My editor at the Eagle? She’s the boss of me, and today (well, technically yesterday) I finished an interview, which will be added to the restaurant review I have due this week.
My editor at Globe Pequot? She’s the boss of me, and it is for her that I have been working non-stop for the past few months, so I can get the draft of my next book in on deadline.
You? I didn’t promise you anything in exchange for money, so if some of my writing is going to be short-changed, guess where.
Do you play “social games” like farmville or sims social or mobwars, etc.? If you’re playing Facebook games, or know someone who is, you really need to read my guide to efficient social gaming.
Naturally, a gamer like myself tends to look at everything as a game. For example: Life*. This week, we made delicious enchiladas and tortilla soup, and I got to see Weird Al in concert. And I performed at two improv shows. So I get a lot of points this week.
A few weeks ago I lost some points when About.com decided to let go all 72 of their Contributing Writers. I was one of those 72 writers, and had been writing about Board Games for them since early this year. So that was a bit disappointing. But I’m a gamer, so when I lose points, I look for solutions to gain more points. And thus I came to the decision that I should continue writing about boardgames**, since I enjoy reviewing games and feel that I am good at it.
Thus, in the coming months you will start seeing me post more about boardgame reviews right here on RisingPun.com. Or, at least linking to and discussing them here. I’ll be posting the full reviews on BGG, because that’s where most serious gamers are likely to look first for reviews. Today, I posted the very first review for the upcoming Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack***. And I’ve got a few older reviews on there, for games like Power Grid: Factory Manager and World of Warcraft: the Boardgame. Those older reviews lacked photos, but going forward I’ll include photos in all my reviews.
I’ve also got a crazy idea for an experimental… well, maybe I won’t spoil it just yet. Suffice to say, my next post will have something bizarre that may or may not work.
* Yes, I know technically there is an old boardgame called “Life”. It is a terrible game with little volition where everyone has to follow the pre-determined path and pre-set milestones. People who treat real life like this oft end up miserable. One day I may write a book about this.
**Albeit, not About Boardgames.
***Short version: I didn’t realize Puzzle Strike needed an upgrade until I tried this, but now I wouldn’t want to play without it.
Let’s start with food*. Labor Day weekend was delightful for me because I got to eat tasty food with a variety of old friends. But the biggest food news this month is a new hip-hop album. Torrentz, the rap supergroup I sometimes work with, has released a food-themed album called The Big Kahuna. I’ve got verses on a couple songs. Every track on this album is food-related hip-hop, and the whole album is free to download. Which means if you don’t hate hip-hop and food, you should give it a listen to see if you like it.
Finances are tricky. Mine, naturally, remain sub-optimal**. But I wrote an epic limerick about the crumbling finances of America, which was recently published in the Providence Journal under the title of Debt Be Not Proud.
Still, I’m mostly trying to focus on having fun***. September is our annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge, which we’re currently right in the middle of. By far my most anticipated gaming event of any year, and one of my favorite events of the year overall. For those of you wonder if having to write about games as a job has diminished my enjoyment of board gaming: Nope.
Speaking of fun, I’m still enjoying the other comedic stuff I’m doing. My most recent humor column was a Back to School Glossary for the young and old. And between working with my improv troupe and doing stand-up comedy, I have a number of performances coming up — including a fundraiser for some folks in Williamstown who were displaced from their homes due to Hurricane Irene and the associated flooding.
Sometimes it’s hard to write a good conclusion****.
* If I had a nickel for every time I said this, I’d be a wealthy man.
** If I had a nickel for every time I said this, I’d be able to stop saying it.
*** If I had a nickel for every time I said this, I’d probably spend it all on more board games.
**** If I had a nickel for every time I said this,….
No, that’s not a typo. I don’t make tyops.* I’m talking about Woe. As in, Woe is Me. Or to explain more accurately, Mug of Woe, the hilarious new book of true embarrassing** stories, includes a story by yours truly. Also, their website has a spotlighted contributor each week, and this week it is me. So go take a look at the site for Mug of Woe, and if you’re looking for a “Chicken Poop for the Soul” sort of book, consider getting yourself a copy. (After you buy all of my books, if you don’t already own them. Priorities.)
Anyway, we’re now in August. I’ve always liked August, but I have to admit, August is a weird month. One of those months in the middle you sort of skip over in planning, because it’s neither summer nor fall. Well, I didn’t skip over it entirely. I played lots of board games. Yet more Scepter of Zavandor (a favorite), some Gates of Loyang, and some Nightfall. Speaking of boardgames, I am still writing both boardgame strategy and boardgame reviews.
But I’ll admit, I’m excited that we’re only one month away from the Fourth Annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge. Related to gaming, but unrelated to boards, I just have to say the announced always-online requirement for Diablo III significantly reduces the chances I’ll end up buying the game at full price. When I play D2 and BNet keeps dropping me, I can still play single-player instead. Worthwhile purchase. Without that option… not so much. (RMAH, on the other hand, I do not care about.)
Also I like cheese. The other night my partner made dinner and told me, “Yo dawg, I heard you liked cheese, so I put some cheese on your cheese…” I am a lucky man.
