A return to normal

For the past twenty years I have been running an annual reunion of gamers from my university crowd.  We go back to the Comfy Lounge where so many games were played back in the late 90s and early 00s and catch up, gamble, and gab.

The past two years we had to do it online.

There are advantages to having this sort of event online of course - there is a certain smell that you can never completely remove from the Lounge, and you don't have that in a video call.  However, it simply isn't the same.  Just being in the room and overhearing people yelling about great rolls or terrible luck in a distant game is a huge part of the joy, and you just can't get that online.

Also hugs.  Those don't work well online either.

This year I am determined to go Back To The Lounge properly, and it seems that the government is cooperating as Ontario will have rolled back its covid regulations by the time the event takes place.

It is going to be *weird*.  Tons of people, in a room, all breathing near each other!  

It does raise all kinds of questions for me though.  It is clear that legally speaking we won't require vaccination or masks, but I don't know for sure what rules the university will have.  It may be that university rules end up deciding how I have to run the event, but if they don't I am not sure what I should do.

If I just say "Everyone welcome, do what you want" I may lose people who aren't yet comfortable going without masks, or who are worried that unvaccinated people might attend.  If I try to insist on restrictions, I might lose people who aren't interested in masking anymore.  (Also I have no legal authority to enforce any restrictions at all!)

There is going to be a lot of adjustment to the new normal.  My crowd of people leans pretty heavily towards vaccination and caution in terms of covid, so it may take awhile before everyone gets back to being easy with being around other humans.

I, on the other hand, am *completely* ready to grind my naked body up against as many humans as possible, revelling in the breath and sweat and goo and raw physicality of it all.  I have spent two years now in hiding from covid, and I am so ready to be done.

Breaking stuff

I was playing in my World of Warcraft raid last night and I was being terrible.  The boss would get ready to do his gigantic attack that we all had to dodge away from, and I would click to move.... and nothing would happen.  I would die, and let the team down.  This is an easy thing to deal with if it is 100% of the time - the mouse is broken, and you move on.  But when things work 98% of the time, you wonder if you are just bad and failed to click.  There is always that doubt in your mind.

You can't keep playing with a 2% failure rate.  The boss is going to make you 'React or die!' 50 times, and failing once means you die and your group loses.

Finally I concluded that I could not keep playing.  Thankfully Wendy and I are using the same mouse so we swapped hers in and I got to keep on going.  That feeling when you play properly and get confirmation that yes, it was the equipment failing, not yourself... priceless.

However, I now have a mouse that works most of the time.  Videos on the internet assured me that all I had to do was tear the mouse apart and clean the tiny metal piece that gets all gunked up over time.  I didn't have a lot to lose, so I tore the mouse apart.  The metal piece was immaculate though, so clearly the internet videos were wrong.  

Upon reassembling the mouse the left click didn't work at all.

In some ways this is better.  At least this way I don't have my money demon telling me I should keep on using the mouse until it is well and truly broken.  I can pretend to keep on using a mouse that works 98% of the time even though it makes me sad.  

I can't use a mouse that doesn't click at all though.

I tore the mouse apart and reassembled it a couple of times and finally concluded that all my attempts at fixing it have resulted in the tiny metal piece being ever so slightly bent.  Wendy and I attempted to get it back to its pre intervention state, but we failed.  It turns out that even a slightly bent metal piece is totally useless, and the mouse is junk.

After only 8 months of use!  Junk!

Admittedly that mouse has had some hard living.  My hands always make all of my peripherals gunky and gross, and I have been on the computer *hard* since the pandemic hit.  That mouse has not been treated lightly.

Still, it irks me that I couldn't fix it properly.  All the internet videos assured me it would be easy and foolproof, but apparently I am fool enough that I broke it anyway.

Yelling at people

I have been hunting for an online home in World of Warcraft.  Finding the right guild to settle into is not an easy affair because there are so many things that can make a guild a bad fit for me.  You need to make sure the people in the guild are playing for the right amount of time, at the right time.  You also gotta find folks that are doing the sort of playing you are doing, at the right level.  Matching all the basic logistical bits is tricky.

