March 25th, 2011 by Chris Eng

It looks like we’re heading into an election pretty damn quick, and while I’m not planning on becoming a pundit and spouting off about every political tidbit that happens to make its way down the wire, I thought I should comment on the general state of affairs and give a brief overview of my General Canadian Political Theory as it Stands at the Moment. My theory is based around the things Steven Harper likes.

Steven Harper likes three things: the rich, corporations and the military.

He likes those things and pretty much nothing else. He hates the Left, he hates poor people and he hates the environment. And if you work for a corporation or the military, let me clear up any possible misconceptions—Harper doesn’t give a fuck about you. He doesn’t care if you die in Afghanistan or get crippled in a workplace accident; he likes CEOs and contractors and if you’re not one of those people—if you’re one of the middle class or below, living paycheque to paycheque and constantly looking for ways to make ends meet—you should not be voting for Steven Harper.

I already hear a lot of disenchanted and disenfranchised people on the left bemoaning their lack of options. They hate Harper, but they hate Ignatieff, Duceppe and Layton, too. They don’t want to vote for any of them. I agree, we could be blessed with better leaders with bolder visions and stronger personalities, but we’ve got what we’ve got and we’re going to go into this election with them whether we like it or not. And it is my earnest opinion that much like Buckley’s, even if you find the taste totally reprehensible, you’re going to have to swallow the stuff and go out and vote because if you don’t the potential outcome is SO MUCH worse.

There exists the possibility that Harper and the Tories could pull off a majority government. I want you to think about just two of the scandals that have broken around the Conservatives in recent weeks: they changed the name of ‘The Government of Canada’ to ‘The Harper Government’ on all official statements and releases and it was discovered that the government lobby of the House of Commons is filled with nothing but portraits of Steven Harper. He did both those egomaniacal things with a minority government, one that’s theoretically supposed to (on some level) keep the ruling party in check. Can you imagine what he’ll do legislatively if he has no one to tell him no? What the Conservatives will try to pull off if there isn’t enough opposition to block any of their bills, no matter how crazy? I don’t want this to sound like hyperbole, but I think it will be a literal and non-waking nightmare for the Canadian people.

To my mind, one of the extreme dangers is the state of the global economy. I know Canada’s faring okay right now, but I believe implicitly that there are worse times ahead and if that’s the case, the last person I want in charge is Steven Harper.

We made our way through a variety of recessions and depressions over the last 80 years due in large part to the large amounts of social programs that were available to all Canadians, regardless of wealth or social standing. Those programs (many of which were seen as rights by our country’s citizens), have been whittled away on a federal level by the Conservatives since they’ve been in power and if they’re holding a majority government during the next massive depression, you can bet the remaining programs won’t last long enough for you to blink. Every poor person in this country will suffer and I can’t bear the thought of that.

“But won’t a minority government just put us through the same crap we’ve been through for the past few years?” Yeah, if the NDP, Liberals and Bloc don’t form a coalition government, it probably will, but I can guarantee that will still be better than a Canada run by an unfettered Conservative party. And hopefully by the time the next election rolls around after that there’ll be some better options on the table.

So vote. Vote your conscience. And if you need to, vote strategically. I vote to the left, but if I discovered that the Liberals were trailing the Conservatives by two points in my riding, you’d best believe I’d be embracing the centre and backing Ignatieff. If you’re against the Conservatives, please vote. And even if you think the political system is irreparably broken, please vote, because even though in some ways it’s not much, it’s all we’ve got and I’m really not interested in seeing how much further the Conservatives can break it.

