck with me, which only happened because I listened to the VaatiVidya explanation of the story. I didn't know any of that, I thought as his smooth, soothing voice walked me through the intricacies of the Healing Church, the Vilebloods, and Byrgenwerth College. I didn't realize that people, y'know…actually beat the game. That it wasn't like Overwatch--something that you could pick up and play and then put down infinitely. It had an end-state. That…was revelatory. It also really only happened in the past year or so. After beating Bloodborne on Christmas Eve 2020, I immediately set my sights on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. However, my retail therapy kicked in during Gayle's first chemotherapy treatment in early January 2021, and I started Dark Souls as well. So, really, between January 2021 and end of May 2021, I have beaten (in order) Dark Souls, Sekiro, Demon's Souls Remake, Dark Souls II, and now Dark Souls III. Not too shabby, considering everything else that's going on in my life. (I want to point out that I've also beaten Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Marvel's Avengers during the same time period, too.) That's a lot of video game time, though I have to confess that a lot of it has been a coping mechanism for the stresses in my day-to-day life. I don't think I would have done this exact thing had it been any other year. And now I'm "done" with these games. Elden Ring is an infinity away from being released; DLC (with the exception of Bloodborne) doesn't necessarily interest me; New Game + is intimidating. I don't know if/when I'll return to these worlds in any meaningful way. I plan on firing up Bloodborne again--that's probably always going to be a given, considering how it was my first entry into the FromSoftware library and is, by almost all counts, the best of all of these kinds of games--but returning to Lordran, Drangleic, or Lothric? I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure that Dark Souls II won't see me revisiting it…of them all, it was my least favorite. But I also have another conundrum: What actually counts as one of these games? See, the original Demon's Souls was made over a decade ago, but its remastered version was a launch title for the PlayStation 5. In the research I did about the game, the new take on it is pretty faithful--some changes here or there, but on the whole a very similar experience--to the original. But there are some differences. What should I do about that? Have I really played Demon's Souls? Both yes and no…I've played a version of it. But not the version of it. The same, as a matter of fact, goes for Dark Souls. I'm playing the PlayStation 4 "Remastered" version, which has some changes and tweaks to it, too. I, for instance, never had the problem of framerates dropping to almost-unplayable levels when I went through Blighttown, as that was an issue with the original PlayStation 3 hardware. The PS4 doesn't struggle with that area at all anyway, and when I play it on my PS5, I haven't had a single issue. Does that mean I haven't really played Dark Souls? My experience with Dark Souls II was exclusively through the Scholar of the First Sin version of the game, which includes the DLC but also has a lot of other changes to the game that have been controversial among the dedicated fan-base. So was my experience less-than-authentic to the true experience of Dark Souls II? (Frankly, I don't care either way about this one: I didn't really like Drangleic very much and while there were some enjoyable moments, on the whole it wasn't my thing. The others, however, give me pause. I don't think I'm hardcore enough to want to try out the earlier versions of these games, frankly. I don't even want to play through the DLC of some of them. So I think I'm probably safe in saying that, for me, I feel as though I've completed the series, despite the technicalities. But what of DSIII? What were my thoughts? Well…pretty positive. Playing a PS4-era game is always preferable to a PS3-era game (unless nostalgia is involved; that's a different story). There were some small tweaks that DSIII took from both Bloodborne and Dark Souls II that I thought were great. After going through Demon's Souls and Dark Souls II and really simply being irritated at the way my life-max was depleted after dying once, I liked how restoring my character's ember--either through using an ember item or defeating a boss--expanded the health bar, rather than simply restoring an amount that had been sitting empty while I was in the "undead form" or whatever. Like, there was a psychological frustration to see that the punishment for my earlier failures were constantly being rubbed in my face due to the inability to have a full health bar. I didn't see how it was being used in any way but that, and it was not something that I wanted to see again. Dark Souls III changes the formula in its effect, despite the fact that it is doing the same thing mechanically. By giving me a larger health-bar after restoring an ember, I feel rewarded for having done well, rather than punished for having made a mistake. And, since the game is designed for me to make lots of mistakes, it got tiresome in those other games to be living under that constant punishment. Another change to the format from DS to DSIII is the inclusion of dual-wielding. It wasn't something I really experimented with in Dark Souls II, but I had a lot of fun swinging around a couple of axes throughout most of my playthrough. I did end up switching over to a more traditional sword-and-shield combo in the