But those aren't the only sort of considerations.  I had been in a guild for six weeks or so with everything seeming quite reasonable and then it went from fine to disaster in a tiny span of time.  One raid night one of the raiders starting telling risque jokes, which generally I am fine with, and then graduated to telling jokes bashing gay people and people with disabilities.  I got pissed and told him to stop.  

I don't have any sort of authority in the guild.  Other people can ignore me unless management is willing to step in, and management seemed to have nothing to say on the matter.  Still, apparently my grumpiness was intimidation enough, and the jokes stopped.  Temporarily.

The next raid he started up again, and after the raid I wrote a post talking about how much I cannot and will not tolerate such things.  Both on a political / philosophical level, and also on a deeply personal level.  Even if I would be fine with gay bashing jokes generally (I am categorically NOT fine with it) there is no way I could tolerate it because of the people close to me.

The guild management made it clear to me that they were going to make gay bashing comments now and again, and I could either be cool with it or leave.  They also made it clear that I was making people uncomfortable by calling this sort of thing out, and they weren't happy about it.

You see, they play WOW to relax, and they don't want to feel judged while playing.  They want to be a fun, no politics, no drama sort of guild.  That means gay bashing has to be tolerated, because after all, it is crucial that the guild be a easy, welcoming place for straight people who want to be bigots.

They also chastised me for thinking only of myself, and not taking anyone else's feelings into account.

It made me sick to my stomach.  Obviously that attitude is wretched, and I am well rid of them.  However, I hate having to find a new place to hang out, and I hate not knowing if I am getting into a nest of vipers when I am doing it.  Guilds all claim to be fun, easy going places.  Nobody advertises "We are a bunch of bigots, come take a dump on minorities here."  Nor do they say "This is a place where we do not tolerate bigotry."  They just talk about raid times and what bosses they have killed.

In both board games and computer games I keep seeing this idea floated that gamer communities are the most accepting communities.  It is so obviously nonsense.  They *are* the most accepting places of being a gamer, that is for sure.  Accepting of other things though?  Not so much.

Welcoming to some

I have been following and commenting more on the World Boardgaming Championships Facebook page.  There is a large and contested set of posts there surrounding women feeling safe and included in WBC.

One thing I have seen in several posts is the idea that WBC is completely welcoming to everyone regardless of gender, race, culture, appearance, or anything else.  In fact it has been pitched as the most welcoming place in the entire world.  (Naturally it was pitched this way by men who think that we don't need to do anything to change women's experiences at the con.)

Of course we also, in the same thread, see women talking about all the challenges, insults, and rude or abusive behaviour they have witnessed on many occasions.  How do we square these two points of view?

I have a story that may help illustrate.

Years ago I was invited to an puzzle solving event.  After the event, all the attendees went to a nice bar to get dinner and drinks.  At the time I was living well below the poverty line, and I was regularly skipping events solely because of the cost of bus fare.  Everyone else at the party was ordering whatever they liked off the menu and chatting about their homes, their cars, and the vacations they had planned.

I didn't have a house, or a car, and vacations were a dream.  If I had ordered dinner at the bar I would have burned through 3 months of entertainment budget in a single meal.

Many people in that group might well have felt uncomfortable in many areas of their lives.  After all, they are a group of puzzle nerds.  I am sure to all of them, this was an incredibly welcoming environment.  I am also confident they thought they were being welcoming to me.

But it is fucking hard to sit and listen to people talk about their financial misfortunes when they are bemoaning how they have to put off buying a cottage, and you have to feel guilty about not tipping the waitress because you can't afford a single drink.

I can tell you without any doubt, people can be extremely comfortable, *think* they are being entirely welcoming, and make someone feel desperately out of place.  I left the bar eventually, and didn't get back together with that group.  I don't blame them, or think they did anything wrong.  They didn't know how it made me feel.  I didn't complain.  But I wasn't going to go back.

