Author: chris

An Enthusastic Critical Framework

Posted on by chris

Kyle tweeted the following recently:

all text is hyper-text

all canon is head canon

In response I made a bad joke and then mentioned:

I think I subscribe to authorial intent way more than you do. Not like there’s one true canon, but there are some that are interpretations we can and should agree on.

To expand on that somewhat the questions I use to interrogate media (and art) are as follows:

  • What was it trying to do?
  • Did it successfully do it?
  • Did you like how it did it?

What I’ve found is that this helps me approach the work on the author’s terms. Afterward I can decide if that approach and result was something I subjectively liked. If I don’t ask these questions it’s easy to default to simple descriptors like “terrible” or “awesome”. This also has the advantage of helping me appreciate work I might otherwise choose to interact with and find that, yeah, I did like how it accomplished its goals!

A Further Question

A subset of the first question is “Who was the audience this work was created for?” If you’re not the target audience then it can be helpful to understand that up front. You might not have the capacity to understand what the work was trying to do because it relies on shorthand experiences you don’t have. Alternatively–and this is most of my life right now–you might not be a toddler so the repetition or low stakes just don’t work for you, but would work for your toddler.

Games for 2018

Posted on by chris

Donut County

This is my clear game of the year. My wife and I both tore through it and then our toddler got surprisingly into it. For a few months she would ask to “play the donut county one?!” and was able to complete a few of the leves herself (“snake” and “rabbit”).

Horizon Zero Dawn

In our household this became known as the robot dinosaurs game. I put this down at some point in 2018 and wish I hadn’t. I no longer remember where I was or what I was doing; however, while playing it I was enjoying it quite a bit. Super fun stealth combat and a beautiful world to run around in.

Dark Souls Remastered

I am a sucker for Dark Souls and really enjoyed replaying this on more modern hardware than the Xbox 360. They added nothing to the game other than making it look prettier and run at 60fps, which is honestly fine by me. Praise the sun!

Gorogoa

Take a saturday afternoon and play this in one sitting. It’ll take you 3ish hours and it’s very worthwhile. It’s an extremely inventive puzzle game with gorgeous art made–somehow!–by one person. It’s stuck with me even though I played it very early in 2018.

Destiny 2

I played a few hours a day of Destiny 2 for about a month straight when it was a free game on ps+. On paper this is a game I shouldn’t like at all, but turns out that Halo-like first person shooter mixed with diablo-style loot grinding is very fun.

I was surprised how little the game asked me to spend money up until I needed to buy expansions to do more story stuff. And this is where it went off the rails for me. I bought Curse of Osiris because it went on sale. It wasn’t good, which I’ve since learned was a near-universal opinion. Then about a week after buying it they started including all the expansions in a bundle and it felt like I was being penalized for buying expansions at the wrong time. it was enough annoyance to kill my momentum and I stopped playing. That said, monetization issues aside, it’s an amazing game that also happens to be not super compatiable with my dad-of-a-toddler lifestyle.

Parasite Eve

Parasite Eve still rules and Aya Breya is still great! It’s painfully 90s and really does deserve a remaster. Square put out just a shocking amount of good games between 1997-1999: List of Square Games

A door, a fix, some lessons

Posted on by chris

I dislike the doors in our house. I love the knobs though.

The doors, however, have faults. They’re old and hollow, the veneer is peeling, the springs in the deadlatches don’t spring as much as they used to, and the regrettable decision by the previous owner to put carpet over the hardwood floors means that they’ve all be cut too short. However, these are the door we have.

During a lazy sunday afternoon I finally gathered the energy to address a problem with the door to my daughter’s room. This particular door would rub against the jamb whenever swung open or closed. A scratch-screech as the fibers worked their way past each other screaming protests. One of many minor annoyances of a 60s kit house that you quickly learn to live with amongst the deluge of other minor annoyances. Until you think about it and the problem grows roots and becomes The Current Fixation.

I mentally prepared to take the coward’s solution: just sand the thing down. Make a millimeter less door to impede free movement. Of course, as these things go and will always go, upon inspection the problem rested not in the door, but the hinge.

Whomever had hung it had done so half-heartedly. They chiseled enough material to roughly seat it and no more. And compounding the problem on the other side they also stopped short on the strike. It’s probable that decades ago this was enough to get it in just fine. To do it properly would have meant shaving a bit more space for the hinge, a bit more space for the strike, a bit more time and energy when it likely wasn’t needed. But, as we all know, houses flex and relax and shift and breath and smrik at our half-measures.

Once identified, the problem then became a series of small steps: the hinge pins were removed and the door placed gently elsewhere. For all its other faults it wasn’t in trouble today. Then the hinge and strike screws were unscrewed. Then the hinge and strike pried off. Then 20 minutes of inexpert work with a dull chisel and utility knife—both found in their proper place rolling around the bottom of the toolbag. 15 minutes of cleanup work with a toddler helping.

Now the door swings and closes and the only sounds the slight woompf of air pressure and the metal on metal grind of the deadlatch.

Soon the daily annoyance will evaporate into the ether replaced with a memory more and more infrequently recalled. Time will proceed as follows: its absence will be savored, then unnoticed, and finally a new annoyance to take its place.

