I spent part of yesterday evening hanging off a wall. My fingers ached, and my palms felt rough and sweaty. My thighs and calves complained in equal measure. By the end of an hour, my toes burned – and when I took my shoes off I found that I had split my left little toenail down the middle, blood smearing the skin.
This is my second week trying out climbing – or at least bouldering – as a form of entertainment and exercise.
My choice of exercise might seem a little odd. I have, for the longest time, had a fear of falling. I’m reasonably certain the prospect of pain at the end of a fast descent provides the source of my discomfort. Once I might have said a fear of heights, but in the analysis that description doesn’t quite fit. I definitely fear the possibilities of an uncontrolled descent ending in pain. As a result of this fear, I tend to cling and struggle to get up and down a ladder into the loft.
You can understand why climbing doesn’t quite fit the profile as a viable form of exercise for me.
On the other hand, bouldering doesn’t involve a lot of height. I favour traversing at the moment, as that doesn’t involve any height. Moving horizontally from knobbly lump to knobbly lump, grasping and clawing for grip means I get a work out while never more than about a foot off the floor. I have tried some of the puzzle climbing, where you choose a colour of handhold and seek to work up from the ground to wall top. I struggle with the height a bit, but have tried to reassure myself that what waits at the bottom happens to be quite padded and forgiving.
My prospects for injury come from the inability not to loosen up enough and flex, allowing myself to fall easily without scraping and scrabbling at the surface of the wall. I scraped the skin off one of my knuckles last night because I kept too close to the wall. When I dropped a short distance, I should have pushed away, but instead I desperately tried to find something to cling to.
I managed to complete several metres of traversing last night that I didn’t manage last week. I rented a pair of proper climbing shoes and got a proper feel for the wall. I have learned that I need to trust in my ability to balance and hold my weight without necessarily engaging all my limbs at once. I know that I need to develop my upper body strength. I can’t even manage one decent pull up at the moment, performing a rise but once, with arms going from straight to 90 degrees, for a fleeting instant. To effectively climb, or just traverse, I need to know that I can rely on every muscle of arms and legs without doubt or question.
I don’t have to achieve any Zen connectivity with the wall just yet. Just getting in touch with myself would seem a very necessary first step.
I had a chat with some of my roleplaying group the other day about storytelling games. We just finished a very tight and entertaining game of Fiasco - using Graham Walmsley‘s “Unaussprechlichen Kulten” playset – and had started to chat. The discussion concerned why certain storytelling games worked and others didn’t – or at least, why that happened in the opinion of specific members of the group.
For example, I like Fiasco, but I didn’t like Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne. Witch effectively presents a pre-rolled Fiasco-style playset, but without strict definition of the relationships between characters – so, why didn’t I enjoy it anything like I enjoy a game of Fiasco. Is it the balance of controlling elements somehow failing for Witch, and if so, why? A Fiasco playset gives you relationships, a thing, a location, and a need. Witch gives you a character, and a few slices of his personality, a purpose, several locations, and an ultimate goal (to decide the guilt or innocence of the witch).
I can’t quite fathom why what Witch sets in down for you shouldn’t work just as well as the selection of guides and influences Fiasco offers. I wonder whether having a spattering of personality defined around your character somehow constrains it in a way that Fiasco doesn’t. Perhaps that constraint generates too much of a line of resistance for me.
I could create the relationships between my character and others, and I could define my background as I wanted. I didn’t really launch myself into anything too strenuous, but I didn’t sit back on my haunches either. What I did have set out for me already were those questions that Witch wants you to answer and those fragments of imagery that might appear throughout the telling of the tale… Did they create too much restraint on my playing the part? Did I spend too much time worrying about how I might include a rusty wheel or a dagger stuck in a tree?
To pull this all out to a macro level discussion, what does a storytelling game need to provide, or choose to exclude, to make for the most engaging and entertaining experience? Can too little be too much to handle?
This weekend my weight dipped down to 11 stone 13 lbs. Admittedly I weighed myself in the morning, after exercising and before breakfast. I almost definitely weighed more by the end of the morning. However, I have always weighed myself at this sort of point in the week/day, so I do aim for consistency.
Having started out close to 16 stone, hitting this point feels like a real achievement. I have lost roughly 25% of my weight over the last seven months. That’s quite a big deal, I think. I add to this sense of achievement in reminding myself I got here without spending money on some expensive nutritional supplement or stressing over some obscure dietary balance. I chose to eat less, eat healthier, and exercise once a day, every day. Simple. I didn’t fret over the details, just consumed with a dose of commonsense. I didn’t stop eating dessert or sweets, I just realised that eating them more than occasionally simply didn’t make sense.
Now, I plan to revert to something closer to normality. I have eaten as much as 1000 calories less than the recommended intake per day since the start of this diet, and now I need to ease that back a little. I will continue to exercise, but I will accept that I need to rest occasionally. If I only managed a short walk or something, that will suffice. I know that tomorrow I’ll cycle for half an hour or burn off 200 calories doing an aerobic workout, so no hassle. I need to get into the moderation mindset. I no longer eat portions like I used to anyway, so keeping to the eating shouldn’t be a problem. I have grown indifferent to the site of cakes at work or biscuits in the kitchen – but the occasional slip should do no harm.