When I first attended WBC I felt wonderful.  It was incredibly welcoming to me, and I felt right at home.  But I am not every person.  My experience is not universal.  Just because WBC is extremely welcoming to straight white guys who are good at games does *not* mean it is welcoming to all.  Some people at WBC, notably women, have the same experience I had at the bar, but at the con instead.

If you are a white guy who loves to dress in nerdy Tshirts, cargo shorts, and a backpack of board games, WBC is fantastic place.  The rest of the world may give you looks and shut you out, but this place is perfect.  It is easy for you to fit in, and you are completely accepted.  I can easily see how you remember all the places in the world where you weren't accepted, and conclude that WBC is simply accepting of everyone!

But that isn't reality.  WBC is super accepting of you, for sure.  But that experience is not universal, much as you presumably want it to be.

So if your experience of WBC is one of comfort and acceptance, great.  I am happy for you!  But when you conclude that everyone else must have had the same experience, you are insisting that your experience is the only valid one, and you will accept nothing else.  You are refusing to be the accepting person in turn.

If you remember other places in your life where you got side eyed looks, and people talked as though you weren't there, or assumed you were clueless without knowing anything about you, you know that isn't fun.  It doesn't make you want to go back there.  Women are telling us all that this is how they often feel at WBC.  The men at WBC have a responsibility to try to give them the accepting, easy, comfortable experience we have.  The first step is listening to what they say, and *believing* it, even if it strikes us as quite different than our own experience.

I am not saying WBC is the worst.  I love it!  I think the people running it have good policies in place, and work hard to make it great for everyone.  I think a lot of the people attending do the same.  But we have room to improve, and the stories women are telling us make that crystal clear.

Warm welcomes

This is the time of year that I travel to the US to play in the World Boardgaming Championships.  It is one of the best things in my year and it is a great disappointment to have to miss it this year.  Unfortunately playing board games in a convention hall is only slightly below orgies in the covid 19 risk list, so WBC stood no chance.

Much as I love WBC it has some issues.  The official policies regarding inclusion of women, minorities, people with disabilities, and such always struck me as good ones, and my experience has been that the con officials do a solid job trying to make it welcoming to everyone.  However, we can't deny that board games are a white male dominated hobby, and the people that come to WBC trend very white, and very male.

Yesterday there was a thread in the WBC Facebook page about how extreme the white male dominance in board game design is.  It pointed to this article about the issue, which comes from a woman who designed one of my most played games of the past few years - Wingspan.  So far so good.

One of my friends replied to this post talking about her experiences at WBC, and how there have been many incidents that made her feel unwelcome.  The problems she had weren't ones that are easy for officials to do something about - it wasn't people saying obviously awful things like "Girls can't play this game!  Go away!"  Her struggles were more subtle, like people making comments that suggested that she was only there because she had a husband / boyfriend who was at the con, or assuming that she has no idea how to play, with the clear implication that this is because she is female.  She likes WBC, and a lot of the people there, but these experiences taint that.

This sort of post is hard to make.  I know it was difficult for her because she was struggling to explain the problem while avoiding coming off as whiny.  Women are often dismissed when they try to walk this line - they often find there is literally no ground between downplaying the problems they have and being ignored because they are 'too emotional' or 'too pushy'.

A couple of guys wandered in to make excuses.  The men just don't know how to talk to women, you see, and they want more women involved in the hobby!  I decided I couldn't just let this stand, so I explained that if you want more women involved in the hobby, you don't try to shout down women when they explain the problems - you fix the problems.  Claiming that you don't know how to talk to women is just misogynistic nonsense, because you can just talk to them the same way you talk to men.  Talk about the con, or the game, or whatever else.  Women aren't some foriegn species with inscrutable motives.  Just assume they are humans who like games and talk to them on that basis.

Of course there was some tension, as there always is when you ask people to behave better, but the conversation was entirely civil.