late-game, but I don't regret focusing on the two hand-axes throughout most of it. (This was particularly nice, since I'm not very good at parrying, so the shield wasn't used to its best effect with me.) This may be my own ignorance showing, but I was happy to be able to level up a couple of weapons to +9 or even +10 in the course of the one playthrough. That was unexpected: I've always struggled to get my weapons improved quickly enough to justify a mid- to late-game switch from one to another, which means that I'm usually still swinging the same thing around that I started the game with. The ease of improving the weapons made it a lot more viable for me to experiment. In fact, my favorite weapon--perhaps of any of the games in total--would be the Abyss Watchers' sword-and-dagger combo. Two-handing that, with the unexpected moveset of diving low and swinging about wildly, is lots of fun and can make really short work of many enemies. While tried-and-true methods are still utilized, I felt much more comfortable branching out and experimenting with my approach to the game, and that definitely increased my pleasure at playing it. Now, as I already outlined above, I have blazed through these games in less than half a year. I don't have nostalgia connected to any of them (except Bloodborne). That isn't to say that they aren't important; I'm instead saying that I don't have any deeper connections to them that time often will generate. Nevertheless, it was quite the thrill to be back in Anor Londo again. I'd only been away from that iconic Dark Souls location for a few weeks, yet running up the flying buttresses again, knocking back the silver knights (or, more frequently, being smacked around by them), and revisiting the grand cathedral arena where Ornstein and Smough drained hours of my life was a really enjoyable experience. Seeing it with the enhanced graphics and smoothness of the PS4-run engine made it even better. It wasn't quite as powerful as when I returned to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4, but it was still pretty great. The bosses were also a highlight of the game. While Dark Souls II tried to overwhelm me with its thirty-plus bosses, Dark Souls III was instead going back to a more Demon's Souls-style of variety. Some bosses simply required some smacking around, yes: Figure out their moveset, use the right weapons, win the day. However, there were more that required some thinking, turning them into hyper-dangerous puzzles rather than just a brute-force experience. I'm thinking of Yhorm the Giant as the best example of this. When I arrived in his fog gate, I was immediately concerned with the size difference…how was I supposed to topple this guy? But, ever the brave warrior, I leaped forward… …and barely even scratched him with my weapon. Uh-oh, I thought. This is bad. Then I died. Going through the process of trying new things--a new weapon, a new armor set, a new load of rings--proved fruitless. Maybe I needed to lure him to the pillars and let the ceiling collapse on him? No, that didn't work. No matter how I tried it, I couldn't get around that fact that he was fast, strong, and didn't take any damage. I noticed, however, an item near his throne at the far end of the arena. I normally avoid picking those up during the boss fight: They're a reward, I figure, or I'll get cut down because I'm busy looting instead of fighting. But I was desperate. Not knowing what else to do, I went ahead and picked it up. A sword. Great. I already have dozens of those. Yet it tickled the back of my mind. Why give me this sword in this place? What might it do? After dying moments past picking it up, I went into the inventory and checked out the equipment. It was a Storm Ruler…the same kind of sword that I picked up in Demon's Souls. One that has a unique moveset… Not only that, but the description says that the sword is particularly useful against giants. Well, that seemed to fit, then, didn't it? I took some time to level up the sword a couple of times, then brought it into the fight. It was a really easy fight after that. Of all the bosses I've beaten in these games, this is the one that gave me the greatest satisfaction. (Orphan of Kos was the one that I'm proudest for having defeated, though.) I had figured it out. I had put together the clues and deduced how to make the weapon work in my favor. Yes, I could have done what I often do--looking online for tips and helps--but I had decided to do this myself. And I'd pulled it off. That's a good feeling. Not all of Dark Souls III was that way, however. I'm getting better at these games--you have to, if you want to beat them--but there are still hiccups, hang-ups, and disappointments. The first that springs to mind is the online-default. A whole other side of these games is the online component, where other players may summon you to fight by their side--or invade your world to do battle. Some players love this component, and thrill at invading or beating back invaders. And while it's been thrilling on the rare occasions that I've been invaded of having actually defeated another player, I haven't put much time or effort into this component. For Dark Souls III, I figured trying out a new part of the series might be fun. I joined a covenant that frequently pulled me into fighting through others' worlds, running around and chopping up whoever I could. It was fun. A bit of a diversion, but still…fun. However, it got tiresome to be in the middle of a fight, only to be suddenly pulled into another's world. Returning, the enemies I was confronting had