Showing posts with label personal stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal stuff. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 March 2017
BreakOut 2017 Convention Debrief
Tuesday, 7 March 2017
Into the Breach
This weekend, Megan and I are going to our first gaming convention. It's Breakout Con in Toronto, and we're pretty excited about it.
Sure, we've been to small gaming conventions put on by the local game club at Western University, but this is a whole other level. It's three days of games, with industry professionals there to run games and sit on panels about the hobby, and maybe, if we're lucky, let us fans buy them a drink or two.
Thursday, 10 November 2016
How Gamers Can Help Save the World from Donald Trump
Last weekend, my wife and I travelled to Kingston to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. We were able to surprise my mother by having my brother and his family show up at the restaurant where we took them for dinner, and it was lovely having everyone together for that special occasion. We also got to visit and play games with some of our old friends, who we miss dearly and wish we could see more often. We also were in a bit of a celebratory mood because my wife had just secured an ongoing job (with benefits) that will make us financially secure for the next few years. For once, everything in our lives seemed stable, happy, and good.
And then we drove home, Tuesday night, to the Trumpocalypse.
Monday, 21 September 2015
My Better Half (Part Two)
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| Megan during a podcast recording session. |
Thursday, 17 September 2015
My Better Half (Part One)
Today is my 11th anniversary.
Yeah.
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| Me (with much redder hair) and my lovely bride Megan. |
Sunday, 1 June 2014
A Safe Place (Part One)
I was eighteen years old as the winter of 1989 began. A high school senior, looking ahead to a university career studying English Literature and Creative Writing. I had a part-time job at the mall selling stationery that kept me in gas money and the occasional night out at the movies (which were still pretty cheap on Tuesday night). I was single and nerdy, and like most teenagers I spent a good chunk of my time depressed about one or the other of those things. Still, my life was pretty good. I wrote my stories, got okay grades, had friends, a job, had worked my way up to the good parts in Drama Club, and there was still time to play long sessions of AD&D or Villains & Vigilantes on weekends. My life was stable.
That changed on December 6.
As stories of the massacre at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique began to reach me, like everyone else, I was horrified and angry at the awful violence. How could this happen? This was the sort of thing that happened other places, not mild-mannered Canada.
I also had an eerie feeling that, somehow, this was connected to me personally. I was hoping to be accepted into a university in Montreal myself -- not Ecole Polytechnique, but Montreal -- and the violence I was seeing everywhere on the news seemed like an awful sign of what was waiting for me in the outside world. I remember my mother saying something like, "What kind of awful place allows things like this to happen?"
I'm not sure whether this was aimed at me, something my mom said to maybe make me change my mind about where to go for my university career, or just an idle remark by someone else overwhelmed by barbarity. As the days went by, and the world tried to grapple with what had happened at Ecole Polytechnique, I fought to justify that choice in my own mind. I was headed for one of the best Creative Writing programs in Canada, after all, in one of the most culturally rich cities in North America. Montreal was the place to be. And after all, it couldn't happen again, right?
But it did.
It did happen again, only two and a half years later, and this time it happened at my own school: Concordia University in Montreal. This time it was an attack perpetrated by a member of the Engineering faculty against his colleagues and employees of the department. I had often used the computer lab in the Engineering department where the tragedy unfolded, and again I felt the eerie sense of awful horror touching my life... closer, this time.
For my roommate, it was much closer. He was studying Engineering, and some of the victims were familiar faces to him.
And now, it's happened again. In California this time, the tragedy perpetrated by another deranged young man furious at women for denying him sexually. Anyone who's been paying attention knows this is not the only act of mass murder perpetrated in the twenty-two years since the Concordia tragedy, it is one of many. Numb, we stagger from one atrocity to the next, turning them into statistics, political debates without resolution, place names now spoken in whispers: Virginia Tech. Columbine. Sandy Hook.
Ecole Polytechnique.
That name has become synonymous with tragedy in my mind, like many people of my generation who went to school in Montreal, and it holds a special weight for nearly every woman I know. Many communities in Canada have a small memorial to the women who died in the December 6, 1989 massacre. We have one here in London, which seems very distant from Montreal to me, in a quiet corner of Victoria Park. Occasionally I will pass it, in the midst of one of the raucous summer festivals that bring the park to life in July, and my thoughts will for a few moments drift from summer days and loud music to a cold winter night in 1989.
For the women I know, December 6th is a day that has become filled with dread. It is a day not only about remembering the lives of young women brutally ended too soon, at that Montreal school, it is a day they remember acts of violence that have been perpetrated against women since that day. Always, there have been more women murdered for no crime except their gender, raped, brutalized, kidnapped. The statistics are painfully clear and chilling.
