Embracing my Inner Nerd

15 year old me would be so proud

I like to read books about wizards and shit. I like to watch TV and movies about space adventures and zombie apocalypses, but damn it sometimes the protagonist is doing it wrong and I know I could do it better. Not always, but sometime the protagonist is a badass and just has a touch of the douche-face that is spoiling (I've turned off movies less than 5 minutes in due to Eric Balfour being in the movie for any amount of time. I'm sorry, but being a Skeet Ulrich knock off, who in turn is a Johnny Depp knock off, is no reason to be put in front of a camera).

When I was in middle school, my friends and I had a routine every weekend. We got together under to play role playing games and gorging ourselves on junk food. I don't remember actually playing most of the games. I think we mostly made characters to use to adventure through whatever world we were hoping to explore and then got distracted with talking about what badasses we were gonna be when we actually played. We mostly made references to awful B-movies and then got too annoyed with one another to get to playing. Eventually it stopped being cool to play nerd games on your weekends and my friends bailed on our routine for other stuff.

Except none of us shaved our heads and ODed on Percocet...at least I didn't

What with one thing and another 15 years passed and my interest in telling collaborative stories with characters controlled by other people has started to peak my interest again. The major problem I had was trying to get other people to agree to try to play games with me.

Far from it indeed.

I said role playing games and very few people had positive images about the amount of fun they would have. The more I pressed with my friends the more I realized their hesitation was typically with a fear of not knowing exactly how to play the game and not being able to get into it. People became a lot more responsive when I started calling them collaborative fiction games. I'm still the only person I know that enjoys them enough to learn the rules and teach them to other people and get them to play the game, but willing players is a step in the right direction.

My conclusion: I think this is really all leading me to needing to start a blog about this type of gaming. Not only the things I do, but reviews of games. I've got hundreds of PDFs I've collected over the years of all kinds of games, from the worst to the best that were executed poorly. I usually talk my friends heads off about these games if I have them cornered long enough. Maybe it'd work better if I just blathered endlessly on the internet about instead, seems to work here at least.

Cheap books and someone else's efforts to be heard

I had an English professor early on in college that gave an impassioned, albeit well rehearsed and repeated as his opening day starter for every course he taught, speech about books that always stuck with me. He urge us all not to sell our books back at the end of the semester. The college gives you a terrible price on the buy backs and who knows when you might find use for them later. Just one more way colleges screw you over, he said.

Bitter old English professors aside (or realist ahead of his time?), I have always loved used books. The more tattered the pages the better. Books that look like they had gone every where with someone. Passages underlined, notes in then margins, dog eared pages, evidence of another reader. I always felt books picked up extra meaning beyond the words on the page when you could see the wear on the spine and someone's words in the margins.

That is the mindset I that has always kept me from getting a Kindle. While I'm sure I'd love an ereader, I feel like it disconnects me from the book too much. There is a lack of permanence in the way the feel. A delicate nature that makes it hard to live in the words the same way as a physical book. Letting it pick up who you are as a reader as it travels with you. Those lived in books always felt handmade to me.

I've been thinking a lot about the DIY and crowd sourcing communities. The idea of building it yourself by hand instead of having someone glaze over your efforts with the gloss of expensive print jobs. At the same time letting the community that invests in choose help the projects develop into their full potential. In still piecing together my mission statement for a project I'm going to begin working on soon. If I can get a central idea to umbrella all my efforts under first, then I'll be able to really push myself into it and get it done. If I start trying without that idea solidified in my head fist I'll just waste my efforts trying to figure out step one for an unfinished idea. That wouldn't end up helping anyone.