September 10th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The Crisitunity (also known as the Great Almost-Flood of 2009) passed without incident. I know that not having closure on that unresolved aspect of my life was keeping you up at night, so I wanted to clear that up right off the bat. The mess that was distorting and cramping our living room is gone, the boxes have been sorted and moved back into storage and six new boxes are on the “For Sale” pile. Despite that, the bookshelves are all still overflowing to the endtables and there’s still a general lack of space in the house. But at least it’s a clean and generally organized lack of space. What else is going on? Here’s some Pluses and Minuses:

+ The Donald Westlake kick I’ve been on for the past few weeks is a massive, massive plus–specifically with his Parker books. Fans of hard-boiled crime fiction need to take specific note of this, in case it’s somehow passed them by.
- The greenpunk books I should be reading are mouldering on the shelves because I’ve been reading Donald Westlake and noir fiction.
+ Gonna go hide away in a cabin on the Island for my birthday in a couple of weeks.
- The general malaise and depression that seems to be afflicting me at the moment. Not sure of the reason. Not sure there needs to be one.
+ Will and Kyla’s fantastic wedding that I went to a week back, hanging out with a ton of awesome people (many of whom I probably haven’t seen in the better part of 15 years). The wedding featured a bicycle procession (with the bride and groom on a tandem bike) through the streets of Victoria to a park for a champagne toast and then to the reception. Freakin’ amazing.
- My friend Jeff getting on an accident on his bike on the way home from said wedding and shattering his clavicle. He’s okay, if a little sore and chagrined.
+ I’ve been spending less time obsessing over what’s happening online and tending to my downloads, allowing me to spend more time IRL…
- …mainly because my computer disagreed with the beer that got poured on it and now refuses to communicate with me. Or with anyone else. Or in any way whatsoever. So it looks like a new computer is on the horizon, but that’ll have to wait for a little bit. In the meantime, I’m on Carla’s machine. *sigh*

All right, I’m off to sell one of those boxes of books. A local store said they’d take them off my hands for $150. w00t!

August 17th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Lisa: Dad, did you know the Chinese have the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity’?
Homer: Yes! Crisitunity!

It could have been a lot worse than it was, but it still sucked.

Over the past year or so, “the office” in our house has morphed into “the storeroom” and things that I’ve decided not to immediately part with but which we we don’t have room for in the rest of our modest-sized house have made their way there.

Yesterday, after Carla and I came home from a lunch/shopping/window-shopping expedition we discovered our landlord (who lives in the suite above us) at our door in a bit of a state. It seems the pipes were backing up in the house. The laundry room had flooded with black water and he wasn’t sure where the blockage was coming from. He did, however, need two things from us:

1) To not use the water at all, maybe for another 24 hours or so.
2) Access to the storeroom where the plumbing access valves were hidden in the walls.

After not being able to get into the access valves himself, he called in a favour from a plumber friend who came over and determined that our personal plumbing wasn’t blocked and we could use our water (yay), but that he couldn’t find the blockage in their plumbing, so he needed a plumbing snake to find it. They went off to Home Depot to rent one, but not before telling us: “You’re going to need to move some of this stuff out of here.”

“How much of it?”

“Whatever you don’t want potentially flooded.”

Considering that almost every box in that room was filled with books, I considered that as an encouragement to empty the room top to bottom–posters, stuff on shelves, EVERYTHING. And so we did. In 20 minutes flat, Carla and I emptied the room to the bare walls. And just as we moved out the last box, our landlord and the plumber returned with the snake.

Long story shorter, they found the blockage (NB for GeekUnplugged Readers: don’t put grease and coffee grounds down the garburator–your pipes won’t like it), only sprayed down the walls with a bit of black water, cleaned up the mess (thankfully) and departed. The only problem was that the contents of the storage room were still in our living room. Carla and I could have just moved them back (probably in only another 15 minutes or so), but I preferred to see it as an opportunity to strip down my belongings yet again.

