Some of you have likely noticed that the URL interpunctgames.com redirects to this blog — mostly by clicking a link on one of my online bios and discovering yourself here.

I do have plans. I also need to file a DBA with my local county and get a business license from the local city and some other odds and ends (including actually making a separate web site) and I don’t currently have the luxury of gobs and gobs of free time given the 40 hours a week I spend in other gainful employment.

The non-existence of that separate site seemed like something worth noting, though, so I’ve noted it.

Plans (for 2024)¹ including getting on a regular publishing schedule and providing actual downloads (free on itch.io) on my way toward longer-format products and uniting some of the currently unrelated bits-and-thoughts I have floating inside my head into something larger and more coherent.

More information, or at least some hints, about the 2024 schedule and the over-all plan behind it will be coming later this fall². If you can recall some of my sporadic blog posts from earlier this year I’m working on fantasy maps, among other things, and trying to figure out appropriate map scales and templates. That’s part of it, and will probably be the bigger part, but hopefully I can also drag my undiagnosed lump of brain matter away from hyperfocusing on just that and can also move along other, currently slower moving parts of the project too.

Thanks for reading, and for not kicking me out of your RSS feeds.³

In other housekeeping here on the blog: I’m not sure if this means more regular updates here as well as on the new site. I certainly enjoy sharing my progress and process, and I could certainly be a lot more systematic in how (and how often) I share. We shall see. Watch this space, I guess.

¹ I had similar plans for 2023. and 2022. and, um… yeah ok fine it’s been a while.

² Just a reminder that we just started fall/autumn and ‘later this fall’ is technically any time before 21 December.

³ should I not have mention that? no… wait… don’t do it now…

Let’s just ignore that I haven’t written anything for the blog in two weeks & we can skip the apology/excuses/justifications and get back to a topic.

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” per Robert Frost, and he also described it as playing handball without a wall. Most of us don’t play either sport but handball, I’m guessing, is even rarer which is why the front half of the quote is the bit we remember.

I like the handball analogy better because sometimes I don’t get really creative until I literally¹ bounce off a wall. Or until I find the right kind of person to bounce ideas off of. The tennis net always seemed more arbitrary, and when a ball hits the net, it stops. And then you have to reset and go through all the motions to get the ball back in play, which is why players avoid it.

Anyway, the point of Frost was that without some structure and a few rules², you’re not really writing Poetry™, at least as he preferred it. But just like a couple of kids can have fun with two rackets and a tennis ball without having to keep score, free verse is still poetry³.

In designing games, particularly board games where many of the rules will be given both representation and often physical form in the printed board and components, we have all kinds of structure to work within. Our game is the board is the structure is the rules. Folks can ignore the rules⁴ but since we’re using the same pieces, even variations tend to be pretty close to form. Italian sonnets and English sonnets are not the same but 14 lines is 14 lines. Board games are fun, but playthroughs of Monopoly and Risk all tend to look the same – and while both are now traditions in some families, the tradition is also usually to play them just once a year.

Card games, particularly those that use the now-standard deck of 52, in four suits, are probably the closest we get to a “Frostian Poetic” genre of games: there is structure, there are rules. But there is also a lot of creativity in the variations. A single deck but ‘according to Hoyle’ we have a couple hundred variations of play. Within the limits of 10 + 3 times 4 we get Poker, Bridge, Rummy, Cribbage, Blackjack, Solitaire, and War, with all kinds of ways to match, count, or rank cards and just as many ways to ‘take tricks’ and keep score. Eventually we hit limits, and we add a joker — or we get variations like Pinochle, or the UNO deck. We keep the vocabulary (draws, hands, playing out of the hand face up on the table) but use new alphabets.

And eventually we get things like Mille Bornes [1906 or 1955] and Magic: The Gathering [1993]. Is MtG still playing by the same design rules as Poker?⁵ There is a very distant family resemblance. MF Doom and Robert Frost stand a century apart but Doom and other rappers are most assuredly still using rhyme and meter.

And with that, I think I have stretched the analogy just about as far as it’ll stand.

##

RPGs have rules, obviously. And many, many available accessories, minis, and tokens that can make some sessions play more like board games or war games, at least in part.

But RPGs, at least those played on table tops⁶, are more like a free-form collaborative story-telling game. The rules we start with give that story some structure, and also help shape the course of play, but over time we’ll change the rules, too, to get closer to the kinds of stories we want to tell.