March 23rd, 2011 by Chris Eng

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Bill McKibben
(Knopf)
ISBN: 978-0307399182

There is a very simple argument at the heart of Eaarth: we’ve fucked the planet to the point where we’re living on a terrestrial body entirely different from the one we’ve always known and now we have to find new ways to live on it or die. Funnily enough, this is essentially my core philosophy these days. When all the various books and documentaries were coming out over the past several years waving their arms and saying, “OMGWTFBBQ! IF WE DON’T ACT NOW, RIGHT NOW, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO GO TO SHIT,” I stood back saying, “But we’re not going to act now, right now, because it’s too easy for humans to ignore the things happening around us and for us to absolve ourselves of any responsibility in order to keep living our comfortable lives. By the time we actually have visible evidence of our own wrongdoing, it will be way too late for it to matter. In fact, it’s probably too late right now.” And in that sense, the first half of Eaarth is no different from other books of its kind, but its second half, where McKibben tells us what we can do to help fix things, diverges dramatically from the fold.

He doesn’t tell us how we can fix the planet—that option’s kind of off the table now—but he does provide suggestions on how mitigate the damage we’re doing and maybe even roll it back a bit. What he suggests is mostly common-sense but it still needs to be stated loudly and repeatedly: we need to institute global policies supporting urban gardening (it’s been done before—multiple countries encouraged citizens to grow Victory Gardens during WWI and II) and revitalize our sense of community in urban centres and through a reintegration into smaller, rural communities. And while none of that is particularly new, what is refreshing is McKibben’s down-to-earth (if you’ll pardon the pun) attitude. Because unlike messianic enviro-preachers who sermonize about the non-stop benefits of doing exactly that, McKibben knows there will be drawbacks. There will be things we’ll have to give up as a society if we ever want to make a massive change like that work. Some of our big city cosmopolitan attitudes, for instance–McKibben acknowledges that while a return to small town/rural lifestyles is essential, small towns are not always the most open and nurturing toward non-traditional or outsider values.

He addresses this point, though, when he talks about how much more broad our field of vision has become thanks to the internet and its positive impact on social diversity, and for that reason he argues it is vitally important we keep the internet operating at peak levels, both for communication and for the spread of knowledge, because although we’ve done an incredible job of forgetting pretty much everything that was common knowledge three or four generations ago, we’re going to have to remember it faster than we forgot it and the internet’s the best channel for that.

There will be sacrifices in our new, more unpredictable, smaller (in scope, if not in size) planet, yes, but McKibben’s sense of realistic optimism which pervades the second half of the book is extremely heartening and that’s exactly what we need now right now. The time for blind hope about the world fixing itself (or even us doing it) is over. We need pragmatists willing to assess the situation and offer informed choices so we can move forward as a race. McKibben is one of those people, and for those reasons I find myself firmly back in the environmental fold, infused with optimism about the fact that I personally and we as a species can do something about the mess we’ve landed ourselves in.

If you’re feeling beleaguered by news reports, give Eaarth a read (and turn off the news—a lack of sensationalistic reports does wonders for the spirit). It just might revitalize your enthusiasm about finding ways to re-connect with this weird new world we’re living in.

March 12th, 2011 by Chris Eng

First the anxiety, then the depression. They were actually staggered the better part of a year apart, but both of them in conjunction kept me away from this blog for a year and a half. Let’s start at the very beginning… and by that I mean about three years back.

It all started for me with The Long Emergencyby James Howard Kunstler. I’d always been fairly green and very left, but that book was my wake-up call as to HOW BAD the state of affairs on our planet was. The Long Emergency was my formal introduction to the concept of peak oil. It was the Boogeyman ripping the covers off my previously-comfortable existence. To his credit, that was exactly what he was trying to do, so kudos to him; it worked. I went off and dove head-first into the literary pool, devouring everything I could read on various different yet intrinsically-connected subjects like Peak Oil, Climate Change and General Planet-Fuckery. I became reasonably self-educated on the subject, became convinced of the impending doom of mankind and was quite assured that I would be better off in a shack somewhere (or maybe a yurt—I like yurts).

And that’s where everything fell apart. First off, there was no real way that Carla and I could afford even a modest shack in the woods. We have some modest retirement savings put away, but nothing that would buy any kind of sizable chunk of land. Moreover, even if we miraculously acquired said chunk of land, we wouldn’t have been able to work it; neither of us had the skills necessary to cultivate a medium-scale garden, and there was no short term method for us to easily acquire them. (Yes, there were other options like community gardens and the like, but I’ll get to them in a minute.) So going Back to the Land became this distracting pipedream that we (but mostly me) fixated on. And by fixating on it, I set up a feedback loop of anxiety which grew louder and more oppressive as each day passed.