See, my problem with keeping stuff in storage is that, by definition, the various belongings aren’t available to access. And if you can’t access them, you can’t use them, so why do you have them? I know I may have more display space eventually (though I’m not counting on it), and some of the things I don’t have room for I do still want, but I bet I don’t need everything in the 20+ boxes that were in there.

So, before the Chris & Carla Overflow Project goes back into storage, I’m going to go through all of it again to see how much I can live without. In point of fact, I’m going to challenge myself to take advantage of this near-disaster and get rid of as much stuff as humanly possible. I’ll report back when I’m done and let you know how well I took advantage of this crisitunity.

January 28th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I’ve kept to-do lists on and off for year, and while I haven’t used them in any organized fashion in the last year or two, I thought if I was turning over a new leaf this might be the time to do it. What I need, I thought, is a pocket-sized book—preferably one divided up by days, in case I need to make notes in advance. Yeah, a day-planner, but which one? There’s plenty out there.

The first consideration (it being January and all) is one that’s on sale. The second is one that’s tasteful. The third is one that’s going to survive all year being tossed around in my bag. The winner? The Moleskine 2009 Pocket Diary—specifically, the one with a separate page for each day of the year:

It’s got an elastic to keep it shut tight and a ribbon bookmark to keep your place. Plenty of room on each page to jot down what I need to do (it’s divided in hourly gradiations, but I don’t use them for that—I’m not that anal), plus phone numbers, emails or whatever else needs jotting. It cost me $9 on sale (at 50% off), but I’ll happily be paying full price for it next year.

(And yes, that is a Sleater-Kinney sticker on it, because A) notebooks need stickers, and B) S-K are still teh awesome. For additional radness, check out Carrie Brownstein’s music blog Monitor Mix on the NPR site.)

January 14th, 2009 by Chris Eng

If I could spend all day fucking around, surfing the ‘net and reading, I would. This isn’t an exaggeration—I’m a world-class procrastinator. If there’s something that needs to be finished in a timely fashion, it can wait until I’ve finished the next Castlevania level or get caught up on Battlestar Galactica. I’ve tried various methods over the years to motivate myself and get things done early, but none of them have ever worked. As a result, I remained an undisciplined slacker past the point I thought it possible to get away with.

But the winds of change might finally be blowing. Over the past month or so, two things have occurred to shift the balance of power toward motivation. The first is simply the will to change. I’m tired of the way I’ve been living and I want to get more done. Continuing the way I have been isn’t going to give me the time I need in order to complete everything I need to work on and learn, so obviously a change is in order. Which is fine as far as it goes, but wishing for change isn’t gonna do jack unless there’s a plan to back it up—luckily I’ve got one.

Half of you may start rolling your eyes when you read this, but here’s my simple plan (which has worked so far, I might add): get up at 7:30am. “Chris,” you say, “you want to grow and raise your own food. That’s what a farmer does. If you were a farmer you’d have to get up a hell of a lot earlier than that.” This is true. The crucial difference is I’m not a farmer; I’m a freelance writer and comic shop employee at the moment, and getting up early doesn’t automatically mesh itself with those lines of work. But I’m taking care of the dishes and laundry on a daily basis, as well as studying and getting my writing done—all of which can be accomplished by noon if I get up at 7:30. On the days when I’m at the comic shop it means I can have everything done by the time I have to leave for my shift. On the days I don’t, my afternoons are free to do chores or whatever other projects I have going on. Which is pretty awesome.

It feels good too. I have more energy since I started my new schedule and I’m genuinely getting more done. It’s not like the urge to screw around isn’t there anymore, but I’m able to put it in its place thanks to a positive routine. And sure, some days it takes me until afternoon to get everything done I wanted to, but I figure that happens to everyone sometimes. I’m getting a lot done aside from that; the bar is leaning much more heavily toward productivity than it was last summer.

Do I feel slightly smug about my newfound drive? I think I’m entitled to a little of that. But in the interests of politeness, I’ll just keep it to myself. If you need me, I’ll be over by the sink, drying dishes and chuckling quietly with self-satisfaction.

*heh heh* Awesome.