*I like that this is one letter away from “tyoops”, which makes me think someone is in the middle of typing a quick thank-you to someone when they accidentally knock a pile of papers off their desk.
**One embarrassing thing is that I’ve been mentioning this book a few places, and I keep missing the second “r” in “embarrassing” until my auto-spell-checker*** underlines it for me. I’m normally a fairly decent speller, but there are occasional words for which my instincts are bad. Perhaps after this week I will remember how to spell it correctly, with a clever mnemonic device like “You’d be embarrassed to forget the second r”, or “It’s got two r’s, stupid.”
***I would prefer an Otto-spell-checker, wherein a German man with a big bushy moustache looks over my shoulder and points to each mistake and says, “Das ist wronk!” (I am presuming that “wronk” is German for “wrong”, based on my knowledge of German that comes from bad action films.)
June seems to have escaped me. Which makes me feel lame because it should not be that difficult for me to make one post a month. And yet, here we are. I suppose I could have done some backdating* and pretended I was on time, but June just flew by and I have to admit it.
To be fair, part of the reason is that I spent the last week of June in California at my brother’s wedding. You could read about my anticipation of the trip or even some of my trip highlights. But basically, the weather was consistently nice, there was copious tasty Mexican food, and my brother got married.
Now it’s back home, and trying to catch up on everything I’ve fallen behind on. Thankfully I managed to write the latter column while on vacation, and had finished my June submissions to the About.com boardgame site before I left, but I still feel like I wasn’t done with June yet. June could get 40 days, and that would be okay**.
Meanwhile, it’s not as if I’m starting July yet. Coming off the tail of a flight, I now have friends from afar in visiting for the 4th of July festivities.*** So it’ll probably be mid-July before I settle down and re-engage with the world around me. But in the meantime, there are copious amounts of food, friends, and fireworks, and two out of three ain’t bad.
**You could take another ten days from February, a month that nobody likes anyway. Except for one friend of mine who seems to believe her being born in February somehow redeems the month. She is charming but still wrong.
***Or more accurately, concurrent to the 4th of July festivities. Lovely though North Adams is, nobody from more than a town away is going to come here for fireworks. And if someone did want to come here for fireworks, there would be no particular reason to come on July 4th regardless, since my neighborhood seems to delight in setting off fireworks all summer long. My delight with this state of affairs, in comparison, is significantly smaller.
Well, we’re past the Ides of March. But I still had three or four Caesar salads* in the past two weeks, which were delicious. And unlike most other delicious things I’ve made of late (such as greek meatloaf), with the salads I even feel like I’m eating something healthy.**
Anyway, I have to say, this March has been a fairly eventful month for me. First, I mean that literally — March has been full of events. I did another presentation at a temple for God To Verse, attended a few different birthday parties for good friends, had the usual bunch of gaming events and random gathers. And I also had an enjoyably busy weekend where each day, I was quickly trying to create something to perform that night. Third Fridays of each month are now Comedy Night at Main Street Stage, and March’s edition saw me in the role of both stand-up comedian and improv comedy performer. I love improv because it’s made up on the spot, but I was still honing my stand-up act right before the show.
The next day was a poetry slam, and even though I was only going to be reading two poems, I always feel I should perform at least one new piece whenever I attend a slam. I’d had a vague idea for a while, but hadn’t managed to write anything new. But right before the event was scheduled to start, a bolt of inspiration suddenly struck me, and I realized what I wanted to do with my poem. Sure, I couldn’t figure out how to do it, but I could at least write about what I wanted to do, and thus managed to finish and print my poem and still arrive in time to enter the slam.
Sunday after some logistical snafus, I was slated to attend a friend’s birthday party, and suddenly had the idea that I should bake and bring something interesting. So once again, although it made me late, I did arrive bearing freshly-baked wasabi-sesame-ginger cookies.***
March has just been filled with things. I traveled to Boston and then Rhode Island, doing some research for another RI book. I decided that I have too much stuff, and need to stop acquiring random stuff. Then I ordered another box of board games, because they were on sale, and I’d wanted At the Gates of Loyang for a long time. (Perhaps I can justify that as research too, as I may soon be writing About Boardgames.) Before the month is out, I may go see a poetry reading by Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Taylor Mali, or even go on a bizarre expedition that combines RPGs with speed dating.
Suffice to say, March may only be three days longer than February, but it has certainly felt very full.
*Oddly, the only popular dictator food. Nobody ever orders a Hitler sandwich. I suppose you could argue that the Earl of Sandwich should count, but he wasn’t really a dictator. Although now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps they should make dictator tots.
**Which of course isn’t entirely the case given the copious dressing and cheese. But I guess since there’s some lettuce, I am technically eating something healthy.
***My own recipe, of course. Where by “recipe” I mean “vague idea of three ingredients I wanted together in cookies”.
Given how small Rhode Island is, it’s amazing how much stuff is packed in there. The same could be said for my book:
America's best city-state
Sure, my new (as of 2007) book has a few things everyone knows about, like Waterfire and the Big Blue Bug. But there’s also some history, some cool events you’ve never heard of, and a whole bunch of fascinating people.
