I enjoyed a very low-key New Year’s Eve. I got to go for a walk with a few old friends in the afternoon (always a delight!), and now I am back home and my big excitement for the evening will be opening a fortune cookie.*

This is good, actually. Having established that most eventful excitements these days are negative ones, I have arranged my life to be one of quiet contentment, which is very good for me as a person, albeit not very good for me as a blogger.

Still, one advantage of being a writer is that I always have something new to share. My last column of 2023 is very well-spiced with puns, so please enjoy my Season(ing)’s Greetings. My newsletter is also moving platforms, due to the impending closure of Tinyletter, so if you’d like to get an email every two weeks or so with my latest column and various rants and rambles (with silly jokes in parentheses), then you can subscribe to my new Buttondown newsletter here:

That will sign you up for semi-monthly nonsense*** labeled “Seth Says (Parenthetical Digressions)”, which as you’d expect, will include me saying things and then digressing quite a bit. Lest I digress overmuch here in this more concise blog, I will simply bid you all a happy new year, and now I’m off to listen to my new year’s song.

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* eating the fortune cookie will be less exciting. Which doesn’t say much for fortune cookies, given my that my general appreciation of eating cookies has oft caused people to confuse me with someone blue and furry.**

** although it could just be the lack of shaving and occasional depressed mood.

*** but, like, the fun “this weasel is wearing sunglasses” kind of nonsense, and not the “can you believe this messed-up world” nonsense. Because yes, I can believe the messed-up world, and I do not like it.

The more they stay the same. For example, I have updated* my website to the newest version of WordPress, with a whole new interface to make it easier to deal with the thousands of spam comments that continue to pour in (which is why comments are still off; feel free to email me). And it should now be easier to post. Technically. By which I mean technically, and also technically.

Ah, English.

But the primary obstacle to my posting is always my attention span and sense of time, and neither were terribly good to begin with, and the past few years have done neither any favors. Amidst my paid freelancing for clients, it’s harder for me to motivate myself to write things no one is paying me for that I’m also not sure anyone is reading. I have been writing my biweekly email newsletter, which I’m sure at least a few people are reading, because no comment spambots are subscribed to my list. Yet.**

So if you’d like to get fortnightly updates with my latest columns and my even laterest ramblings (this issue: Blisters! Gilligan’s Island! The Apocalypse! Tweety Bird!), please follow the complicated instructions below:

Meanwhile, I’ll share some of my favorite recent columns with you here. If you like Edgar Allen Poe, or poetry, or wonder if his friends ever called him Edgar Allen Poetry, you might appreciate my parody of his poem “The Bells”, but about birds, which I have imaginatively titled “The Birds“. Also, if you’ve been following the news lately, I’m so sorry. I’ve also been following the news, which has been even worse than I imagined, which is impressive given the capabilities of my imagination. I could tell you more about how that all ties together if you’d like to hear about Imaginary Friends.

Life is short; have some sushi.***

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*by which I mean, I have hired someone competent at these things to update my website, because apparently skill at words does not translate to skills at WordPress.

**You could be the first! Act now! No money down! Additional terms and conditions may apply. You might well ask why I am advertising to spambots. Well, turnabout is fair play.

***Admittedly this probably shortens it more for the fish. But actually this footnote is to note that the one tangible improvement in this updated wordpress is that I can now move my footnotes down the page without having to enter a few lines with a single period on them.****

****That’s a footnote I wrote before loading the preview screen, which turns out to be completely incorrect*****, because all my carriage returns didn’t prevent the footnotes from being right up next to the text. So much for modern technology. I’m keeping my carriages. One day I’ll have a whole carriage house. That’ll show ’em.

*****Well, not completely incorrect; sushi still does shorten life for fish.

For the past month, I’ve been besieged by an absolute torrent of spam comments. Over a thousand, easily, although I haven’t exactly been counting. But the upshot is, since I no longer have the brainpower to pore over every single comment, I’m just deleting comments in droves, so if you’ve commented on this blog in the past month and you are an actual human person annoyed that your comment never showed up, feel free to drop me an email. It’s nothing personal, it’s just bad timing.

