I don't like unearned redemption

 I'm going back to a familiar well and re-reading older books this year. Well, not always older, one was The Employees by Olga Ravn, and I read that only in 2022 and it came out about a year earlier. But mostly older books.

One book I reread the last few days was The Magician's Nephew. Book 6 of the Narnia series, though it's now placed as Book 1 because chronologically it comes first. The story of two children, Polly and Digory, who get involved in the schemes of Digory's uncle (the titular Magician) and find themselves waking a terror of another world, the half-giantess Jadis, who will later be the White Witch of Narnia.

Digory is a bold and loud idiot. He's generally trying to do the right thing, but only after serious consideration or hesitation, and when he does the wrong thing, he goes all in. He's the one who insists that Polly and he go to another world; once there, he decides he's going to ring a bell that seems to be bad news and hurts Polly when she tries to stop him. That bell wakes up Jadis, and lots of unfortunate events follow. Eventually, for no particular reason, the Jesus-substitute Aslan the Lion allows him to do an important job and redeem himself, when at no point has he earned the right to be important or valued.

Meanwhile, there's Polly. She's consistently for doing the right thing, for not taking stupid chances, for leaving clearly bad things alone. But because she's a girl, and because Clive Staples Lewis is very, very Christian so the unearned redemption comes in, and she gets nothing. She's sidelined in the narrative, and will not be the old professor who the Pevensey kids end up staying with, and basically just gets ignored. She's permitted, as a favor, to fly along with Digory on his redemption quest, but not to really participate.

And then, again, he does nothing to earn the thanks and regard of Aslan except do as he's requested, but he gets thanks and regard just the same. "Do the thing!" and then he does it and is treated as if doing the thing was the biggest deal in all of history. He's sorely tempted to fuck up on doing the thing, almost does; Polly on the other hand never has a moment's thought of messing up the task by involving herself. Again, she gets paid in relative dust.

I think there's a lot of good things in the book; I adore Jadis, and really Aslan is even okay in this book. Strawberry/Fledge is a great horse. Uncle Andrew is a pretty good character, if an awful and worthless human being. The green and yellow rings and the Wood Between The Worlds are neat! Even Digory isn't as annoying as I am making him out to be. It's the story where the redemption of Digory's boring failings is built in and guaranteed because it's what Christ would do that makes me crabby.

Anyway, I want to do something with Jadis. I want to do something with these settings and ideas. It's still under copyright so it'll be a slantwise sort of thing, but I am having thoughts and they might turn into words, eventually.

Polly deserves better, at the very least. 

Game Day!

 Holy shit, I had people over, strangers over, for a ttrpg one shot, and it was great!

 I'm in a Discord that's connected to the book clubs associated with Parallel Worlds, and yes that's an awkward chain, but no matter. Parallel Worlds is a speculative fiction book store, small but mighty, and so as perhaps expected there's a good number of tabletop gamers in the Discord. Since we moved to a better place in Irvington in Portland, I have been thinking about hosting, well, something, anything. And I have about 40-50 smaller games that could work for one shots which I've never run or played, so it seemed perfect.

I should mention that the group formed around that Discord is so wonderful--there are activities planned every week, official to the group like the Book Clubs and a few other events, but also just ad hoc. Bike Rides, writing sessions, craft groups, meet ups at shows or readings, it's just such a great community. So I was not really concerned that I didn't know the people who would be coming, and I felt like maybe it would be great. 

And you know what? It really was. 4 people showed up for this first one (and it will be a first of many) and we got a little acquainted and talked about our gaming history and what kinds of games we liked. And then we played a game of The Witch is Dead with me running it and the players were all so great, so game, so fun; and I think I did pretty good running it. Off and on since we've come to Portland I've run games, but never at home for a variety of reasons, and I think I'm just better in a home place. I feel more comfortable, and when I feel comfortable I can do my best (as is obvious, yes, but I hadn't thought about it.) The four familiars of the poor dead witch rolled pretty well and more importantly were cunning and cooperative, and they brought the witch back from the dead, hurray! And maybe a couple not-good people got killed in the process, but that's the breaks. Of a skull, specifically, for the first poor bastard.