Maybe more importantly than the rules of an RPG is the vibe of the RPG. And I specifically chose vibe to describe this because I am Gen X and cringe and trying too hard to sound cool, but also because the Vibe of a Game is a mix of things: quite a bit comes in the published settings or ‘worlds’ of the game, some in the rules-as-written, some from other media including the sources used for inspiration by the game designers, and some from roughly 50 years of playing these games and the 20 years of mid-century sci-fi and fantasy that came before them.

Mork Borg is a Vibe. Apocalypse World is a Vibe. Blades in the Dark is a Vibe.

Pathfinder has a lot of overlap with D&D but the settings of Golarion and Forgotten Realms have very different vibes. [Even within D&D: Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and OG Greyhawk are all very different games to play though technically they share a common rule set — if we fudge a bit. Different D&D settings came out for different editions, and 2nd isn’t 4th isn’t 5th.]

A really neat thing about RPGs is that the rules almost don’t matter. Characters can be defined in different ways, the labels can change. A paladin could be called a Holy Warder, Realm Guardian, Templar, or Lightbound but if a player wants to play a character with that paladin vibe, we find a way for it to fit the overall vibe of the game world and we give that character Smite, because paladins, even if the rest of the class kit and power set are wildly different. I can build a paladin by rolling 4d6 multiple times to generate stats or I can start with 100 points and break out some of the GURPS manuals. I can search online and find the appropriate PbtA Playbook [edit to add: Dungeon World’s Paladin. there ya go.]. I can grab my copy of Band of Blades (it’s in my to-be-read pile) and see what the deal is with Chosen [edit to add: It’s a whole different Vibe].

When even whole rule sets are optional and swappable (to an extent) what is the limitation we put on our RPGs? What’s the rhyme scheme and meter?

When your game can technically be played across an entire whole world, it’s often necessary to drop two sets of parallel lines down and make ourselves a board. Starter village, dungeon, quest hub, capital. Quite a few early sessions fall back on the familiar so we can ground ourselves and figure out the Vibe, both of the game and setting, and also what this particular table, this set of players with with this GM, how that’s going to feel as we play 3-5 hours at a time.

That’s our ‘board’, I think. And across many different genres, I find the parallels. It could be horror-survival on a sci-fi space station but we’ll have a Safe Starting Area, a Dungeon equivalent, eventually a quest hub, and probably a goal, destination or end game — in a fantasy context, the ‘Capital’ — whether that means impressing the monarch or taking their throne. A wild west setting will have some sleepy frontier town, Canyons and Badlands and the things in ‘em, and maybe eventually some sort of slowly simmering plot that leads the story to the Big City, or even Back East. The road there and back again starts in the Shire but eventually takes us to Minas Tirith, and as a “road movie” it’s more about hitting the landmarks than bouncing around a quest hub but there’s comparable story structure there.

Twisting expectations, and (as a GM) finding whole new ways to make a “starter village” and “dungeon”, that’s what keeps the game fresh⁷. And of course: with the biggest dungeons, the whole campaign can just be town and vaults, back and forth but always exploring deeper or farther, until we find the story in it and the eventual endgame.

A lot of us have stuck with D&D (various editions with various additions and often a lot of homebrew) but only because that’s where we started. The basics of D&D have proven to be pretty adaptable, and folks have done some wild things with just 12 classes and a handful of character backgrounds. But the tropes of D&D and our expectations going in are also ‘grounding’ in a way – and grounding in a couple of senses: a foundation underneath us, and a sort of electrical ground for the rules to keep things from short-circuiting.

So to answer my own question, yeah, the tennis net is kind of necessary. Arguably, the rules we agree to, at the table, keep the game ‘on the rails’ just as surely as the clockwise track around Monopoly, and the limits of the setting (fantasy or otherwise) are also the edges of this (huge, imaginary, but still contained) game board. RPGs don’t have to be limited, but we accept the limits. That’s the vibe we like and the type of stories we’re looking to tell.

Just like no one is actually playing Monopoly by the official rules, no two GMs run their table the same way, and no two groups are playing the exact same game either. Everyone adapts something. Every GM has had a player who wanted to do something that required either a creative interpretation of the rules or some sort of exception (hopefully minor) from them. This flexibility is core to RPGs; not unique to RPGs but much more common among them.