My wife posts a simple memorial every December 6th on her LiveJournal: the names of the women killed at Ecole Polytechnique. Many Canadian women do this. And there is always some young(?) sociopath willing, on that most awful of days, to respond to even the most innocuous of memorials with a litany of hate against women. So it is for women all over the internet, when they remember December 6th, or speak out in anger over the California massacre, or in fact voice their opinion about just about anything under the sun. There's always a guy there to shout them down, scream NOT ALL MEN, and then in the same breath unleash more threats of violence and rape for any woman so uppity as to exist.
Even though the killer himself posted videos full of misogyny, the denials were quick in coming. This wasn't about women, some dudes were quick to tell us, it was about someone with mental health problems yadda yadda yadda. This couldn't possibly be something that has implications for us, the dudes said. We're nice guys, see. Nice guys don't do things like that, and here's a list of the things we'll do to you women if you say we do.
Yeah. Men were saying that back in the early 90s in Montreal too.
A number of women have chosen to speak out this time, under the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen. I encourage you to read their stories. Listening to women's experiences of casual misogyny and violence in their lives is sobering for anyone who thought incidents like this were isolated or unconnected, and not part of a larger pattern of behaviour that touches all women. As a man, no one has ever shouted sexual things at me on the street. But that's happened to my wife. No one has ever posted a response to one of my blog posts or Tweets with a rape threat. But that happens every day to countless women on the Internet.
And here's the thing, guys, women are asking us to step up this time. Step up and listen to their stories, without feeling the need to get our two cents in. Step up and let other men know that the kind of casual misogyny that poisons our society and breeds tragedies like the one in California (or Ecole Polytechnique) are not acceptable. Women are people, and they need to be treated that way. Always. Doing any less than that makes you an accomplice.
Let me leave you with this thought:
I told you about my own small connection to two horrifying acts of violence in Montreal, and the feelings of dread that it inspired.
Women carry this fear with them all the time.
Every day.
Think about that.
I'll be using this space over the next few days to talk about ways that the gaming hobby can be made more inclusive, a safe place for women and something we can all be proud to be a part of.
That changed on December 6.
As stories of the massacre at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique began to reach me, like everyone else, I was horrified and angry at the awful violence. How could this happen? This was the sort of thing that happened other places, not mild-mannered Canada.
I also had an eerie feeling that, somehow, this was connected to me personally. I was hoping to be accepted into a university in Montreal myself -- not Ecole Polytechnique, but Montreal -- and the violence I was seeing everywhere on the news seemed like an awful sign of what was waiting for me in the outside world. I remember my mother saying something like, "What kind of awful place allows things like this to happen?"
I'm not sure whether this was aimed at me, something my mom said to maybe make me change my mind about where to go for my university career, or just an idle remark by someone else overwhelmed by barbarity. As the days went by, and the world tried to grapple with what had happened at Ecole Polytechnique, I fought to justify that choice in my own mind. I was headed for one of the best Creative Writing programs in Canada, after all, in one of the most culturally rich cities in North America. Montreal was the place to be. And after all, it couldn't happen again, right?
But it did.
It did happen again, only two and a half years later, and this time it happened at my own school: Concordia University in Montreal. This time it was an attack perpetrated by a member of the Engineering faculty against his colleagues and employees of the department. I had often used the computer lab in the Engineering department where the tragedy unfolded, and again I felt the eerie sense of awful horror touching my life... closer, this time.
For my roommate, it was much closer. He was studying Engineering, and some of the victims were familiar faces to him.
And now, it's happened again. In California this time, the tragedy perpetrated by another deranged young man furious at women for denying him sexually. Anyone who's been paying attention knows this is not the only act of mass murder perpetrated in the twenty-two years since the Concordia tragedy, it is one of many. Numb, we stagger from one atrocity to the next, turning them into statistics, political debates without resolution, place names now spoken in whispers: Virginia Tech. Columbine. Sandy Hook.
Ecole Polytechnique.
That name has become synonymous with tragedy in my mind, like many people of my generation who went to school in Montreal, and it holds a special weight for nearly every woman I know. Many communities in Canada have a small memorial to the women who died in the December 6, 1989 massacre. We have one here in London, which seems very distant from Montreal to me, in a quiet corner of Victoria Park. Occasionally I will pass it, in the midst of one of the raucous summer festivals that bring the park to life in July, and my thoughts will for a few moments drift from summer days and loud music to a cold winter night in 1989.
