Yes, it’s official: Legend of the Cipher – The Game of Hip-Hop is finally released to the public. This is the tabletop hip-hop deckbuilding game I’ve been working on for the past year. We had our grand release just a week ago, at PAX East, where many dozens of people sat down to try their hand at the game, and it was gratifying to note that almost all of them really enjoyed themselves. Many were delighted at the unique idea, as I had been a year ago when I first saw the game and decided to join up. So, the game is now available to purchase through the Game Crafter, a POD outfit.*

We’ve gotten just a touch of press after our first week of released game. A fellow who demoed the game wrote up a review about Legend of the Cipher at PAX East. Then AllHipHop.com wrote up an article about how Card game Legend of the Cipher teaches players how to win the real Rap Game. The video at the end of that article may or may not include a few brief clips of my terrible freestyles along with various players demoing the game. But the real joy was watching gamers who had never rapped in their life, go from being too afraid to rap, to rapping, in just minutes. I have no doubt that anyone playing this game regularly would become a much better freestyle rapper.**

Anyway, I’ll hope to have yet more updates about that later, but feel free to go buy the game now. Speaking of games, I recently reviewed Zen Garden on BGG. And speaking of things I write, this past month I’ve written two columns I’m quite pleased with, one about a Chrono Detective, and one that’s a simple Pope Quiz. And speaking of creative output***, I attended more poetry events, have upcoming comedy events, and hopefully will get back to writing my next book now that PAX is over.

*Technically, although fully playable, this is still a beta version, as we are hoping to gather enough demand to one day do a mass printing. But who knows when that will happen, and meanwhile this is the real deal, full color quality cards and all, and it’s pretty dang fun.

**Improv troupe members, take note.

***And speaking of weak segues…

February was a pretty full month for me, performance-wise. Pittsfield held their 10×10 Festival, which I participated in as much as I could, performing poems and stories for WordXWord at the Y Bar, performing some stand-up comedy as part of a comedy showcase put together by friend and fellow comedian Tom Lewis, and just earlier this afternoon, performing a full show of improvised mini-musicals with the Royal Berkshire Improv Troupe. All in all, a pretty full and satisfying month*.

I also finally sat down to do some more game reviews, which I’d been too swamped** to do for a while. You may not remember my review of Rivals for Catan at About.com***, but their new expansion was just released, and I’ve got the first review up on BoardGameGeek for Rivals For Catan: Age of Enlightenment. I also had to put up a review of Path of Exile, not least of which because I can’t stop playing it. And this weekend I’ve been looking over the proofs for Legend of the Cipher, which I will be demoing at PAX East next month.

Meanwhile, with a marriage equality bill having passed the Rhode Island House of Representatives, and now in the Rhode Island Senate, my most recent column is titled “To Rhody, With Love”.

*Well, satisfying to live, anyway. Admittedly, reading about hilarious shows is a lot less fun than attending them. This is why people usually write about disasters; they’re much more fun to read about than attend.

**”Do you want to review this new black deck for Magic:The Gathering?” “No thanks, I’m too swamped as is.”

***But I suppose it’s commonplace not to remember things when you’ve never read them.

Well, that was a long post that my computer just ate. So, here’s the slightly shorter version.

WordXWord was an awesome week-long literary festival every August. It still is that, but it has now expanded to include exciting literary times in Pittsfield every Tuesday night. A poet friend of mine made it her new year’s resolution to attend these, and I have tagged along, and so far it has been awesome. We read poetry at some open mics, performed in a storytelling competition, and tonight she’s MCing an Invitational Slam for three of NYC’s top slam poets, and three Berkshire poets, of which I am one.

Work on Legend of the Cipher continues apace. I think after the latest round of playtests and revisions, the game is now something I’m very pleased with; it’s fun to play, offers some interesting choices, and moves along at a good clip. While I’d love to still squeeze in one more round of playtests and numbers tweaks before we go to print, I realize at some point you have to call a game done, and can’t be rebalancing forever. I’ll be running a demo booth at PAX East in March; more about that in a future post.

