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.

July 3rd, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I’m back at the old bookstore, which still manages to make me squee a little with the amount of cool environmentally-conscious and just generally neat books it stocks. The work is good; the people I work with are good. Goodness abounds.

In other news, I was trying to think of what had been going since since the last time I’d done regular updates and I realized Carla and I had climbed a mountain.

See how happy we are? We’re at the top of The Chief, out in Squamish! Third Peak–you know, the far one!

It took us and our friend Liz about two hours to get up to the top, but when we got there, there was plenty to look at.

Like this tree:

We could also see what we think is Black Tusk where one of our best friends got brained by a rock on his 30th birthday and almost died. We are not in a hurry to climb that one.

And we saw this pond, which we’re pretty sure produced all the mosquitoes for the general Squamish area:

And after taking pictures of the surrounding area, we clambered back down and we ate gigantic, organic and kind of politically incorrect burgers at the Tomahawk which is awesome and everyone should go there. The end.

June 30th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
Jeff Rubin
(Random House)
ISBN: 978-0-307-35751-9

The premise is simple: there is a finite amount of oil in the world and pretty much everything we consume relies on it. Therefore, as oil supplies dwindle, everything is going to start getting a whole lot more expensive.

Your groceries? Shipped from California and New Zealand. Your consumer electronics goods? Shipped from China and Asia. And the shipping boats and cargo planes they come over on use a cubic assload of fuel. Jeff Rubin’s prediction is that as the cost of fuel rises, the cost of shipping those goods will also rise to the point where it is simply more cost-effective to make them domestically.

But while he asserts that industry will start to come home, that’s not as small as he thinks your world is going to get. The most obvious side effect of expensive oil is expensive gas. Driving will start to become untenable; plane flights almost unthinkable. We, as a world, will return in many regards to the situation over 100 years ago when most people stuck close to home. Vacations were had in your own province or state and not in a different hemisphere. We aren’t going to reach a point where the gas runs out and we turn to a Road Warrior-esque standard of living (not in our lifetimes, anyway, all you Lord Humunguses-in-training), but our lives will be less luxurious and more spare.

And if that were the only thing Rubin had to say on the matter, he probably could have condensed it into a long-ish essay without too much of a problem, but he has also taken pains to explain everything in depth and make connections to things that you may not have automatically assumed were associated with the problem of peak oil, i.e. that the underlying cause for the financial crash last year wasn’t subprime mortgages, but in fact oil prices. And that leads to the double-edged sword of going in-depth on financial issues. Rubin needs to do it, because various fiduciary concepts are central to his arguments, but in doing so he creates sections of the book that are bone dry. I’m interested in what he has to say—deeply interested—but you just cannot make talk about inflation gripping. To his credit, he tries, and he has crafted an otherwise very readable book, but in order to get across various ideas connected with the forces at play he needed to explain some economic concepts which do not make for a breezy read. They’re not impenetrable, but they do require extra effort to assimilate and often bring the pace of the book to a screeching halt.

The other problem with talking about economic concepts is that it’s hard to objectively evaluate what he’s saying. “Oil caused the financial crash last year,” he proclaims. “Here’s why!” And what he says sounds right, but since I have no background in economics I can’t actually assess it with any degree of confidence. Still, his background in economic journalism makes for a more even-keeled book and its tone is much more grounded and practical and less hysterical than many of the other “surviving peak oil” books on the market these days.

Economics aside, though, most of his basic arguments are basically unassailable, like:

- “The key to downsizing the role of oil in our economy is micro decisions made every day by households and consumers, not macro decisions made at the level of monetary or fiscal policy.” (Because while fiscal policy is incredibly important, none of the decisions made at the top is going to have lasting significance if we keep consuming goods and energy at the same rate we always have.)
- “Figuring out how to get the most out of what we have at our disposal is going to be the key to adapting to a smaller world, and that applies to assets like infrastructure and trained workforces more than anything else.” (Which will come into play as we switch to a more locally-produced economy and our former-barista friends and neighbours figure out what other skills they have to contribute to it.)

One of the main arguments in the book—not explicitly delineated, but made plain in the subtext—is that we can choose now to reduce our energy consumption and move toward a local-based economy as individuals or we can have the decision made forcibly for us at some point down the road when it’s much less convenient. Nothing we do is going to make moving into a post-peak oil world entirely painless, but shifting toward a sustainable lifestyle now will make your life—maybe all of our lives—easier in the future.