all healed up while I was gone--though I hadn't--and I sometimes ended up losing my own game's battle because of that. The real issue, however, was that the game kicks you back to the main menu when the internet connection is lost. My home's internet can be immensely frustrating, and it isn't unheard of for it to drop connections often. After being dropped from a boss fight I was on the cusp of winning, I decided to just turn off the online feature entirely. The benefits of the hints left by other players just weren't worth the frustration of losing progress because of buggy internet. In the other titles, losing connectivity simply shifted me to offline mode--a switch that the game notified me of with a text box. No such convenience with DSIII. Despite how much I enjoyed some of the boss fights in the game, I have to say that fighting King of the Storm (and The Nameless King) was so frustrating that I never ended up beating them. Unlike Orphan of Kos or some of the other incredibly hard bosses, KotS and its rider just…bugged me. Maybe it was my particular version of the game, I don't know, but the sound effects wouldn't always load. That put me at a disadvantage in fighting them, as some of the tells for certain attacks have an audio cue to them. I would kill the one snake shaman at the end of the hallway before attacking the boss, pulling in 2,400 souls with each kill. Since the souls were easy to recover, I would slowly pile up more and more souls. After pulling in over 200k souls this way (which tells you how many times I attempted the fight), I gave up. It just wasn't worth it for an optional boss. I similarly struggled with the final boss, losing often because of my own mistakes or--in one particularly frustrating moment--because my character didn't get up when I pushed the corresponding button. So I died. By this point in my experiences with these games, I'm accustomed to having to try a lot to win. I'm used to close calls and tricky fights, to close-calls and one-shot deaths. But being accustomed to them and liking them are two different things. Three consecutive game sessions (each ranging between one and two hours) saw me still struggling to get past the Soul of Cinders. It probably took me more than fifty tries to get past him. That was…a lot of attempts. That means the Orphan of Kos, Lord Isshin, and now Soul of Cinders are the full-stop hardest bosses for me in the entire series. There's nothing wrong with being a hard final boss, though. I mean, these games are supposed to be hard. But sometimes… The last criticism I want to point out is entirely a personal one: This game feels a lot like Bloodborne. I know that they were created almost simultaneously, and it looks like they run on the same sort of game engine. They definitely have a similar feeling as far as the art direction goes, too. More than once I (or even Gayle) observed, "That looks like something from Bloodborne." It isn't really a problem…except it kind of is? Okay, analogy time: A few Christmases ago, Gayle bought me the English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, per my request. It's filled with all of the no-one-outside-an-English-department-has-heard-of hits like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Arden of Faversham and The Malcontent. I've read only a couple of them thus far (have I mentioned how bad I am at reading stuff? I'm really bad at it), and while they were pretty okay, the entire time I did so I was thinking, I could be reading Shakespeare right now. While not even in the same realm of power or importance as Shakespeare, the impulse is similar. If I'm playing a game that feels, looks, and sounds so much like Bloodborne, why not just play Bloodborne? The answer to that is pretty obvious: Dark Souls III is not Bloodborne. They are different. They are trying to do different things, tell different stories, explore different worlds. While Lothric isn't as engaging to me as Yharnam, by the end of the game, I was pretty fully on board. The quality that I've come to expect from these titles was fully evident, and despite some of my personal disagreements with certain choices (I still hate the "kick" mechanic--it almost never works as well as I want it to), the game is definitely one of the best in the catalogue. So, with them all completed, where do I go from here? I'll probably still be dabbling in Dark Souls, if only because my 11-year-old son is currently trying to beat it. (And can we take a minute to acknowledge two things here? One, I'm a bad dad for letting my young son play an M-rated video game; and two, it's crazy impressive that he's so far into the game--he's defeated Ornstein and Smough, for crying out loud! That is no mean feat.) I really want to go after Sekiro again, because I wasn't really appreciating what that game was trying to do within the FromSoftware formula. And the Old Blood beckons, of course. Yharnam awaits… I began creating my own tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) back in January. After about five months, I've written well over 35,000 words among the sundry components of the game: A loose outline of the rules for the game, a module that acts as a training manual for how the game begins, and a growing body of lore that fleshes out the world and tries to make a more interconnected, cohesive-feeling experience. I also have started a novel (I guess…I don't know how long it might be) that adds another 10,000 words or so. With all of these and the occasional notes and outlines and miscellanea, I have almost 50,000 words invested in this world.
