Local Library

 We've struggled a bit with libraries in Portland.

There's a big overall system-wide upgrade going on, where the Multnomah County Library system (which is the Portland system, since Portland is almost all of Multnomah county and vice versa) is closing and remodeling or expanding branches one after another. When we moved here, the Central Branch was our closest, and then it closed for a while, and then reopened for a few months, and then closed for a year almost, and then we moved not too long after it reopened. Then our local branch was in the part of our area we went to all the time in Hollywood, and so that was nice, except it too, then closed. So I was going to a branch near the Powell's Book Store location I worked at, but then I left that job. And truly that wasn't a branch, just a pick up for hold books, and drop off for any books.

So we've been here almost 4 years and our local branch has been closed roughly half that time.

This week, the Hollywood branch reopened, and it's not super close to us but as noted it's where many other things are: the grocery stores cluster there, there's a nice record store, a farmer's market, and so on. So we go that way a lot, and it's really nice to have the branch open again.

I'm not using the library so much right now, because I have an exceptionally large number of books on my to be read pile (it was 141 at the start of the year, and I think it's probably gone down by a handful of books at most because I keep buying more, somehow.) (Somehow, as if it were a mystery.) But there are books I know I don't want to own, or I'm pretty sure I don't, or that I don't want to buy at least, so those are coming from the library. Uncertainties, possibles, grim monstrosities, various categories like that.

Right now I have only one book, You Weren't Meant To Be Human, and I'm kind of dreading it but will be starting it probably tomorrow or the next day. It's apparently A LOT, and I don't know if I'm ready for it, but I'm going to dive in just the same. Hopefully I'll finish it?

It's wonderful, though, that I have the option, that I can walk a bit and grab a book of my choice from a very, very wide selection and read it, no risk except to my mental state, and then give it back after. Libraries are the best. 

Shit, two plus weeks

 I thought I meant to post more often

But I'll try

So it's been a far too nice winter, but then we had two incredibly wet days, and now it's sunny and clear but cold overnight, and that at least feels like the way a winter here should be. I'm not personally able to complain about it being sunny and not terribly cold in February, because winter gives me SAD and so if it fakes summer I feel so much more alive. But it's not, in the abstract, good. So a few days that feel wintry (for PNW standards) is nice.
 

I am working on maps in watercolor and dip pens with sparkly ink. It's so very nice. I just love it, tbh. The one I finished a bit ago is so damn lovely.

 

Maybe there's a world for it? Faerie winds blowing from the east, and a fallen empire that is shattered by rebels and the inability to deal with the faeries who occasionally follow the winds and transform lands into nightmare wonders of wild, untamed glory. Even if there's not, it feels wonderful to hold it and just think "I made this beautiful thing."

Analog life, that is. Creating things more by hand than before. Also I've bought a lot of cassettes, two players (one portable, one home based), and I'm listening to them so much. It's just...nice. Real.

So then is blogging of any use? It's a computer! It's digital!
But I guess I'm making a thing? Which is also nice. I don't know. Have to consider it still. Figure out if there's a point that outweighs the online of it all. For now, I'm still going on. But we'll see.

(aside: the Seahawks won the Superbowl, and I mostly don't care, but it's still a pretty cool thing, I guess. My boss at the bank, because I work at a bank these past two months, went to the celebration parade today. So that was fun, for him, and I'm happy he got to go. end aside. also end post.)
 

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.