Stumbling Out of the Gate

“If I didn’t have so much of this life all wrong, I would have gotten it right by now.”

– Buddy Wakefield, “The Information Man”

So here we are. When last our heroes met, I talked about how I was rebooting the Captain Hammer Project, and embarking on an action-filled romp with an ethnically diverse group of kids to find a lost treasure only to discover that the greatest treasure of all was inside of us all along. Meaning of course, self love.

And then I pretty much face-planted at the starting gun.

Historically speaking, I’ve been able to accomplish more burning hate as fuel. I’ve done some impressive things in terms of weight loss, but it comes at a pretty terrible cost. You use self-hate to motivate you, to power you through that workout, to make the better intake choices, etc., and when you succeed, it validates that hate. Feeds it. Makes it grow. Something something two wolves inside of you. I had lost a person’s worth of weight, and was no happier for it. People would shower me with praise, and I could only see what I hadn’t yet accomplished, and it made me bitter. Hate in, hate out. I made my demon stronger even as I was making huge strides towards my fitness goals.

Strides that as I mentioned in the last post have since been undone, but not because I learned a better way. All of that ended up being for nothing. I wrote the last post clawing myself out of blackness and setting an intention to learn to do better, both by means of results and the methods taken to achieve them. Then I was told something that really tore all of that down, and reintroduced shame into the menu. It took a bit for it to sink in. It was a difficult enough conversation by itself, I’ve alluded to the insane difficulties I’ve faced in the past few weeks. The short version was being told about someone else’s accomplishments in a way that made them….better than me? Oh, maybe there’s some nuance, or maybe that’s not the communication that was intended. but that’s what stuck.

And it burned.

Even now typing this, my jaw is clamped shut in silent rage. But, that’s okay. These are fires I know how to grow. This is my specialty, and I aim to start a fire visible from orbit.

*sigh*…which is NOT exactly the right lesson to learn here. I told one of my best friends about this, and how consumed I was feeling by the desire for revenge, and how this transformation would make me “win.” My friend just told me to examine and reflect on what my definition of win was. And she was right to do so. Buddha said that holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Revenge can’t be a part of this, for about a million reasons. First, it’s short-sighted and this is a long game. Second, that kind of sustained rage is really bad for you on multiple levels, this is something I have extensive experience with. Third, and maybe most important, it. just. doesn’t. fucking. matter. Accomplishing everything I talk about here doesn’t change what made me feel this scorn. So what is the point of that save to torture myself? What am I doing bothering to write this out if I refuse to learn the lessons I so desperately need to learn?

So hate can’t be the answer, but I really struggle with the love part. People keep saying “you have to love yourself” but I ask WHO THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE THAT CAN DO THIS?! I actually leveled this at my friend, furious at the suggestion that it is somehow simple, or even possible. She told me that for her, she didn’t drink herself unconscious anymore, and that she stopped sleeping around, and these were acts of self-love. This prompted further introspections on how to open myself up to this, She’d suggested that hating yourself is like sitting in a field with a pile of rocks. The rocks are all of the bad things that have happened to us. All of the reasons we hate ourselves, hate the world, hate other people, etc. All of the evidence we need to support that hate. We sit with our heads down, hitting ourselves over the head with rocks, throwing them at ourselves and at times others. In this practice, we also torture the people we love by making them watch us do this. She poses that if we take a moment to be mindful, we will notice that everyone around us also has a pile of rocks. Some people are hitting themselves with rocks, others are throwing rocks at other people. Self love, she says, is being able to sit next to the rocks, feel the sun on our skin, look at the ants and the flowers and listen to the birds.

This is another problem for me. I appreciated the sentiment, but…I don’t appreciate those things. I definitely take them for granted, and celebrating that feels silly at best and insignificant at worst. Opting to look at flowers and ants instead of hitting myself with rocks just feels like I’m trying to stop the bleeding, and I don’t know how to wring joy from that. You see, for me, love is a joyous concept. It doesn’t have to be an idyllic fantasy, a fairytale, something fantastic and ultimately unrealistic, but I really need it to feel good. I really struggle to recognize taking actions that just stop or slow my decline as love. Meanwhile, it’s exhausting to keep fighting for stability and to keep my head above water. How does one ever just .be. happy. with themselves?