The thing about the enviro-lit books of a few years back is almost none of them had any workable plans or solutions in them, and while the reason for that is almost certainly that when asked how the planet could be saved scientists were forced to throw up their hands and yell “I DUNNO”, the general tone of the books didn’t help the problem. At the point in each volume where there should have been a few chapters discussing what ordinary people could do, the books simply ended. And yeah, there were several books that came out around that time which proposed addressing exactly that, but they mostly ended up addressing the question: “How can I save the environment while simultaneously maintaining my North American bourgeois quality of life?” They were, in essence, band-aid solutions to a triage problem—ways for the middle-class to assuage their guilt through cosmetic life changes—and I found them by-and-large to be trite and insulting and so consequently ignored them.

But by surrounding myself with environmental doomsayers 24-7 and without a shred of hope anywhere to be seen, my anxiety levels soon hit critical levels and the emergency shut-off valve was tripped. What the shut-off valve did was simple: it made me turn my back on all environmental discussion. It’s not that I stopped caring (if anything, I’d been caring too much), but in order to remain a functional human being I had to step away and since I hadn’t moderated my anxiety levels before allowing them to dominate me, I had to step away entirely.

It was an easy solution with an unpleasant side-effect: the depression.

I’m not going to pretend that going cold turkey on enviro-studies is what caused me to get depressed—it wasn’t; there was a much easier cause for that: I lost my job—but it contributed to it in one significant regard.

I had lost sight of one of my most sought-after dreams.

Moving to a plot of land somewhere in BC and being as self-sufficient as possible has been one of my dreams for a few years now, and not staying up-to-date on the environment and farming/permaculture/self-sufficiency basically closed the door on it. Moreover, losing my job and not having any spare income nailed the door shut. And so I sat at home, rudderless and directionless, doing the occasional editing job, not knowing where I’d end up five or ten years down the road, and spiraling down into depression until I finally came out of it, well, really about a month ago.

Landing the gig to manage my apartment building has been huge for my frame of mind. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but at least there’s money coming in and at least I’m doing something. I’m generally happy and motivated again, so I’m pretty pleased about that. The other thing that set me back on the enviro-track was Eaarth and I’ll get to that in my next post.

August 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
(Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0679314837

At some point, my aunt asked me to review something happy in order to help assuage my cousin, who apparently is going through what I went through a year or so ago and is suffering a bit of the “PEAK OIL IS HAPPENING TO US AND CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO COLLAPSE AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE IN A ROAD WARRIOR-LIKE WASTELAND!” And my mom, after I handed her my copy of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (because I thought she might appreciate the info therein), asked, “This isn’t going to make me depressed, is it?”

Yeah, I guess there’s a lot of gloom and depression mixed in with environmental books nowadays, because (depending on who the author is) it’s either too late or almost too late to fix things in the world, and while that may be the actual state of affairs, it’s not exceptionally heartening to have it repeatedly hammered into your skull. This review, then, is for my cousin, mother and anyone else who may want to read a book review of something inspiring a certain degree of hope.

The premise of The 100 Mile Diet is simple: a couple decide that all they’ll eat for a year are those things which can be produced within a 100 mile radius of where they live. The premise provides ample opportunity for elitism, snobbiness and hard-linery to proliferate in the book and could have easily turned into a proscription for Righteous Living, but it is miraculously devoid of more or less any of that, instead making its case as a sensible suggestion. This is a marked difference from the usual doomsaying environmental bestsellers who seem to think that telling you “IF YOU DON’T LIVE YOUR LIFE THIS WAY, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” is a practical and non-alienating course of action. In fact, without trying to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT: they make it through the year), at the end of the book they go back to eating some of the things they weren’t allowed to. But that’s essentially Alisa Smith and JB McKinnon’s point: for all of us to move into an ethical future is for all of us to live as ethically as we can and do the best we can; not to embrace some unrealistic hairshirt environmental dogma which requires us to martyr ourselves for unattainable goals that nobody else cares about.