I keep coming back to the question: Why, though? I mean, there's always the "safe" answer of "I have an idea and a need to create so I should follow that impulse." And that's true, as far as it goes. After all, I've dumped over one and a half million words into my different novels over the past seventeen or so years (not counting all my before-marriage writing). So I've clearly put a lot of effort into generating new worlds, new stories, new characters, new ideas. This, however, is different. It's not just because it's a game. I've designed games before (though it's not quite what I wanted, I do like the Quidditch-inspired board game I made a year ago), and I've done pure world-building exercises on occasion, too. Really, what I think is perhaps the biggest thing that's fueling this question is one that Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence". He uses his prodigious reading career to try to trace the ways in which certain authors are so heavily influenced by a certain source that it affects how they end up writing. In some cases, there's almost an exorcism of the influence that he can see in some of the works--Shakespeare's exorcism of Spencer and Marlow are, I believe, a couple of his posits (though I haven't read his book on it yet, so I can't say for certain). I bring this up for two reasons: One, because I believe that, were Bloom alive and knew about my using his theory for discussing board- and video games, he would likely be rather put off; and two, because I think it's a salient point. Perhaps his readings aren't entirely accurate, but the theory of an anxious influence on an artist is something that I certainly feel myself. It isn't just about writing in the shadow of Shakespeare (as Mark Edmund--another fantastic writer--asks, why write when Shakespeare already has?), as everyone is writing in his shadow, whether they know it or not. That doesn't bother me so much. It's about knowing what to do about the things that I get involved in. See, this game world, Drimdale, is not simply a TTRPG: It's a response to the fact that I wanted to try playing a hunter from Bloodborne in D&D and was tired of trying to figure out how to tweak the rules enough to make the hunter work inside of that game system. Now, I'm a big fan of D&D, even if I'm not the most knowledgeable about it, and so the idea of having a Bloodborne hunter as a character was really exciting. Despite the versatility and flexibility of D&D, however, I just wasn't getting out of these homebrew solutions what I wanted from a Bloodborne-inspired character. So I just…made up my own version. It isn't particularly good--I think it has potential, but I don't have a lot of playtesting opportunities to refine the ideas--though it certainly has a lot of the Bloodborne vibe. However, after a few pages of work, I realized that I was really making my own thing, my own version of a grimdark, Gothic world filled with monsters and violence. I switched it up, tweaking the terms that are from the video game and generating my world moving forward. I've written tens of thousands of words of lore for Drimdale, and every time I sit down to work on it, I have to ask myself if it's worth it. The influence is so large, the changes feel almost more like an insult than anything else. Why should I bother pursuing something that is so derivative? I recognize that there are no original ideas--everything is based off of something else. Heck, even Bloodborne is indebted to Lovecraft and gothic England for much of its verve, art-style, and concepts. And I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm not trying to flatter Hidetaka Miyazaki, though. But I can't really say what it is that I'm trying to do. A couple of years ago, I did an etude of the beginning of Stephen King's It. I practiced it (It) to try to figure out what King does and why it works out so well. I also attempted this etude in order to exorcize the Losers' Club and Pennywise from my mind. To a certain degree, it worked: I didn't feel the need to reread It during the summer of 2020--which was the first time since 2017 that I skipped the book. (That I watched the movies as a stopgap is a fact we shall pass in silence.) To another degree, however, it didn't work at all. I wrote a novella, Mon Ster, in a very Kingesque way. My Pen+ notebook, handwritten novel--a tortured little piece called The Strange Tale of Charles Green--is another attempt at capturing what fascinates me about Derry and its monstrous past. I'm still haunted by King's work; his influence gives me, as it were, anxiety. There's nothing wrong with me continuing to work on Drimdale, of course. There's nothing wrong with my fanfic-as-a-game, of taking another's idea and twisting it into my own version. I know that. What I still struggle with is how much time I'm investing into this project. I'm not a published author, but when I write one of my own stories, there's at least a possibility that I might be able to turn that into something potent enough to sell. The odds are long, but they're there. When it comes to Drimdale and this goofy little TTRPG, this constantly-expanding document of lore, I have to wonder why I always want to write more. I don't know how to find the answer to that. It's time for another bit of writing about my bits of writing.
