Legacies and Links from wandering Armadillos

This post contains no useful information about the actual animals.

We’ve been busy and things have piled up, so I have some announcements, and then some links to dump – er bounce of a reflective surface. I was going to try to build a metaphor around that, but this turned into an Armadillo thing.

Anyway:

UnObtanium Bazaar will appear at the Two Rivers Renaissance Faire in Yuma next weekend.

We will open the full tent for our first big show of the year. Come by and be social, maybe drop some coin.

Happy to not be dead…

You might notice the new bareness of the website. we jumped ship from Wix, and I haven’t had time to rebuild it. No complaints regarding Wix except it was a lot more graphic goo-gahs than we needed and and a lot more money than we can justify.

I turned 57, and my cancer levels came back undetectable – meaning my final cause of death remains a mystery. My wife took this as good news and threw a party.

Those events, and the 14 boxes of Christmas I had to wrangle made for a busy month. Which is how I like it.

My good friend Mathew Howard has beaten me to a graphic novel about dinosaurs going into space.

My friend Joseph Schwartz has a new volume of his Thomas Berenford Chronicles: Wilder Fire. Straight-up fantasy action-adventure with a bit of noir at the edges.

I know these guys from the old Armadillo Writers group (which persists, but now only by Zoom). We were named for the now-defunct bar we once met at. The fate of that establishment is finally revealed by Reality TV Update.

No on left to sue us now…

A couple of things:

• We left the bar when they closed the back meeting room we used to turn it into an office. We made do a the Duck and Decanter across the street until COVID forced us into Zoom.
• We are still on Zoom. It’s just so much easier.
• The loss of the lease was the final blow. I think they might have made it otherwise.
• That lot is now empty.

LINKS FROM RECENT MEETINGS OF THAT GROUP:

[From Zoom’s chat function that I copied, pasted, checked out and now choose to reflect back to you]

Mentoring STEM students: https://prescientist.org/

The 8 ages of Comics : https://sitcomics.net/blogs/news/the-8-ages-of-comics

Vedic Mathematics: https://www.vedicmaths.org/

Two “GDR_Compliant” alternatives to Microsoft Office: https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office OR https://www.freeoffice.com/en/

Full disclosure: I don’t use either one of them. I pay for Microsoft because I long ago accepted that the world works in Word, and Excel is by far the better spreadsheet period. But those operating theories are expensive.

And finally, this exists:

The world’s smallest Ouija board.

I won’t make this week’s meeting of course. I’ll be setting up in Yuma.

WORD COUNT:

In the last seven days:

I added a post to Are We Lost Yet? – The Max Delta Trail on South Mountain. = 1000 words.

I wrote 1500 words on the newer 64 novel. [more about that setting].

I made the Thursday night Armadillos of Zoom meeting. = 500 words.

I had a meeting with management at a comic/game store about carrying Go Action Fun Time. = 500 words.

I ran an episode of GAFT – The Fox Who Hunted Back. = 1000 words.

I wrote this very blog. = 1000 words.

I did that all around prepping for the faire, and some other drama that is not of public interest but time consuming nonetheless. 5500 words.

Whiskey.

No – one more thing. Last week I easily made word count putting the video below together.

There will be more to come – hopefully all better than this one. But this one exists:

Let’s go!

If anything is possible then nothing is certain.

Somewhere in my strange and voluminous files, I have a folder with notes for a science fantasy setting, a post-apocalyptic Earth where magic now worked because reasons, and that was the tag-line. I think I called it Warp World, but that name has long been trademarked by others.

As early as 1991 there was a published game of that name with a similar premise. So it goes.

But I want to move on to real life. Much like my divorce, I am projecting that the only thing that will remain the same about the basic facts of my life in the near to mid-term is my day job.

