Category Archives: Play

Butchery

In my kitchen I’m not supposed to be executioner. I have my meats butchered before I buy them.

But one meat, not yet cooked—the cat—scratched at the sliding door. Out, out, brief kitten: I opened the door just enough so she can slide on through.

And then it was back to the babe or something equally needy.

Meows from the door—the cat is back. Then come in, it’s open, cat, despite the cold air you’re letting in.

In she comes, finally, persuaded that the meat inside is better than whatever dead things inhabit the porch.

And I go to close the door because the cat can’t be bothered to do it herself.

And I heard something squish, maybe—just the tiniest sound above the crunch of the door shutting, another, more personal, crushing.

But I didn’t hear it and I went to wash my hands because it seemed I hadn’t done that recently enough.

When I returned to the window I saw there was another meat stuck in the crack between sliding door and sill: Pentatomidae—the one of the five. A stink bug.

The back of its carapace was stuck between pane and glass. I hadn’t seen him when I’d closed it: I hadn’t known to look for him.

Unsure what to do I slid the door open: he stuck for a moment, suspended in space upon a drop of yellow insides. And then perhaps he remembered gravity and embraced it, falling to the kitchen floor so many stories below.

I went to get a tissue but there were none: never mind, a baby wipe will clean this up, too, put him out of his misery.

Butchery in the kitchen: crushed insect in my hands.

Then I bent down over the sill and folded over the wipe to find a clean side, bones safely inside, and cleaned the sill with what was left of the rag.

Because when else am I going to get down and clean that thing.

 

 

Application for Statehood

May 5, 2023:

 

All right, England, it appears you’ve applied for American statehood. Guess the Ukraine’s successful bid must have given you confidence, hmmm?

Well, we’ll see about that.

You brought your application? Thank you.

And the statehood checklist? Great, let’s take a look:

 

Love of sweet and fried things? Check.

World War winner: Double-check!

Bands of roving teen goths? Even more than America has. Remember, this one counts against you.

Consumer of American pop culture? Whether you like it or not!

You like to vote for morons? All right, so far so good.

Troubling history with native peoples? Done and done!

Ever been a sovereign nation previously? Not a problem, on our side. So was Texas, and it hasn’t Texited yet.

Disconnected from the Continental United States? Well, so is Hawaii, and the only difference there is the ridiculous shipping rates and restrictions. And the Spam thing.

Tipped cap to empire but every once in a while asking yourself, what if? Yes that’s all right.

Do you like Star Wars? Okay, cool. We can beat that dead horse together.

Good food? Well, the old empire did give you something.

Have you hosted American football games? All right, baby, you’re in, just—

Wait, wait—it says here you have a Queen? I’m sorry, we actually. Oh, she also loves football?

 

Welcome home, love.

 

(Ed. note: Elizabeth reigns forever, it turns out, much to Charles’s chagrin.)

My Laughing Boy

What is he? Sitting there. His face contorts: the eyebrows rise, the lips curl. He waits.

And I know what he expects so I oblige: making faces and waving my arms and devolving into a spinning fan of nonsense syllables and smiles.

He opens his mouth in appreciation, and waves his fists, and drops his chin and laughs and cackles and shrieks.

It worked, again. Success. He laughs.

But why?

It’s not random at this point: he awaits me, he knows I have it in me to make a fool of myself at his request. We communicate through his laughter, and his anticipation of it, and my love of it.

He makes me make him laugh, and then I laugh, too.

Again, though, why?

Some say laughter is the human reaction to realizing that some threat has vanished; fear rises within us, but when the bogeyman morphs into merely a shadow or a witch’s cry has only been the wind, the fear turns to laughter and release.

But my son is not afraid of me. He tells me this when he glows, upon seeing me come home at the end of a work day. He assures me of this when I swing him through the air, or when he sits on my lap to read with me, and then tilts his head back to see my face and make sure I’m still there.

So his laughter must mean something else.

Aristotle thought it marked a juxtaposition: we laugh because we see a living contradiction. Maybe this is what James sees: an apparently stolid, serious father transforming before his eyes into a clown.

Maybe William James and Carl Lange were right, that our bodies betray our seriousness and we laugh before we understand why. Emotion begins in the muscles and joints and spreads to our mind last of all. We smile before we know we’re happy, and we laugh only to realize we’re entertained.

I like this idea best: because it means that the laughter is deeper in our hearts than it is in our heads. Laughter comes packaged with the soul and the mind’s interpretation of it is only peripheral to its operation. Laughter is as real and solid to him as mass and extension.

Perhaps Descartes can guide us through. To borrow from the Frenchman, maybe James laughs as proof that he is a laughing thing. He laughs because he realizes for a moment that he is a figure to be made to laugh. He laughs because he is safe and because he is happy and because he is noticed.

And I laugh for those same reasons. My guard has dropped, my self-consciousness has receded, and I remember what it is to be artless and guileless and to live only for the unmixed joy of living.

The corners of the mouth tell us the truth about ourselves and each other. James knows this, and he laughs to assure me that he understands the important things. He knows that I will always laugh with him, and to him, and for him.

I laugh that it can be this simple.

Why Blizzard Ended the Unholy Union of Grim Patron-Warsong Commander

 

hearthstone warrior axeI awoke to good news this morning: the Hearthstone Warrior card, “Warsong Commander,” had finally ended its reign of terror. The professional reaction is here, but I’ve got some points to add to the discussion on the immediate fallout.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m a very casual Hearthstone player, and I almost never play Warrior class, so this only affects me indirectly. However, I am so glad that the Grim Patron Warriors are going to thin out. Seriously, every time I was matched up with a Warrior, I knew exactly what the deck would contain, and it didn’t seem worth playing unless I could end the game in the first few turns.

Perhaps I’m just a bit miffed that my control decks were no match for this setup, but there was something else to this nerf that gives me pause—and excites me. Blizzard is saying no to a possible pay-to-win exploit within their game, and that speaks volumes about their company ethics.

Let’s back up a moment. There is no pay-to-win problem with the Warsong Commander card itself. It’s a basic card that everyone gets if they play through the first few levels with the Warrior class. But the other piece of this puzzle, Grim Patron, comes from the Blackrock Mountain expansion. Unless you’re willing to throw down a significant amount of cash—or save up an insane amount of gold from winning hundreds of matches and lock it all up for a few new cards, something few people actually do—this card is inaccessible. We could argue about this inaccessibility all we want, but the point is, it would take an awful long time to get this card without just spending some money.

So, not only was there a potentially overpowered game exploit—Warriors are able to trigger the Grim Patron duplication quite easily with a number of spells, leading to an entire side of Grim Patrons next to a Warsong Commander, all able to attack in one turn, after just being played—but it was an exploit only available to those who paid for it—either with their credit cards or with a vast amount of time and energy.

But, even worse, was that as a result of this exploit, every single Warrior deck began to look identical. Every game against a Warrior was the same exact ramp up, trying to kill the enemy off before he could summon an army of unkillable, unstoppable Grim Patrons. There was no point in playing these games unless your deck was optimized against this single build.

But today, the world changed: Blizzard said no. No to pay-to-exploit, no to tedious gameplay, and no to uninteresting, unchallenging deck-building. And today I am proud of Blizzard.

Had they left Warsong Commander’s Charge ability out in the wild, they would have been tacitly stating that pay-to-win is all right in their world, something that Hearthstone has avoided throughout nearly its entire history. Through patience and innovation, you can win at this game without resorting to spending cash in it—and that’s the definition of what a free-to-play game ought to be.

And for the first time in months, I’m looking forward to my next game against a Warrior; for the first time in a long while, it will be something new.