Aside from Legend of the Cipher, it’s been less board games and more video games for me of late. Path of Exile just released an open beta, a Diablo clone with FFVII-materia-inspired active skills, and an FFX-inspired passive skill grid of literally over 1,000 nodes (of which you can only have 100 or so), making all sorts of expansive choices.

You have choices too. You can read my column about How to Argue, or my column explaining why so many are Living in Denial.

Yes, I know, I should be assembling a more proper Holiday Gift Guide like I did in 2010 so you can buy stuff from my friends. But between empty Etsy storefronts and my own laziness, all I’ll do is point you to that link, rather than try to compile a new list for this year. By next year, there will be enough new products made by friends that I will make a new list. I promise.

Meanwhile, there are worse places to start for holiday gifts than my own books. You can click on the big heading above that says “Books” in fancy font (or HERE), and see summaries of all five. The newest, It Happened In Rhode Island, was officially released at the beginning of this month. It is a series of true stories about historical events that happened in Rhode Island.* These range temporally from the first settlers before the state was officially founded, to last year. They also range in seriousness from a Titanic-like tragedy, to Bob Dylan swapping his acoustic guitar for an electric one.

Naturally, my four other books remain available for purchase. From God To Verse is a line-by-line rhyming translation of the first five books of the Torah/Bible, making it a perfect holiday gift for your religious friends. Rhode Island Curiosities is not only filled with weird people, places, and things to see around Rhode Island, but also sprinkled with limericks and bad pun photo captions. Think You’re The Only One is a collection of sixty-odd profiles of odd groups, a perfect book to adorn your bathroom reading rack. And Shards is my first novel**, about a programmer turned artist, his comedian friend, and begins on an up note.

Anyway, enough hawking of my writing and asking you to pay for it. My columns I give you for free, so here’s last week’s impassioned plea to help defend America from The War On Thanksgiving. And this week I discuss the Hostess with the Leastess.

On the boardgame front, playing lots of new boardgames has taken a backseat to playing the classics overflowing my shelves, while I’m trying to improve the design of the game I’m working on, “Legend of the Cipher”***. It’s been a lifelong goal to design a game, and this one is pretty fun to play, so I hope sometime next year it will be ready to share with the world.

*(“My word,” you exclaim, “I would never have expected that from the title!”)

**And technically, only novel. But don’t let that cheapen it for you.

***I met the LotC team when they were showing off an early version of the game at PAX East. A bit of my cipher may have been caught on film at that point, but I’m not proud enough of it to link to that. Anyway, the important part is, now I’m on the team, and there’s no I in team, although there is an I in blathering.

Well, technically of humid air, but then it rained a lot and the air got fresher*.

Anyway, this month has been interesting, but I’ve already forgotten most of it, because I’ve been pretty busy. Not quite busy enough — need to do more recording tomorrow for the exciting project I was hired for last month — but busy nonetheless.

The biggest event of the month for me was probably the WordXWord Festival in Pittsfield, a week-long event celebrating the spoken word where some of the country’s best performance poets came to perform, and it was totally awesome. But don’t take my word for it, take my 600 words in a parody of Poe’s Raven. Which will probably be taken down a few days after I post this, but oh well.

My most recent column, rather than being celebratory, is a lot more depressing. However, I think it’s also something important to note that I really wanted people to read, and of particular interest to anyone interested in humor in general or politics, which I believe covers almost all of my readership, so I encourage you to read (and share?) my musings on The Death of Satire.

That column came out two days ago, and already I’ve had numerous new examples sent to me since then. I think it really is a disturbing trend. Almost as much as people making abnormally short blogposts that end abruptly**.

*More fresher? Re-fresher? Freshluggner? Good thing I’m not a writer.