“I cannot teach him, the boy has no patience.”

Thanks, Yoda. This peels back another layer in the rotten onion that is my innermost psyche, that I am famously impatient with myself while having a near bottomless well of patience for others. I need to get my two-cycle weed whacker of a brain on board with the concept that maybe the goal for now just needs to be the mitigation of hate. Something something walk before you run or something. That there’s no switch you can flip to go from self-hate to self-love. Like everything else, this is going to take time, dedication and effort, and you’re not going to see the results of it until they are unexpectedly tested and you can say “Wow, old me would have reacted much worse to that.” Everything therapeutic takes for-eh-ver. But this, as much as I hate it, is pretty clearly the correct answer.

The bigger takeaway from her point for me was how much it sucks to watch someone you love hit themselves with rocks. I recall a point when my favorite person on the planet had written something about how they didn’t want to be around anymore and how much that destroyed me. I think that this will likely be very difficult to put into practice, but I think that trying to occasionally see yourself through the lens of someone close to you is probably a good mental exercise.

None of this makes me feel anything. I guess I’m grateful that I don’t feel resentful or bitter about it, but it sure would be nice to feel good about it. About anything. Ultimately I need to learn to appreciate and love myself in a way where I can look in a mirror and smile at the guy I see rather than suppress the urge to destroy the mirror. And the road to getting there is going to be long and hard. These are the only tools I’ve acquired as to where to start with that. So with just a blank parchment to draw my own map on, I’m going to start with a plan. A series of behaviors to mold into habits, and a hope that maybe with enough persistence, something will click some day and this concept of self-love won’t be so paralyzingly inaccessible.

Today I signed up my kid and I with a summer gym membership, for both motivation and to lead by example.

Last night I did some online research and ordered myself a bunch of supplements and digestives to revitalize my gut flora.

I’ve already gotten back on my anti-depressants.

Sunday I wrote out a meal plan to hold myself to to guide my shopping decisions and to avoid getting food deliveries which frequently compromise these goals with low quality ingredients and portion size that encourages overeating.

I’ve put myself on a moratorium with the tabacky of the wacky variety, as I tend to not do anything overly productive if I’ve indulged. Eventually I would like to re-introduce this as a reward. I don’t get to do this unless I’ve accomplished the other things that I needed to do to further my goals here.

And of course, I’m trying to stay accountable by publicizing what I am going through to my 3 readers and forcing transparency on myself. Is this going to work? Can it possibly work? I guess, but it’s going to take a lot. I’m staring down a mountain here, and I will destroy it pebble by pebble.

Episode For: A New Hope

So I came back here to the mouth of the river. To look at my own reflection under the moonlight, and see what it says for myself, where down my whole body it is written: “P.S. See me for who I am. We’ve got work to do.“

– Buddy Wakefield “Human the Death Dance”

*taps mic*

…is this thing on?

Yeah, I know the title has a misspelling. It’s intentional, you nerd.

Wow. So, uh, yeah. I guess it’s been a while, huh? And what a while it was. How radically different a world we live in than the one where I last spoke to you, my 2.84 readers. We all witnessed a shitshow of the most epic proportions with the turn of leadership in the country. We saw the world grind to a halt under a global pandemic. We have all changed.

There’s a lot to talk about, where I’ve been these past few years (SPOILER ALERT: hiding under a rock), what I’ve been doing, etc. And then more importantly to talk about where I’m going. So let’s jump in, shall we?

“You’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here”

Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been a terrible narrator. I can’t even blame the pandemic. I stopped writing here long before that was a thing. At the time, I was going through a pretty rough breakup. I was struggling with my mental health. While I was seeing a therapist regularly, I was off my psych meds (more on that later). It took a long time for me to pull out of that. I had tried to remain friends with the ex in question, but that proved too difficult. She took me to lunch for my birthday in…2019? 2020? She told me that she would always love me. And I had to tell her that the only way for me to heal was to cut her completely out of my life. That was an incredibly difficult decision to make and to execute. She had told me then that she’d gotten me a gift for my birthday already but it had not been delivered yet and she still wanted to give it to me. A couple of days later, there was a plastic shopping bag hanging off of my apartment door with this inside of it.