June 24th, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I should probably explain to you all that I’m a crow. Not THE Crow. I’m not Brandon Lee and I’m not sitting around in my makeup and black clothes listening to Nine Inch Nails as I type this. But I do get distracted by shiny things. Or, closer to the point, I get fixated on one or two things at a time and if something comes along to supercede my interest, I’ll focus on that at the expense of other things I want or need to be doing.

Case in point: there was a secret I mentioned in my last blog entry. Well, it never quite resolved itself to the point where I could talk about it, and the actual secret (not to mention the secrecy involved) more or less took over most of my waking thoughts, to the detriment of my blog (among other things). The secret is this:

Carla and I were going to move back to Victoria—possibly in fairly short order. See, around the time of my grandpa’s funeral I got to reconnect with a lot of my family and friends in my hometown, many of whom I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to over the last several years. And it was nice. On top of that, Carla was really fed up with certain things that were going on at her job and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to continue with it if that’s the way things were going. So we started debating about whether we needed to be in Vancouver over the next few years, and we couldn’t come up with a good reason why we should. I mean, if it’s all about paying down our debts and saving, we could do that pretty much anywhere. If it’s a matter of our friends in Vancouver, Carla has a few good friends that she would miss very much, but most of my close friends are moving or have moved away. And as for the things that both of us moved here for in the first place, well, neither of us goes out to the bar much anymore and all of our favourite restaurants/stores in town seem to be falling prey to gentrification one by one. We’ll miss the food when we move away—A LOT—but that’s one of the few things.

So, we thought about this between February and March and eventually came up with a game plan that could have seen us moving back to the Rock (as Vancouver Island is affectionately known) as soon as June. A lot of prep-work was done on my end. I basically disassembled my office (which was no big loss, because no writing was getting done in there anyway) and turned it into a storage room, and into that I packed up about twenty boxes of books and other random stuff. I assembled about ten boxes of books for the The Purge IV (I think that’s right—God, I can barely keep track of how many times I’ve gotten rid of books this year) and generally tried to get my possessions into a state whereby if we needed to move with a few weeks notice it wouldn’t kill us.

And I succeeded. Our house isn’t in that bad a shape right now and I have less stuff than at probably any point in the last decade. Plus, things will get slimmer with subsequent cleanings. The problem was that moving wasn’t really something Carla and I could talk about publicly, due to our jobs. I mean, you don’t just go and make announcements about making plans to skip town in a place where your employer can read it.

“Uh, Chris, I wanted to talk to you about your blog and these plans to leave Vancouver.”
“Okay.”
“You know how we’re overstaffed right now?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re fired.”
“Ah. Can you wait to fire me for another few weeks—maybe more—until my plans gel?”
“No.”
“Hm. All right, then.”

It might not have gone exactly like that, but it’s still not the kind of thing you want to be declaring until you’re ready to go public (as it were). So we sat on it and sat on it, and the plans I had for spring kind of disintegrated. I wanted to go and work on the UBC farm, but since all signs pointed to me leaving in fairly short order I decided not to. That decision made me slightly miserable after it became apparent I wasn’t relocating immediately and I missed my chance to work through the entire grow cycle (at least this year, anyway). My depression grew, my responsibilities slid and I bounced from one writing project to another without any real sense of commitment to any of them. My one resolution for the year (look back a few entries and you’ll find it) was to speed ahead full-bore, learn and experience as much as possible, and not stop. Well, I stopped in almost every important regard. I let the indeterminate state of affairs in one area of my life (a fairly large area, but still…) engulf most of the rest of it, and I’m currently paying the price.

The status updates since then are these:

- The factors at Carla’s job that were driving her nuts no longer are. She’s quite enjoying it at the moment.
- I’m moving from the comic shop back to a book store I worked at a couple of years ago (and miss very much). I may stay on for a day or two a week at the comic shop, but that’s up in the air. The book store also knows about my medium-range plans, hence the fact that they’re no longer a secret and I’m talking about them.
- We’re still looking at relocating to Victoria, but it’s not as pressing a concern as it was a few months back.

Taking our time with the relocation means we can be more choosy when searching for jobs in what is essentially a depressed market, and it means we can look for an apartment we might actually want to live in (as opposed to the first one that crosses our path). That’s fantastic, no two ways about it, but now I also have to put the pieces of my shattered plans and resolve back together.