In short, Cheryl is moving to Phoenix, and I am moving in with her. To be clear: she is buying the house with proceeds from selling her house in Las Vegas, which has a comparably hot real-estate market. So financially, it will be a lateral move for her. Her mother, who co-owns that house, is also part of that financing. I am not. I will just reside there. The legalities of this are both private and, trust me, boring.

I burned some vacation over the holidays, and we spent a lot of it packing and storing the accumulated crap possessions that have gathered over the past decade plus in her 3000’ + residence. Some of that is UnObtanium inventory, which will finally be unified with my portion of that inventory on the same property somewhere close and sometime soon.

Verity (the truck), Rattletrap (the trailer) waiting in front of Cheryl’s soon to be former residence for me to get my shit together.

There were some practical lessons learned:

• A hand-truck totally pays for itself when you are moving big piles of boxes from point A to point B. Yes, $120 or so at the hardware store for the good one. Worth It.
• You can buy a roof rack at Harbor Freight ($320) that will sort-of clamp on to any pick-up truck, and therefore sort-of clamped onto mine.
• Installing a roof-rack that sort-of fits your truck is where you realize how real the disparity is between Cheryl’s collection of household tools and my bags and boxes of accumulated rigging tools. But we now own a set of large size metric sockets, which I am not certain I had anyway. (US theatrical rigging is almost all SAE).
• I do not miss beating the crap out of my hands on a daily basis.

I used the roof rack to transport the UnObtanium tent, thereby keeping it out of Rattletrap, because I otherwise filled that trailer with UB inventory.

The bell tent turns out to be 6 meters, not 5, so the pole I had imported from China is too small. That’s a $260 mistake that will require a $320 fix, because…

This is not the way…

We also spent about $200 on garment bags which should both protect the clothes and speed up install and strike.

Having all the inventory at the same address will mean not only can we load and unload easier for shows, but we realistically sell things on-line as well. Between us, Cheryl and I have enough antiques to stock a small shop – at least for a few months.

So we might have a consignment booth as well. But that, like many of our life’s details, depends upon where we end up.

If anything is possible, then nothing is certain.

Varied uses of vinegar and other news

I’ve been going through the vinegar lately, courtesy of several circumstances whose only common thread in the involvement of vinegar and myself. I could blather, in good blog style, another two paragraphs before getting to actual content. The research on vinegar is right there on the other screen. But let us assume you have a useful familiarity with the common household acid and get right to the things.

Vinegar deters ants. I have a small invasion going on in my kitchen, and the front-line treatment is vinegar. It’s not pesticide, but that’s ok. I don’t desire to exterminate the ants. I just want them to stay out of the kitchen.

Vinegar will kill the buggers on contact. The true value is that it will wipe away the chemical trail they follow across my countertop. This works until they blaze another trail. So, this insurgency may persist until I find whatever hole they are getting in through. Then I can solve the problem for good – not with vinegar, but with grout.

Vinegar relieves ear-itches.

Or so we all hope.

The rest can be explained better by photo:

Still not actually my dog.

Vinegar kills mold. Unobtanium (specifically Cheryl) has acquired several Easy-up shades and a 5 meter bell tent. The bell tent did not come with poles, which is a $60 proposition, but that still saves us like $700, if we can mitigate the mold inside the tent and one of the Easy-ups.

A generous treatment of vinegar and the bright Vegas sunshine seems to have mitigated at least the mold smell off the Easy-up.

When the poles get here, we’ll set up the big tent and empty a gallon of vinegar via spray bottle underneath the relentless Vegas sun.

Tangential to Unobtanium becoming more of a lifestyle than a hobby, I have asked Cheryl to marry me, and she said yes.

Kinda buried the lead there, didn’t I?

The plan is to merge our lives in Arizona, due to the fact that I have a good day job, and she is basically a pirate seamstress who just needs to get to an airport.

So I fear we are 6-9 months from blogging about real-state in this space.

Meanwhile, she is in Vegas digging out from spending all summer at sea. She has been out with Royal Caribbean Cruises, for those not in on the joke. What should have been 5 weeks of costume alteration and repair turned into 3 full months due to the various quarantines.