She bought it for me before I excommunicated her. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. And a choice piece of irony that her last gift to me, bought before the meeting and delivered after it, embodied what had to be. Of course it didn’t strictly end there and I continued to punish myself for reasons that I can’t even make sense of in hindsight, before a dear friend of mine pointed out that my behaviors were more like an addict than the bearer of a broken heart. Which I needed to hear. That perspective really helped me to bring that chapter of my life to its finale.

And then the world closed.

The pandemic was…not good to me. Dutifully, I was vaccinated, boosted, and kept pretty strict adherence to social distancing rules. Maybe too good. I leaned into the curve a bit too hard there. My work had become remote. I had groceries delivered rather than put myself amongst the hoi polloi. I avoided people whenever I could, and was masked when I could not. But then I started avoiding people online too. I was becoming more and more reclusive, and isolation was having some weird and unfortunate effects on me. It got to a point where I was having mild panic episodes about the idea of being around other people. And so I stayed inside. And worse, it more or less undid all of the work that so many of the other posts in this clownshoes blog talk about. I’d put on weight. I’d started hiding myself more. This is not to say that the whole time I simply devolved into madness. I actually did end up meeting someone else through a very unlikely means, whom this post is indirectly dedicated to. Things ultimately did not work out, which is besides the point save to say that it brought me back here. But failing that, I was frequently alone with just my thoughts, which have historically never really been my friends. I felt more and more distant from the species, and this was a struggle for me to begin with. Even in relatively “good” times, I frequently felt like life was a movie being projected on a screen that I was standing in front of and trying to blend into. To anyone looking remotely closely, myself included, it was obvious that I did not belong. But this got worse. I got to a point where I felt like an astronaut drifting in space, and I was terrified to look behind me to see that I was no longer tethered to the shuttle, that all there was left was me and the vast, cold emptiness.

Therapy was having diminishing returns. I wasn’t talking to much of anyone. I was desperately lonely, isolation was actively damaging me. People would make plans with me, and I would secretly pray that something would force a cancelation, even though I needed that connectivity point for survival at that point. My therapist had recommended that I go back on my antidepressants. I’d been off of them for a number of years, citing the solid progress I was making in therapy. I didn’t feel like I needed them anymore. I certainly didn’t notice the glacial pace of my degradation, but the bigger issue was that I didn’t care. I had front row seats to my decline, and was utterly apathetic to it. With nothing left to lose, I went back on my antidepressants. A month later, things were making more sense. None of my problems had gone away, but my ability to process and deal with them had greatly improved. In fact, this last week was the best I’d felt in years. Better living through chemistry, indeed.

And then the bottom dropped out.

I’m not going to go into detail about specifically what happened to catalyze such a huge change, at least not yet, but I can tell you that the fallout was ugly. The past 3 days I have spent mostly crying. I normally have a very manly cry. Some balled up fists, a single dramatically stoic tear, sometimes even two, and some short panicked breaths before I regain my composure. Oh no, this was bad. Ugly crying. Screaming, wailing, gallons of snot. I was completely out of my mind. Oscillating between a searing fury and the deepest and most profound sense of loss I have ever experienced. I didn’t cry like this when my mother passed away. I didn’t cry like this at the aforementioned breakup. I’ve never cried like this for anything. I went from feeling engaged and optimistic and ready to take my life to new places and experiences and dare I say heights, to spending last night on a crisis hotline at my lowest point. It’s been…a lot.

“ummmm…*exhale*….ah….are you okay?”

I bottomed out. I’ve had a lifetime dealing with depression, trauma and self-loathing, and I’ve never been as angry with myself in my life as I’ve been the past few days. I’m talking white-hot anger. It burned me out, and left me hollow. And when the flames subsided, the embers cooled, and the ashes were carried away by the wind, all that remained was me alone in the quiet darkness, with a single glowing strand of light to pull myself out with.

Hope.

I’ve dealt with so much hate in my life. Most of it directed at me, by me. It has at times acted as a motivator of some sort, but if we’re honest, it was always more of a burden than a help, even at its best. And I’ve never really had a lot of success with self love, but I feel that this is the only thing left to me. And it’s very alien. A vast sum of currency for a country that no longer exists. A book with all of the answers written in a language I cannot comprehend.

