If You're In Cleveland, And Looking To Game, May I Recommend Critical Hit Games?

…I recommend Critical Hit Games, in Cleveland Heights.
They were a complete surprise to me, as we had driven to dinner on that side of town and I saw a gaming shop out of nowhere.  “GINI!” I said, grabbing her sleeve.  “A NEW GAME SHOP CAN WE STOPCANWESTOPCANWESTOP” and I kept yelling the words over and over and over again until she pulled the car over.
I wasn’t expecting much.  Most game shops are surly places, warehouses for a meager supply of stock, and since it was 8:00 I expected a single clerk to glare at me balefully as I wandered around a mostly empty place.
But no!  I was greeted by not one but two people, both of whom made eye contact – a rarity akin to platinum coins in the world of gaming shops – and unbelievably, on a Wednesday night, the store was filled with gamers.  Two roleplaying games going on, each with at least five people, a pretty rousing game of Dominion, and some third card game I didn’t know.  And the store was – hold your breath – clean.
I talked with one of the owners, and they’d only opened up two months ago.  But they’d made the very wise decision of reaching out to local gamer groups and saying, “Hey, come play here, you don’t have to buy anything.”  (Which is a really smart strategy for game stores, as it gets people trained to go to their store and makes them look successful when strangers like me walk in.)  So they’d contacted the Cleveland Pathfinder’s Group – there is one, apparently – and gotten people in the door, and they’re already sold out on their Khans of Tarkir Magic prerelease tournament.
So that’s going well.
Still, any gaming store needs a little love to thrive in this day and age, and so if you’re interested and on that side of town, I’d check it out.  Their stock is more weighted towards board games than RPGs at this point, sadly – that’s standard, these days – but they’re well organized and super-friendly and they have a signup board for games where if you’re interested in, say, playing Hero System or Vampire, they’ll put you on a list and notify you when they find a GM.  That, I kinda like.
(And I bought the new D&D Player’s Guide.  Because I am a goddamned sheep, my friends, I am a goddamned sheep.)

How Pokemon and Magic Cards Affect the Minds and Values of Children

This was too awesome to sum up on Twitter, so I’m just gonna point you to this awesome fucking web page on The Occult Dangers of Pokemon.  Your highlights!

What if [children] carry their favorite monsters like magical charms or fetishes in their pockets, trusting them to bring power in times of need?

What if?  What if?  I remember the Tamagotchi plagues of the 1990s, when children routinely walked into the dens of rabid lions and trusted their plastic pets to shield them from danger.  Those children are now lion dung.  Can Pikachu be any less harmful to the feeble-minded?

He told her that during recess on the playground the children would “summon” the forces on the cards they collect by raising sticks into the air and saying, “‘Spirits enter me.’ They call it ‘being possessed.'”

Dude, you’re – you’re not playing according to tournament rules here.  Put the stick down and fucking tap your Mewtwo.

Share your observations. Spark awareness in a young child with comments such as, “That monster looks mean!” or “That creature reminds me of a dragon,” along with “Did you know that in the Bible, serpents and dragons always represent Satan and evil?”

Now I want to go to the Prerelease this weekend and just say this during every goddamned match.

The last line, the Pokemon mantra, fuels the craving for more occult cards, games, toys, gadgets, and comic books. There’s no end to the supply, for where the Pokemon world ends, there beckons an ever-growing empire of new, more thrilling, occult, and violent products. Each can transport the child into a fantasy world that eventually seems far more normal and exciting than the real world. Here, evil looks good and good is dismissed as boring. Family, relationships, and responsibilities diminish in the wake of the social and media pressures to master the powers unleashed by the massive global entertainment industry.

This is literally how I think of the Internet.

…Any child exploring the most popular Pokemon websites will be linked to a selection of occult games such as Sailor Moon, Star Wars, and others more overtly evil.

I wish I had known which overtly evil games they were discussing here.  Aside from “Fuckmenace: the Gathering,” which encourages you to remove your pants for gain.
Oh wait.
Anyway, it’s an awesome read for any Magic player and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  It’s like The Room of Collectible Card Games.