So you might disagree with me. The poetry of what you’re making is maybe more spoken word than dactylic hexameter or alliterative Old English or strict quatrains and couplets.⁸ But I feel like some limits are probably necessary, especially when the boundaries of what we can imagine are basically limitless.

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The image at the top of the post is only tenuously, tangentially related. Though I needed some starting point for thinking about the post today, & I took the literal boundary drawn on an otherwise completely open-ended map. It’s the latest version of the template I’ve been working on for making hex World Maps (for fantasy settings or other things that work well on hexagonal grids) – you can see the last couple of posts for more on the scale for the map, and what the rectangular overlay is for.

Eventually I’ll find a final template I like and work up a couple of samples that use it and put together a packet, a pdf, & make that available on Itch.io

¹ “literally” in its modern meaning, not literally literally.

² Like the Pirate’s Code, rules for poetry is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules

³ Frost was using a version of the tennis-and-net analogy as far back as 1933, Ginsberg wrote Howl in ’55. So whatever trend Frost was responding to, it wasn’t specifically the Beats or Ginsberg. And arguably the use of repetition in Howl gives it a structure and, especially when performed, the spoken word cadence is just as effective as a strict poetic meter would have been. But enough commentary on poetry I am way out of my depth here.

⁴ Everyone is playing Monopoly wrong, for example.

⁵ Magic should probably be compared to games like Rummy instead of Poker, in that a bunch of cards are played in front of each player and you can react to what your opponent played on your own board, albeit in a limited fashion

⁶ Table tops, real or virtual. A lot of people play the game on screens these days, so we can’t differentiate just based on ‘is it software?’ anymore. But for MMOs, JRPGs, and other computer RPGs the game world is kind of a fixed thing, and you interact through your PC (both your Player Character and your personal computer) and your options are strictly limited to those of the interface. For “table top” RPGs, we’re playing as the PCs and we interact with each other. The options are close to being unlimited, so long as we agree to keep telling this particular story to each other, even if we do occasionally let the dice decide some outcomes. There may eventually be some sort of hybrid, certainly some companies keep working toward that as a goal. But the original sort of game, played in person in living rooms, dens, and at kitchen tables, with or without a lot of battlemaps and minis, will always be an option available to us.

⁷ …plus new options for character fantasies: classes, subclasses, ancestries, backgrounds — we’ve been building this kit for decades.

⁸ makin’ that analogy work.

I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

##

¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.

Tabletop RPGs [/stylebookinsistsIspellthisout] or “Role Playing Games” [/stylebook] are a popular format of ‘board’ game that one plays with pencil, paper, and dice. Or sometimes cards and dice. Or sometimes on an actual board, though that is rarer; though much less rare is a gridded game mat one sketches on with erasable markers, for make-do terrain, or a set of dungeon rooms and corridors, and usually populated with snack crumbs and small cast figures representing players & “monsters”. The miniatures are optional, as is most of the rest, dice included. There are a lot of variations, which only makes sense because Tabletop RPGs are 50 years old at this point, and draw from various wargaming traditions (simulating battles using representational miniatures) that can be dated to the 1780s and popular (within its niche) through the 19th century, along with “role play” parlor games that date back to at least the 1930s, if not further.

The basics that you absolutely need are one player to take the role of group facilitator and arbiter (a “Game Master”, also stylized “Dungeon Master”, as it is in perhaps the oldest and most popular RPG, Dungeons & Dragons), enough other players to take on the roles of the story characters (I recommend at least two, but no more than seven), and play sessions where these Player Characters join the Game Master in telling a developing narrative, over the course of a single session or several sessions.

Am I done with exposition yet? Has the stylebook been appeased? Y’all know what RPGs are, right?

I’ve been collecting rule books for various RPG systems since my teens. Other than D&D, I didn’t actually play many of them, though I was always the DM for my groups through middle school and high school, so I’d run several campaigns and knew 2nd edition inside & out. The group I started to DM during our freshman year at Tech played a half dozen or so sessions, then decided to migrate to a lab in the College of Computing basement where we’d telnet into Arctic MUD [wikipedia entry; see also mud.arctic.org] on amber-screened IBM terminals—which is still the best way to play an MMO, honestly, sitting in the same room with your friends while you do it (text-only and CRTs totally optional; some things are better now).

