Step by Step [UPDATED]

A small lurch forward.

1728 / 50000 words. 3% done!

UPDATE: 7% is way better than 3%:

3691 / 50000 words. 7% done!

A Novella of 50,000 Words...

Begins with the first thousand.

1056 / 50000 words. 2% done!

Where I've Been

Lots of red on these maps.


visited 45 states (90%)



visited 13 states (5.77%)


The world map will have more red on it by the end of the year.

Interesting thing about the 50 states map: you can tell that my family liked to take road trips for vacations when I was young. I've somehow missed Mississippi and Alabama, and despite living in Washington never saw Montana.

Excerpt from Planets by Kate Rusby

On nights like these
I could fly up to the sky above me.
Like Superman
I would change the course of earth below me.

Through the world I am wandering, wandering,
A soft breeze blowing, I am wandering now.
Through this world I am wandering, wandering.
These are the days I live now.

I can see
The planets are aligning for me.
And I dare not breathe for then
The clouds will come and then deny me.

A Game That Matters

One of the members of the Alliterates pointed me towards this great editorial on The Escapist: How A Board Game Can Make You Cry. It's a really great look at what Brenda Brathwaite has been doing recently in terms of designing games that make you think - starting with a game about the Middle Passage she made to illustrate how horrific the slave trade was, so that her ten-year-old daughter could make an emotional (and logical) connection to the facts taught in her school.

The article then cites a game called Train:

The object of Train is to get a collection of people from Point A to Point B by placing them in a boxcar and sending them on their merry way. Played among a group of three people, players draw cards from a pile that can impede other players or free them from existing obstacles. The first player to reach the end of the line wins.

The destination? Auschwitz.

The "game" didn't stop there, however. The game board ... is an allusion to Kristallnacht - Brathwaite explained that she needed to break a fresh piece of glass each time she "installed" her work in a new location to properly evoke the violence of the experience. She even typed the game's instructions on an actual SS typewriter, which she purchased solely for that purpose.

Nazis have featured prominently in games for a long time, typically as the enemy, whether it was Wolfenstein's chaingun-wielding Hitler or the recent flood of World War II shooters on the market. Nazis are kind of like zombies in that they've become sort of an abstract enemy, relentlessly evil and fodder for headshots.

Very few, if any, games featuring Nazis ever touch on the Holocaust, and if they do it's usually some muscle-bound mook with guns liberating a death camp where you don't actually see the victims.

What makes Train - and, I would argue, any game whose mechanics make the audience think (Braid, I'm looking at you) - so interesting is that the connection it creates to its subject matter is both rawly emotional and rationally engaging. In the example about the African slave trade, a game mechanic involves the players arranging groups of slaves by tribe and family, and then picking up slaves by the fistful, so that the full impact of separation is both observed and felt. All that hard work - to work of building a life and a family - is laid to waste, and then the true 'game' begins.

There is an argument about whether games can be art. Things like Train and designers like Brenda Brathwaite prove beyond a doubt they can.

Curtains Up

Performances of the Subversive Puppet Show will resume shortly, albeit at a reduced schedule. Thank you for bearing with the Management during these past few months.

Sonnet 138

I realize this is just something I could share in RSS, but it's so beautiful I can't not post it here. Dave McKean imagines Shakepspeare's Sonnet 138 as an animated film.

WHEN my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth supprest.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O! love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.