“Okaaaaay….soooooo…what now?”

What comes next is my attempt to grow. To create. To maybe even become more human. And I can’t do it alone. That’s where you come in, my 4 readers. I’m making a series of commitments here. I am relaunching The Captain Hammer Project. It’s funny to me that I could update my end fitness goal to something more relevant, but naaaaah. I’ll be documenting that journey and all of its ups and downs here. I’ll be starting to write about games again. Or trying to. Playing games that people want to read about means playing with people in real life. Which just typing that made my stomach clench. I’ll be doing my best to update regularly. With no more excuses about why I have not.

And in a wildly uncharacteristic fashion, I’m asking for your support. I don’t know how to love myself. But I have to learn, and I know I am not alone. We are all healing from something, so let’s do it together. Feel the fear…and do it anyway.

Leave comments. Let me know that there are eyes on me, always watching, always judging, and if you feel like it, maybe even always cheering. At some point this will turn into something I do for me entirely, but until then, I need to know that I’m doing it for you…for us, and I don’t want to let you…us down.

Healthy Gamer: Right Here, Right Now

“I used to do a little, but a little wouldn’t do, so the little got more and more. I just keep trying to get a little better, said a little better than before.” – “Mr. Brownstone” by Guns N’ Roses

So…been a while. I’m not going to talk about where I’ve been this past…however long it’s been. Not yet anyway. Coming back here after so long reminded me that I had a fun plan associated with this whole fitness thing, a cosplay idea, and I want to resume that, even though the longer this process takes, the less relevance said cosplay character has, so better get moving.

Welcome to the Captain Hammer Project ver. 2.0: A Man on Fire. Time for the plan. 

Guild Masters: A PSS Kickstarter (P)review

So it’s been a bit since my last post. I’ve been pretty busy lately. About 2 months ago I got a new job, and it’s been a bit of a ride. I was with my last job for 16 years. Six. Teen. So the “reset button” impact is fairly deep. So far, it’s been a blast. I honestly love my new job, I enjoy being there, I feel good about what I do and there is a persistently positive atmosphere amongst my coworkers. I’m good at my job.  I’ve been ranking in various spots on the top 10 list across a number of sales metrics, 3 of which with me at number 1 in the company.  Today the CEO told me that he’d caught wind of me forcing a customer to play along with our Halloween puns. (I told her that the discounts she was being offered were “spooktacular” but I wasn’t going to offer her to them unless she repeated it back to me) He approved. It’s a nationwide company, I’ve been there 2 months, and the CEO knows who I am.  Dare I say this place might have a noticeably positive impact on my general well-being.

But I digress. Love the new job, very busy life, but I promise I’ll be writing more, you know the drill. Let’s smile approvingly at my lie and move on.

Being busier than normal has caused me to see my time a little differently. I don’t get to play nearly as much as I would want to, so when I play a new game and it’s mediocre, I feel the cost of opportunity more acutely. Naturally, this makes me a bit less adventurous lately when it comes to game selection; but when I’m also obligated to write a review for the game, that doubles the stakes. If the game sucks, I’m out the time for the game AND I have to invest more time writing about it in order to maintain the last remaining sliver of my professional credibility, imaginary though it may be.  So when I am contacted with the request that I scribble about a game getting ready to start its crowdfunding adventure, if I agree, I am taking a leap of faith that I will not regret the commitment. I’m glad to say that the latest leap paid off.

Game: Guild Masters
Publisher: Mirror Box Games
Players: 2-5
Ages: 14+
Time: 60-90 min.
Coming to Kickstarter October 2016

So What It’s About?

Guild Masters is a tightly designed Euro game where you are the master of a guild of adventurers. You kinda had to see that coming. You don’t go out and do any of that icky adventuring though; you leave getting the bruises and blood spatters to the brutes. You’re going to supply the goods for their forays in exchange for a share of the spoils of their conquests, by means of Gold and Treasure Cards which you will use to further enhance your guild.

Cool, cool. How’s it work?

Pretty simple, actually. Each turn you can take one action, from 3 choices.

