Divers Matters (aka N things make a post)

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With all the terrible news in the world right now (along with the deeply awful responses) I’m going to write about some personal stuff.

1. One of the regular features of this blog is the recurring Story Seeds posts: when I get a story idea that starts taking over too much of my thinking, I give it away here on my blog for anyone to use. Well, as I mentioned before, a writer ran with one of those ideas and sold his story. And now the anthology is out: Caped: An Anthology of Superhero Tales. His name is Stephen Kotowych. Check it out.

2. Everyone’s buzzing about the latest new awesome video game, so let me mention one I played right before my Portugal trip: it’s called PORTAL. Very fun and funny! I played Portal 2 immediately after, which was also fun and funny, although not as much. The cake is a lie! Right?

My kid has other ideas, and convinced me to preorder Fallout 4 for him. With our terrible internet, it took 2 days to download, but he’s been playing it regularly ever since and he loves it. Do you love post apocalyptic settings? You might like it, too, but if you wait ten years you can probably pick it up cheap and play it on an old computer.

3. For the first time ever, I figured I’d try NaNoWriMo, because I was having trouble getting momentum on the book after a month away. I’m supposed to write 50,000 words during November, and today is the 15th. The halfway mark. How many words have I gotten done? 8,000.

That would be fine if they were all excellent words in great scenes, but there’s at least one pivotal scene that I know I screwed up in a big way.

4. I mentioned this on social media, but I’m almost psyched to watch Jessica Jones on Netflix. I say “almost” because I don’t really have strong expectations, and might be deeply disappointed, but I still plan to start watching at midnight when it airs, just as I did for Daredevil.

This is the way I enjoy big corporate entertainments: I see them as quickly as I can, with little to no enthusiasm. This lack of excitement is why I usually find myself deep in online discussions of movies or shows without feeling even remotely like a “fan.” I think it’s also why online disagreements about a show, which usually feel clinical to me, can be so upsetting to other people, especially now that everyone has decided that casual conversations are “attacks from fans”.

5. The other video game that is taking over my life is Sentinels of the Multiverse, which started as a cooperative card game but was turned into a virtual card game last year. It’s a complex game, and frankly I found all the conditions impossible to keep track of when I had to jot them on pieces of paper. I much prefer to have the software keep track of all that for me, not to mention how much easier it is to read the cards on my screen.

Steam assures me that I’ve played this game for 83 hours this year, which doesn’t cover the many hours I played the version on my wife’s iPad. And while the graphics are colorful and the knock off superhero characters (pseudo-Flash, pseudo-Iron Man, etc) are cute, the different decks interact in interesting ways. Winning games becomes a matter of working out each deck’s strengths.

Anyway, Handelabra has created a free version of the game that you can download. You can play the free version with a tutorial that teaches you the game or you can turn that off. And while the paid version of the game comes with four villains, four environment decks, and ten hero decks, the free one has only a single villain and environment deck, with four heroes to oppose him.

So if you want to see not-Superman, not-Flash, not-Batwoman, and not-Iron Man take on not-Lex Luthor on Dinosaur Island, try out that game for free. There’s no time limit on it and you can play it as many times as you like.