Faraway Friends

            One of the great opportunities we have in our modern society is the simplicity of communicating through the internet. We take it for granted now, but just a couple generations ago, it didn’t even exist. If you wanted to talk to someone on the other side of the world, you either wrote a letter (and waited forever for the response to return) or made an expensive phone call (although, if you go back just a little further, even that wasn’t available).

            Now we just pop open the internet and within moments we’re having conversations with people all over the world. Marginalized groups, who previously felt alone in the world, have a way to discover they aren’t as alone as they thought.  People who otherwise would never have met become fast friends.

            Having spent much of my younger life playing online games, I’ve been lucky to have many such friends. More recently, though, my online friends have come in the form of my writing support group, the Alliance of Worldbuilders. We started out as a group focused on giving constructive criticism on each others’ writing, but grew into something much more – a group of good friends from around the world. We even published an anthology of short stories together.

            This week I had the great opportunity to meet one of those friends in person – she was on vacation nearby and she suggested we could get together (last month she had met up with a number of the others in the group who, like her, live in England and previously had met a number of others around the world as well). Opportunities like this rarely arise, so even though it meant leaving my house (blech!) and driving to and in one of the largest cities in the country (blargleblech!!!), Colleen and I decided to go meet her.

            After arriving late because I’d only planned for half the bad traffic we encountered, we the three of us hit it off fantastically. I think we actually got along better in person than online. I had expected that we’d visit for maybe an hour, but we ended up chatting for over three hours an everything from writing to social issues to plotting global domination (forget I said that last one). My first meeting with an online friend was a huge success.

            For me, it highlighted the wonderful opportunities afforded to us through the internet. It had the marvellous capability of bringing together people who, in a past age, could never have met. What’s so great about this? The discovery that all the people across the world aren’t all that different from ourselves. Previously, all we could go on for picturing people of other nations was derived from meeting a few here and there, maybe travelling, and hearing from other peoples’ descriptions of then. This, of course, all gets simplified down into the stereotypes that still survive today.

            Yet, now, those stereotypes are tempered by the ability to go online and talk to almost anyone. We can really meet and find out about each other; discover how similar we are. In spite of the people clinging to the past – insisting it’s us against them – cultures from around the world are being brought closer and closer together.

            What a wonderful potential this has for changing how we view the world.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Experiences

            Looking back over my blog posts, I’m astounded at how rarely I mention my LARPing days. This should probably change, as it was what my whole life revolved around for close to four years.

            Firstly, for the uninitiated, what is LARPing? It’s short for Live Action Role Playing. The quickest way if describing it is that once a week I’d dress up in a costume and go out to a park with a group of friends. We would then proceed to have fights using pool noodle swords and yell the magic spells that our fantasy-based game (Amtgard) had. It’s a bit more complicated than that, with playing the roles of characters and solving puzzles in quests, but that’s the general gist of it.

            It sounds strange, I know. When our local group was first founded and my best friend and I were invited to join, we almost didn’t go. But we figured that it was worth trying out – and it sure sounded safer than the fighting with wooden swords we’d been doing – so we went and we were hooked. We both became part of the core of the group and were soon heavily involved in running the group.

            If I had gone with my initial “that’s weird” instinct and never joined, I would have missed out on some amazing experiences. Two, in particular, come to mind. I think of them as being “movie experiences” because... well, they felt like I was in the middle of a movie. They felt like they shouldn’t be possible, yet they were happening.

            The first happened at an event called Battle of the Dens, hosted by the largest Amtgard group in Canada. Hosted on a large, forested private property, this event allowed us to have night-time battles. As I am a sneaky type, and played as an assassin, this suited me quite well. One night, a group of us ran a mini-game were one team played the a caravan and the other – a team of assassins – set up ambushes. It was wonderful, but one moment stands out the most. The team of six assassins were stalking our prey, creeping through a field of long grass under the starry sky. I stuck my head above the level of grass to get my bearings, and saw nothing but a field of grass stretched out before me. Then another head popped up. And another. Just like raptors in Jurassic Park. One by one, we vanished back down into the grass. It was amazing.