January 6th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I am a procrastinator at heart. I dawdle, dilly-dally and drag my feet if it means that I can put off until tomorrow what I really should be getting done today—doing my writing/housework/errands. So, this past week, in the interests of protecting me (or, more importantly, my time) from myself, I’ve taken the step of blocking myself from a few of my favourite time-wasting websites (notably Facebook, Livejournal and few torrent sites) between 8:00am and 8:00pm daily.

I know fully half the day seems like a drastic measure, but there were a few solid reasons I chose those hours:

1) It’s the time Carla’s usually at work (on the days she’s working), so it’s the time best served by being productive.
2) If I want to see what happened during the night on any of my blocked sites, I have to get up before 8am (or wait until evening again). This is an incentive for me not to sleep in (or at least a trade-off if I want to).
3) There’s generally nothing on Facebook that can’t wait until after 8pm for me to see it.

Having chosen the time I wanted to set aside and I sites I wanted to block, I installed the Leechblock add-on for Firefox and was amazed by how simple its setup was. Under the preferences, you tell it which sites you want blocked and it will either block them between two set points on the days you specify (like I have—8:00 to 8:00, 7 days a week) or block them after a certain amount of surfing within a time frame (i.e. 10 minutes per hour, an hour per day, etc.). On top of that, if you don’t trust yourself not to go in and turn it off, you can lock yourself out of the preferences while it’s running. I don’t trust myself; I’m fond of this option.

I know the internet’s just one of dozens of distractions that conspire to keep me from knuckling down on a daily basis, but I figure if one free add-on can keep my daytime hours clear of the most omnipresent and invasive distraction in my life, that’s good enough for me. More time to deal with stuff that matters. And I promise I’ll read all your status updates later tonight.

December 19th, 2008 by Chris Eng

Should you conduct your own purge, you’ll hit the point (or perhaps points) where you can’t wrap your head around getting rid of some beloved and useless collection. It becomes an immense blindspot, rendering you unable to even consider getting rid of it, even if on some basic level you know it does you no good. I just dealt with one of those. It took a lot of thinking and reasoning to acknowledge the problem and move past it. And it hurt. A lot. I made the decision to part with a huge portion of my roleplaying books.

Gaming is a life-long passion of mine. I got my first set of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Why start with Basic? Doesn’t that imply it’s dumbed-down? Gimme the good stuff!) for either Christmas or my birthday when I was nine—I can’t recall which. And though I didn’t have enough similarly-minded friends to get a game going at the time, it was D&D’s singular emphasis on imagination which kept me hooked. I made character after character, designed dungeon after dungeon, created world after world. By my teens I usually had at least one group together at any given time, culled from a variety of social groups.

And bought game books. I wasn’t particularly picky—if a system had a cool premise or neat set of gaming mechanics, I’d pick up the core rules. If it showed promise beyond that, I’d buy the supplements, too. It probably hasn’t helped that I’ve worked in gaming shops off and on pretty much since I got out of high school, but it’s helped me accumulate some pretty amazing RPGs: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the game they came out with before Games Workshop decided to switch completely to miniature-based tabletop gaming; Amber Diceless, a system based on one of my favourite series of novels, and the only one I own which proudly eschews any use of polyhedral dice; In Nomine, concerning the machiavellian interplay between the various castes of angels and devils; and Exalted, the greatest single game I’ve never gotten to play.

It’s a little difficult to describe Exalted in a nutshell—you might as well try to distill the essence of our world down to a short paragraph. The incredibly wide scope of the game is part of its inherent appeal. Still, a not too unfair description of it would probably be to take high fantasy on an epic level and add an equal portion of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style wuxia with a small dollop of the Holy Roman Empire. I’m forgetting some important influences, but that gives you a very basic idea. I fell in love with Exalted the first time I had it shown to me… and I started buying the books.

I don’t know how many I’ve ended up with over the past five years or so, but I have a stack of them standing over two feet high. Well sure, there are some doubles in there—if I ever got a game going, each of the players would need a copy of at least one or two of them—but most of them are singles, each of them covering an aspect of the game world at large. Sadly I never got that game going, so the books have just sat there.