If you are in Rhode Island for any length of time, you are going to come across something from my book, even if it’s by accident. But if you buy my book, then you’ll know. Maybe you’ll have read up about who brews the Yacht Club Soda you bought at the farm. Or maybe when you run into the Coupon Queen over dinner, you’ll recognize her.
But Rhode Island Curiosities also contains things you would never come across on your own. And for some of it, that would be a shame. This book could entertain anyone, but naturally it will be of most interest to two groups of people: Those who live in Rhode Island, and those who might visit Rhode Island. The former group will be glad to see some of their favorite things in here, as well as learn about cool people or events just down the road, which you might catch in the near future.
As for visitors, Rhode Island offers a unique chance to see a whole bucket of cool stuff in a short time. You could pick any three places (aside from the annual events and world-travelling professionals), and easily catch them all in a day trip. Heck, there are dozens of things to see in a few hours just walking around Providence. My point is, unlike those travel books that list a hundred things to see of which you’ll realistically only catch two on any given vacation, you can find everything in Rhode Island.
Compared to Think You’re The Only One?, this book has a bit more of my voice. Rather than sticking to a purely fact-based reporting of my findings, I’ve tossed in my own opinionated commentary, a few limericks, more than a few puns, and often a whole lot of excitement about the topic. Why? Because Rhode Island is really cool. And once you read my book, chances are, you’ll agree.
In November of 2005, I wrote a novel called Shards, as part of National Novel Writing Month. I’ve got too many books in the works already to be pitching it to publishers, so I printed it up through LuLu. What’s the advantage of this self-publishing? Well, instead of waiting years to find the right publisher and make agreements like my other books, it was instantly available online — and still is. If you want to read some sample chapters for free, or even purchase it, just clicky on the cover photo.
my first (and currently only) novel!
It was a change for me to write a free-flowing story instead of a labored process of neverending re-editing of minutia. It’s my first novel and I’m glad I wrote it. It’s heartfelt, and in some sense contains more of me than other books I have written and am writing. My friends who have read it all seemed to enjoy it, but this book contains more of my deranged mind and less research than my other books, so be warned.
Organizations of procrastinators and pessimists? Competitors in sports ranging from cheese racing to rock paper scissors? Religious devotees who worship everything from slack to Satan? Men proud of their award-winning beards and women against peeing while standing?
Yep, we’ve got all of that, ever since 2004.
my first book!
Think You’re The Only One? is a collection of short profiles on over five dozen of the world’s most bizarre groups. Two-page spreads on everyone from the Christian Deer Hunters to the Space Hijackers, with probing questions, inside information, and of course, instructions to join. Although I certainly had my trials and tribulations while writing the book, I must say that it was pretty cool, at least in retrospect. I got to talk with some truly fascinating people, from whom I found out a whole bunch of neat stuff, which is all in a conveniently priced and portable book form.
Well, it’s officially Thanksgiving. And if I had to name one thing I was most thankful for, it would probably be my friends. They are smart, funny, kind, talented people. And heck, if you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you’re one of them, since I am not that famous. So thanks.
Now, to business. And by business, I mean, helping you become happier. How can I do that? Simple. A study from 2008 showed that your happiness is influenced by the happiness of your friends. And not just first-degree friends, but their friends, and even their friends. The upshot of this is that a great way for you to become happier is to increase the happiness of your friends, as well as (if you’re a friend of mine) the happiness of my friends.
Conveniently, I have a plan that will accomplish both of these goals. See, as previously mentioned, my friends are really talented, and make cool stuff. So if you bought the cool stuff they made, they would be happier. Then if you gifted that cool stuff to your friends, *they* would be happier. And with these two groups of people now happier, you and I are (statistically speaking) likely to be happier as well. So here are some awesome gifts to help you increase happiness all around:
Yes, I threw my three books in there as well. But there’s also an award-winning graphic novel, two great fantasy novels, a kama sutra for Snuggie-wearers, an incredible stick-figure version of Hamlet, and a novel about child sex trafficking. All written by friends of mine. And not all books are on Amazon; if you’re willing to brave the LuLu storefront, you can find two poetrychapbooks, one children’s book, and even my own NaNoWriMo novel Shards.
Or perhaps you’d prefer a game?
These were not solo endeavors, as games require many people, but friends of mine worked on each of these games. Heck, I have *two* friends who worked on Rock Band 3. I did mention my friends were awesome, right? And finally, some unique and handmade gifts that aren’t available on Amazon. But they’re worth navigating other sites for!
Finally, for people who are too stressed and don’t need any more material goods, you should get a gift certificate for a massage, presuming you live near one of my masseuse friends in Boston (sarah.reinfeld) on hiatus until mid-2011 or NYC (kimicat). Both can be emailed @gmail.com, and tell them I sent you.
So that’s it. A whole bunch of stuff, which you should buy from my friends and give to your friends. I bid you all a pleasant Thanksgiving, and may you increase happiness in the world.