            Still, as great as that was, it doesn’t compare in outright feeling to a three-way battle we had one day. This was during a summer when our group had its largest number of members. There were three teams of about ten people each, competing with each other. Being clever and strategic, my team was letting the other two weaken each other until they caught on to what we were doing. Then they teamed up against us. Our small team was down a hill from the other two, and I was at the head. The enemy army, twice the size of ours, came pouring down the hill. I stepped out into the fray, swinging to the left and right, cutting down my enemies as they streamed past me to engage with the rest of my army. It was a glorious moment, straight out of a movie, and before I had done it myself I never believed it was possible to survive an onslaught like that. But, I did, and we won – and though it was “only” part of a game, to this day it remains one of the greatest moments of my life.

            Yet, every now and then, I wonder, what would have happened if I’d decided not to try out this game that I first thought was crazy – as do most people I tell about it. How many experiences would I have missed out on, just because I thought it might be embarrassing to dress up and go sword-fighting in public? Or because I was shy and uncertain about joining a group of mostly strangers? Some things we just have to try to find out what they’re really like. Otherwise we can miss out on the most important experiences of our lives.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Strange Gatherings

            One of the most fascinating things to me is how quickly complete strangers can bond over common interests. This could partially be because I, as an extremely introverted person, tend to prefer staying home and avoiding as much social interaction as possible. The idea is somewhat alien to me that people actually seek out social situations. That said, I do occasionally emerge from under my rock to mingle with the living.

            Last Thursday was one such occasion. The vast excitement over Pokemon Go had bred whole new social circles. There are now Facebook groups focused on helping each of the three in-game teams co-ordinate their catching and gym battling efforts within their city, as well as sharing their latest victories.

            On my team’s local group (team Mystic), the idea came up to throw a PokeParty at one of the local parks – just to get together, meet each other, have a barbeque and maybe battle the nearby gym. Within a few weeks, the pavilion was rented and the event was organized. They even decided to open the even to the rival teams.

            So, Colleen and I thought, why not? We went down to the park with my sister-in-law to see what it would be like, catch some pokemon, and maybe meet some people if it couldn’t be avoided.

            Now, this was an all-day event, which was nice for making it available for people with many different schedules. The flip side was that the result was that, rather than a whole lot of people, there was a small amount of people there with the members changing throughout the day. As an introvert, I greatly approved of this.

            For most of the two hours we were there, there were seven of us there. We flipped between hanging out as a group while eating hamburgers and wandering between the nearby pokestop and gym. All of us got along astoundingly well – not surprising, since we were all team Mystic.

            Then the gym was claimed by some team Valor players. Through struggling back and forth for control of the gym and watching the nearby people, we were able to identify the three rivals who were, like us, wandering between the pokestop and gym. So, after we claimed the gym a filled it full of magikarp (Pokemon players will understand how hilarious this is), one of the party’s organizers approached the Valor players and invited them to join us for some hamburgers.

            So, the party grew – and, despite the playful trash talk (now mostly aimed at the not-present team Instinct players), we all got along wonderfully. While I wasn’t there for the rest of the event, I think it can be considered quite a success.

            It’s even more interesting, though, when you look at our current society. We’re told from childhood to beware of strangers. We avoid all contact with people we don’t know. It’s like we have this fear that anyone we don’t know is a horrible person, or someone we wouldn’t get along with.

            Yet, all it took was a single point of interest to bring together a group of people who would never have spoken to each other. Not only that, but that point of interest (and food) was enough to ignore that we were on rival teams and competing for control of a gym. There was reason (at least for extremely competitive people) to be antagonistic, but we were all friendly.

            It seems to me that all it takes for people to get along is one thing in common. I wonder how much better a place the world would be if people, when looking at others, looked at the similarities rather than the differences (and maybe shared some food).