On the other hand, I’ve somehow recently managed to convince (or trick, I’m not sure which) Carla to play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’m running. It’s 4th Edition, which I was sure I’d hate (based on the fact that I’d been there since 1st Edition and a couple of them seemed like blatant cash grabs), but turns out I am a complete convert for. The changes made to the new edition are sensible and logical and it’s the perfect game to get new roleplayers involved with—hence, Carla. I’ve been buying the new supplements and have enough material and ideas to last for years. In fact, it’s one of the only games I can envision myself getting a campaign running for during the rest of my life. Sure, I may feel the need to branch out and break out the Paranoia for one or two sessions, or dust off the Warhammer FRP books again, but those would be the exceptions to the rule. I don’t see teaching Carla to play Exalted at any point in the future and she’ll likely be in most of the games I run from this point on (since she seems to be quite taken by gaming in general).

So, what to do with the mountain of gaming books that have accumulated over the course of my life? Get rid of them. It’s the only sane answer. I love gaming, but what I love about it is the interaction—the roleplayng. The imaginative part of the process (i.e. adventure creation and world building) is still fun and captivating, but I left the part of me that was content to sit there and world-build by myself back in my childhood. If I really want to build a fantasy world, I don’t need a set of rules to do it; I can just sit down with a pen ad some paper and make some notes. If I’m going to incur the expense of buying gaming books these days, it’s because I’m going to play them, and that means any games I won’t likely use will have to be gotten rid of.

It took way more effort to come to that realization than with any of my other collections, and I think it’s probably because of the extra investment of self which comes with gaming books. Whether or not you ever use them to run a game, when you read through them you can’t help but imagine yourself (or your group of characters) in the setting to some degree or another. There’s a piece of you in every gaming book you read. Still, they’re small parts of me, and they’re parts I can get back by participating in other games. Any ideas inspired by leafing through piles of rule books can be salvaged and used again somewhere else. Nothing is lost. So, it is with just a small amount of regret that I say good bye to most of my Exalted collection.

I say most because I’m keeping a few of the core books. Not many—five or six. A fraction of what I started with and only a few inches of the two foot pile, but enough to keep the ideas flowing. And I’m also getting rid of In Nomine and most of my 1st, 2nd and 3rd Edition D&D books. I’m never going back to play with the 2nd Edition rules again (I’m not a masochist; I hold no nostalgia for THAC0), so why keep them?

When all is said and done, the books I’m getting rid of will probably fill about four or five medium-sized boxes. But it’s not the amount of space I’m freeing up that is the payoff—it’s the fact that I know that over the course of years I may just end up with a streamlined and optimised gaming book collection I can use to give my wife a fraction of the joy and fun tabletop RPGs have given me over the years. Well, that and getting the rest of my friends eaten by dragons.

Save vs. Awesome.

December 6th, 2008 by Chris Eng

You weren’t around for The Purge I, I know. That was a few months ago when I roped my friends into driving me and nine boxes of books down to Pulp Fiction to lighten my collection of Stuff. And in the short term it did. My bookshelves were blessed with noticeable gaps here and there, and there was breathing room… for a couple of weeks, anyway.

And then the books came back, because that’s what I collect, by and large. Yes, I collect comics, but let’s be honest—those are just really skinny books. And I have other collections, but they don’t take up much room. (For instance, I have all the Buffy DVDs, but Buffy’s done and that collection’s not gonna get any bigger… well, except for the new comics, which I’m buying.) No, I collect books primarily, and books are a collection that takes up an assload of room. So much room, in point of fact, that at least half my books are in storage—about 20 boxes at my house and another 15–20 in my home town.

It’s pretty hard to read books in storage and even harder to read those a ferry ride away. And when you can’t access them to any degree, it really makes you consider why you have them. “Well, someday we’ll have the room to display them,” my inner collector pipes up shrilly. “Someday we’ll be in a bigger house with plenty of shelf space and all our books will be on display!” That’s a nice fantasy, but I’m not sure it’s not completely delusional. Even assuming that the next place Carla and I move into will be larger (which is not necessarily assured), I’d have to assemble my collection of books in one place (which will require effort, a truck and ferry fare) and buy more shelves to house them. Well, shelves aren’t cheap (though there are inexpensive ones to be had) and books are friggin’ heavy.

