If the 1980s had a tabletop card game, RESISTOR_ would be it

My friend's tabletop card game, RESISTOR_: Hacking on the brink of nuclear destruction comes to its close on Kickstarter in just a few hours. If you haven't heard about it yet, here's the promo video:

It's been a great run for Nicole and her partner Anthony, but it's not over yet. They met their goal early, and buzz about the game has been great, so they are setting a mystery prize-goal-thingee at a level four times their initial goal. Can they do it?

As I thought about this post, I realized that if there's a story here, it's in these three points:

great games are made by women but few know this,

great games can be simple,

great games don't get to be famous unless there's a groundswell of support from friends, friends of friends, and strangers--all saying, "Huh. That looks cool. I'm going to support it by buying a copy."

I was one of those early sponsors who supported RESISTOR during its first day. Word spread quickly via facebook, twitter, vine, instagram and online communication, and I thought about how much easier it is to connect with like-minded hobbyists and enthusiasts now as compared to the 1980s (the deacde in which I like to imagine these supercomputers battling it out). If you were lucky, you had access to compuserve or usenet. Most of the time, the newsletter arriving via the post office was the way enthusiasts kept in contact over vast distances. Maybe that's the point here:

Perhaps someday RESISTOR will have a digital version that we can play online--who knows, maybe we'll be reading a review by Chris Grant over at Polygon--but for now this game, that has set itself in the early days of the digitally networked world, that uses so many of the tropes that lay the groundwork for our current world in which we meet without really meeting, asks us to be in the same room to play it. It's wonderfully ironic.

I really hope RESISTOR reaches its new goal and Nicole unlocks the mystery at 40K. Heck, I hope the 705 backers turns into 7000 backers. I can't wait to see what Nicole and Anthony have planned.

I'm looking ahead to a few months from now, to the first time(s) that we all sit down to play this. I think that part of the magic of that first time will be this: all of the people that came together online to support this game, will be able to come together IRL.

And we'll be pretending to be computers trying to hack into each other. I love it.










 

The one where I tell you about poet Jill Khoury

My email gets backed-logged. If you know me personally, you know this truth. Then, some mornings, I sit down with a big mug of coffee and commit to reading every email. That's when I discover wonderful news buried in the bottom of a weekly newsletter from a company I often ignore (but shouldn't). One name among a list of recently published poets: Jill Khoury. The very cool Jill Khoury has had some poems accepted in the past week.

Who is Jill Khoury you ask? She's an old acquaintance of mine from college. Her words always carried a directness that I appreciated. She didn't take shit, yet she was kind enough to spend time listening to me jabber on those few times she was unlucky enough to run into me during my more desperate days. I've been watching her work appear here and there for the past few years, and I am excited to see her read in Minneapolis for AWP. Look for her work soon in Portland Review, Quaint, and SiDEKiCK. Look for her first full-length collection from Sundress Publications in 2016.

Sundress has a bio for Khoury on their authors page.

Here's her organized and helpful website.

These posts at Stephanae V. McCoy's Bold Blind Beauty impress me with their truth and honesty.

But what about the poems? That's the best part. Try these here and here -- and I enjoy this amusing one here.

Hire a Poet for Your Next Function

Eternally optimistic, I am not surprised that some enterprising folks are bringing poetry to the masses--and finally making money doing it.

In a Fast Company article published today with the irresistible clickbait title referencing "$225 an hour," author Elizabeth Segran describes The Haiku Guys and their "gigs." Weddings, birthdays, corporate events, you name it--they show up and work with the guests to write memorable haikus. Maybe it's a fad. So many activities at weddings and parties come and go, but members Lisa Markuson, Erick Szentmiklosy, and Daniel Zaltsman seem to have a few more tricks up their collective performance sleeves.

Yes, I would say this falls under the category of performance art--it's just not the kind of performance art mocked in popular media. And I love it--especially because it engages the audience (empowers, even?) and celebrates writing as communication tool and memento--not just part of an artifact that only has value when analyzed and dissected.

My only question, where are the Sonnet Dames?

Obviously there's room for growth in this field.

Beat the winter chill with handmade candles

As most know, the winter has been especially harsh on east coast residents this year. Boston has been buried, and while New York, Philly, Baltimore, and DC haven't had the New England snow totals, the relentless onslaught of freezing rain and annoying snow storms have made even the mightiest optimists feel gloomy. My solution has been to light candles that have been lovingly made by my brother.

He uses local beeswax and his background as an artist and researcher to create these amazing talismans against the numbing effects of this season. They smell beautiful. They make great gifts. They will lift your spirits. If you're interested in learning how candles can do this, visit his site.

Nothing like an afternoon coffee break with candlelight.