We also decided what to run next month when we meet again, and hopefully some other folks will make it then, too, and we'll maybe have two games running on opposite sides of the room, or I'll head upstairs with a group and disturb the cats while other folks play at the table on the main floor, I'm not sure, but what I am sure of is that however many people appear, and whatever we decide to do, it'll be amazing fun.

Game Design Angst

In the very many years since I actively posted to any blog, I have done a good bit of tabletop game design. I ran a Kickstarter! I wrote up half a dozen games! But I don't really do playtesting because I always think a) I'm not important enough to ask people to do that labor for me and b) I don't really want to do the labor even if I have people. There's a certain fatalism there, where I assume nothing I do will or can be successful. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course.

However, I now have a few people willing to playtest my games, any and all of them, and that's...intimidating? I have to have a thing! And it has to work well enough to give it a try! And then I have to honor their labor and make changes! And try again! Those are big steps, and big responsibilities.

I'm starting, we're starting, with a game I wrote probably 13 or so years ago called City of Gray Shadows, which is about cats five thousand years ago in dusty cities doing cat things and trying to win freedom from the capricious "gods" who are, of course, just the humans who are all around them. I think...well, I don't know what to think. The players seem interested? I have to make some adjustments before we play in three days, which ought to be quick and can be deeply rough. I should make up quick summary sheets of how to play. I need to make them characters so I can explore as much of the system as possible in a go. Did I mention it uses playing cards instead of dice?

It's frightful. But I'm going to do it. Should have been done ages ago, but if the best time to do it is then, the second best time is NOW. Now is what I have.

Cassette Presentism

 I truly love the concept of Cassette Futurism, which is a scifi vibe that focuses on 70s/80s tech carried into the future, along with many of the aesthetics. The movie Alien is maybe the most known version, but it's gone into the present in little ways, with some tabletop roleplaying games I've seen and some other stuff--it was somewhat a trope in Alien: Earth this last year.

And now it's the future of say, when Alien was made (clearly, we're like 47 years later) and I'm buying cassette tapes.

It's a bit silly, because cassettes were always an odd thing. They dominated the market for a couple decades and then basically vanished. Mixtapes were wonderful, and the mix CD never was as good, while the playlist on the streaming service of your choice doesn't even come close. But that advantage aside, there's not much to recommend tapes. The sound quality is uncertain; they get tangled; rewinding is a guessing game and slow to boot.

So why am I going back to cassettes?

First, there was a guy I worked with at Powell's named Ryan who is temporally out of place; he has a dumb phone, he's ridden the rails, and (the key bit) he listens to cassettes. And when I saw him playing them at the counter, I remembered how much I enjoyed them, in the limited way I enjoyed paid music as a youth. When I took a trip to Europe in 1998, I was too alone and missed English and ended up buying a walkman (my first) and a bunch of tapes that I played over and over through the remaining weeks of the trip. Wham and Madonna featured strongly. A boy who maybe loved me and maybe I loved sent me a mixtape from home to meet me at Rome. I really liked that trip and those cassettes.

Second, I read an article about how cassettes require attention. Focus. In a way that streaming services--Spotify in my case--don't. That's...not exactly true to me? Maybe they even require less attention. They also reward patience and make your life better when you just ride along instead of considering "should I skip this song?" Because you can, of course, skip a song on a cassette, but it's a pain. And I want to have less digital in my life, and less skipping of things, less easiness when it comes to just deflecting anything that I don't at the exact moment want to deal with.

So I bought a little not-Walkman, and today I went out to Mississippi Records and bought a few cassettes from their in house line that are just fucking awesome. I know none of the songs--some of the artists, yes, but not the particular songs--but they're all great. There's little artifacts of the tapes being mixtapes, snippets of songs that they didn't mean to record, or moments of empty silence, or the hissing of a weird recording. I listened to two cassettes almost completely and there's a third for me to get excited for tomorrow. I love it.

It's maybe time to complicate your life, in ways that are nostalgic and pleasing. Think about what you might do in that regard. 

Welcome to 2026

 I don't think there's anything in fiction, or anything notable, set in 2026. It's not one of those iconic years. But it has to come along eventually, as all years will do in time. Even if nothing notable happens in 2026 in fiction, it's happening to us now. And I'm aiming to make the best of it.