I guess I’d have to describe the spam as a Minor Headache. Certainly not on my list of top 20 things wrong at the moment, and as 2022 has continued giving in its 2022 manner, I am trying to take my victories where I can find them. For example, I finally got around to starting up my bi-weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to in this form which I should really put somewhere more permanent on the site:

Meanwhile, I’ll just put it in my posts with no rhyme or reason. Well, I guess technically me being me, I’ve always got rhyme.*

Not much boardgaming these days, but videogame-wise in addition to continuing in Genshin Impact, I’ve recently started the delightful puzzle game Baba Is You, and it really requires some lateral thinking. I’m always a couple years late to these things because I want them on sale, but single-player games don’t go bad, and I’d still recommend it to people who want to experience cleverness.**

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* Well, most of the time. It isn’t a crime. Go suck on a lime.

** Which I hope describes most people reading my blog. I’d feel a bit put out if someone was like, “Oh no, I hate cleverness, that’s why I read Seth’s writing!”

“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
–Mark Twain

Had a friend over for lunch earlier this week, and we were discussing creative work and motivation. I said for me, there are only three reasons I do something:

1) I enjoy doing it.

2) I am being paid for it.

3) I want to have done it.

Obviously, it’s relatively easy to motivate yourself to do things in the first category. Sometimes there’s a startup inertia to overcome (see: making plans to actually interact with my friends face to face), but generally if you know you like something, it’s not hard to get yourself to do it. When it comes to writing, I’m actually surprisingly good at the second category. If I’m being paid for something, I am fairly motivated to set down and write it. I find this slightly more difficult with larger projects (such as my upcoming Little Book of Mahjong), but still if someone is paying me to write something, I’m pretty good at motivating myself to sit down and do so.

That third category, however, is what I often refer to as a “Mark Twain Classic”. I realized this week that sometimes blogging for me falls into this category, which is why I only end up doing it once a month or so. More (de)pressingly, into this category also falls any ambitious creative project of large scope for which I am not being paid. Small projects often stay fun long enough to also be in the first category. But big projects like books or albums or games*, if the fun is gone and the money shows no signs of appearing, the only remaining motivation is that Mark Twain Classic.**

But things don’t have to be restricted to one category. My humor column happily fulfills all three: I enjoy writing it, I get paid to do so, and I’m happy that the completed columns exist. Heck, I even hope you’re happy they exist, and might enjoy reading about how my family has a tradition of saying the wrong thing despite the Best of Intentions, or how people underestimate the Importance of Inspiration. Come to think of it, probably the best thing we can do is life is try to find outlets which fulfill all three categories at once.

But often that won’t be available, and so we do what I do, which is enjoy the first category as much as possible, plan to work on the second category as available, and tell myself that next month when the paid project is done, I’ll get around to that big personal project.

* Or in my case, a book about games and a game that would include a full album.

** And that’s why it took me a decade to write From God To Verse.

Smashed my head on a support beam today. And it hurt quite a bit. I knew I should put something cold on it, but our icepack had gone missing, so I was left choosing between bags of frozen berries, frozen corn, and frozen edamame. I went with the edamame, although it does make me wonder if there’s a job as injury sommelier where you could pair frozen foods with injured body parts needing icing.

I was hoping this injury might get me writing my book, because my friend Tom had mentioned a neurological condition where people with head injuries start writing a lot. Alas, no such luck. But I suppose in a way I’m lucky it didn’t work out, otherwise there would be the temptation to give myself a concussion whenever I needed motivation. So I’m glad that my (still painful) head injury didn’t make me write anything.*

Previous to smashing my head, I wrote this column about marriage.

*Aside from this blogpost.**

**A discussion with Tom last week confirmed the opinion that my blogging last decade was more entertaining. I am going to try returning more to the form of random blather, and less self-promotion***, since the people who read my blog seem to prefer it.

***Buy my books!

Well, my nomination would be February. But as I explain in my most recent column, April is the Crewelist Month.

Still, this month has been somewhat cruel. My partner’s office closed down, resulting in dozens of people who lost their jobs, including her.* And I’ve been so busy with a freelance project that we’ve barely had any time to play board games at all — although I did attend PAX East in March, where I got to play Outpost (fun, although I still prefer Scepter of Zavandor), Innovation (still addictive), Quarriors (fun, but a bit too luck-based), and Legend of the Cipher (so fun, I’m joining the development team). And in April I got in a few rounds of Flash Duel, which I mean to review as soon as I can take some pictures of my first edition.