Today's Programming Embarrassment

So as it turns out, I had a database that was missing critical data.  It was possible to “fill in” that data from other sources, as this was a rarely-used database, so I did what programmers since time eternal have done: I whipped up a script to fix the problem.
But after running the script, I discovered that the quick-fix script had only filled in about 90% of the necessary data.  Investigation showed there were edge cases that needed some special handling – and so I changed my script to handle those special edge cases and ran it again.
That got us to about 97% completion.  But – you guessed it – there was a tricky 3% that needed to be handled with an entirely different method, so I changed the script to handle those edge cases, reran it, and got us to 100% completion.  Awesome!  We fixed the problem!
Now, months later, the database has grown, and once again it is missing critical data.  Normally, this would be a trivial fix.  After all, I’d already filled in the data!  I can just take the logic I’d created in that quick-fix script, apply a filter so that the critical data is filled in whenever a new row is inserted, and have things up and running within an hour or two!  We’ll fix this lack of data forever!
Except.
Except.
I didn’t actually save that first script.  I just kept saving the old script, modifying it to handle the current edge case, and re-running it.  So what I have now is not the script that fixes 90% of the data in one run, but some messed-up tangle of code that handles a 3% edge case.  What happened to the 90% fix logic I created?
Well, I saved over it.  Basically, I deleted it in stages.  So I’m going to have to recreate all that logic from scratch today.
I AM GENIUS.

I Don't Have Sex To Get Gold Medals

Some people sleep on soft mattresses. I sleep on a hard mattress, and that makes me better.  In fact, I sleep fitfully on an Olympic-grade mattress, a cold and merciless sheet of titanium, a pillowless place where only most-trained slumbernauts can find any rest at all.
And my only meal is the ortolan, a crunchy bird literally drowned in alcohol, which I devour whole a bite at a time, my face draped in a towel so you can not see my bloodied gums sharded with tiny, needlelike bird bones.  This is Olympic-style eating.  It is the best –
– oh, drop the bullshit, can we?
This essay’s inspired by another essay on FetLife titled Double black diamond sex, which ostensibly has the positive (and correct!) message that you have to find the sexual partner who loves doing what you do, but is sadly wrapped up in the bullshit idea that there’s a style of sex that is superior simply because it is difficult.  According to that essay, there’s “beginner” sex and “intermediate” sex and then the dreaded double black-diamond super-ski magnate sex, which not anyone can aspire to.
(Guess what kind of sex the author of this essay has?  G’wan.  Guess.  It’ll be totes surprising.)
And let me say here that difficulty is not goodness.  Unless the only music you enjoy is the tweedliest of prog-rock where the musicians play in time-signatures that don’t exist within human thought.  Unless the only movie you like is Primer, a time-travel movie so complex that even Wikipedia seems vaguely confused about what actually happened.
The fact is that this Saturday, I went to the Velvet Tango Room, literally one of the top five bars in the entire world, a place where I had $18 cocktails using only the freshest ingredients, with ice cubes that tumbled out of a $10,000 ice machine designed to create perfectly-cubical cubes at zero degrees so they wouldn’t melt your drink, everything squeezed and shaken by hand.
Then I went to Old Fashion Hot Dogs, a dive so divey that I’m not even sure they’re aware enough of the Internet to *have* a website, and paid $3.25 for a bacon-and-egg sandwich.
Both were delicious, in their own ways.  Except according to the Double Black-Diamond guy, “a good skier won’t bother with the bunny hill,” and I would never of course be caught dead eating simple food.
Fuck that.
There’s this ridiculous hierarchy assholes keep trying to build, where it’s not enough to have found the sex/food/movie they like to experience, but they actively have to start ranking things so what they like is on the goddamned top.
Sex is about enjoyment.  And yes, I have my “double black-diamond days” where I feel like breaking out all the skill and equipment and the whipped cream and the gimp suit and the team of Clydesdales, and that can be fucking awesome.
I can also have a quick missionary lay.  And that can be just as good.
And it’s not for some people.  I get that.  Some people need all the acoutrement and the seven-hour fuckfest to get off, and I completely am behind that.  They should find like-minded people to swing from the chandeliers with.
But do you have to malign the people who like the quick missionary stuff to do it?
In a world filled with kink, the last thing we fucking need is to take our own preferences and turn them into some sort of objective superiority in order to make people feel like, “Gee, I can’t have the *good* kind of sex.”  The good kind of sex is the one that makes all people satisfied.  That is not the same as complexity, because I know of some skiers who *can* do the double black-diamond but prefer the gentler slopes because they don’t have to worry as much.
We fuck.  We love.  We enjoy.  Let’s not make this complicated.
Or maybe, according to this fucked-up scale some people are espousing, the more complicated we can make it the better it’ll be.  But I think if we apply that logic to relationships, we’ll see how quickly that shit falls apart.