**But I guess the footnotes can go on for a bit. At least, I can. What my column doesn’t mention about the WordXWord Festival is that I found out another local poet was also a freestyle rapper, and neither of us had ever known the other rapped. So at the afterparty for the festival, one of the more-famous-than-us poets announced this fact, and invited us both to the stage to do some quick freestyle line trading starting on topics of the audience’s choosing. This ended up being a $10 bill and Battlestar Galactica, the latter of which launched our rhymes into a series of delightful nerdery, and it was the most fun I had all month, and basically I thought of all of this now because during that freestyle session the other fellow said that his rhymes needed large footnotes, and I replied that my footnotes were the tallest, because I was the rap world’s David Foster Wallace. Granted I’m not actually the rap world’s DFW, I’m probably more the rap world’s Calvin Trillan, but anyway, I was thinking about footnotes, and so that’s why I told you all this, and wow, this sentence has gone on way too long, and I’m surprised you’re still reading, but nobody stops in the middle of a sentence, so I guess if I kept using commas to create an infinite pest sort of run-on sentence, you’d be stuck reading it forever, which would suck for you,  sort of like a vacuum cleaner, which nature abhors, abhors love men with nice abs, okay I’m going to stop typing now.

November 2012 is the official release date for my newest book about Rhode Island, but you can order it on Amazon now. (At the time of my writing this, it’s on discount, but that tends to fluctuate.) Unlike my previous Rhode Island book, this is a more serious historical book, covering historical events in Rhode Island from the founding of the state to the sewing of the World’s Biggest Sock.

Okay, so it's not all, like, super-serious.

But my point is, while my previous book about Rhode Island may have been about random silly things, and filled with whimsy in the form of pun-laden captions and ridiculous limericks, It Happened In Rhode Island is a more scholarly tome. Not, I should hasten to clarify, that this book is particularly academic, or high-minded. I just mean that I had to do actual research and write up historical events that happened in Rhode Island, and then the hardest part — leaving out all the puns, rhymes, and dumb jokes that I might have been tempted to make.

That being said, the book is still surprisingly entertaining. Which is to say, when I got my proof copy, after having written it and forgotten about it, I was surprised how entertained I was to read it. Granted, it’s easy to surprise someone with a terrible memory. But having stepped away from the research material for a bit, returning to read these little summaries of events was actually quite interesting. The book contains some “traditional history” that talks about the Great Swamp Massacre, Burning of the Gaspee, and some slightly more esoteric historical tidbits like General Burnsides.

But it also has more modern “historical” events, which include things like Babe Ruth’s first home run, and the moment when Bob Dylan put down the acoustic guitar and picked up the electric guitar instead. And of course, no book about Rhode Island would be complete without some stories of ridiculous RI politicians. Because they are ridiculous. Anyway, this is my newest book, and you should buy a copy for yourself to put in your bathroom along with Rhode Island Curiosities and Think You’re The Only One?, because it’s a bunch of interesting little 4-page stories, and they’re all true.

What can I say, when it comes to bad pun titles for blogposts, I just have an itchy trig finger.

For me, freelancing often feels like a sine wave, as the projects tend to come in “boom” and “bust” cycles.* A few months ago was a nice boom, when I wrote the rough draft of my next book, and also did some work for Fodor’s Travel Guides travelling the Berkshires. Then I had a bust cycle, and I re-discovered that I am addicted to video games between Steam and a ceaseless torrent of indie bundles.

Now, it is boom time once again, with the page proofs for my book having literally just arrived a few minutes before I wrote this post. This means I basically get to re-read my book and fail to find typos because I am so familiar with the material that my mind will probably miss them. But the good news is, I am pleased to announce that before the end of the year, my next book It Happened In Rhode Island will be available for purchase. More information in coming months.

Meanwhile, the most exciting new development for me is that I have been hired on to help with an educational project. This is still in the early stages, so details will have to wait for later, but suffice to say I am finally able to both put my talents to use and have the result be educational in addition to entertaining, and to get paid for that is pretty much what I want to do with my life.**

Oh right, my life. Well, I am Still Not Dead, albeit no thanks to my parents’ pantry, and continue to enjoy each day. My partner, whose office you may recall was closed down a few months back, has decided to take up knitting as a career, and has been cranking out socks that look pretty awesome. Once these are in sufficient quantity to be for sale, I will let you know. I can tell you from personal experience last winter, these are much, much better than normal socks for making your feet happy.