1. Gather – Taking the Gather action allows you to collect resources. You can take three of a single type, or one of two different types.  The resources are Cloth, Metal, Leather, Wood, Magic, and Gems. The last two you cannot collect without a special means to do so.
2. Craft – Taking the Craft action allows you to choose a Quest from a queue of 5 and craft the necessary equipment to complete the Quest, which requires an expenditure of resources collected with the Gather action. Completing a Quest has rewards of Coins and Treasure Cards, many of which contribute towards end game scoring or provide powerful temporary bonuses. The Quest deck also acts as the game clock.
3. Upgrade – Buy one Room and/or Buy one Worker. Rooms provide additional benefits to your Guild such as increased storage space for resources (yes, you have limitations) and a variety of ways to score more Prestige (victory points) for pursuing specific strategies. Workers are people you can hire to help you run your guild better.

Each time a Quest is completed, the person who completed it takes the card and places it next to their Guild, and a new Quest from the Quest deck is added to the queue. The Quest deck is made up of two ages and at the bottom of the deck is a card that signifies the arrival of the King, and the end of the game. When the King arrives, everyone gets one more turn and then the game is scored. There’s a really novel twist at this point in the scoring process, and in determining the winner. Ah, just fucking with you, chump. The winner is  whomever has the most Prestige when the King shows up, after scoring across a number of different criteria.

Things What I Liked About Guild Masters

So earlier, I said that the game was tightly designed. Actually the publishers said that in their pitch to me, but I agree with their assessment completely. Here’s a few reasons why.

No AP Traps – While the choices that you’re making are definitely important to your strategy, at no point did I feel like those choices were agonizing. This leads to the next compliment I can pay to the game, namely…

Good Tempo – Once we had taken a few turns, the game became fairly intuitive, and the turns were going quickly. This means little downtime off turn, which leads to the next thing I like about Guild Masters…

Scales Well – The Rooms, Workers, amounts of Resources, and the Quests all change with the number of players, and while it doesn’t have perfect scaling like 7 Wonders where the length of the game isn’t really impacted by the number of players. The speed of turns with multiple players keeps the game flowing smoothly. That is not to say that the experiences are similar. Multiple players plays a bit differently than head to head, which reminds me…

Hits the sweet spot between Tactical and Strategic. In the short terms, you are dealing with Resource scarcity, hand management and optimizing the timing of your actions to mitigate the losses of opportunity that will inevitably occur when your opponents take their actions; all while keeping an eye on the game clock for some long game point bombs. While VP is the only way to win, there are several different ways you can focus on how to acquire them, each with their own flavor and priorities on how to execute them.

Things I Didn’t Care For As Much

The only critique I have for the game is that the two player game can feel a little too quick, which is easily enough fixed by just adding some Quests to the deck. That’s a pretty ringing endorsement when I have to try hard to find faults with the game.

Thoughts As A Designer

From a design standpoint, there is a lot to love about Guild Masters. The game communicates almost exclusively through iconography and the iconography is simple to understand. Decisions are simple without being automatic and have complex and satisfying results. It’s rife with expansion potential. It’s got asymmetrical starting points, which I am always a huge fan of. The scoring system encourages different avenues of strategy. It’s easily accessible and plays quickly, or if it doesn’t actually  play quickly, it feels like it does and that’s probably better. Nothing feels extraneous. How many games can you honestly say that about? Guild Masters is a very clean and well executed design.

In Conclusion

In an effort to keep this relatively concise, I skipped over a lot of things I liked. It’s easy; while I wouldn’t call it a gateway game, any gamer worth their dice will be able to pick up on this quickly. A few games in, I felt like Guild Masters was the illegitimate lovechild of Lords of Waterdeep and 7 Wonders, and I mean this in the most complimentary way. Both of those games are favorites with solid reasons, and Guild Masters touches on things to like from  both pedigreed parents while not feeling derivative of either. At the end of the day, the highest praise that I can give any game is that “I enjoyed this, and I would be happy to play it again.” This doesn’t sound like very high praise, but when your time is as limited as mine is, that whole “would be happy to play again” is kind of a big deal. Besides, isn’t that really the goal of any game?

Mirror Box Games is a publisher that continues to impress me with solid offerings to the hobby. (Their first release Chaosmos is one I am still working on a special review for). Guild Masters is coming to Kickstarter, and is a game I enthusiastically endorse as being worthy of your support.