But even after moving largely to computer MMORPGs and sticking with those on and off (mostly off) ever since, I was still buying the core rules and various source books for a lot of different systems, and reading these RPG source books as what amounted to a small, but fun, game-adjacent hobby. I don’t think I’m the only person that does this, just based on how many books are sold vs how many people actually GM for a group on a somewhat regular basis.

The thing about reading a bunch of rule books, though, is that your game-brain gets stretched in a lot of different directions and you start meta-gaming the games. Thinking about similarities and differences, and even backfilling from computer RPGs, and you start to get ideas. If you already have “house rules” and homebrew parts of your preferred ruleset to suit player preference (or to “fix” “glaring errors” in the original) you’re halfway there already. At some point, dissatisfaction with available alternatives—or the need for a specific feature or mechanic that won’t quite fit otherwise—will lead many game enthusiasts to develop their own game system from scratch. Though I hadn’t really thought along these lines in a decade or more, or touched a rule book, quarantine gave me a lot of time to think—and to fill. I found myself feeling a pull, to get back to gaming, and while I was playing WoW Classic and enjoying that, it also didn’t quite scratch that specific gaming itch. So I dug up the old books (and bought more recent editions) and read and re-read and opened up a new folder and file on my computer and started writing down the ideas.

I have notes for a lightweight tabletop RPG system that uses intuitive things like a zero-to-10 scale and descriptive comparative terms (borrowed from FUDGE) to borrow/play well with source materials from a lot of different games. I'll probably start blogging it

— m · blind (@mdotblind) March 31, 2020

More than anything else, my initial seed for the system started with the idea that you shouldn’t have to rebuild everything if there were systems or settings you could just borrow wholesale. So it wasn’t so much about how to play any one type of RPG under a specific set of rules, but how to get different systems to talk to each other and play nice, or nicer, with each other. And that would be a very lightweight ruleset, basically defining one actual system mechanic with some sample translation tables (from 3d6,d20 to the “in-between” descriptive system, for example) to show how other games could all “talk” to each other. So if you like one character creation regime, but wanted to use a different combat resolution schema, and a world setting from a 3rd source, you could frankenstein those parts together using the ideas presented in what could probably be boiled down into a single page RPG “ruleset”[sic].

But then I thought, “Well OK but what if you wanted use this mechanic as is, without borrowing — what’s the minimum viable game look like?” and of course down that path lies madness

SO. My 'lightweight' system is feeding well and puts on additional pounds every day. That said:

One base mechanic [Describing 'rpg things' like stats, attributes, quality, and skill with a I-hope-it's-intuitive zero to ten scale] will be pealed off to fit on a single sheet https://t.co/IyrqyoFVlN

— m · blind (@mdotblind) July 26, 2020

I am not sure where this will end up. The game system that started as a “lightweight” or even single-page idea is still in there somewhere but I have a whole system developing now. The worldbuilding bug decided to take a bite, too, while I had my whole ass hanging out, so now that Game System has it’s own World Setting (at least, the draft of one) and I’ll be working on things like character classes (or alternatives to classes) and character heritage & backgrounds (we prefer “background” to things like the classical fantasy “races”, because who’s to say a Elf raised by Dwarves wouldn’t be a whiskey-swilling blacksmith with a Why-Is-Scotland-in-Middle-Earth accent, a two-bit two-handed battleaxe they like to use called “Trollstumper”, and a perpetual hangup over not being able to grow a decent beard like a proper member of their people).

My fantasy world setting probably won’t have Elves or Dwarves anyway. I’m not even sure if there will be analogues for either, though I’ll include allowances. Though the rule set, separate from the setting, will have Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and whatever else lives in the public domain as backgrounds, both for the sake of being kind-of-generically-complete but also as the best way to introduce the game concepts to players (and new-to-this-setting GMs). We’ll start with what is familiar and ground things before taking off over the far horizons.

So that’s the scope of work for what will be likely months-to-years(?) of me fiddling with this thing and piling on and whittling away and whatever other metaphorically-used verbs can be applied to outlining, drafting, and writing. As for what it’s called?

I’m recycling “Amphithael” as the name of the fantasy world setting. I’m also recycling most of the world already built under that name as well, though that map will likely change and comprises only a fourth or so of what will be my new fantasy globe.