Meanwhile, an increase in knitting*** means a decrease in boardgaming, both due to time constraints, and table covered in knitting stuff. We’ve still played a few games, like Vikings and Ascension, but with everything else taking up time and space I may have to — *gasp* — sell some of my board games. Not my favorite ones, of course, but just some of the others. I guess that’s a bit of a tangent.

*** If I were a knitter, I’d have some clever pun about increases and decreases here. For once, I’m sad not to be a knit-wit. Maybe a joke about clutching your purls? I don’t understand knitting.

Just back from performing stand-up at a Chocolate Festival. This marks the first time I can recall where there were so many kinds of chocolate to sample, I became full before I’d even tried half of them. I definitely hope to go back next year, especially since the stand-up went well too. Here’s a joke I didn’t think was good enough to tell: I used to have blackberry bushes in my backyard, but then I found out my soil was contaminated with lead. So I tore out the bushes because I couldn’t stop eating the berries anyway. In retrospect, I could have used them to make Pb+J.*

So, my set was funnier than that. Speaking of food firsts, June also marks my first time making nime chow at home, a delightful experience I hope to repeat often, because yum, nime chow. My most recent local restaurant review was of a new Austrian place, and while I found it only mediocre, I’m pleased with my headline for the review.

Speaking of headlines**, my column this week was about Headline News, basically headline jokes the kind you might hear on a talk show. And the week before that I explain that my endeavors in comedy stem largely from the fact that I am seeking approval.

Game-wise, a friend lent us Through The Ages, and we have been playing it obsessively. As in, sometimes 4-5 times a week, which is a lot for a 3-hour game. We haven’t played a game this much since Goa. At some future point, I’ll have to review it, but I’ve only played a single multi-player game so I’m still holding off. Meanwhile, it’s an incredibly compelling 2-player experience, and always leaves me thinking, “Next time I’m going to try…”, which I believe is often a sign of a great game.

* Making puns about “lead” is very difficult in writing, since the pronunciation as “led” screws up a lot of the possibilities.

*** Which is another joke I decided to cut from my stand-up this time around.

Or technically, Last Day In May Day!

It’s been an interesting month, with some good things, and various unfortunate events.* I did a lot of editing on the projects I was working on in April. The good news is that I can now add Fodor’s Travel Guides to the list of places for which I have written reviews, and I should have my next book about Rhode Island coming out before the end of the year.

Due to aforementioned unfortunate events, we’ve had very little gaming, although I expect that to change quite a bit in June. And the other bad news is that in spite of now having two fancy microphones thanks to the generosity of others, I can get neither of them to actually record without static on my computer. Which, now that I have finished my most recent editing commitments and have free time again, is becoming an issue. The answer may be that I just try to make some progress on doing things, and then record somewhere else if I have to.

Meanwhile, there’s still comedy. I am not only writing columns for posterity, but most recently wrote a column about what it’s like to write a joke. Which I’ve been thinking about because in addition to attending the occasional comedy open mic, I’m performing at the PAVE Chocolate Festival at the end of June, hosted by Rick Conety. It’s a family-friendly show, which means I can’t do any of my Rick Santorum jokes**. And while RBIT doesn’t seem to appear much in North County these days, we may have a few shows coming up at the Freightyard Pub on second Fridays. This, in combination with the first Thursday comedy open mic at Public, and the fourth Friday poetry slam at the Local, means it’s pretty easy to get out there and see me say ridiculous things, if that appeals to you.

*Life’s gifts have lately been lemony, and even a bit snicket.

**If your family isn’t politically homogenized, it’s possible that vulgarity and sex is more family-friendly than incisive political analysis. Which set of jokes is going to cause more tension in the car ride home?

