Busking on the Digital Streetcorner

Wether it's music, painting, making barrels, or telling diarhea jokes, honing skills in one's craft and producing things for you to enjoy and/or use takes time and a considerable amount of effort. If you enjoy what someone's producing, send some money their way.

This is the age of the creative commons. Artists are now buskers on the streetcorner of the internet. If they can make a living creating the things you enjoy instead of working a day job, they can make more for you, faster, and cheaper than a major publisher. Given enough capital, they can even release that cheaper product with just as much polish.

You both win. :)

Craptastic Tuesday

I got one of those Facebook things from a friend asking me to put two things together to make my  superhero name. This is what came of it:

"Because of events this past Tuesday, I think I may already know what my superpower is. I was pooping like, every 10 to 20 minutes for 23 hours, and I don't think a normal human can do that without serious permanent damage.


Technically, you can't really call it poop, per se. Brimstone it's more the word, if in fact brimstone enters this world through a portal in my rectum leading straight to hell. Judging by the sulfurous stank and the scorch marks on the toilet and my poor, tortured sphincter... I'm pretty sure it does.

The dudes from Supernatural even showed up to sprinkle my smoking star with salt, and practice their mantra to exorcise the demons. At least I think it was them, and not some random salt sprinkling pervy types. They were mostly behind me, so I can't really say for sure what was going on. I'm better now though, so... Whatever works I guess.

It was not an ideal Tuesday."

Remembrance Day

From 11:11 until 11:12, I paused and thought of fallen comrades and family. I also thought about of the civilians who've died as "collateral damage" in war, or who died at the hand of whatever monster we needed to go out and fight.

I also thought about what that silence means, what it represents. I pictured soldiers, huddled in their cold, wet, smelly trenches, yelling down the line "Shut up! Everyone shut up!", and then just listening. Listening to a sound that some hadn't heard in years.

Silence.

No artillery. No machine guns. No rifle fire. No battle cries and screams of death. Just silence. I can only imagine how it sounded, how it felt. A sound so beautiful, so profoundly sad, that it brought the toughest men in history to tears.

This sound... this Silence, in the end, is what they were fighting for all along. Their gift to us, which we've largely ignored. The Silence that says... screams...

Please...

Never Again.

Over da' Boards - Kids' rules done

Testing update: Over da' Boards rules for little kids run really slick. 4-6 year olds understood it and loved it! :)

It's a pared down version of the main rules that allow little Coaches to learn the core mechanics and basic strategies of Over da' Boards.

A full game using the kids' rules can be played in 20 minutes to an hour, depending how lucky and/or focused the little ones are. ;)

I'll post more as it happens.

If you're here...

If this is the first post you're reading, chances are you've arrived here because you've interacted with Ben, Chantal, or me at one Con or another, and saw a demo of the board game Over da' Boards(tm) and/or the web comic The Sacred Ice (c).

The sites for Shared Weave Games(tm), Over da' Boards, and The Sacred Ice are still in development, as we still need to collect the money required to pay a web designer. If you haven't seen The Sacred Ice yet, here is the first panel of the Web Comic. The character featured in the panel is in Over da' Boards, and his player card is shown below the comic.

Punching The Monkey

Some people get an iPad when they punch the monkey. All I get is a moment of pleasure followed by shame. And blindness. -- Doc Wilson (@DocDraconis)

We Two, Through The Ring of Fire

Man, what a night. I'd had six burritos with refried beans and extra hot tamale sauce, chased by half a two-six of texas whisky and most of a jar of pickled eggs.

Somehow I'd managed to make it to the biffy, and something evil was about to breach the gate I'd inadvertently opened to hell through my tortured bowel, if the gutteral growling from underneath was any indicator.

I heard from the stall beside me, "Sweet jimminy cricket! Are you all right in there?"

That's when most of my innards exited my body, along with three metric tonnes of what felt like molten brimstone. I answered, "Bgaaahhhgg!"

Without missing a beat, you started yelling, "Puuuush! Puuuuuuuush!"

This prompted three others who'd apparently entered while I was otherwise occupied to start yelling the same...

"C'mon! Puuuush! Puuuuuuush!"

I grabbed the stall walls, braced my feet and pushed to beat hell. "Ghaaaarghaaaaghaaaa!"

My bowels answered in kind with a sound not unlike a mighty river throwing a heard of bison into a half-full olympic swimming pool.

In what seemed like an epoch, I emerged from the stall sweating, bleeding, and raggedly breathing. I found you, like a Canadian soldier at the Somme, still at your post when the others had apparently fled.

"Thanks.", said I, and we wandered off to enjoy the rest of the Con'.

"No problem, man, no problem."