And then the WBC official in charge of social media walked in, deleted all the comments, and told us we weren't allowed to talk about this anymore.  This was the comment she left

"There are many things we can do to ensure our hobby is welcoming to all people. Arguing divisively is not one of them. Commenting is closed. Read or do not read the article. Talk to your gaming friends. Invite someone new to WBC. Have a nice weekend!"

This absolutely enrages me.  This pretends to be about making WBC welcoming, but instead makes it clear that women with negative experiences are not allowed to express those, and anyone asking for change will be summarily ignored or officially silenced.

I assume the goal in this was to preserve WBC's image, but instead what it accomplished is to make it clear that WBC has a real problem and that management's current response is to try to pretend it doesn't exist. 

Did MeToo teach us NOTHING?

When a woman says that men having been treating her badly, the solution is not to try to hide her story and pretend nothing is wrong.  The correct course of action is to listen and learn.  I don't think the WBC officials can actually fix this directly, with rules.  I don't expect every paternalistic comment of 'so, is your boyfriend playing this game too?' to suddenly stop just because management says so.  (Also heteronormative, as well as sexist, for the record.)  But even if you can't directly fix it, you can let women talk about those experiences, and let other people listen.

I am going to contact the board and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable behaviour.  If the thread had been full of people calling each other assholes or otherwise making personal attacks, shutting it down would have been a reasonable course of action.  It wasn't, at all.  The thing that caused the ruckus is that somebody had the temerity to suggest that there might be a problem that needs fixing.

If you go to WBC, I would ask you to join me.  Writing to anyone on the board and asking for action is useful.  Sharing this to your other gamer friends would also be appreciated.  I am not calling for anybody's head here.  I don't think that 'silence women' is actually a policy.  I think this was a serious error, one that needs fixing, and I am going to ask them to do just that.  I would encourage you to be specific and make it clear that talking about the challenges women face in the con should be supported by the administration.

We want our hobby to be welcoming to all.  We will never accomplish this if our approach is to pretend is already is, and no work needs to be done.  We have to publicly talk about the issues we have, and take steps towards change.

A deadly virus

This past weekend The Flautist, Naked Man, Amazon, Wendy, myself, and two people who don't yet have creative names on my blog all went to do an escape game called Pathogen.  It is held at a fantastic escape room place here in Toronto that I have been to before, and I have been consistently impressed with its offerings.  This latest one was no exception.

Note that I will be discussing some things about the escape game, so there will be thematic spoilers.  However, I won't discuss any of the puzzles directly, so it shouldn't affect your results, should you attempt it.

The theme of Pathogen is that we are doing a heist in a dystopian future.  There is a deadly virus and we have to break into the place holding it.  The environment felt a lot like the Portal game - futuristic computer panels and graphics combined with tubes and knobs.  A slick mishmash of high tech and functional engineering is how I would describe it.  It works.

In every escape room group you need to figure out how to divide up jobs.  We have a bunch of puzzle experts in the group so I figured I would take the role of large man who whacks things.  You don't have to destroy stuff to win an escape room of course, but sometimes having someone focus on the physical tasks is beneficial.  Plus I take immense glee in throwing myself down dark tunnels not knowing what is at the end and I do not fear dirt nor discomfort.

Naked Man organized the group, and he puts together a good crew.  He certainly wants to set records, and he knows a lot of people who are good at this sort of thing, so getting onto his teams is a good way to experience success.  When I am not around he generally gets to be the one doing the physical tasks, but it is hard to do that in a group I am in because I am already throwing myself down the tunnel and you can just try to catch up.

I ended up being a bit of a hybrid between solving puzzles and doing physical tasks.  I figured out a couple of the puzzles on my own and was part of a team doing others.  As usual after we ended the round there were some puzzles I had absolutely no idea about that other people solved while I wasn't looking - I could probably run the game again and spend half my time doing totally new things.  However, I absolutely got to do the most fun physical part of the game - lasers!  You know in movies when the protagonist is sneaking through a maze of lasers to get to the thing?  I got to do that, on a clock, worried about alarms.  It was magnificent.  It turns out that you can finish the lasers either by being small or by being tall, but if you are neither you are pretty screwed.  Thankfully I have the tall bit all wrapped up and I completed the lasers quickly without any alarms blaring.  I also got to crawl through tunnels and tubes which was excellent.