There is wisdom to be gleaned from that line in Fight Club when Brad Pitt sagely intoned that the things you own end up owning you, and that’s something that anyone that’s had to move upward of 100 boxes of boxes could tell you. You start to consider places to live based on the amount of boxes you’ll have to move (and the amount of stairs you’ll have to carry them up), and eventually you just never want to move at all, no matter how bad your home situation is. “I don’t care if I live with an abusive grizzly bear—how could that be worse than packing, moving, and unpacking my crap?!”

So over the past year or so, in the interests of not having my stuff own me, I’ve been paring down my life. Getting rid of Stuff, which is mostly books. A few months ago was The Purge I, which was certainly a success, but I’ve been driven to further reevaluate the rest of the Stuff I own. So I pared down and I made some hard and brutal cuts and I pared down some more and I boxed everything up and took a count after the dust had cleared. End result: thirteen boxes of books and two short boxes of comics to be sold and/or gotten rid of. The storage area in my house is now half emptier than it was a week ago.

The funny thing was, at the end I felt like I had to keep going—find just a few more books to get rid of, clean up my life just that little bit more. Then I looked over at the thirteen boxes I’d already culled and thought, “Hm… I think we’re good for now.”

I feel particularly proud of being able to let go of a couple of collections I was assembling for the sake of collecting—most notably, my Harlan Ellison books and my Vancouver Film Fest Guides. The Ellison books were particularly hard to give up. Almost all of his books are out of print now and they’re continually sought by collectors, so you generally don’t just find stacks of them kicking around—one in a used book store here, one a year-or-so later over there, etc. I’ve been collecting him since I was fifteen or sixteen and over the years have come to amass a respectable collection of 35 or so books (out of the 70+ he’s written). But thinking about it recently, I came to realize that almost all of his stories that I come back to and re-read time after time are contained in his best-of omnibus The Essential Ellison, which I not only have but which is signed—why would I need more than that?! (Okay, there’s a few others I need to keep, but probably not more than, say, six, which leaves about 28 unspoken for.)

The Film Fest Guides I’ve been collecting basically since I moved to Vancouver in the mid-’90s and have been an annual tradition with me. An annual tradition that’s lost a lot of its magic since I stopped being a habitual cinemaphile who went to movies every other day. But I kept buying the guides and sticking them next to the others on the shelf. This past year I barely gave it more than a cursory glance before consigning it to its dusty fate. And really, what’s the point in that? I never go back to the old guides and sift through them for movies to see. I never use them as the reference guides they should be. They’re just something to look at—a collection notable for being a collection. And I don’t have space in my house or life for that anymore.

There’s a part in the Sterling article I quoted a couple of entries back where he asks, in essence, why we allow the things that surround us to be anything less than excellent or beautiful. If there’s a piece of art in your house that’s, y’know, kind of nice, why do you have it? If you own a series of books or DVDs that are only okay, why do you allow them to take up space? If the things you own don’t elevate your soul or inspire you or make you come back to them again and again from their sheer awesomeness, why give them any of yourself at all?

It’s exactly that argument that’s been guiding my buying over the last month or so: “If I buy X, a year from now will I thank myself for doing so? Will my life be better for having bought it? Or will it be something I give scant attention to and then never really look at again?” And let me tell you—even just this far, it’s stopped me from buying a few things that have no lasting value to me.

And that’s the criteria I used in evaluating the Stuff I already own: “If this disappeared from my collection, would I even notice a year from now?” And for the Stuff in storage: “Did I even notice this was packed away?”

Having less Stuff is freeing. It’s satisfying, and it makes the stuff you’ve decided to keep worth so much more because of the purging. And, seriously—take a look around you and think about how good it would feel if you could say that everything on those shelves—every single thing you own—was something of amazing quality and made your life better. That would be a place to come home to. That would be a collection worth owning.