And: The rule set. I’m calling it “System15”—this is a placeholder name, and I borrowed that general idea and the numeral 15 from Randall Munroe and XKCD, “Standards”. We all know there are too many competing RPG systems already, we do not need another no matter what the author claims about the system being “comprehensive” “flexible” “genre neutral” “universal” and probably tasting minty fresh while leaving your kitchen surfaces gleaming. So System15.

This is posted the night before but is “the order of the day” for 31 December 2019. Last of the year.

I’m starting this as a habit before the actual new year because it’s not a New Year’s Resolution. It’s not. It may only last a week. It may only last until I go back to work on Thursday. But I need to write something to get in the habit of writing something, and if that means a damn daily “web log” or journal we’ll give that a go for a month and see where it takes me.

Today, Tuesday, my Dad and I are moving his bee hives from the old community garden (which has a certain run-down funky charm) to the new community garden. The new garden is… new. I can’t think of anything else to recommend it. I should have some pictures after the deed is done, though sadly you won’t get to see me in all the bee gear because it is hard to wear that stuff and deal with live bees and take a selfie.

I’m meeting Dad at 9am and we’ll knock that out and after? I think the plan is to buy some beer, hop online, and maybe play some more World of Warcraft, though I’m slowing down a bit in WoW Classic and I’m back to playing Hearthstone more often than not.

I should also move furniture and build bookcases and finish moving in (I’ve been here for a year and a month now; the disassembled bookcase parts leaning against walls and mocking me daily) but I’m not feeling that ambitious. It is still a rare day off and I’d rather squander it, deliciously.

This past Tuesday was New Year’s Day and that means we’re not even quite a week yet into 2019 and there are no doubt at least a few resolutions made that are not being kept.

At least, not yet. Don’t give up hope just because it’s been a rough week.

If this blog post were an essay or pamphlet of a vintage, say, around 1790, the title would be something like “A Year’s Resolution, in Three Parts, and a Proposal for a Scaled Back Annual Commitment, ~or~ A Month of Sundays” (I used the shorter title above). So I guess I need to get to those three parts first, and then the proposal.

One thing about a New Year’s Resolution is that mostly, we expect too much of ourselves, and we discount the effort some things will take. If you have a nebulous goal, like, “I’m going to eat better!” or “I’m going to lose weight!” you’ve basically just signed on for mindfully keeping a commitment every waking minute of every day ¹. One stressful day, or a day where you don’t have the time or energy, and you’ll find yourself with a take-out or delivery container [or pint of ice cream] and an excuse; after enough excuses stack up you’ll be back on your usual habits and routines and you’ll actually feel better about giving up.

If your goal is to daily [Do The Thing], make it a small ask. Take the stairs, not the elevator: small, concrete, measurable, often a substitute for other worse behavior, and not more than 15 extra minutes out of your day. If you have a nebulous goal like ‘eating better’, you could make it something small & but actionable like, “I will eat one extra serving of vegetables with every meal.” (Baby carrots, either with breakfast or as a snack between breakfast & lunch, is a good way to get that first one in. Vegetable omelets are good too, if you have time to cook breakfast; most leftover non-salad veg from dinner the night before can be put in an omelet the morning after and usually works).

Health-based resolutions are most common (and sell a lot of gym memberships every January) but creative or project-based resolutions can be fun targets that encourage you to stretch your limits a bit. But if your goal is too big, too broad, or a daily [do the thing] you might find yourself in six to eight weeks eating metaphorical pizza amid the ruins of your 2019 Resolution failure. Possibly also with actual pizza.

Let me drop a section break and restart the article with part two.

##

New Year’s Resolutions could, possibly be traced back to certain practices of ancient Babylon or ancient Rome (…if you believe Wikipedia, and in this case actually no, I don’t) but the idea of making changes for the New Year probably dates back, informally, to a point when we first had numbered years and calendars to track them with.

Odds are good the annual “resolution” as such is more modern, perhaps taking a bit from historical paying of debts before New Year’s Day (in ancient Babylon or more-recent-but-still-going-pretty-far-back China), lenten sacrifices and other religious annual practices of reflection, atonement, and forgiveness, and the Aristotelian idea of temperance, virtue, and self-governance as rediscovered by Europe in the 1200s and then refocused through the lens of the Reformation? At any rate, we have proof of Samuel Pepys making resolutions for 1662 and 1664, “solemn vows”, and gaining cultural traction and wider acceptance by the early 1800s. The idea of a New Year’s resolution as a secular, personal thing as opposed to solemn vows made to God or god probably date to Kant, or the Transcendentalists who followed him — not that I can point to a single essay saying as much, but the timelines match and then the Victorians get a hold of it and a lot of “things we’ve always done” and our collective holiday traditions only date back to like, 1840.