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, so I figured I may as well get my thoughts down. The short version is: I am hard-wired for media scarcity, and we now live in a time of media abundance. Here follows the long version:

A decent analogy is probably food. There is often a difference between the way people approach food, depending on whether they are used to abundance or scarcity. There are people (myself included) who save and re-use their teabags, because it would be wasteful not to do so, and there is at least two cups of tea in there! And there are people who do not, because why put up with extra hassle and a weak cup of tea to save ten cents! There are people who will want to save even small amounts as leftovers, and there are people who will leave half-finished plates at restaurants and not stoop to a doggie bag.

Speaking of half-finished plates, some people will stop half-way through if they aren’t particularly enjoying the food, and toss it. Other people (me) will finish a mediocre dinner, because it would be a waste not to. Some people when presented with a plate of four foods, will start in immediately on eating the one that most appeals to them. Other people (again, me) may start with the less appealing food under the time-honored principle of “save the best for last”.

However, if you are at an all-you-can-eat buffet, such actions are madness. You should eat the best first, because if you like it there is more best to be had. There’s no reason to start with things you might not enjoy. And if you do have a small serving of something, and don’t like it, stop after a single bite and get something else. There is abundance! Buffets are tricky and dangerous for those used to being perpetually hungry, as the glutton can easily over-eat. In a place of abundance, it is better to be a buffet gourmet, and eat the most delicious food, rather than simply the most food.

I am a media glutton in a world of abundance.

Video games, like teabags, I would save and re-use, having played through the original Final Fantasy more times than I can remember. It would be unthinkable in my youth not to clear my RPG plate of sidequests, let alone quit an RPG half-way through just because I thought it was only mediocre. And I always saved the best for last — when I first bought Final Fantasy and Faxanadu, I started with Faxanadu because I knew Final Fantasy was the game I was most excited about.

But the modern world is an all-you-can-eat media buffet. My shelf of console games has at least half a dozen games I was excited about that I have not even started, and two dozen more I got on sale that might be good. My Steam account has two dozen titles I really want to play, and another five dozen I might try. I began by playing the “maybe” games, saving the best for last, until my partner convinced me this was preposterous.

As usual, she was entirely correct. In a world of media abundance, settling for mediocre makes no sense. Rather, I should start right in on the best, because when I finish it, there will be more best available. Likewise, rather than running the optional post-game 100-floor dungeon to squeeze everything out of one game, I should simply move on to the next game. And if I try a game and find it mediocre, rather than slogging onwards, I should just pick up the next game. (Note that these are all formulated as “should” rather than “do”.)

And it’s not just video games. You’re reading this on the Internet, which means you have an abundance of things to browse. I have Netflix, an abundance of things to watch. Libraries are an abundance of things to read. I have over 200 boardgames, an abundance to play. We live in a world of media abundance, and there are certain behaviors more appropriate for this world than a world of scarcity and media conservation.

But old habits die hard. My partner can walk away from a movie she’s not enjoying after a half-hour. I still feel compelled to finish the movie. I still greedily devour borrowed media (books, movies, games, etc.) that may disappear soon, even if more appetizing media sits upon my own shelf, because I have the idea of scarcity. And while I no longer start off with the games I think I won’t like, if I have three new games I think I will really like, I still save my favorite for last.

It’s a difficult mental shift. For anyone who lived in poverty for a time, some of those habits stay with you even if you now earn a big salary. And media is no different. I know, intellectually, that we live in an all-you-can-eat media buffet, that more new media is produced every year than I could consume in a lifetime, and that I need never worry about running out of media again. But we are what we have lived through, and forged by a time of media scarcity*, I am still unfit for this world of abundance. Hopefully I can start to shift from glutton to gourmet, and realize that I can’t consume all the media, so the best thing I can do is figure out which I will most enjoy.

*(In a way, it’s insane to call my childhood “scarcity”, because I grew up with TV and a library, which is a cornucopia of media abundance. But with regards to movies and video games, there was a scarcity of what I possessed. And certainly I now have an embarrassment of abundance.)