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Rules of Time Travel

            In fiction, there are three main concepts for time travel. Each of them have their own rules that must be followed in order to maintain consistency.

            One of these methods is the constant timeline. This is the theory that events throughout time cannot be changed at all. Characters can travel backwards or forwards in time, but anything they change was already accounted for and had been changed for them. A perfect representation of this is in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where the characters travel back in time in order to save some lives, only to discover that they had done so all along – one of them had even caught sight of themselves before they knew they were traveling back.

            Next is the theory that time is fluid. In this theory, a time traveler can go through time, changing whatever they want – and, in turn changing the future, sometimes with disastrous results. This is sometimes tempered by a rule that history will work itself out, such as in the Dr Who series where the Doctor and his companions are constantly saving people and changing things without altering the course of history.

            Thirdly, we have the dimensional theory. In this case, as in the fluid one, time travelers can change the course of events, but each change branches off a new dimension of reality. The changes are there for the people moving through time, but the other dimension (where the time travelers came from) usually remains unchanged. I some cases, if a big enough change is made, this method allows some branch dimensions to be erased, or at least cut off from the other dimensions. An example of this can be seen in the Back to the Future movies, were the main character nearly causes himself to have never existed – and later finds himself in an alternate timeline that is nearly apocalyptic.

            Now, it really doesn’t matter which theory of time travel is used for any particular work of fiction. It needs to be chosen to fit both the story and the world well. The important part is that once a rule set is chosen, it gets stuck to. Every story – or series – needs to follow the same rules, without jumping from one rule set to the other. As soon as the established rules are broken, the internal consistency is broken and the believability of the story falls to pieces.

            So, if you use time travel, choose and choose well. Then stick to it, no matter what.

            This semi-ranting blog has been inspired by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – an good story, except for the part where the internal mechanics do not match those established earlier in the series.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Ebb and Flow

            Something that I find amazing about working an art-related job is that there’s no telling what items will sell, or when. Selling chainmaille this past weekend at ConBravo! was mind-boggling – I never could have predicted the way our sales went.

            First, some background. When Colleen and I first started attending shows with Ringcrafts, we had no idea what to expect. We didn’t know what would sell – or how much. As a result, we managed to over-prepare by quite a bit. We made five of each chainmaille design we had on hand, only to learn that at any given event we would rarely sell more than one or two of any given item.

            Well, we learned. We cut back to three of each item, and when something proved popular we would up the number to five. Alas, as soon as we had plenty of said item, it completely stopped selling. Plus, we discovered that we were having trouble finding space to store and transport everything as our variety steadily grew larger.

            So, we fine-tuned our system. When we make something new, we now only make one. If it sells, we make two for our next show. After that, every time we sell out of a particular item, we add one more to the total that we keep on hand – the idea being that we’ll always have one available for display. This is working remarkably well, and in part helps predict what is most popular and what will sell well.

            This year, though, has been very strange. Items that have never sold before are suddenly our most popular items – alongside things that were popular in our first year selling, but that have received little interest for three years.

            This weekend continued that trend, but in a new and unexpected way. Usually, most of what we sell are our low-to-mid priced items – keychains, bracelets, necklaces, earrings and such. We usually sell a tie or two per show and a few dragons, those being items that are getting into a higher price range.

            At ConBravo! this weekend, we were astounded by the number of large items we sold – not only did we sell a beanie, belt and coif (higher priced items that rarely sell), but someone bought the chainmaille Spiderman mask that we’ve had on display for over two years. We were blown away – with the track record, we’d thought it would never sell.

            We’ve talked to other vendors and artists, and they all say the same thing: you carry items around and have them on display for years without selling one. Then, suddenly, they’ll become the most popular product you have.

            The ebb and flow of what is popular really is an inscrutable thing. I’m very interested to see in what direction this latest trend will carry us – and what will happen next.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.