Resolutions are fine, strive to be a better human, yada yada yada, but this isn’t ancient wisdom handed down on papyrus from the first civilizations. More self-help 1960s & 70s, less 1690s or even 700s.

So Don’t Feel Bad™ when inevitably all your resolutions fail in an epic pizza binge on Friday 15 February ².

The main takeaway here is that you’re not breaking a vow to Janus and breaching the ancient compact when you fail with a resolution, as about 88% of us will, and that there’s nothing particular about the New Year (and its 1st day) or the calendar year except as a convenient framework.

We can select different frameworks.

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There’s actually a whole very long List of Timed Artistic Challenges, including a few you’ve heard of like Inktober and NaNoWriMo, and others for every month and some year-round or year-long ‘organized’ challenges besides. A New Year’s Resolution might be considered the first of these, or at least related as a type. Granted, resolutions predate NaNoWriMo [1999] but now we have a model and a vocabulary for this sort of thing (including but not limited to ‘timed artistic challenge’) and we can see how certain types of New Year’s Resolution (like any other year-long project) are a timed artistic challenge in all but name.

The various WriMo’s and -embers and -obers all have a certain cadence and set of rules: where creatives & others who want to try the ‘challenge’ take a month (30 or 31 days) and Do The Thing — and occasionally, post and share it. There’s an ad hoc community that can form, either organically on social media as everyone posts using the same hashtags, or in official and unofficial forums. The Doing Of The Thing is enough for some people, and the excuse/opportunity of the timed challenge plus their internal motivation is enough. But for most of us, we need the social-support-slash-peer-pressure to convince ourselves to stretch, to go just a bit past what we think our limits are. An opportunity to try something new or to tackle something in a new way. So the community is the more important part, even past the challenge ³.

But the big honking thing in the room with these timed artistic challenges is The Daily Grind: the daily grind is kind of the point — but could also be very off-putting for people who can’t sacrifice that much time OR maybe could but not for a full month OR for those who think they can hack it and will try, but for whom burnout around day 7 or 8 is a real and often encountered thing.

A month of the daily grind is one thing. If we were to stare down a whole year of a daily grind, we’d be forgiven if we just gave up on, say, the 5th of January which happens to be a Saturday and order a Fail Pizza ⁴ and get wrapped up in other things happening because damn, there’s a lot of distraction out there. The Resolution dies on Saturday with pepperoni.

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And so: the proposal.

There’s an English idiom, “a month of Sundays”, often used to imply a really, really long time or something that happened a long time ago. But if you do the math, it’s only 30 or 31 weeks and that actually fits quite comfortably in a year with a fair buffer on either side.

If you were planning on doing something for ‘a month of Sundays’ in 2019 you could start now(-ish, Sunday 6 January, though most of us just missed that mark so 13 January) and finish up on 4 or 11 August

…Or pick any start week between now and Sunday 2 June and still be able to start and finish a project of 30 or 31 weeks in 2019.

You could use any of the List of Timed Artistic Challenges, already framed for a month, and instead post/finish/finalize one block each week, instead of a daily dash to a scramble finish and a mess it takes weeks to recover from.

The benefit of doing a creative challenge this way is that instead of a daily grind, you only have to post once a week. On a Sunday, so after most of us have Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning — even if we did the ‘bad’ thing and put off doing any creative work during our ‘pays the bills’ work week. And many of the challenges are annualized anyway, “Hey friends let’s break and bust everything and do this impossible thing in a month — but not every month, ha, who’d do that. We’ll do it this one month out of the year”

If the thing is so impossible to do that we’d never manage outside of that flat-run-whole-month-heroic effort, why, it might take A Month Of Sundays to do otherwise. [insert a self-satisfied winking meme here]

That’s it: A neat catchphrase, a recycled idea, and a framework you might be able to hang your project on. I’m not curing cancer here. But if you either made a resolution you’ve already slipped on — or only had half an idea for a project, if only you had the time, let me give you a gift of time.

A month of Sundays.

Let’s go.