I went to Vegas, picked her up at the airport, like a good boyfriend, and then the next morning asked her to marry me over breakfast. This approximates our third anniversary as a couple, thought that is, I swear, coincidental.  So, we are no longer boyfriend/girlfriend. It is worse than that now.

No longer my girlfriend…

I do not expect her in Phoenix until the end of October for Goth Christmas Halloween.

Meanwhile, she has outfits to sew, and I have lies to fabricate.

If you want to go down the hole with vinegar versatility, the links below will start you on that journey.

https://www.almanac.com/many-household-uses-vinegar

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/white-vinegar#bottom-line

Now we know.

A grab bag of uncomfortable truths

I have some small observations to share, but first a reminder that I am still the Gaming Coordinator for Leprecon 47, and if you want to run a game – now only late Sunday afternoon – I am the guy to contact.

Also Las Vegas Pirate Fest has changed both date and venue:

At press-time their website had not been updated to these new coordinates

I will be there as part of UnObtanium. This means it will not be overlapping the London Bridge Ren Faire, which we will also be at. There was a plan involving time travel – but now we don’t have to…

Uncomfortable Truths in no particular order:

The team that gets the fewest DUI’s the week prior almost always wins the Superbowl.

I am not going to rehabilitate the derelict hot tub in my yard for less than the cost of a new one.

Relatedly – I am not a long-term resident at this address. (I am technically still house-sitting).

So I bought a portable hot tub with my year-end bonus.

This one.

I am walking proof that you can carry COVID without running fever.

Operation Warp Speed may be the Trump administration’s greatest achievement, and might have gotten him re-elected if he hadn’t buried it with administrative neglect of the rest of the pandemic, and compounded that with political malfeasance.

BUT-BUT-BUT

If a Democratic President had done this the Republicans would be comparing it to socialism.

The drive back and forth to Las Vegas does not improve with repetition.

The cohort that won’t wear a mask because they won’t live in fear is the same cohort that are afraid to go into a library without a gun because homeless people.

I remember now why I try to avoid serving on non-profit committees -particularly for local cons. I’d be more specific, but this is still a going concern, and I do have some sense of organizational loyalty.

You can’t convince anyone into anything long term. They have to get there themselves. Even if you martial  all of your powers of logic and charm, the decision will always be temporary. Sales-folk get away with this, because they only need the spell to last until you pay.

For anything longer term, all you can do is make your case, and hope they are ready to take that path.

This is the first thing of any length I have written in seven days.

But I’m caught up on a lot of other things.

And I have a hot tub coming.

Now we know.

The Things You Learn Time Traveling

First off, in warning, both pizza and commercial quality whiskey are relatively new things. They can only be found in recognizable form from the late 1800’s onward.

I accidentally set myself up for some difficult dives in Go Action Fun Time. There are three adventures where the cast travels down the Silk road, with merchandise bought in China, hoping to sell it for a profit in – well I wrote Byzantium, but that’s not actually on the Silk Road. Least of my problems.

Currency. Not so much for a specific episode – I can look up, to a point, the currency of China circa 250 ce (where the journey starts). But when I’m writing rules for commerce, i need some exchange medium that will translate across different times and economies.

This is a good quick primer.

In the existing rules,I defaulted to a prevailing day’s wages, but that would take too much research for the average Executive Producer (the game-master in GAFT). Plus, compensatory wages are also a relatively new thing. But I may be able to come up with a table of shells= animals= salt = silver = gold that will take us into recorded history.

It takes about 60 days to cross the Taklamakan Desert on foot via camel caravan. I mention that because it was a hard fact to come by, and basically had to be deduced.

The sixty days assumes taking either the north or south route arond the edges of the desert. No one goes straight across. Taklamaka supposedly means Desert of No Return. It is one of the driest and one of the coldest deserts in the world. Some years the only precipitation is a brief dusting of snow. There are zero water sources in the deep interior. It is a sea of sand.

