the month in me
I have become an owner of dice.
I played a lot of games last month.
arts
I also played a lot of electric guitar, accompanying Bummertown at HUGE Theater. Back in 2018 I tried to do this show with a keyboard, the instrument I’m proficient in, but everything I played felt too… well, too much like music. It was while watching Jill Bernard’s Drum Machine that I started to daydream about playing the show on guitar. Using an instrument I’m less familiar with forced me to simplify, to focus on atmosphere and mood. I love it, and I loved going back to it this year.
I don’t have any shows coming up until May, but it’ll be a busy summer! I was already preparing to return to two of my favorite groups, Two’s Company and THE PAiNTERS, and this month I was cast in Family Funeral. It’s an improvised drama that hasn’t been mounted in almost ten years – I saw it when I was just figuring out how to watch improv, never mind doing it. I’m honored and excited and a bit frightened by the chance to perform in this show.
code
At the end of February I finished a coding task I started in 2021. It should have been easy, but was made hard by a previous choice. So before I could do the easy thing, I had to do a harder thing, revising a bunch of code we’d previously written. And before I could do the harder thing, I had to do a harder thing than that: deciding we’d been wrong.
Sometimes we get invested in our choices, and it’s hard to reverse them, even as begin to hazily understand that they’re making our lives worse. It was a mistake, but it was our mistake!
life
I semi-accidentally went to two tabletop gaming conventions in one month: 2D Con Unplugged and Con of the North. This was a big shift from zero such events in the first three decades of my adult life, but, you see, I wanted to play more games.
They were very different – for example, in how they organized play. Con of the North sent me a link to a list of hundreds if not thousands of pre-planned gaming sessions: which game was to be played at which time on which day at which table in which of dozens of rooms. Confronted with this, I scrolled through the list for a while trying to guess what games would be fun from their names alone, then blacked out. It took me a few weeks to muster up the courage to go back and make a plan.
In contrast, 2D Con Unplugged was like, I don’t know, man, it’s a big room full of games. Go nuts!
I had fun at both. Some favorite games:
- Moonrakers, a deck-building negotiation game about space contractors
- The Red Dragon Inn, a very silly card game about adventurers getting drunk
- Once Upon a Time, a freeform storytelling card game
- Decorum, “a game of passive-aggressive cohabitation”
- Electric Bastionland, a low-rules, high-creativity surreal RPG
The best games are the ones you play in good company. I played these games with strangers I hope to meet again.
onward
March looks pretty low-key – no performances, no big projects – until my now-annual pilgrimage to the Big Ears Festival to get my mind blown.