Poetry Saves Lives

The 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival reminded me that firmness and certainty are antithetical to truly magical writing--or at least to the type of writing I enjoy. I encountered none of this at Dodge.

Everyone I met and listened to at readings and panels seemed curious and generous. Perhaps the only certainty embraced was this: poetry should be an act of love.

Three magical moments for me: receiving a page of haiku from a stranger, listening to Dan Vera read, and receiving a handmade chapbook from a guy who admitted that poetry helps him cope with depression. While the first dozen or so pages are full of his poems, the back pages of the book are full of hotlines and numbers people can call for help if they are struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts.

While this Festival clearly addressed the engines of war and imprisonment that our country too often relies upon, I hope future festivals will address how our country still stigmatizes those grappling with mental illness.

If you're interested in seeing some of my tweets from Dodge (I tried to tweet about every event I attended) you can find me on twitter: @yesthatwarfield

The importance of being edited

If you've been a fan of Doctor Who for as long as I have, you understand that it is, at its core, a children's television show. That was how it was designed. Tom Baker knew this--he admitted as much in interviews on special edition DVDs. The writers know this. The actors know this. There has always been a certain amount of sloppiness that I think the show and its audience have tolerated--a certain gap between what's expected and what gets accomplished. The gigantic imaginations of the young (and young at heart) will seep into those gaps and make each episode seem smooth and magical.

However, this season, the gaps or sloppiness seem too large or ill-timed. It began with the writing of a practically gerontophobic Clara in episode 1, and smaller, hard-to-pin-down missteps in other episodes. One in particular grabbed me two weeks ago: Capaldi and Coleman are impressive actors, but even their talents cannot hold me in the scene below where a talented actor seems to be ill-placed by the director or forgotten by an editor. I took some screen shots and designed the following graphic to illustrate my point. What is supposed to be an emotional scene between the Doctor and Clara, becomes a film school lesson taught by Capaldi and Coleman.

Part of the fun of Doctor Who has been the acknowledgment of its fantasy elements:  a mysterious mad man in a magical blue chariot that's bigger on the inside, his screwdriver magic wand, the adventures he undertakes, and the oppressed he saves or empowers. The special effects have only recently gotten better, but I never tuned in for that. It was the fun.

As a kid, the fun didn't end when I considered how the mountains in my sandbox weren't real mountains. The fun ended when the adults distracted me. This my point about editing.

Editing is not simply the tidying up of mistakes. Good editing works to create a world that holds the audience, to let the audience feel embraced by the world of the text--whether it be viewer, listener, or reader.

Forest Moon of Endor is near Columbus, Ohio?

Can someone explain this to me?

It happened like this: I'm focused intensely on writing another poem about the Pine Barrens and my brain screams, "HEY! MARSHALL! DO YOU REMEMBER CALVIN AND HOBBES? WHAT DO YOU THINK IS GOING ON WITH BILL WATTERSON?!"

Well, this poem is sunk. Time to use the internet. So, it turns out Watterson has been in the news a bunch over the past few years (a Pearls Before Swine collaboration, the documentary Stripped, and other things). Also, the Thrill, the blogging arm of the Kenyon college newspaper, has been publishing some of his old college cartoons. WHERE IS KENYON COLLEGE, MARSHALL?!?! WHY DON'T YOU GOOGLE MAPS THAT?!?!?!

Thanks, brain. I can hear you just fine without--

CLICK IT!

Wait. What's that in the lower left corner?

Can someone explain this to me? I gotta get back to work.

Star Wars Screensaver Returns to My Desktop!

If you don't agree with me that this is the best screen saver ever, I will fight you--and legions of Star Wars nerds will be on my side. Okay, while I'm not that nuts, recent Star Wars Episode VII news has made me nostalgic for this old screensaver.

Computers come and computers go, but software on old 3.5 inch diskettes doesn't always make the move from 1994 computers to 2014 computers. But that's why there's Ebay, right?

Here are some screen shots of Jawas dismantling my desktop for scrap as part of the "Jawas" screen saver in Star Wars Screen Entertainment. The program includes other cool screensavers (listed for you over at the Wookieepedia here), but "Jawas" amuses me with its chaos. Not only do they scrap my desktop for parts, droids missing restraining bolts cause a bit of havoc. Banthas stomp onto the screen. Desert troopers double march firing blasters that blow "holes" in the desktop, womprats hop by, and--well I could go on listing the mess for at least another paragraph.

Share my nostalgia, won't you?

Hey, Poetry! What gives?