The Silk Road takes up three episodes, and I plan to eventually publish them.

 

Yes, That Lusitania, in contrast, is likely to remain a convention only episode. This is mostly due to my reliance upon the Lusitania Resource site. Any published document I produce would have to re-write and re-present the historical accounts, and re-render their maps, and that’s all way beyond fair use. So I just open up a laptop at the convention game room.

It doesn’t always load – so there’s that.

Also, as excellent as that map is, it does not have the level of detail you would need for a tactical encounter. There must be, logically, ladders of some sort from F deck tot he boiler rooms, but they are not indicated on the floor-plans.

The deck plans are from design blue-prints. They are not as-builts.

Also, Lusitania – which starts hours before the ship sinks, involves known, historical people with real living relatives, and that would require a more sensitive treatment of the subject than GAFT time typically achieves. The narrative voice of GAFT can get flippant.

My real problems are not research.

My problem with the existing product is that I am not yet confident that someone could make a character, must less run an adventure, without me being in the room to interpret what I wrote.  As much as I want to Just Do It, we are probably 30% through the playtest/revision process, rather than the 80% I once assumed.

A note from writer’s group mostly for my own reference (while I still have deck-plans left):

The Flea by John Donne

Still the Lusitania goes on…

So one more history note, this one about Jack’s on -again/ off-again mentor, the legendary bard Taliesin.

There are extant poems reliably (by Dark Age standards) attributed to a historical Taliesin, who served the lords of Rheghed in the early 6th century. This actual bard, though was, well, mediocre, judging by those works, which were mostly songs praising his patrons.

Good for him, but it doesn’t justify the legend.

My head-canon is that the bard of Rheghed took Taliesin’s name, but is not actually that legendary bard.

The Taliesin I write about (in the sequel to Beanstalk and Beyond) would never write any of his own poetry down anyway.

Now we know.

 

 

The Sun Shines Brightly on distant shores – and other notes.

First, some announcements:

 

Go Action Fun Time returns:

Go Action Fun Time info.

[For perspective, for the last game session, I drove like a madman from Vegas to make the game on time, and one person showed up. If that pattern continues, I have a back-load of other projects that need attention.]

My artwork. 

Episode 2 – The Fox Who Hunted Back

In the far future, an uplifted fox holds an ancient grudge.

Saturday, November 9, 2019

1:00 PM

Scale & Feather Meadery

1050 N Fairway Dr, Building E, Suite 112

This is part of the regular Crit Hit event. You do not have to be part of that group to participate.

Scale & Feather has excellent mead, but limited food. 

Not my artwork. 

Episode 3 – The Blistering Death

A mysterious disease threatens to wipe out the pygmies in the prehistoric Congo. You will find a cure. 

Sunday, November 10, 2019

4:00pm

My house.

If I have no players on Saturday, we might play Fox Hunt on Sunday. 

There will be a third episode – Likely Silk Road Part 1 – over the 3rd weekend in November. It will be the Friday night, unless I have to travel, in which case it will be the Sunday. 

 

Now to content:

I will admit it freely: I predicted, to myself mostly, that with an actual starting point guard, and with any improvement from DeAndre Ayton, and with any production from whoever plays power forward, the My Beloved Suns had a shot at 30 wins, and a ceiling of maybe 38 – which would be double their win total from last year.

They just beat the previously unbeaten Philadelphia 76’ers in a game they would have been blown out of a year ago. 

Now we are all thinking play-offs – even in the brutal, brutal Western Conference.

Even if they fall short, they will be in the hunt until the last few games, and it is awesome to have basketball that is not painful to watch again.

 

Regular readers will recall that I go back and forth from Las Vegas for reasons. Last week I learned about the Inescapable Resort Fee, but on the plus side, I discovered a Brit bar (The Crown and Anchor)  that serves Scotch eggs. Those are the dish of choice to go with your Guiness for brunch. 