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¹ If your resolution is to quit smoking: Do that! Some days will be rough, and none of this advice applies, but go for it. If you have a really rough day, might I recommend a pint of ice cream instead of nicotine? I mean, it’s not a perfect solution but we can address the extra 15 pounds in 2020.

² Epic Pizza Binge is my new holiday/tradition, to be celebrated annually on the Friday after 14 February because why not.

³ See, it’s the end of the post, so I can reference the whole post in the footnotes and not just the bit with the number on it. If *someone* who isn’t me because I’m not doing it, wanted to do a Month of Sundays 2019 as a Thing, I’d recommend 3 March to 29 September (that’s 31 Sundays) just to kind of work around some of the end-of-year stuff, including NaNoWriMo and also because it gives folks 7 or 8 weeks into 2019 as a runway to ramp into the “year-long” project before the 3 March/first Sunday in March launch date.

⁴ sorry for relying so heavily on pizza-as-metaphor; as I write this, I think I’m just hungry

I can tell from the visitor logs that someone is trying to hack, redirect, or otherwise gain control of this blog (why? the other thing I can tell from the visitor logs is how infrequent the traffic is) and while I can ban IPs (and will start doing so) I realize the futility there because any entity with the knowledge to try this kind of hack, however hamfistedly, likely also knows how to redirect so as to come at it from a different IP.

So I’m just going to put this on the front page for a bit: Whoever you are, just stop.

Obviously it’s not working for you, and having any sort of “in” to the back-end of my CMS doesn’t really matter when I have separate control, through the company from which I purchase webhosting, to the SQL databases and actual files. In a worse case scenario, I just delete the blog, reinstall, and restore from backups. Though I shouldn’t have to go that far. (But thanks for the reminder to to do a backup)

You can save a lot of your time by just not trying. As for my time: well, I’ll just keep monitoring the situation.

I still don’t know what I’ll be talking about.

On the last iteration of the blog [now found at archive.rocketbomber.com] I started with the vague idea that I might generally cover sci-fi—hence the name, RocketBomber—but over time I ended up digging into ebook sales, tried to track digital sales more generally, took off on a three year tangent on bookselling, and mopped up the last year or so of blogging there with some linkblogging and music essays.

I don’t feel like taking any of those topics up again.

If I look at the sorts of news sources that I subscribe to, and what I’m currently reading, and the stories that I share on social media, that may give us a better idea of the sort of topics I might fall into later.

Urbanism:

Cities & Living. Neighborhoods, how they live, grow, and die, and the related issues of gentrification, zoning, walkability & transit, affordable housing, and changing demographics including the growing aging populations

The Future of Energy:

As the now-4-year-old Onion headline succinctly puts it: Scientists Politely Remind World That Clean Energy Technology Ready To Go Whenever. Electric cars are part of this, but that’s not my beat. I’d rather look at how materials science is changing solar panel efficiencies and costs, how house-scale battery technology is improving, how off-the-grid and small local grids might develop as alternatives to long-distance transmission, and the other odds and ends of the new energy sector.

Design:

Not gadget design, & not necessarily industrial design, and while I’m fascinated by the design of spaces, I hesitate to call it interior design.

Working Spaces, particularly things like open floor office plans and why they are evil, standing desks and other alternatives to the table-and-chair norm, shop spaces and work benches, organization of all types (because I recognize my own lack), and generally any space where we work – even kitchens, labs, classrooms, and factory floors.

I might get distracted and chase design down a rabbit hole, which would lead to considering Restaurant & Bar spaces; Creative Retail; Halls, stages, auditoria, & performance spaces; Galleries & Museums; Libraries—damn but I do love libraries—
But it’s the working space, from corporate offices down to individual corners, that I might try and write about first.

And also designing for accessibility, which is cool.

Pop Culture?:

Fandom is turning toxic in odd corners and I’m not sure I want to open that can of worms. But I do like comics, comic art & sequential art, and I might succumb to the temptation to write about them, or their adaptations into media other than print.

Also: I still love science fiction. The blog is still called “rocket bomber”. It might come up.

& Storytelling:

The art and craft of writing, and storytelling – on the page, in games, on screens, & the nuts and bolts of practical modern myth-making

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That’s five pretty big targets. I might find something completely different down the line. And even though this isn’t a Diary Blog, I’ll be starting with some more personal posts until I find my feet (and my voice) and get into the habit of blogging again.