No, there is no coffee grown within a hundred miles of Vancouver (which, coincidentally, is where I’m from and where Smith and McKinnon are based). But there are free trade and ethical choices you can make in your coffee consumption. Or black tea. Or chocolate. Because again, no one is asking you to be a monk—just do what you can. What the book does encourage, though, is putting in the footwork and not giving up in your quest for viable alternatives. By putting themselves in a situation where they couldn’t bend the rules, they were forced to keep looking for things like wheat, which—despite the lack of grain farmers on BC’s coast—they eventually found. Yes, we who occupy the Vancouver/Victoria area tend to be a little spoiled in our options, because most things can be grown in our neck of the woods, but wherever there have been permanent settlements of humans, there have been the means to thrive locally. Of course, that equation has become pretty skewed with the rise of the metropoli—you can’t feed a city of 1,000,000+ on purely organic, locally raised food (not under our current structure, anyway)—but the general principle is sound.

But why, you wonder to yourself, would I want to eat locally in the first place—what’s the point? Well, there are a few of them.

- Locally grown food is more nutritious. It’s not that organic produce has a bigger selection of vitamins or nutrients than vegetables grown on industrial farms, but local produce is generally picked much closer to its sale date than the stuff in your supermarket. Since produce accumulates nutrients as it approaches ripeness, it only makes sense that a tomato picked the day before it’s sold will be more nutritious that one that’s picked and shipped when it’s still green.
- Locally grown food is likely to be more ecologically sound. Some small-scale farmers use toxic pesticides and chemically-laden fertilizer, but not all of them do, and if you’re buying from the grower personally, you can ask what their standards and practices are yourself. Plus, on a very basic level, locally grown food is good for the environment because growing things benefits the environment. I hope I don’t have to explain this point.
- Buying local is also good for the economy—your local economy. It will probably cost more to shop that way, yeah, but if and when post-peak oil becomes a reality, food prices will start to go through the roof regardless, and I’d rather pay higher prices and support someone I know on a first-hand basis because I buy from them all the time than funnel my hard-earned food dollars into a faceless corporation’s coffers in exchange for some comparatively bland food.
- Which brings us ’round to the last (and possibly most) compelling reason: locally-grown food tastes better. It does. Seriously. Vegetables are delicious enough to eat steamed with maybe a touch of butter. Dishes in general require very little seasoning due to their nearly overwhelming natural flavours. No, the stuff we’re used to eating in packages isn’t what food is supposed to taste like—it’s a “good enough” approximation of a home-cooked meal. Somewhere along the line, though, we forgot what scratch-cooked food was actually like and accepted the food corporations’ assertions that what they were giving us was the real deal—besides, it was faster and even if it wasn’t excellent it was still, well, good enough. But the thing you have to prepare yourself for is that once you start eating local food, “good enough” isn’t good enough. You may keep eating it, but you’ll likely come to view it as filler in between the meals made with organic veggies and meat.

And what if you’re in a position where you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or its equivalent? The 100 Mile Diet also has buckets of inspiration to go around. Thanks to the non-preachy, non-guilt laden approach, you may find yourself inclined to do some gardening by the time you’re done… or bee-keeping… or cheese-making… or salt-distilling… or, for that matter, any combination of the above. None of these are impossible, and not all of them are necessarily very hard. We (as a culture) had most of the skills it takes to do those things up until 100 years ago or so—we’ve just forgotten them in the meantime. Smith and McKinnon have written a book encouraging us to reacquire them, and I’d encourage you to do the same. Moreover, I encourage you to do it for purely selfish reasons (on your part) but toward an altruistic end. You may or may not contribute to the ultimate salvation of our world by buying local food, but you’ll certainly contribute to the betterment of your diet and palate by doing so. To paraphrase Buckley’s, it tastes awesome and it works.