A Brief Word To You Cancer Survivors

A friend of mine got some wonderful news the other day: her cancer is in remission.
And she felt a terrible guilt.
Because she is a friend of mine, she knows all about Rebecca, and the brain cancer that took her life on her sixth birthday, and she had the reaction of, “Why did I live when that beautiful little girl didn’t?” And perhaps that reaction is natural, and human – survivor’s guilt is a very real thing – but I said something to her, and I want to say it to all of you:
I am thrilled that you’re alive.
I want you healthy.
I want no one on this Earth to die of cancer, ever again.  Not a little girl, not an old man, not a middle-aged genderqueer, nobody.
That won’t happen in my lifetime, sadly – “cancer” is an umbrella name for a thousand different different kinds of diseases, and we could completely cure breast cancer and still have the astrocytoma that ravaged Rebecca’s brain running rampant – but I am never going to be angry when someone else lives.  I was not in the least comforted by thinking, “Well, other children went through this.”  I would have been far more comforted by the knowledge that this was a unique situation, that in all the billions of humans who lived we were the only ones who were watching a child die of a disease we could not cure, and that all the other families were living peacefully and thriving.
If you live, it is a triumph to me.  It’s a middle finger thrust into the face of a cold biological process that, God willing, one day science will manage to stop.  And in your case, it looks like science did stop it, and good.
I speak for no one else, of course.  I don’t know how my wife feels, I don’t know how the Meyers feel, I don’t know what’s normal.  But if you’ve had some life-threatening disease and you made it when Rebecca didn’t, I will clap my hands and sing your joy and praise whatever powers that be that you will continue to be ambulatory.
I’m thankful you’re here.  Live long.  Live well.  Live beautifully.
Live.

Can You Recommend A Local Tattoo Artist To Me? Because I Am An Idiot Who Needs Ink.

A few months ago, on Facebook, I asked people for a recommendation of a good local tattoo artist.  And then, because I am stupid and Facebook is impossible to search, I lost about ten good recommendations from people.
I’m going to be getting a tattoo of Rebecca – a silhouette of a photo taken of her, so I need someone who’s very good at doing photo-perfect work on flabby skin.  My friend Kat will also be getting a tattoo to commemorate Rebecca’s life, but hers will be a design that she needs help with, so I need an artist who can also translate rough sketches into actual beauty.
This will be my only tattoo, I think.  God willing.  So make it good.
And it has to be a local tattoo artist – we have someone good in Pennsylvania, but we don’t want to drive three hours to what might be a multiple-session tattoo.  So while I know there are many fine artists in your town, I’m not interested unless your town is near Cleveland.
(I’m also smart enough to know that tattoo artist > tattoo parlor, so specific names will be weighted better.)
Anyway.  Thanks for everyone who did recommend last time, and I’m sorry I’m sufficiently dumb to forget to bookmark a Facebook post.  If you can recommend here, I will at least be able to Google this post when I find it.

What Are You Most Happy To Have Left Behind From Your Life As A 20-Something?

