Author Archives: Eric

OG What?

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I have a habit of holding posts, not publishing them, because I’m trying to give deeper consideration to whatever topic it is along with editing my words before sending them out to the world. I’m thinking that I might start just firing some things off and circling back to them later.

There are changes coming do my life long love, Dungeons and Dragons. These changes are NOT looking good. Bad optics and genuinely… corporate choices. Wizards of the Coast, the company that controls D&D (along with Hasbro – their owners) have decided to move towards making more money for their share holders. That’s what businesses do. They try to make money.

Does that make me feel good about it? Absolutely not. I genuinely worry for the future of the paper and pencil, meet in real life version of my favorite game. It has angered a LOT of people, specifically creators. I’m not going to go crashing into all the details. IF you want to get into that, I think this is a reasonably well put together video on the topic (here).

Does this effect me? You bet it does. It makes a (dubious and flatly evil) grab at claiming MY work and saying they own it. It means that the game I’ve been streaming for more than a year won’t likely be streaming anymore. It means the YouTube channel where all those videos are shown might be going away. It means Attacks of Opportunity, where I sometimes co-hosted with Author Jon Sprunk won’t ever likely return. They have gone out of their way to kill or claim creators who are not them… and that’s very much the opposite of what a creative system like this is all about.

It’s bad optics, but it’s also a bad feeling. I’ll update more as things move and change… but it doesn’t look good for sharing my hobby in the future.

Check out more about all this here.

An Anniversary

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I got this message the other day.

I thought you *were* a social network?

I genuinely did not recall that was the official starting point of the Pretend Blog. Yes, my blog was not always on my own website. I moved it here so that it would be totally mine and I could post, list and keep whatever crossed my mind. History lesson – I named it the Pretend Blog because I knew I was going to be pretending that other people would be reading it. I planned to write whatever came to mind or whatever I found amusing at the moment. I believe I posted a link to a music video that amused me (it still does – check it out here).

I didn’t click on the link. I’m afraid of what LJ may or may not have turned into. I noticed the advertisement that LJ is “in” social networks… I thought they were a social network? It was confusing and one of the red flags that made me thing clicking any link there was suspect.

Here we are 15 years in. Somehow I thought it would be more… something?

Maybe I’ll be able to track anniversaries more accurately moving forward and we can post some kind of fireworks here for 20. Just have to get there.

D23 – a challenge

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I was spending some of my free time roaming through news feeds I keep track of and websites I like to keep up on when I stumbled across this interesting challenge. Yes, it’s a “new years” thing that I said I *very specifically* DO NOT DO, but it does seem like it could be fun.

The challenge was in this article [here]. The short version is, every day you draw and describe a single room in your dungeon. Just one. Doesn’t take monumental effort, but what it does take is consistency. Being constantly at something I can do. Making small adjustments and keeping the path.

What I’m not going to do… is a dungeon. Yes, I know that’s the idea, but I’m going really dig into the details of a city in my game world called Lithia. The Free City of Lithia will need maps and buildings and markets and so very many things… that can be made a day at a time as I go.

The best part is that I’d already started. I’ve been developing my game world for a long time now and this is just an easy spot to land. I’ve got a sketchbook and a partial city map. I don’t really need to overthink anything (as the article says), I can just make stuff up.

Just one building a day

I’m excited to see how this all goes, and will post updates from time to time (perhaps more frequently – add a comment if you’re interested in seeing this more).

Obligatory Posts

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Despite having a little time off and the availability to work on things for my website, I didn’t do all the “end of year” things that so many people program and just let go. I find as often as not that I get frustrated by recycled content. There are certainly things to look back at – both good and bad – but there are also many things to look forward to.

No, I don’t do resolutions. I made a new year’s resolution many years ago to *never* make a new year’s resolution again, and I haven’t since then. I post about it every year, and it hasn’t changed.

I received a summary of my “year in books” from Goodreads. I was extremely disappointed in my summary. Not because of the company or the format or anything like that. It was the simple fact that I ended up with less than 10 books for the year. It was just about 2,600 pages of reading total, but the “books read” also included one that I literally shelved as “DNF” because I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. It would be easy to be very depressed about this lack of quality reading, but I’m going to take the advice of a random internet person and be happy that I was reading. I didn’t stop reading, I’m just going slower than my previous years of 2 or 3 books per month. I’ve had a lot going on in my life and reading for pleasure became something of a challenge – but I didn’t stop. There are so many people out there that don’t read at all, and I do NOT want to join those ranks. I’m taking it as a win that I kept plugging along.

So this year I’m going to keep doing the things I love. It will still be a challenging time as things move and change and grow in the family life here. I’ll still have to work at making the time to actually accomplish things, but for some reason the start of this year doesn’t feel as bleak as some in the past. We’ll see.

Up next – some of that “creating” stuff. More to follow~

Holiday

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This year I am very thankful that some of my creativity and drive to write seems to be returning. It’s been something of a rough year, but things are looking up. I hope your holiday season brings all sorts of positive things your way.

I also hope your family traditions – like being the one to get the rings off the end of the canned cranberry sauce – make you smile.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

You Should Be Watching

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Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities

This was originally published in the Watch The Skies November issue.

I’m doing two things with this recommendation that I wouldn’t normally do. First, I’ve not finished all of the episodes of the show in question. Second, it’s a little bit of genre mixing but there’s enough quasi Lovecraft in what I’ve seen to make me thing readers here might be interested. What am I talking about? Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix.