August 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I don’t want children. Ever. Neither does Carla. On either our first or second date, we had a conversation that went something like this:

Chris: Babies?
Carla: No babies.
Chris & Carla: *whew*

There are a variety of reasons for this decision, not the least of which is that I’m pretty sure I’d be a bad dad. I’m not looking for reassurances, here–my dad is a stubborn bastard with periodic rage issues and I can see some of those qualities in myself. Carla and I are also not ready to give up as much of our lives as we’d have to (a couple of decades or so) in order to raise another human being. But the overriding reason not to breed, for me, has always been the fact that there’s too many people on the planet already. I’ve watched the population soar in my lifetime and the thought of bringing yet another person into an already overcrowded world smacks slightly of insanity. I mean, if you all want to have babies, that’s your choice; I understand the biological imperative, but the more children brought into the world, the larger the ecological disservice done to the planet–an argument borne out by this blog entry.

Yes, thank you for sorting your recycling and driving a hybrid car. Now, for your next environmental contribution, please stop making more babies.

August 4th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Picture of Light
Director: Peter Mettler
(Microcinema)
 

Most documentaries have a straightforward mission. They shoot footage of something and intend to present to you the thing’s reality. It’s a visual dissection, stripping mystery from the subject in a clinical manner. Picture of Light is a different type of film. Ostensibly about the aurora borealis, the documentary follows a film crew to Churchill, Manitoba where they attempt to film the Northern Lights. What emerges, though, is a much more enigmatic piece which explores the landscape of the north, the psyches of the people who live there and the lights themselves. Despite the fact that an astronaut is filmed in the space shuttle giving an explanation of the phenomenon, his words still do not fully concretize the footage and the lights playing across the screen appear to owe as much from Inuit folk tales as they do from science. Science’s hold over winter on the tundra seems tenuous at best and as sparks shoot through the air inside a train car the elements willfully defy any attempt at rationalization.

There is certainly breathtaking footage of the aurora contained in Picture of Light, but almost more notable are the snapshots of humanity not often seen—of people living on the edge of civilization (the edge of the world, as they put it). People who develop a symbiotic relationship with their dogteam (without one, the other will die), and people who will put a bullet through their exterior wall to watch snow seep in through the knothole and develop in drifts across the floor, simply to relieve the monotony. And then there are the scenes of the frigid snow, the endless cold, the trackless waste, impermeable and unstoppable, majestic and terrible in its own right, possessed of its own very real and unpredictable personality.

Picture of Light is a singular film, haunting and evocative, not explicit in any regard. It shows you what the landscape has to offer, then leaves you to your own conclusions. Perhaps it’s best to accept its offering without putting too much weight of explanation on it, perhaps its best to appreciate the north for what it is without trying to unravel its mysteries.

July 24th, 2009 by Chris Eng

And following hot on the heels of my little rant on IKEA a couple of days back were two news stories about the box chain on The Consumerist:

- The first details how a breastfeeding woman in Brooklyn was forced to take her shame (and baby) into the washroom and think about what she’d done (or until she was done feeding her baby, whichever came first), despite state laws that say she doesn’t have to do that. Oh, then the security guards gave her a metaphorical kick in the ass on the way out, just–I guess–in case she was thinking about coming back in the future.
- The second (and this is the one that kills me) is on a report in the latest issue of The Atlantic which names IKEA as “the least sustainable retailer on the planet”. Literally a good 75% of my household furniture comes from IKEA. Excuse me a minute while I throw up a little in my mouth.

July 22nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

I love IKEA. Love it. And putting aside any discussion of my relationship to big box shopping for another day (which I do intend to explore in-depth in the future), I have always appreciated IKEA’s general attitude, as well as their meatballs.

It’s tradition for my wife and I (as well as all our friends) to scarf down some Swedish meatballs every time we make the trip out to the suburbs and yesterday was no exception. However, instead of being presented with the standard ceramic plate/steel cutlery/glassware combination, this time we got paper plates, plastic forks and paper cups.