I've started my reading challenge already, going to be 141 books this year which is the size of my to be read pile by my best current estimate. I'm reading Spear by Nicola Griffith and it's great. I made delicious pizza. I worked on editing my Arthurian novel, inspired by reading Spear. I wrote a little on a short story proposed by my colleagues in the Vicious Lion Writers Club, which in this case is going to be about starvation at the end of the world. I went out with Adam to get coffee at Seven Virtues, which is new to us; we liked it, even if the rain made it less than ideal to walk there. There was also laundry, and playing a sort of fun calendar game which in my case is the Dungeon one; I bought it at Powell's in the last week I worked there when I bought so many things (see: the tbr pile of 141 books.)

Anyway, Happy New Year. 

It's Been 84 Years

Not actually 84 years, but more than 8. I haven't posted to any of the dozens of blogs I've made (well, three, and a Tumblr that at one point I was fond of) in all that time. That's not entirely true. For a little while I had a blog on, I think it was called Ghost? It was fancy, too fancy, and I posted to it perhaps half a dozen times and then gave up on the fuss of it. That was a couple years ago.

So why am I back again to a thing that was never notable and that also is now an artifact of the past (a blog, that is, not *my* blog which is clearly an artifact of the past because I am that, myself.) The reason is, I'm not really part of social media, and there's words I want to share, and this is the place I came back to. There's drop cloths on the furnishings and dust is piled on stuff but that's fixable. The dust on stuff, that's my reduction in my already limited blogging skills. Which I can dust away; that being, uh, practice.

So I'm practicing.

Have I been writing? I have, and I finished writing a novel about Christopher Marlowe last week so that's something. But it's a mess of a novel, and I haven't been writing a whole lot.

What am I reading? SO MUCH. This is a banner year, where I've read about 165 books, and I'm aiming to pick up a couple more in the last 3 days of the year. Right now I'm reading The Hounding, about five troubled girls in the 1700s who might turn into dogs; and also The Hobbit, which I'm reading to Adam at night; and also Embers of the Hand which is a history of the Vikings.

I live in Portland now instead of Seattle, that's a big change. I'm a banker (only very recently.) Still married to Adam, still have two cats (did I ever talk about my cats, Jack and Daphne? They're cats, we have them.) We live in a condo that's big and on the edge of the nice neighborhood that's super walkable and I greatly like it.

And it's almost the end of the year, and the new year will bring new things. Maybe new posts. I don't know. Who can say. 

Better?

I went to see the doctor, and got told it was probably allergies. I lacked a bunch of symptoms: very little sneezing, no runny mucus, no itchy or watery eyes. Just in case, I was told to use Nasacort, and it has been pretty good so far. The worst of the congestion has cleared out of my sinuses, and I feel like I am much improved. So, yay?

The weather, on the other hand, is still really a grind. I was walking through the mall across the street, and there are trees all over. It's a week in April, and half of the trees didn't even have buds. There were some with delicate new leaves, but so many were still hibernating. And it's been raining forever, and there is wind, and clouds all the time. When the sun comes out it's glorious, and the light lingers so late into the evening, but I don't know, it's just a long dragging misery.

I've had a lot of games to look over, some I've talked about and more: Hillfolk with Iron Age personal relationships, Esoterrorists with horrific conspiracies to bring demons into the world opposed by expert agents; Fear Itself, which is Esoterrorists but with normal people instead; Trail of Cthulhu which is Call of Cthulhu but with better investigation rules; Microscope Expanded, the broadening supplement for the brilliant Microscope; Owl Hoot Trail, D&D in the fantasy Wild West. So many games. I'm thrilled with it. This is a good thing.

Saw Logan. It was fine. That's all that needs to be said.

I'm reading what I wrote, 30K words to try to figure out how to fix it. But I'm more interested in reading Catherynne M. Valente's short stories in The Bread We Eat In Dreams, some of which are shatteringly good. The sort of thing that makes one want to give up writing because you won't be that good. I'm tearing through them. It's great stuff, but out of print, so that's bad.