But I digress. I was talking about April showers of cruelty. They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But I will tell you that it’s much worse to have a false hope dangled in front of you and then pulled out from under your feet than not to have seen it at all.**

So, a few days ago I got an email from someone wanting to buy a banner ad on my blog. Two years ago I received a cold email from a random company wanting to buy a text ad, and said text ad is still atop my site (go click if you like online bingo, non-US readers!), and has brought me a few hundred dollars. So I figured a banner ad, though more intrusive, would bring more money which would be really handy roundabouts now. I suggested a price I thought was a touch high, and it was accepted without negotiation, to my surprised delight.

I looked at their instructions for putting up the banner ad, and it included instructions to install a WordPress plugin, which set off my Spidey-sense. So I Googled the name of the ad company and the word “scam”, and came across this blogpost, which confirmed that indeed this was spam/scam, and not the deus ex machinadvertisement I had initially hoped. And I mean, I know two weeks ago I wasn’t expecting that money at all, but it’s sure more cruel to have it appear and then disappear.

Speaking of cruelty, April is National Poetry Month, so I’m going to share one of the short poems I’ve been writing daily throughout April:

“Absolutely True Sonnet of the Afternoon Flash Game”

Thisafternoon I played an online game
Where players build a deck and PvP.
The first of our three rounds my foe did claim
And, poised to win the second, typed “GG”.

But then, I drew the cards to stay alive,
While his deck seemed to give him cards that suck.
And somehow, I had managed to survive,
He’d not, and said, “You had a lot of luck.”

Retorted I, “Your luck was in rare cards.”
Said he, “That wasn’t luck, I bought each rare.”
Said I, “Th’economy these days is hard,
If you can spend on flash games, your luck’s fair.”

Said he, “I’m well-employed, I must confess.”
Poor me, at least I’d had a lucky guess.

I ended up losing the third game. But at least I discovered a new alternative energy source, which is to hook a generator up to Shakespeare***, who is surely now turning in his grave.

*Her comment: “I’m just waiting for someone to ask me if I looked under the couch.” Yep, I’m still in love.

**It’s even worse than a horribly mixed metaphor where hope is suspended from the ceiling one minute and serving as a rug in the next. Hope: It’s a combination chandelier and carpet! It’s a floor wax! It’s a dessert topping!

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.

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.

(this post exists outside of time)

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.

(this post exists outside of time)

People always talk about Good Friday, but most people prefer Saturday. My Saturday was particularly good, because we discovered that you could make bibimbap* in the rice cooker, and then my improv troupe had a show which was probably one of the best we’ve ever done. This is probably unrelated to the fact that I half-mooned the audience as a plumber, served as another member’s parachute and binoculars, and sang about having ice cream and sex.

I’ve gotten too lazy** to post all my columns to this site, and the Transcript site hasn’t been posting all the recent ones, but you can still read my column about clouds. Aristophanes had nothing to do with it. An observation that reminds me that sometimes, I am too educated for my own good. Last week I was asked to do a user review of a site where people keep an online tally of what places they’ve visited. Asked for how I’d describe it, I said it was the apotheosis of conspicuous consumption, and then I realized that I am a giant egghead and people asking for site feedback don’t want to hear about the sociological theories of Thorstein Veblen***.

Having used up all my online boardgaming credit on my last order, I knew it was time to stop buying board games. But it wasn’t time to stop trading for board games, and so for the past week and a half, I’ve been eagerly awaiting a package from Canada containing a number**** of games. I’ve been checking the tracking number every day, and the blasted thing is still in Montreal. That’ll teach me to trade internationally. Although it’s silly that Canada is international. We’re all North America, so we should just be friends. I mean, Alaska’s not international, and it’s further than the rest of Canada is.

* Of course, I think of the hot clay pot as the key ingredient in bibimbap, and we don’t have that. But the slightly crisped rice, the bulgoki (korean-style beef BBQ), the egg, even the hot sauce, we got it all. And wow, was it tasty.

** Not that I wasn’t already very lazy. But I’ve also started thinking maybe I shouldn’t have everything I write online. Maybe I should just keep a few best-of columns up, and take down the rest, in case I want to do a book of them later. But I haven’t taken any columns down either, leading me to believe that in fact, I’m just lazy.

*** Even though he was totally right. Seriously, tourism as conspicuous consumption is already pretty obvious given the focus on photos and knicknacks. And then a site launches solely so you can brag to others where you’ve been, and how can you not bring up conspicuous consumption, right?

**** Ten. Including a game that combines complicated strategic programmatic movement with a wind-up toy. I can’t wait.