Having the attention span of a crow is great when you’re just leading your regular old geeky lifestyle—it enables you to change course at a moment’s notice and chase after some new and cool thing from halfway ’round the world. In terms of trying to keep your life on track and stick to a course of action that runs contrary to most of your instincts, though—not so good. It’s become clear over the last few months that staying on target is something that will require most of my energy, willpower and determination in order to succeed. It will be hard work. It will most certainly kick my ass on more than one occasion. But it will be worth it in the end, no matter where I end up living.

(Also, as a brief aside, I’m not sure why the website has decided to spontaneously put the sidebar on the bottom of the front page, but I’ll look toward dealing with that when I have a bit more time in the next couple of days. Grrr…)

March 18th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I can’t tell you everything that’s been going on for the past month or so. That’s because it’s a mix of “nothing” and “I’m not ready to talk about it yet.” Don’t worry—it’s nothing serious. Oh, all right, here’s how it sort of went:

Nothing’s happening. How about now? Nope—nothing’s happening. This is kind of disheartening. I know I have some long range plans on the horizon but the lack of any immediate change in my life is dispiriting. Also, there’s nothing to talk about on my blog. I haven’t even made any cakes lately. *sigh*

[INSERT MEDIUM-SIZED REVELATION HERE]

Hey, Carla—how about this idea? You like it?1 How about we work on that in the short term? Awesome! Wait until I blog about… aw, shit. I probably shouldn’t talk about this until it’s a little closer to happening. Still, we’d best get to work.

And so here we are. I’ve been busy for the past few weeks working on something I probably won’t be able to talk about for another couple of weeks, but at least I’m not sitting around wondering what I’m doing (in a short-term capacity, anyway).

In the next while I’ll probably try to come up with something new and exciting food-wise to tell you about, but for now I’ll just drop a list of the top three pop-cultural things I’ve been enjoying lately:

1) Harry Potter, as read by Stephen Fry
2) D&D Player’s Handbook 2
3) America’s Next Top Model (but only for Creepy-Chan)

So, exciting updates will be forthcoming sometime in the relatively near future. Yep—I live to keep you in suspense.

February 18th, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I did it. I actually baked my first cake. And you know what? It was pretty kick-ass.

Here’s me, before the mixing and baking commenced:

 
And here’s the cake after I took some of its still warm deliciousness and slammed it in my facehole:

So, first things being first, I preheated the over to 325 (or slightly below because our oven is really small and heats up too much).

Then I sifted 3/4 cup of cocoa, 1 1/4 cups of all-pupose flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt together, like so:

 
Next came the fun part (or at least the messy one): chopping and splintering 8 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate:

 
Unfortunately, very soon thereafter I came down with an outbreak of Chocohand:

 
The chocolate was put into a bowl with 12 tbsp of butter and that was put into the microwave until it was all one glorious, gooey mess.

Meanwhile, 4 eggs were getting cracked into a bowl:

 
And after 1 1/2 cups of sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract were added… THEY WERE ASSAULTED WITH GREAT VIGOUR!

 
Then comes the stage when the chocolate mixture is whipped into the eggs, which is also the stage when your wife tries to surreptitiously lick the chocolate spatula without you noticing:

 
After you’re done scolding your wife and after she’s done cleaning the spatula, you add 1 cup buttermilk to 1/2 tsp baking soda. This is whisked into the chocolate. Then the dry ingredients (from way back in the beginning) are whisked in and the mix is ASSAULTED WITH GREAT VIGOUR!

 
When the batter becomes smooth and glossy, pour it into a buttered 13-inch baking pan. And, just so you know, this is what awesomeness looks like before it goes into the oven:

 
Bake the cake for around 40 minutes (basically, until you can insert a toothpick in the centre and it comes out dry). While you’re waiting, why not do the dishes? The less mess you have kicking around when it’s done means more time to sit there and eat cake. Also, have you got something better to do?

 
When the cake was done the top had puffed up and created an air hole underneath the crust. This had no detrimental effect on the cake, but the crust did make for a tasty, crispy chocolately snack, which we ate while we waited for the cake to cool.

 
I’m not going to pretend I had much (if anything) to do with the icing—that was Carla’s purview—but it was delicious and egg nog flavoured. And when it was done we put it on the cake:

 
Then we ate it. The end.