I aimed for 12 stone 3 lbs – effectively a 3 1/2 stone loss. I have slipped down further than this for the moment, but I know that I can bob around in that general area and bring it on back should I really slip. I feel a great sense of accommplishment and I’m happy to admit it. I’m also keen to support anyone else who tries it for themself, as finding the willpower can be really difficult. At the beginning, you feel every temptation picking at your resolve like an itchy scab. I’m up for supporting the cause and helping people through the rough patches. You can do it, because I did.
I impressed myself this year. I read 28 books. Yes, some were a little short, but some were quite long. I also abortively started some, like Will Self’s short stories, and only got halfway… that more than a 100 pages uncatalogued against my target. Time spent, time lost.
With two days of 2011 to go I’ve fallen back on comics. I have a backlog of DC’s New 52 to get through and make a call on what I will or won’t continue to read. Reading short superhero stories comes across like something of a reward in the wake of my (personally) mammoth reading achievement.
I suspect I will need to consider a Best Read… and do my best to write a review for everything I finished. I should aim to make that part of the reading ritual next year. Read, review, read, review. I did post a couple of reviews here. I also posted at Amazon and Goodreads.com. I just need to be a little more thorough. A little more conscientious. If I write a review I practice my reading, comprehension, and my critical faculties. All good.
I set a target for 2011 of just 12 books. I stretched that target twice, to 18 then 24. In the end, I beat that final target also. Starting with a target of 24 for 2012 would seem a good first stab. Some of my current reading will figure in those numbers – like The Return of the Native and Listening to Britain – neither of which I stand a chance of finishing in the time I have left. I’d also like to return to some defeats of the past – like Catch-22 – that I ought to have stuck with through to the end. I also plan to read the next on the Bond series, a Doctor Who novel and something Star Trek, for the purposes of covering my throwaway paperback/light reading quota.
I’d rather not pick out too many in advance and spoil the surprise. I have grown accustomed to a fortnightly visit to the local library. I hope you will also try to read more… I wish I could get my youngest to reading anything at all; he needs to make reading his resolution… I can’t really force him.
And of course there’s the whole other matter of writing more… I’ll save my thoughts on that for the next post.
‘Witch’ provides an improvised entertainment for a small group of people without any need for a gamemaster or referee. In practice, it might be useful for someone to be familiar with the content of this ‘Ashcan’-edition booklet, but by no means imperative as the content could be scanned through and imparted quite rapidly at the start of, and during, the session.
Players assume the roles of a ragtag band of medieval travellers tasked with transporting a supposed witch from London to Lindasfarne. Each player sheet presents some very basic detail, including three questions that warrant an answer during the session and a few flavour lines at the bottom that might serve as the basis for the scenes that will follow.
Over the course of the journey, players take it in turn to frame scenes that involve their characters, the other defined major characters, and any peripheral persona. The person framing the scene can identify a character and a player who will take that role. Here in the middle of the 14th century burning a witch may very well provide a timely and much needed resolution to a plague that ravages the land. Each character has something to invest into this predicament and possible links to the other players – from an inspiring squire and his world-weary knight, to a disgraced Crusader and a wary Brother charged to accompany the witch by the Church.
The game consists of a simple booklet and some strips of paper with the very limited character detail. Only one character sheet has an illustration at the moment – as this edition of the game is still a work in progress. As a player, I didn’t see much of the content of the booklet – but it seems to mainly consist of some short guidance on the game, and narrative sections to frame each phase of the game.
The witch has two ‘envelopes’ to choose from at the start of the game, to determine her guilt or innocence. Her crime may be true or fabricated, and in the course of the game the players need to come to some sort of conclusion. Making the wrong decision will send an innocent woman to the flames, and while the characters may ‘succeed’ in their lives thereafter, the witch character adds a bitter end to their existence. If the players make the right decision, they may rid the land of the plague.
Given the game exists in this half-finished state, I can only judge what I’ve experienced first hand and seen for myself. I wonder what additional material a complete edition of the game might include. As it stands, I’m not overly impressed myself. While I participated and found some role in the game, as the deserter Crusader ‘Sir’ Thorne, I found the whole story massively dependent on considerable effort from the players in creating and developing the narrative. I have played Fiasco and the many random elements generated at the start of a playset provide some character, relationship, and focus to work with. Somehow, I felt ‘Witch’ had cut me adrift. I’m quite a history buff myself and I appreciate you don’t need to adhere to historical accuracy necessarily, but I found the background very limited and the guiding questions and flavour insufficient. I felt uncomfortable playing, even amongst people I have played games with for a while now. The ‘game’ doesn’t feel like it offers much support.
I have read reviews that the game likely offers incredible replay value, but I don’t see it myself. I have played it a single time and now I doubt I would want to play it again, even as a different character or with a different group of players. I can’t quite see how it might engage me or where I might muster the enthusiasm – but, that could simply be me. On the other hand, having played a Fiasco playest (‘The Ice’), I think I could replay that more than once, purely because the elements that make up the game will subtly change with a fresh set of dice rolls.
I can’t judge the outcome of further development or the release of a final version of this game, so I write this review based on what we have now. For the moment, the ‘Ashcan’-edition of ‘Witch’ offers an interesting premise for a genuinely one-off game. I will take an interest in additions and developments, including illustrations for the characters (currently limited to the Brother), but I could, in good conscience, recommend this game to anyone over, for example, Fiasco.