Consequently, I get a lot of ads across my social media about Vegas things. And I ignore them. I have other sources I consult. 

No resort fee…

Now, I am getting ads about Iceland.

Events in the Jack sequel I am writing  (to Beanstalk and Beyond) take place on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland, which, I know from research, is home to like 90 species of birds at various times (none of them puffins) and three species of land mammals, one of which is technically invasive. 

I have no idea how the name would be pronounced.

It has also seen a good amount of volcanic activity since 498 ce (when the action takes place) so I feel free to make up some details about the coastal features. 

I have lost track of word count, but we have been going good the last few weeks, in spite of the travels. I do not normally play Nanowrimo, but I am committing myself here to finish this manuscript by the end of the month. 

Google maps is also keeping track of Jack’s journey:

 

Now we know.

Briefly resurrecting old jokes.

I have recreated my dead(ish) hiking blog Are We Lost Yet?. Sometimes I can access the ghost of it’s presence on my publisher’s site. Sometimes I can’t. I have yet, after six mnths of promises, been able to add to or modify the site, so I am pulling the plug on my end as well.

New hiking content (as well as some old retreads) will appear at Arewelostyet.blog.

Who knows? I might even make a dollar or two.

Old Suns joke:

Why haven’t the Suns ever won a championship?

Because Alvan Adams is still the best center they have ever had.

But I saw the Suns preseason opener tonight, and I believe DeAndre Ayton could get there. As a raw rookie, I yet disbelieve he’s going to be the 20/10 all star he has been projected to become, but he is already starting quality.

Wasted, of course on a team that is still painfully young, and has a 30 win ceiling, despite any of Ayton’s heroics, because they neglected to trade for or sign a starting quality point guard.

In other news, I need a pirate costume by October 12th because of my girlfriend. I just like having that sentence not be random gibberish in relation to my life.

In particular I need a shirt.

Worcestershire sauce, spilled all over the floor, is disturbingly like blood.

Word count is 3000, mostly on the new blog, which is remarkable given my distractions of late.

But … oh my lookit the time.

Now we know.

 

The Ladder of Poor Decisions

I dimly recall reading somewhere that, on a broooaaad average, half of US management decisions are wrong. I’d love to cite that source, but it was something I picked up working backstage at a university in  the early 90’s and skimmed through while waiting on a cue.

That’s poor documentation for an insight that has informed my approach to managing and dealing with managers most of my adult life.  Even so, I have found this to be roughly true. We are only right about half the time – on the first try.

In my RPG systems (I’ve written three) I assume that an average person will succeed at a common task (that they have no particular expertise in) about half the time. This more or less works out.

Now, this is hard to pin down because most of us do not keep score about when we are right or wrong. Some experts think we should start, but most of us don;t actually balance our checkbooks, so good luck with that.

At a recent writer’s group, we received well meaning if unsolicited advice about how we go about making poor decisions. Complete with a hand-out.

Adapted from The Fifth Discipline by Peter Serge

We work our way up this ladder of loosely defined terms whenever we make a decision, or so the presentation went. Experience informs data which informs Meaning and so forth. On average, though, we go up this ladder in about six seconds, which does not leave a lot of time to fully consider all the steps, particularly the lower ones.

Which may go a long way towards explaining our half-wrong problem.

But there’s an even chance that’s not the problem at all.

Our friends the octopi (a frequent subject of this blog) have a completely different approach., as this well-animated TedEd video explains:

Now you know.

 

Accumulated Notes from Writer’s Groups

First an announcement: I have started One of 64 as a web-comic. Every Thursday, you can watch me teach myself, perhaps painfully, how to produce a web-comic. The first four pages came out, by accident of Friday. That has been corrected.

Start here.

For those who might be new here, I go to a fair number of open invitation drop-in writer’s groups. More about that here, if’n you care. Sometimes I share first or second drafts. Most of the time I take notes. Here are some that have accumulated over time, in more or less the order they appears in my notebook.