My friend Geoff Hunt asked a great question: What are you most happy to have left behind from your life as a 20-something?  And my answer was immediate:
That wandering feeling of uncertainty.
Which is to say that my teenaged years were about trying on masks really rapidly – one week I was seriously into prog rock, then I was a punk because I liked Billy Idol, and then I was soooo into reading 17 Magazine and pop for a while before I figured out that it was for girls.  I had no idea who I was, so I kept experimenting – which was totally healthy, of course, because how are you going to know what you really like doing unless you try them all on?
And that’s why a lot of us don’t hang out with our teenaged buddies.  It’s not that they’re not nice people.  But there’s often these distinct and unpleasant reminders, usually in the form of embarrassing anecdotes, that they knew you before you were fully formed, and they keep highlighting these failed trial runs of Who You Might Be.
I thought I’d left that behind in my twenties, but the truth was that I’d left behind the wild experimentation but kept the idea that there was some role I had to play.  I was a Rebel Punk.  I was a Rowdy Drinker.  I was a Guy Who Slept Around A Lot.  I was a Bookseller.  I was an Intellectual. I was a Jokester Who Told Funny Stories.
I spent a lot of time feeling like I was doing those roles pretty terribly.  Mainly because I was an Intellectual but I hadn’t read all the right books – and more importantly, I didn’t want to, but I kept throwing myself at musty classics I didn’t enjoy because hey, that’s what Intellectuals did.  I actually hated going out and getting drunk every night, but everyone else did it after work and it was what Rowdy Drinkers did, and so I did that.  Plus, I had to Tell Funny Stories, so the drinking helped with that, even if sometimes I felt like I was exposing way too much of my life with these stories at inappropriate times, but that’s what my heroes did and so did I.
Oh, and I was a Rebel Punk!  So I couldn’t enjoy a fine glass of Scotch and a nice meal, I had to be Rebellious and drink crappy beer at clubs that were sometimes fun dives but other times were just fucking uncomfortable pits I couldn’t wait to get out of.
And by the time I got to the end of my twenties, I was coming to realize that roles were like training wheels on a bike.  They might be helpful when you’re starting out to give you an idea of how things go, but soon enough they start constraining your journey and they look totally dorky.
So I cast that off.
And I also cast this idea off, in my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon of all time:

Because I had the idea that I had to be A Grown-Up, and A Grown-Up knew How To Do Things, and when my car got broken into then someone would hand me the Big Book Of Insurance Information and I would be magically gifted with all the knowledge.  And I spent an inordinate amount of time chastising myself for not knowing how to buy a house, or not understanding how the stock market worked, or having no idea how my furnace worked in my apartment.
The truth was, I eventually realized, that yes, it’s all ad-libbed, and the best skill you can have as a grown-up is Investigation.  I don’t know how much about to make a claim on insurance!  But I know that there’s a number, and I can call someone there, and have them explain it to me, and then read whatever forms they send me.  Today, there’s an Internet I can look at, which is also fantastically helpful.
Which is freeing.  I still don’t know much about buying a house.  That’s because Gini had bought seven houses in her lifetime, and I let her be good at what she does, and in the unlikely chance I ever have to buy a house solo, I can do research.  I don’t have to know it all, and in fact the world is too damned big to carry all of this information I don’t need right now with me, so what if I don’t know how to start a fire in the woods or change my own oil?  It’s not relevant.  And if I want to learn it, great – certainly I’ve acquired all this silly info on beekeeping, despite the terrible job of it I’ve done this particular summer – but the point is that I’ve shifted away from the idea of Being A Grown-Up, and so I don’t have to memorize this arbitrary list of Things I Feel A Grown-Up Should Know.
And basically, my thirties and forties have become a journey in leaving roles aside and being me.  I still sleep around a lot, but I do it because I enjoy it, not because I feel it’s some sort of identity I must project.  I know a little more about the stock market, but my investments are mostly simple 401ks and a couple of IRAs, and I am comfortable knowing that my money isn’t completely optimized.  And I’ve discovered I’m not an Intellectual at all, I don’t enjoy many of the great classics, and while I can occasionally be smart in public I’m in no way diminished if I haven’t read War and Peace or if someone knows more about the Scottish independence movement than I do.
Basically, in my twenties, I felt this constant, vague shame that I wasn’t living up to something.  Now that I’m forty, I’m okay with being ignorant, and not fitting into anyone’s conception of me.
That’s a gift.  It’s a wonderful freedom.
I can’t wait to find out what an idiot I’ll think forty-year-old me was, once I get to be sixty.  I think that’ll be awesome.