And because it’s Christmas, I’ve got another gift: a piece published about me in the Literary Express, an Indian literary magazine.
Now I feel really like a “proper writer”.
If you feel like reading about me talking about myself (a topic I love discussing), you can find the piece HERE.
And while no one was looking, on Christmas Night, we went over 200.000 hits for the year 2020.
Thank you to you all, ladies and gentlemen.
Just a quick heads up, while dinner is being prepared, and I read a wonderful book called Why we love pirates, by Rebecca Simon, PhD – which is a story of piracy on the high seas, and matters related. The perfect Christmas read.
And in case you are interested, you can get this book – and a ton of other fun titles you’d probably missed (including a great book about anime, one about recycling old tech and one about… hamburgers), in the latest Humble Bundle.
Little more than ten bucks will keep you in quirky reads for months, and part of the proceeds go for a charity.
It’s Christmas, after all.
Arrr… I mean, happy holidays.
In the classic Christmas Movie Gremlin (hey, it is a classic!), the character of Kate observes how the Christmas season is the hardest day for lonely and depressed people.
While everybody else are opening up their presents, they’re opening up their wrists.
And indeed, a lot of people out there are being hit hard.
I usually realize things are taking a bad turn because my insomnia is replaced by absolute lethargy – I’d sleep all day, and it’s probably a coping mechanism, a way to shut out the problems.
Because they get thicker and weirder on Christmas, don’t they?
Yesterday I got an overdue payment bill that I thought I had discussed and settled with the guys.
I’ve got the money to cover it, but what the hell, a menacing letter two days before Christmas?
How come bills and hassles always hit us two days before Christmas?
And this morning both water and power were cut – because a pipe exploded somewhere because of the cold, and to work on it, they (accidentally?) cut the power for the whole village.
Merry Christmas.
Or something.
So, it’s going to be hard – this year probably harder than in the past.
We know it, we can take it.
Hold on tight out there, and if you feel the tide is rising too fast and you’re going to go under, reach out to someone and seek help. There is nothing wrong with seeking help.
And to cheer you up, here’s a song from another movie that deserves to be a Christmas classic.
Check it out.
And Happy Holidays.
I play mostly through the web these days, but I am still on the lookout for strange and new games that strike my fancy. I am not particularly hot for the so-called Old School Revival, that to me too often feels like people talking about how they would play, if they actually sat down to play, but are in fact too busy discussing the Byzantine minutiae of a pretty wooden gaming system that was developed before they were born. People that take themselves too damn seriously for my tastes, and that often flaunt unlikely degrees in Political Sciences or Modern Letters, usually applied to Fantasy Fiction (with a paper on P.K. Dick, or H.P. Lovecraft) or the Social Dynamics of the Gaming Ecosystem.
So, I often roam DriveThruRPG looking for something different – and if I maybe will never play it, well, at least it’s new.
A good example is Cruel & Unusual, a small, fiendishly clever game published by Sinister Beard Games and designed by Oli Jeffery; the game caught my eye thanks to a beautiful cover by artist Lenka Simeckova, and turned out to be something I will certainly, sooner or later, spring on my unsuspecting players. Possibly in a public place, when public places will become available again in the future.
Continue readingToday three stories of mine were rejected.
Rejection is part of the game, of course, and as the end of the year is drawing close, a lot of editors are clearing their desks – as a consequence, a lot of rejection slips are mailed at the same time.
Anyway, I decided to give myself a little gift as a pick-me-up – a way to keep the disappointment at bay.
And while I was browsing Amazon, the Almighty Algorithm informed me of the availability of the digital edition of Mark Schultz’s complete Xenozoic Tales, for the price of a cappuccino.
And I have the Paperback of the Tales here on my shelf but, well, why not?
After all, Mark Schultz is one of my favorite artists, and the Xenozoic Tales are part of my life growing up.
Cadillacs and dinosaurs, and all that.
I also thought I’d check out this digital edition, and then maybe give away a few copies as last-minute gifts to my friends.
Imagine my disappointment when, when finally my reader managed to open the ebook, I found out this is a pirate copy, patched together with very low quality scans.
An ugly rip-off.
So, I had to return the ebook, and ask for a refund, and then I sent a note to Amazon, informing them they are selling a pirate ebook, ripping-off the artist and the reader.
And this is not the first time it happens – in the last ten days I had to ask for refunds for two other ebooks, because they were not what the Amazon page was advertising.
It’s funny, in a very sad way: self-publishing should have freed us of the tyranny of the gatekeepers, and should have turned the whole process into a Darwinian selection that would award quality and contents; it turns out scammers and thieves are taking advantage of it instead.
A pity – especially for my friends, that will not get a copy of Schultz’ cadillacs and dinosaurs adventures anytime soon.
Something that struck me a few moments ago, while I was trying to put some order on my hard disk in preparation for a system update and some other administratrivia, is that in little more than ten days we’ll be in 2021 – the beginning of a whole new decade.
The third decade of the twenty-first century.
It probably comes from all those c heap movies I watched as a kid (and I still watch – sue me), those adventures set in the far future of 1997, 2001, 2018, but the idea of being going into the third decade of the century gave me a sort of shiver.
The future, so far, has failed to deliver much on the old promises – unless of course you were counting on the promises of cyberpunk. Those have been fulfilled with chilling earnestness.
In the 3rd decade of the 21st century, I will enter my 6th decade – at the same age, my father retired, my grandfather too. They were old men.
And now not only I do not feel like an old man, but of course I cannot retire.
My parents would have never imagined such a state of affairs. Still in the early years of the 21st century, they were the “regular 9-to-5 job” sort of people; the “why can’t you settle down and buy a house” people; they had been born when the nation was at war, had gone through the 1968 youth revolts, they had seen the TV been born, go from black and white to color, from 1 channel to 20, from 5pm-10pm to 24/7. They had witnessed terrorism and political scandal and more wars. Men had walked on the moon, computers had become commonplace in the workplace and in homes.
And yet they still expected the system would work the way it had worked for their fathers.
Finish school, find a job as a clerk, copying by hand old bills for thirty years while you build your retirement.
“Why do you waste your time playing with that computer instead of doing something real?”
I was not convinced, but of course I was the kid who read science fiction instead of “realistic stories”, and when I tried to explain that things would be different I caused great concerns in my family.
Why couldn’t I be normal?
Why had I to be such a disappointment?
And they had a long list of friends’ children that were “OK”.
Good office work, steady girlfriends, then a family, children, a dog…
In the last twenty years I’ve seen those OK kids be ground into fine powder and blown away – families exploded, jobs lost, lots of money spent on counselling and psychological assistance, their children leaving without a word, their dogs suing them for alimony.
For me and my brother’s been equally hard, but who knows, maybe because we did not have anything “normal”, we could not lose that.
And now here I am, going into the third decade of the 21st century – my parents, and their parents before them, had a solid body of unshakable certainties, while I do not know what will happen next.
But they were wrong.
Let’s see what hand is dealt to us next.
Karavansara 