I've talked a lot about my penchant for recording how many words I write per day/month/year. It's a way for me to see if I'm really doing anything in my chosen craft, and it has been really helpful in showing me where I focus. In fact, one of the reasons that I have fewer posts on this website is because I saw that I was spending a huge amount of my writing time focusing on my non-fiction and I wanted to change that. Today, I started looking at my word count for the year. It isn't where I want it to be: At the end of April, I had written about 150,000 words. These were split between my book about Metal Gear Solid, worldbuilding the place where my TTRPG is set, rules for my TTRPG, and picking at a bizarre retelling/remake of the Little Red Riding Hood story. There are other, miscellaneous additions, but that makes up the bulk of it. The thing that stood out to me, though, was how April 2021 compares to other Aprils. In other words, where do I stand as far as my word count after four months during the past four years? It breaks down like this:
Clearly, I'm doing about as well as I was at the same point during our first month of quarantine. Considering how much has happened to me and my family in the past half year, I think it makes sense that I'm still writing as if the world is on fire. Because it is. So, I'm not publicly flogging myself for having not written more in 2020. I was spending my school days in front of the computer, draining myself into cyberspace. Writing did not come easily then. By the time I became accustomed to the oddness of my school year, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I even tried to do NaNoWriMo…then I contracted COVID. (I also got three or four rejections on my submissions for War Golem, if we're really adding to the pile, here.) In other words, I wasn't in a particularly creative headspace for a good portion of last year. And it doesn't really surprise me to see that 2021 is following suit. No, what really surprised me the most was the next bit of information that I gleaned. On my spreadsheet, I have a tally of all of my completed novella-length or longer projects. Because I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2015, I've been finishing a couple of books a year pretty consistently. I mean, I even finished two novellas in 2020, despite everything else that was going on. But when I looked back at 2019--which was not my most productive year--I was surprised to see that it was 2019 where I finished the highest number of projects. How many? Seven. Seven books, totaling almost 300,000 words. Three were part of my novella-world project. Another was finishing up a NaNoWriMo from 2018 that I hadn't completed during the month. The next was a short story that morphed into a novella, one that I had been working on occasionally for a year or so. Novellas aside, I had two novels that I finished, both of them Shakespeare-adjacent: One was my Da Vinci Code but with Shakespeare book, Raleigh House. The other was my NaNoWriMo for 2019, Elsinore Ranch, which is a retelling of Hamlet. It makes me wonder what I did in 2019 that I've clearly forgotten how to do in the two years since. I know that a big portion of it is that my video game obsessions aren't easing up. For some reason, indulging my addictions doesn't satiate them. And I know that my life will not be "normal" again anytime soon--perhaps ever. It's hard to say. Will I ever get back to that level of prolificacy? Will I ever be so excited about my stories that I'd rather write them more than anything else? I mean, it isn't that I wasn't writing at all. It was just that nothing really sang to me. And I know that writers have to write, regardless of if their muse is crooning inspiration to them or not. But I'm not a professional writer. I don't know if I ever will be. I don't have a contract or a deadline to meet. I don't have to hit a quota. Yet I'm not happy that my numbers are trending downwards. I want to improve my output, my editing, my craft. I don't want 2019 to be my bumper crop for finished projects. So I guess I gotta figure out how to get what I'm after, huh? In my quest for control over something difficult in my life, I've paradoxically landed on playing through the modern Soulsborne catalogue. Thanks to my incredibly-late arrival to the genre, I've been able to pick up almost all of the games for super cheap--with the exception of Sekiro, I think--and that includes my latest victory, Dark Souls II.