For the women I know, December 6th is a day that has become filled with dread. It is a day not only about remembering the lives of young women brutally ended too soon, at that Montreal school, it is a day they remember acts of violence that have been perpetrated against women since that day. Always, there have been more women murdered for no crime except their gender, raped, brutalized, kidnapped. The statistics are painfully clear and chilling.
My wife posts a simple memorial every December 6th on her LiveJournal: the names of the women killed at Ecole Polytechnique. Many Canadian women do this. And there is always some young(?) sociopath willing, on that most awful of days, to respond to even the most innocuous of memorials with a litany of hate against women. So it is for women all over the internet, when they remember December 6th, or speak out in anger over the California massacre, or in fact voice their opinion about just about anything under the sun. There's always a guy there to shout them down, scream NOT ALL MEN, and then in the same breath unleash more threats of violence and rape for any woman so uppity as to exist.
Even though the killer himself posted videos full of misogyny, the denials were quick in coming. This wasn't about women, some dudes were quick to tell us, it was about someone with mental health problems yadda yadda yadda. This couldn't possibly be something that has implications for us, the dudes said. We're nice guys, see. Nice guys don't do things like that, and here's a list of the things we'll do to you women if you say we do.
Yeah. Men were saying that back in the early 90s in Montreal too.
A number of women have chosen to speak out this time, under the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen. I encourage you to read their stories. Listening to women's experiences of casual misogyny and violence in their lives is sobering for anyone who thought incidents like this were isolated or unconnected, and not part of a larger pattern of behaviour that touches all women. As a man, no one has ever shouted sexual things at me on the street. But that's happened to my wife. No one has ever posted a response to one of my blog posts or Tweets with a rape threat. But that happens every day to countless women on the Internet.
And here's the thing, guys, women are asking us to step up this time. Step up and listen to their stories, without feeling the need to get our two cents in. Step up and let other men know that the kind of casual misogyny that poisons our society and breeds tragedies like the one in California (or Ecole Polytechnique) are not acceptable. Women are people, and they need to be treated that way. Always. Doing any less than that makes you an accomplice.
Let me leave you with this thought:
I told you about my own small connection to two horrifying acts of violence in Montreal, and the feelings of dread that it inspired.
Women carry this fear with them all the time.
Every day.
Think about that.
I'll be using this space over the next few days to talk about ways that the gaming hobby can be made more inclusive, a safe place for women and something we can all be proud to be a part of.
Friday, 15 February 2013
Tea & Crossbows
Tea & Crossbows is the name of our regular Saturday night game group here at Casa del Nerd. I borrowed it (okay, I stole it - happy?) from the name of the unpublished Watchers sourcebook for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer RPG. It fit us perfectly, partially because several of our favourite, most formative games used the Cinematic Unisystem that powers the Buffy and Angel games, and also because we often serve our guests an assortment of teas on game night.
Shortly after moving to Merrie Olde London, Ontario, my wife discovered a wonderful little tea shop at Covent Garden Market called The Tea Haus. They sold a wide variety of interesting loose teas, and Megan began exploring them -- in typically exacting Megan fashion, in alphabetical order. In the years we have been in London, we have sipped our way through the alphabet several times. (The Tea Haus is run by very nice people who also happen to do a large portion of their business via the Internet. Visit them here: http://www.theteahaus.com/)
Guests in our home are often offered a choice of teas as they come in the door (especially during typically cold Canadian weather, which is to say ten months of the year), and it's not uncommon for us to enjoy a pot of tea midway through our gaming evening, sometimes with dessert.
Tea is a very civilized drink. It warms and welcomes you. It greets you with a variety of delightful smells, tickling you with cinnamon or bergamot or lavender. Tea is a drink that requires you to be patient, slow down, take a moment and savour. It is the drink of conversations where we catch up on each others' lives, the sweet kick of caffeine that gives us the gusto to get dinner on the stove, the pause that brings us together halfway through the evening and lets us re-focus so the game can get into high gear.
Food is a big part of our gaming life. We often cook a meal (or, more accurately, our friend Colin usually cooks a meal and we ply his culinary talents with tea) as part of gaming night. Sharing food with our friends before we game is an important part of the social fabric of our group. A meal lets us come together around the table and get to know each other again, gives us a common baseline before we blast off for whatever roleplaying world the night has in store for us.
And all of that usually starts with tea.