February 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

+ After all of the drama, Sokka is okay. As I type this, in fact, (in a bit of a role-reversal) he’s bullying his sister.
- His adventure to the vet cost $550. I like to believe that the fluid IV drip helped him through it, because if it didn’t we spent $550 to make our cat even more uncomfortable for a couple of days.
- A day after Sokka came home I felt queasy for most of the day and that night came down with the chills.
+ If it was the flu, I’d fought it off by the next day.
- But I had to miss a free screening of Coraline in 3-D to do it.
+ I did however manage to get the books from The Purge II down to the local used book store and received $650 for the trip.
+ I was only able to make the trip thanks to the generosity (and car) of my awesome friend Jackie. Thanks, Jackie!
- Due to the random upheavals, my schedule is still thrown off. I’ve been able to keep up with the housework and general errands since I got back from Victoria, but not much else.
+ Scott Pilgrim v.5 just came out. This might be the best graphic novel news all year.

January 31st, 2009 by Chris Eng

I kind of figured that after Sokka ate his mousie and barfed it out of his system, he’d work through it and bounce back to normal like cats usually do.

I was wrong.

He kept throwing up into the next day; he had no interest in his food and he was barely moving around. There was nothing to do but take him to the vet.

Now, we’re not at the bottom echelons of poverty, but I don’t think that Carla and I will ever be mistaken for “middle class.” As a result, having to take the cat to the vet was a big deal financially—not for the examination or the various tests he’d have to undergo, but because (God forbid) if he needed surgery we were up shit creek. So, we left him at the clinic with no small degree of trepidation and tried to get on with our lives.

Long story short, he seems to be okay. The x-rays picked up something in his stomach, but it could have been a number of things. They had him on a fluid drip to rehydrate him and he came home with me yesterday (a day after he went in), cranky but otherwise well-disposed. I fed him a small portion of food a few hours ago—the first time he’s eaten solid food in two days—and it’s stayed down so far (fingers crossed); if it stays down, I’ll work him back up to full portions over the next day or so.

Things I’ve learned from all of this:

1) Pet insurance is more than a pretty good idea; for us, it’s essential. I’m going to be looking into various plans next week. (If anyone has advice or suggestions, I’m all ears.)
2) I still need to work on my organizational skills. I’ve been much better about keeping everything in order lately, but it fell apart again over the last few days. I know it’s been a bad couple of weeks in general, what with my grandfather dying and then this—hell, even my tattoo appointment threw things a little out of whack—and I’m probably being too hard on myself, but I can’t help thinking that I’m setting myself up for a lot more responsibility in the future and I’m going to need to keep a handle on things so when my life is strewn with cowpats from the devil’s own Satanic herd right when the crops need to be brought in I’ll be able to navigate through it more smoothly.
3) My finances are much more delicate than I had previously realised. I’m not sure there’s much I can do about that in the short term, but having to pull $600 out of my ass at a moment’s notice has certainly made me aware of it.
4) Kittens are trouble. Damn them for being so cute.

January 28th, 2009 by Chris Eng

+ I have a new tattoo. It is nerdy and awesome. I will post pics after it’s healed.
- The new tattoo is on my forearm and is preventing me from doing some of my chores (most specifically, the dishes), which is stressing me out a little.
+ I got the tattoo in Victoria, and since the journey to and from the city involves a ferry trip and multiple busrides I caught up on the latest season of Battlestar Galactica while in transit.
- They’ve been auctioning off all the sets, props and costumes for BSG over the past couple of weeks and I had no idea until yesterday (some auctions are still live on ebay right now).
- I can’t afford any of the props anyway, and even if I could, I’m not sure where I’d put the command console from the control room. Or the life-sized Cylon raider, for that matter.
+ After the kerfuffle surrounding my grandfather’s funeral, things have finally settled more or less back to normal for me (which means the blogging should return to a relatively normal schedule, too).
+ In the wake of the funeral, I got to reconnect with a bunch of my family members I missed seeing (some of them literally at ‘the wake’).
- In the kerfuffle, I forgot about my library books. They are now a couple of days overdue.
- One of our cats ate his mousie and is gurving up all over the house. No more of those for you, mister.
10x - He just gurved up ALL of his breakfast in our bedroom. It was a two-towel job. Yeah. I’m pretty sure this is a large part of the reason I don’t want babies.
+ Luckily, they both enjoy the catnip, which doesn’t make them barf. More dope for the kitties!