Most of these notes are things I am reminding myself to look up afterwards, and the link would be the most relevant site I found in a few minutes searching.

I am told by multiple sources that 24 reviews of your work on Amazon bumps you up a level in exposure via their algorithm.

The Cheyenne Tribe speaks of their prophet and greatest medicine man, Motzeyout. The piece presented at group suggested he was a time traveler who predicted the coming of the white man.  That’s not mentioned in the summary here, but not ruled out either.

I have a note that says “Iowa Bird Museum” which does not seem to exist. You can go visit the Talbot Collection at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, and/or the Stempel Bird Museum in Macedonia Iowa. Both are sizeable collections of dead birds in various poses, but I think our author was describing the Talbot Collection. If you yearn to see living birds in Iowa, try the Iowa Raptor Project in Solon Iowa.

I have a note reading “history of Pima cotton in China” which I’m going to skip. You’re welcome.

I have two books noted:

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes 

Poltergiest – a Study in Destructive Haunting by Colin Wilson.

Below these I wrote: “Crackpot psychiatry is good fuel for fantasy”. So you were warned.

I have written “Akasha” which is either the Hindu equivalent for the Ethreal Plane or the name of the first Vampire. I have no idea which I meant here.

Finally, Skylark of Space is the first commonly recognized published space opera. The Author, EE Smith would go on to write the Lensmen series that gave us about half the known tropes in that genre. You can read it on Gutenberg, and so can I.

Now you know.

 

 

 

 

No Ranting – Just Links.

Arizona House Bill 2112, the Technical Production Services exemption, has passed the AZ Senate, and sits on Governor Ducey’s desk. Here’s what I wrote about it for the March 2015 Collaborations – the newsletter of the Desert State USITT

Arizona House Bill 2112, currently awaiting a vote in the Senate, intends to remove the ability of live event technical professionals to collect unemployment. So if it passes, which seems likely, just about anyone reading this newsletter would be unable to collect unemployment compensation from the state of Arizona, even if they otherwise qualify.

The official summary says:

HB 2112 exempts technical event production services personnel from the definition of employee for purposes of the unemployment insurance (UI) program administered by the Department of Economic Security (DES).

That’s one of a long list of stoopid things the Tea & Gun party legislature is doing to our state. But I’m not going to turn this into a rant. This is a list of shorter items.

What I learned at my next-to-last board meeting (I’m currently the Secretary, but will be termed out by September) is that our DS-USITT is a unincorporated non-profit association, which means you can deduct fees or donations given tot hem from your taxes, but they can’t provide you with formal documentation.

Also, we learned that Arizona considers our traditional 50/50 raffle to support a student membership to be gambling – even if you are a lowly  unincorporated non-profit association. Because freedom.

No – not going to rant.

When driving to Tucson, don’t stop at Eloy. When I stopped there, I choked down a Carl’s Jr sandwich while surrounded by overweight white people with guns. I am an undersized, unarmed theater nerd. Ate quickly, Got out. Stop at Pichacho Peak instead. That Dairy Queen/Shell station/gift emporium was stocked by non-threatening, if unhurried old hippies.

Now – Links:

Research to replace my old tent:

http://www.outdoorgearlab.com/Best-Camping-Tent/ratings

What adhesive should you use? http://thistothat.com/

Someone thinks about pterosaurs. A lot.

http://www.pteros.com/pterosaurs.html

Background for my work in progress:

https://fantasticalhistory.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/background-for-the-beanstalk/

Curious Continuity looks at the barely forseeable future:

https://curiouscontinuity.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/some-visions-of-the-barely-forseable-future/

And finally, SciShow Space starts out talking about tin whisklers and ends with talking about one of this blogs regular obsessions – strange toilets.

 

Which leads us to the ESA telling you more than you might have wanted to know about that.

You’re welcome.

Now you know.