To the first point, having watched the first two of the eight episodes, I feel confident in my recommendation. There is a bit of a Twilight Zone vibe as each story has an introduction at the physical representation of the cabinet. The stories have been well written and paced for a shorter time frame, with episodes averaging around an hour (the shortest being 38 minutes, the longest at 1 hour and 3 minutes). The special effects are well done, in that they don’t detract from the story. I think that says a lot in the day and age where the computer is leaned on so heavily for effects that it can have a negative impact on the story telling. Beyond the actual effects is the aesthetic of it all. This show is appealing on the strictly visual level. The details are not lost in this show.

To the second point, it’s the little details. Giant rats, summoned demons, and statues of great Cthulhu (in a blink and you miss it moment) are among the things that lead me to genre mix here. There is nothing expressly or specifically “science fiction” in this show, but there is a lot of the fantastic and I think that’s worth taking a look at.

I intend to follow through and finish all the episodes. I think you should be watching it too!

You should check out the trailer here

Philcon!

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It is once again the time of year to head on over to Philadelphia (ok, Cherry Hill NJ, but it’s just across the bridge) and spend some time with fellow fans.

My panel list is pretty light this year (so far).

 Start Time      Duration      Room Name                          Title
Sat 10:00 AM   50 Min        Plaza 5                    Building the Next Generation of Gamers           
Sat 3:00 PM    50 Min        Plaza 5                    The Evolution of the Dresden Files   

I’m going to reach out to the program team and see if there’s more, but hopefully this means more time to hear what everyone else has to say. Hopefully I’ll see you there!

That drama

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Remember way back at the end of the summer? The sun was out, the weather was warm and there was all this time to just sit and ponder the particulars of being a parent. Writing and creating posts just whenever the mood moved. Something about drama and what parents should… something. I don’t remember.

Here we are in the dark and chilly days of mid-November and somehow two whole months have disappeared. Oh, I know where they went, but they’re are gone just the same.

Having two, non-driving teenagers in different clubs and school based activities has proven to be quite the challenge. Morning, noon and night the schedule here is relentless. Then of course is the drama – the laughing, the tears the yelling… and that’s just me.

There is of course also my professional world. Writing is NOT the day job, and the day job is jumping. On the up side of that, I have accomplished a major first step in my career that has taken me many, many years to get to. It’s just a step, but an important one.

In the end, some of my creativity has suffered. I would not trade a minute of it for sitting and staring at the blank page. Writing is a solitary endeavor in the end, and I have NOT been solitary. I am just fine with this. Long nights and ugly weather will pen us in and give ample time for posting things up to an old fashioned notion like a blog. Hopefully I’ll get here more than once a quarter…

Hidden Drama

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A friend forwarded this editorial/opinion article to me. I read it and had more of a reaction to it than I thought I might have, so I wanted to put this out here for further discussion.

The article

The answer:

Thanks for sending this one along. It was an interesting read, but I think it highlights a couple of things that I have changed my mind about over the years.

The author talks about all the things to hide from your children. This is untrue, and in fact can lead to sincerely dangerous consequences for your kids. Do you want to have a raging argument in front of your kids? No. Do you want them to understand it’s OK to disagree so long as you work something out to mutual agreement? You bet. You can’t have the mutual agreement without seeing / understanding the differences and disagreements. This I think is one of the core issues with so many children that come up not understanding the privilege they have. They fail to understand how the world works and they are crushed when somebody denies them anything – even if that thing is of no consequence in the greater picture. It’s why so many are deemed to be “Karens” who demand to see the manager about how much milk is in a coffee.

People are chaotic, messy and individualistic in the extreme… but they need to see others and understand the shared environment we live in. Hiding the swirling chaos of the world from a kid doesn’t help them. Protect them from it? Of course. Just be certain they understand and can see what’s going on out there. It’s how they go about making the world a better place as society moves forward. They need to know the history or root of why things are happening, so they can (hopefully) do better than we did.

Children also need to understand that the emotions they’re having are real and can’t be dictated by others. “Putting on a brave face” only becomes a saying if you allow them to see that you are scared too. Show them you have feelings and allow them to understand how you process these complex things in life. I have told the younger couples I know with kids – you will never have a mirror that will reflect YOU as clearly as your kids do. They dominate your time. They are with you almost constantly for years, and so they see far more than you think they do. Don’t lie to them. It’s a bad road to travel. Don’t hurt them purposefully, but allow them to fail and recover on their own when they’re young and the consequences are limited (or can be so long as you’re paying attention). It’s one in a long list of very important lessons.

I understand what the author is saying. It was extremely stressful to have (my daughter) get on a plane and fly away for a year. It’s not even like the author’s situation where we could soothe our emotions by knowing she’d be home for the next holiday. She wasn’t. Not for the one after that nor the one after that either. It was a long and stressful year – and we all shared that with each other. We are better and stronger for it. Now we’re trying to do the same thing for a wonderful young lady here from France. It’s going to be a wild ride, and one that we share all our emotions with them for.

I am going to add here that this is a learning process and there is no substitute for experience. There’s only one way to get experience and that’s to do a thing. Sometimes you fail… and that makes all the difference in the world. It’s how you learn and a way for you to discover new things. A partial quote from an old movie I enjoy, “…think what you’ll know tomorrow”.

Flash Prompt – The Doorway

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artist: Douglas Murakami – https://www.artstation.com/dougmurakami

It was a warm day, but not a hot one. Carrying the bag of tools, the mapping equipment and the supplies was an effort, but not an extraordinary one. The quest had almost become routine. Almost.

Endless searching. They couldn’t say that anymore. They’d finally found it.

Now they could step through.