I have to admit, I entered into the world of Drangleic with a hefty host of reservation. Within the Soulsborne community, Dark Souls II has an at-best-mixed reputation. There are lots of reasons for that, including creator-worship (since the creator of the series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, was not in the driver's seat for this entry), disliked changes to the formula, and a fair amount of hate for the hit boxes of the game. In fact, I watched a couple of YouTube videos under the search terms "Should I play Dark Souls 2?" because I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend time in a game that wasn't scratching the itch that FromSoftware games (alone, perhaps) seem to make in me. Still, at sub-twenty dollars, it didn't seem like a huge financial investment. If I didn't like the game after twenty hours or so of playing, no big deal, right? Well, I ended up dropping fifty hours into the game before beating it last night, and I have to say…I definitely see why people like it the least of the Soulsborne games. That does not equal hating it (I wouldn't have beaten it if I hated it). It means that, in the pantheon of Soulsborne games, my current ranking is as follows: 5. Dark Souls II 4. Dark Souls 3. Demon's Souls 2. Sekiro 1. Bloodborne (We'll have to see, in a few weeks, where I feel Dark Souls III lands. And, in a few months/years (?) where Elden Ring fits in.) I feel like the greatest controversy in this is where Dark Souls goes, as it's the originator in the series and has a special, nostalgic place in the hearts of a lot of gamers. Many have been involved with Souls games since its inception during the early PS3 generation, so there's a lot that factors into one's feelings about these games. For me, that nostalgic devotion is centered on Bloodborne (though it seems that most of the community agrees with me that it is the best of all, regardless). Nevertheless, I put Dark Souls where I did in part because while its formula is better implemented than in Demon's Souls, I played the Demon's Souls PS5 remake, which has so many nice features to it--up to and including the superior haptic feedback of the PS5 controllers--that it just barely edges out Dark Souls from the top three. It bears emphasizing that these are all good games. If I have to put them into a hierarchy, then that's how it currently shakes out. And why do I put Dark Souls II on the bottom of the list? Well, just like how I put Demon's Souls higher because of a collection of small-but-adds-up-to-a-lot features, Dark Souls II has the same-but-opposite effect: The tiny changes diminished my preference for the game. The Cons
The Pros
In sum, the game is good. It's great, in fact, though it fails to live up to the high standards of the others in its pedigree…which is basically what the community told me when I did my original due-diligence. Okay. Next up…Dark Souls III. Christmas of 2020 was…rough. Not only were we self-imposed pariahs, separated from almost all family and friends as the (seemingly) only ones still taking the pandemic seriously, but the looming treatment of Gayle's breast cancer cast a pall over a very subdued holiday. One thing, however, that has come from that time was I've picked up a new hobby, thanks to the gift Gayle gave her boys of mini-fig paints. I've been playing D&D off and on for about three years now. My boys have all created characters that they use in our adventures, and thanks to a generous neighbor and my school's 3-D printer, we've even created 3-D prints of them to use when the mood hits us right. As good as these prints are (which, considering the constraints of the technology, are pretty good, I think), they're still monochromatic versions. Despite that, I thought it might be a good father/son bonding experience for us to learn how to paint those same miniatures. I was this close to buying a starter painting set at the last FanX convention we went to, but distance and crowds prevented me from following up. Ever observant, my wife decided to pick up some paints for us as a Christmas gift, thus allowing us to paint together as a family. We kind of have. My younger two boys have sat down with me on a couple of occasions as we've taken some molded miniatures that Gayle gave us and tried our hands at painting them. (My oldest is not really interested in artistic endeavors of any sort, so he has yet to sit down and participate with us.) I watched some YouTube videos, listened to my wife's artistic advice, and then set to work. We primed the models (using a spray-paint primer, in order to prime a lot of them all at once) and painted them in the stock colors that came with the original set. The first one I did was of an elven archer. I was surprised at how well it turned out, considering my inexperience. It was also fun to sit with my boys and quietly work on something together. My middle son has shown the greatest interest, having painted a couple of dragons, a skeleton, and a couple of others. (Ironically, despite the fact that we started this hobby in order to paint the miniatures of our characters, we've yet to try to paint the 3-D printed minis.)