Now, it was Carla who brought up the fact that IKEA’s reason for using actual, washable dishes is because they’re trying to project a more bistro-like atmosphere as opposed to any environmental imperative, and I understand that in a slipping economy every dollar counts and paying full-time dishwashing staff isn’t the cheapest thing in the world, but there’s a cost for the disposable supplies, and part of the cost is my peace of mind. Switching over to disposable dishes will put a massive amount of refuse into our landfills. I’m not going to say it’s more than McDonald’s or any of the other fast food chains out there, but they’ve been using throw-away wrappers all along. It’s not great that we’ve become inured to that particular wastefulness, but it’s certainly what we expect from them. IKEA, on the other hand, felt like more of a haven away from that. Their furniture, while cheap, is kind of classy (well, more classy than any of the other furniture warehouses, if not necessarily better-constructed) and it felt like their cafeteria was striving for that, too—it’s not fantastic food, but it’s cheap and it’s respectable. And I’ve got to say that a lot of that respectability just flew out the window for me.

I mean, the meatballs are good, don’t get me wrong—but if you’re going to dollop a bunch of guilt on top of them next to the lingonberry sauce and I’m going to have to worry about what I’m doing to the environment before I go and buy my cheap picture frames and DVD storage boxes, well, I’ll buy the meatballs frozen and take them home to cook. At least I know in my house they’ve got a part-time dishwasher. His name is Chris Eng, which I understand is half-Chinese for ‘common sense’.

July 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I managed to spend three consecutive days this week gaming. Tabletop gaming, by which I mean board games, card games and roleplaying games (or ‘RPGs’). You know—dice rolling, good times. What you may not have known is that by playing D&D and throwing those funny dice all those years (assuming you have been), you were contributing to the welfare of the planet. It’s true. There are several reasons why, but let’s start with the obvious one:

1) Tabletop games don’t use electricity. You don’t need to plug in your D&D books or your Monopoly board. You don’t need to hook them up to the TV (unless you’re playing Scene It or one of those other DVD games, but we’ll put those aside) and you don’t need to have anything in order to play them except for friends and enough light to see by. They are, in most regards, an environmentally sound choice. In comparison, computer video games suck power from the CPU and monitor, and console games need a TV and video game system. For that matter, consoles also often suck power even when they aren’t turned on (not a lot, but consider how many consoles are plugged in around the world right this minute). And what are you going to do if the power cuts out and you’re in the middle of an adventure? If you’re playing a console/PC game, probably curse loudly and start yelling about the fact that the last save point was over a half hour ago. If you’re playing tabletop, grab some candles and keep going.

2) Tabletop games are social. “But,” the Halo fans splutter, “video games are social!” Yes, some of them are. MMOs, in particular, lend themselves quite well to social events, like raids—but you’re still talking about voice chatting, not actual face-to-face interaction. And even when things get out of control in a D&D game (which I’ve seen happen), you generally don’t say things to people in front of you that you might to someone over your headset. For proof of this, please refer to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Having a 13 year-old boy yell “faggot” over and over at you during literally any given Xbox Live game isn’t socializing, no matter what you say. In the latest episode of THAC0 (a entertaining gaming and geek culture podcast to which I listen on a regular basis), they discussed their reasons for tabletop gaming and the most quoted reason was their social aspect. Roleplaying is collaborative storytelling—it’s necessarily social—and since the limits on what your character can do are literally the limits of your imagination, you are automatically assured of more options than any MMO out there.

3) Tabletop games encourage literacy. Roleplaying games sure do. What, you’re telling me you’re gonna play D&D without being able to read? You can’t—the two go hand-in-hand. For this reason, RPGs are great for kids with learning disabilities. They might not want to read generally because of the amount of work involved, but if you’re simultaneously encouraging their imagination through gaming, it gives them added incentive to push through the rulebooks. This, in turn, is imparting necessary skills to kids who might otherwise gloss over them.