Repeat and repeat and repeat.

Christmas Dice Recipe

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Dice are one of life’s simple pleasures. For less than the cost of many other much-worse-for-you vices you can get a set of dice in just about any color. You also always need another set of dice no matter how many you have. I recently published a Christmas themed one shot adventure called, “A Christmas One Shot: Marley’s Scrooge Case” (go buy it!). That got me thinking about holiday themed dice.

A quick trip to Vault of Midnight—the earth’s finest game store—and I had my ingredients.

What follows is a simple “recipe” for Christmas Dice:

Christmas Dice

Time:

15-30 minutes

Yield:

3 cheery dice sets.

Ingredients:

Our dice ingredients

Chessex numbers for reference

Sorting:

Dump them all out and start making pools: your d20 determines your starting color. Then pick another color for your d12 and the third for your d10. Then start back at the top and keep going until you have three piles.
That’s it!

Pop them back in the plastic cases and hand them out the next time you play, or give them out as gifts.

Mixed sets!

The Best SEO – A Basic Content Strategy

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I tooted about this and thought it’d be worth a post too because I have opinions.

The best SEO is stating what you offer and your beliefs about what you offer without being overly clever or precious about it.
Start by writing out pages for the following in straightforward language your customers can understand (read: avoid jargon that your customers don’t already know):

  • What goods and/or services do you offer? List them all with a short description. Use the words that your potential customers will use to ask for it.
  • Why is your offering better than every other company offering something similar? No need to name names, this is about you, not them.
  • Why do you offer what you do? What drives you to do your thing? Be as personal as you feel comfortable about this.
  • How can a customer contact you? Phone, email, text, snail mail, walking in the door, facebook messenger? If someone contacts you they better get a response. If you can’t do this you need to solve that problem ASAP.
  • How can a customer pay for your goods or services? If they can do it online, have a link where they can do it. If they need to call mention it, etc.

None of the above needs to be a novel. Say what you need to say and don’t overcomplicate it by being cute or coy! People have no attention spans to figure out why you named “Contact Us” to “All the ways you can get in touch”.

Once this is done have a friend who knows nothing about your business read it and answer the questions above. If they can’t answer them or tell you the exact page to get this information…rewrite it.

Advanced Mode:

Until you’ve written those pages don’t bother with the below because writing the above will help you write these:

  • What are the questions you get all the time? Write pages for each of them, or add the information to existing pages. A question you get more than a few times is an indicator that something about your business isn’t as obvious as you might think it is.
  • More information on each of your offerings. For products: describe it, why you made it (or why you’re selling it), and who it’s for. For services: what is it, what’s your approach, and why are you good at it. Remember that you are the expert and your audience might know nothing other than that they need something like what you offer.
  • Reviews, testimonials, and results. When people say nice things about you ask them to do so publicly a site where other people like them spend time. Google is a good default, your niche might have different places. Then start a page on your site where you collect the best of those nice things.

Putting it on a website

If you can manage to patiently write the above before you design your site you’ll find that the site design will come much more easily. Take a shot at setting up wordpress or squarespace yourself. Pick a simple template that makes it very easy to read the text that you’ve written.

Hiring Someone to Help

If any of the above seems daunting then you should hire someone to help you! If you hire them and they immediately jump to a strategy other than “let’s make sure it’s clear what it is you do and why” you should be wary. Especially if it involves spending money on ads, but not on content for those ads to point to.

Some Thoughts on Tools

Posted on by chris

Here is what I’ve been learning about tools:

  • Become enamored with taking care of your tools not buying new ones.
  • Buy the cheapest tool you need for a job. If it breaks or fails its intended purpose then buy a more expensive replacement.
  • Completing a project from start to finish is the only way to see what tools you actually need. Planning is fraught with false assumptions.
  • Youtube tutorials are a useful fiction. Watch them for techniques and explanation yet understand that the moments they don’t show are where all the laborious and detailed work is happening.
  • Avoid forums where people argue about specifications and not real world results.
  • If you are scared of the next step, practice it at a smaller scale. If you are still wary, talk it through with a friend.
  • Modify your tools to suit your purposes.
  • Be generous with your tools. Especially those that spend most of their lives sitting on a shelf.

Detroit Urban Craft Fair 2018

Posted on by chris

Detroit Urban Craft Fair is this weekend! If you’re looking for a unique gift for your friends/family/yourself this is THE place to get it. Major bonus is that it’s in the Masonic Temple downtown:

Friday: 6-9pm
Saturday: 10am-8pm
Sunday: 11am-6pm

My wife’ll be there as Science Bee so go buy everything she has, but also go see everyone else too! Most of the artists and crafters within 100 miles of Detroit will be there too. Some from even farther out!

On instagram they’ve all been posting pictures of new work they’ll have at DUCF. Chances are good that when they sell out they will not have more until after the holidays (bespoke crafts take time!). So get there early if you have your eye on anything.

Note that DUCF charges admission. This has a few effects: people who go actually want to be there, which in turn makes it so that the crafters also want to be there. They’re all bringing the good stuff.

Admission is: “$1 on Saturday and Sunday ($10 on Friday for opening night). Children 12 and under are free.”