Shortly after moving to Merrie Olde London, Ontario, my wife discovered a wonderful little tea shop at Covent Garden Market called The Tea Haus. They sold a wide variety of interesting loose teas, and Megan began exploring them -- in typically exacting Megan fashion, in alphabetical order. In the years we have been in London, we have sipped our way through the alphabet several times. (The Tea Haus is run by very nice people who also happen to do a large portion of their business via the Internet. Visit them here: http://www.theteahaus.com/)
Guests in our home are often offered a choice of teas as they come in the door (especially during typically cold Canadian weather, which is to say ten months of the year), and it's not uncommon for us to enjoy a pot of tea midway through our gaming evening, sometimes with dessert.
Tea is a very civilized drink. It warms and welcomes you. It greets you with a variety of delightful smells, tickling you with cinnamon or bergamot or lavender. Tea is a drink that requires you to be patient, slow down, take a moment and savour. It is the drink of conversations where we catch up on each others' lives, the sweet kick of caffeine that gives us the gusto to get dinner on the stove, the pause that brings us together halfway through the evening and lets us re-focus so the game can get into high gear.
Food is a big part of our gaming life. We often cook a meal (or, more accurately, our friend Colin usually cooks a meal and we ply his culinary talents with tea) as part of gaming night. Sharing food with our friends before we game is an important part of the social fabric of our group. A meal lets us come together around the table and get to know each other again, gives us a common baseline before we blast off for whatever roleplaying world the night has in store for us.
And all of that usually starts with tea.
Saturday, 19 January 2013
The Secret of Life, the Universe, and Everything?
We interrupt our regularly-scheduled nerdery for a special message from HTHD headquarters.
I'm 42 today. Yeah.
It's been another whirlwind year of highs and lows, amazing surprises and existential dread. Oh, and some great games. Always with the gaming.
Sentimental interlude concluded. Tomorrow I promise to write about something very, very nerdy that would get me punched and my lunch money stolen if I were in a high school cafeteria and not in a bully-proof bunker.
I'm 42 today. Yeah.
It's been another whirlwind year of highs and lows, amazing surprises and existential dread. Oh, and some great games. Always with the gaming.
- We wrapped up SHADOWRUN: DISAVOWED, a game I'm particularly proud of. Not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but had some powerful episodes and great moments overall.
- We drifted away from our brunch-on-weekends place, the Westside, as the food hasn't been as good lately for some reason.
- ...But we discovered Billy's Deli downtown, which kicks ass in a satisfying-your-tummy way.
- I continued to struggle along doing temp-work in lieu of a good long term job. The economy in this part of Ontario is pretty lousy.
- ...But I got a nice long term contract with the Ontario government which paid pretty well and let me work with nice people in a low-pressure environment. Awesome.
- And my friend Rob was kind enough to hire me on to do some freelance writing in the fall, working up a rough draft document of the augmented reality game he's been working on for several years now. Tecumseh lives!
- I got to trade e-mails with one of my favourite comic book artists, Tim Truman! And he's going to be doing a special illustration for the aforementioned ARG!
- The conclusion of Colin's long-running postapocalyptic game THE CORE. Farewell for now to Magnus and the gang. Sequel forthcoming?
- THE AVENGERS! 'Nuff said.
- I ran a satisfying second season of my Victorian vampire hunter game SUNSET EMPIRE, setting the stage for an epic finale this winter.
- Apple fritters at the fairgrounds. *sigh*
- We got a terrific, super-tense new Andre Braugher series, LAST RESORT. Then they cancelled it. Argh.
- Rob has been running the awesome COLD CITY. I get to be a Russian killing machine. Love. It.
- Megan ran her first game. Holy shit!
- After many years of idle chat, I started actually working on putting together a real, honest to goodness podcast with my friend Colin and my wonderful wife Megan. Soon.
- Some other movies that I loved this past year: The Dark Knight Rises, The Cabin in the Woods, Cloud Atlas, Skyfall (I really think Ken and Robin missed the boat on this one). We also caught up with The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, which is older but fantastic.
- After a 20-year stretch as a guy with a goatee, I now have a full beard again.
- I have a brand new iMac! So happy.
- My parents bought me an iPod touch for Xmas, for the high tech double-double. So I now own a "device" that I can use for wireless internet, texting, all this stuff that The Kids have known about for years.
- I have embraced this technology and gotten way, way more interested in things like Twitter than is good for me. Oh, yeah, and I started a blog.
- I failed -- twice -- to get a RPG game going with the club on campus. Not enough player interest.
- ...But that made me investigate online "virtual tabletop" software like Roll20, and now I'm planning to run a game for some old friends who are spread around the country and haven't gamed together for almost 20 years. Wow. Technology is awesome.
Sentimental interlude concluded. Tomorrow I promise to write about something very, very nerdy that would get me punched and my lunch money stolen if I were in a high school cafeteria and not in a bully-proof bunker.
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