This past Saturday I had the honor of being on a panel designed to discuss the anxiety readers of poetry often feel. The day was lovely, and the light streaming through the large windows of the college library warmed the audience and my co-panelists Courtney Bambrick and Liz Abrams Morley. Anne Kaier moderated the session, at one point encouraging the audience to write down their anxieties about reading poetry. Courtney, Liz, and I responded to the anxieties.

I kept returning to the body, to breath, to performance. I described the feeling I get listening to poetry, and my experiences at the 2002 Dodge Poetry festival, where I finally learned that poetry didn't have to be such a polite and heady art--that it had to be felt. And sometimes, we don't "feel" a poem. I admitted that readers of poetry treat poetry too politely, that sometimes it's okay to treat it like music, to change the album, switch stations, or walk out.

The 2002 festival at Duke Farms, almost exactly a year after the attacks of September 11th, was a charged event; and it was impossible not to feel it in my body. I heard a tent full of people jeer some lines of Amiri Baraka's "Who Blew Up America?" I watched others leave a tent where the poet was reading boring poetry, and I heard Robert Bly read poems by Tomas Tranströmer (almost ten years before Tranströmer wins his Nobel). Bly reads with an enthusiasm and love. Three lines into his reading of Tranströmer's "Scattered Congregation," he stopped.

Bly asked us if he we could hear how great those opening opening lines were, how beautiful they were; and he told the audience that he was going to read them again because he liked them. Wow. I had never heard a poet do that before. His enthusiasm for the work shook me out of stuffy notions of how poetry should be read and listened to. It reminded me that poetry is to be experienced.

As I told these stories to the Rosemont crowd, I saw some nods in the audience. I continued. I read Billy Collins's poem "Introduction to Poetry" and Mark Strand's "Eating Poetry." I closed by reading part of the opening to Molly Peacock's How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle, where she discusses poems for their talismanic properties. She has some poems that she carried with her for years (memorized, yes, but also in paper form). A talisman is not an object that is precious or cherished per se. Its power doesn't come from its being coveted. No, it has deep symbolic power because of the sacrifices made for its construction.

A talisman seems to involve sacrifices of time, energy--perhaps more--and of course intention and devotion. Power is imbued into the object. On Saturday, I felt the power of the poems I read. The audience fell to laughter and silence.

I am now asking myself, "Am I showing sacrifice and devotion?" I have always had intention, but sacrifice? Devotion? Am I constructing an object that could serve as a talisman?

I consider two lines  I saw on Poetry Daily this morning:

...charcoal, the wood already burnt,
a sacrifice. 

These lines come from Marianne Boruch's "Pencil" in her book Cadaver Speak. I love these two lines for what they remind me about art.

Busy days ahead. I need the focus. I need the reminder.

Drexel Week of Writing 2014

I've been working on assembling two cool panel discussions for this year's Week of Writing at Drexel University, May 12-16. The guests are accomplished writers and professionals, and the topics are exciting. Details to be posted soon.

Last year, Nicole Kline helped to organize and participate in a fun and insightful panel where video game designers and video game writers talked about the craft of making video games. Amanda Lange (Tap-Repeatedly), William Stallwood (Cipher Prime), and Chris Grant (Polygon) joined us.

This year? Just you wait.

On the heels of the Mütter Museum. . .

. . .comes The National Kidney Museum.

I wonder what the museum's cafeteria serves?

Okay, okay, I know. I can hear the Onion headline now: English Professor Improves World by Mocking Typo in Local Newspaper.

It's still a funny typo.

To donate to the National Kidney FOUNDATION go to www.kidney.org/

I'm reading HEArt. Why, you ask?

I read HEArt because it is brilliant and tries to make a difference in the struggle for social justice. HEArt (Human Equity through Art) had its first incarnation back at the end of the twentieth century in Pittsburgh. Editor-in-chief, Leslie Anne McIlroy put together a solid little journal full of poetry, essays, interviews, and more--all aimed at contributing to a conversation promoting justice across lines of race, class, gender, and more. As a student in Pittsburgh at the time, I picked up the journal at readings. Each issue exposed me to marginalized writers and perspectives (and some more well-known writers, too), and I loved the blend of art, intellectualism, and activism. I also bought the journal to show support for McIlroy as a professional writer. I found her first book of poetry Rare Space to be straightforward in its look at where relationships can go right, where they can go wrong, and how we must move between spaces that we are forced into and spaces that we craft for ourselves. HEArt is the space for the artist as activist. HEArt took a few years off, and now it's back in an online form. The latest issue is chock-full-of poets, readings, essays, and interviews that don't simply shout into the wind.

The online journal continues to bring together a wide-range of voices in the struggle for social justice. It's worth listening to. Consider contributing, too. A resource like this takes more than love and kind words.

http://heartjournalonline.com/current-issue/