Where I really became interested was when I got the Bloodborne Board Game, a hefty investment of Christmas cash that arrived back in February or March. I learned about the game after its Kickstarter campaign had ended, so I was forced to buy through an alternative website that incorporated the main game and three additional add-on packs of different types. It was a lot of money (more than I spent on the video game, that's for sure), and I didn't want it to go to waste. Fortunately, the game is really enjoyable--I've played it for dozens of hours so far--and I want to keep my interest in it as high as possible. To that end, I've continued my painting hobby. See, having all of these new miniatures (probably over 100 of them, if I were to sit down and actually count them) means that I have plenty to keep me busy for the next couple of years or so. Each monster of the game comes with two or four miniatures, meaning that I can experiment with different color sets, motifs, and techniques. If I do one that feels incorrect, it's okay: I don't have to reset on that one as I can just paint another one in a better way. It's also helpful in keeping me from secluding myself in my office when the rest of the family is downstairs playing video games, sewing, or otherwise interacting. I sit in the corner of the kitchen table next to a stack of drawers filled with paints, brushes, pallets, and figurines, quietly painting my models. I use an old orange juice bottle with a bit of 3M double-sided adhesive to keep the models attached. A Tupperware container provides the perfect place to put a wet paper towel and a square of parchment paper in order to make a wet-pallet that keeps the mixed paints from drying out before I can use them all. Because Gayle is an artist, she has a huge collection of acrylic paints that I'm now learning how to use. Her generosity is always impressive, if you ask me. There are a couple of downsides: I'm not sure if it's because they're cheap or what, but I think I'm wearing out the brushes. I make small mistakes sometimes because the brush-heads act in ways I'm not expecting, or fail to keep a strong point when I need them to. I also sometimes get irritated by having to paint the same thing four times (eight, if I prime them by hand). I know, I know--I just said that it's good that I have so many options. And that is true, for reasons I mentioned above. It's also true that it can be tedious to go over the same details again and again. This doesn't happen all of the time--I have so many figurines to paint that I really can just bounce from one to another whenever I want--but as far as the game is concerned, I want to play with the pieces that I've painted. When I've only painted one or two, then I feel the urge to paint the remaining ones, but struggle against the aforementioned irritation of being involved with the same one again and again. It isn't a massive con, or anything, just one of the quirks of the situation. Paint choices are also limited, in a sense. I mean, I can paint them whatever I want--obviously--but the game's source material is rather grim, bleak, and dark. There are lots of blacks, browns, and blood-red, yes. However, bright colors that really pop, or provide interesting contrasts don't really fit into the game's design. (I cheated a bit when it came to painting the item chests, as it gave me a chance to make some that were gold or silver and much more eye-catching.) So, I've had to settle with going in slightly different directions as far as the coloring goes. Despite these slight difficulties, I am really enjoying this new hobby. It has taken away from my writing and reading (though I just finished listening to The Fellowship of the Ring while painting in my corner, so it's good for audiobooks), but it's also immensely cathartic. I mean, there's a lot in my life that requires a lot of my emotional energy. Writing is one of the most demanding things that I do outside of my job. Sometimes--most times--I'm drained when I get home from work. The last thing I want to do is spend time slapping a keyboard. Add to that a continuing doubt about ever writing something worth being published, the (perhaps) connection to increasing my medication dosage to deal with my depression, and the overall stress of the continuing cancer treatments while in a pandemic from which my oldest is still at risk, and it makes sense that I want to do something that doesn't have any higher stakes than "Can I make this look cool?" Anyway, I'm pretty proud of what I've done. There's a whole thread on Twitter that you can look through everything I've painted so far, as well as a few more here below. |
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