4) Tabletop gaming encourages cognitive thinking. Strategy is a huge part of board games. C’mon—chess? It’s nothing but strategy. People spend their entire lives focused on developing that one new chess strategy nobody else has ever thought of. I’m not sure doing that is particularly healthy, but strategic thought, problem solving and thinking outside the box are more skills that can’t necessarily be taught but can certainly be fostered via gaming. RPGs also teach those skills, but in a less-structured way. While chess has very rigidly defined rules about how any of the pieces might move in a given situation, RPGs don’t—you solve a problem with the equipment your character has on-hand and whatever plan seems most likely for them to follow. Group strategizing in RPGs can actually be pretty time-consuming overall, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun—taking time to plan and then watching how your plan simultaneously comes together and goes awry is one of the principal pleasures of the hobby.

5) Tabletop gaming encourages concentration. I learned how to paint lead miniatures this week. Somehow, over the years, this became one of those quintessentially geeky areas of expertise that I never managed to pick up. To be fair, when I was a kid, I tried it, but since I didn’t have anyone to teach me even the most basic steps, my minis ended up looking like glazed shite and I stopped shortly after I started. This time around, I had an awesome instructor in my friend Neil, who paints regularly. As you can see, the results were much more satisfactory:

Yeah, the picture is kind of washed out, but you get a sense of it. This particular mini took me five hours to paint. Most professional painters (or ones who seriously pursue it as a hobby, anyway) will spend much longer than that on a single figure. It’s a long time committment on a tiny scale and it forces you to both look at the details and to pull back to see how it looks from a distance. It definitely promotes concentration and (maybe surprisingly) is quite relaxing.

6) Dollar for dollar, tabletop games give better value. A copy of Arkham Horror may cost the same as one of Prototype (for any given system), but I pretty much guarantee you’ll get better value from Arkham. Assuming you enjoy the game and treat the pieces with respect, it will last you quite possibly the rest of your life. Your new video game will last you until one of a few things happens: maybe you’ll get bored of it, maybe you’ll plough through it in epic time and not look at it again, maybe your system will become obsolete. Yes, you can absolutely get bored of tabletop games, but the well-designed ones stand the test of time. If I asked you to play a hit video game from twenty years ago and tell me how it stacks up to a next gen console release, what do you think you’d say? Sure, I play old video games, but I’m ancient (in video gaming terms) so I have nostalgia for Wizard of Wor and Infocom. But when gaming nostalgia requires that you either save every single console system you’ve ever owned (which can take up a ludicrous amount of space) or, in the case of computer games, that you continue to download patches so that you can play older games on newer OSes, it becomes a chore and starts requiring an outlay or either time or storage space. Even downloading ROMs for your favourite games requires that you update your software on a semi-regular basis. Scrabble, on the other hand, takes up exactly the same amount of space it always has and is maintenance-free.

Yeah, tabletop games have their drawbacks. Board game boards are made from carboard and many of them contain an ASSLOAD of plastic pieces; roleplaying books are made from paper (and hence dead trees). But nothing is cost-free. I mean, if you want a gaming experience with no environmental drawbacks, you could sit around with your friends in the dark and play “What Number Am I Thinking Of?”, but the replay value is poor and the next time Gaming Night rolls around your friends will just conveniently forget to invite you. If you are genuinely concerned about the pieces and packaging, though, I recommend you check out Cheapass Games. Hell, listen to their production strategy:

“Cheapass Games come with the bare essentials: boards, cards, and rulebooks. If you need anything else, we’ll tell you. And it’s probably something you can scrounge from a game you already own, or buy at a hobby store for less than “they” are charging you for it. Heck, if you need to, you can even buy the parts from us. And once you’ve assembled your collection of generic small parts, you can use them for every new Cheapass Game. We’ve standardized our designs so your gaming toolbox will last.”

And their games are fun. ‘Kill Dr. Lucky’, their flagship game, has easily as much replay value as anything in the $30+ price range, yet comes to around $10. Like their name says: cheapass, and hence better value.

I’m not going to tell you which tabletop games are the best—everyone out there has different tastes and there are games to cater to all of them—but I will encourage you to go down to your local games shop (most of which keep playable demo copies of the most popular and fun games) and try out something new. Because if we all work together, tabletop gaming will be on its way to saving the world… one die roll at a time.

July 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

This amused me.