The theme of Pathogen was brilliantly executed.  I felt wrapped up in the show, to the extent that at one point I thought "We need to get in the elevator and go to another floor in this building"... and then remembered that the 'elevator' is just a room with some display panels, not an actual elevator!  There were 7 possible endings to the game which reflected choices you made throughout, and they felt appropriate when we learned about them all later.  The one thing that marred the experience was that we made one choice but then got the ending sequence for a slightly different choice when we finally finished solving everything.  A small glitch, but one which didn't reduce the fun much.

We finished up in 40 minutes, leaving us 20 minutes on the clock still.  Our score was 4350, which is slightly more than double the average score of 2150, and was the monthly high score.  Go team!

I had a blast, and everyone else seemed to feel the same way.  Finishing with a high score is a rush, and Naked Man and I have spent time since discussing the puzzles we missed and how we might have done better in order to get that score to be an all time record instead of just a monthly one.  A couple conclusions we had were that we needed someone dedicatd to not solving puzzles who would just watch over the whole crew and read stuff.  A manager, essentially.  Also we should cut down on the number of people.  5 or 6 is ideal, but 7 left people just in the way or with nothing to do at some points, and made communication more difficult.

The one trouble with escape games is that they aren't cheap.  They are pretty much the best thing going in entertainment though, so while I don't like the price I certainly want to pay it again.

Armageddon, but for farms

I am back from Farmageddon.  I travelled to North Carolina on the 26th and got home yesterday.  It was a grand time with so many games played.  Even though the event was themed around the game Agricola I only played it five times over ten days of gaming - I don't even know how many different games I played but I had a great time in any case.

North Carolina gives me culture shock.  The group at Farmageddon was pretty liberal and fit with my politics fine, but when driving around or wandering through airports I was often taken aback.  Last time the thing that got me was the emphasis on the military and veneration of active duty military personnel, as well as people wearing clothes that made it clear they wanted to murder people.  This time the strange thing was medical ads.

There are advertising pushes for hospitals here in Canada, but they are fundraising drives.  I think this is stupid and we should just tax more to fund them properly rather than wasting money making ads, but I don't get to decide this stuff unfortunately.  However, in the US the ads were different because they didn't seem to be about fundraising but rather about recruiting patients.  The idea of medical institutions having ad teams to drum up business blows my fucking mind.  How is this the way it works?

I knew that medicine in the US was privatized, of course.  Sometimes though these things catch me unawares and I realize that I hadn't followed it to its logical conclusion.  Why is healthcare in the US so ludicrously expensive?  Lots of reasons... but one of them is patients are paying for advertising aiming to bring in more patients!

The free market is a useful tool, good at many things.  Running hospitals is not one of them.

A consequence of travelling to visit my parents from the 21st to 25th and then travelling to play board games from the 26th to 6th is that my workout routine is completely disrupted.  I can do pushups anywhere, and I can do pullups off of a beam at my parent's place, but that isn't a proper workout.

During Farmageddon I found another person who was really into the whole gym rat lifestyle, and we figured out how to get our workouts into days that are full of games.  We set up challenges where we would do clap pushups based on game actions, which ended up with me doing something like 75 clap pushups over the course of a single game.  I made a lot of time in between game turns into pushup time over the days I was away, but I really didn't know how my fitness level would hold up.  Today I finally got back to the routine, and I found out that my constant pushup sets during gaming kept those muscles in good shape.  All of my push exercises were no problem.  The other exercises were pretty rough though.  However, this means it shouldn't take long for me to get completely back into fighting shape.

I wonder how much me running away from the game table to crack out 25 pushups all the time affected other people.  Were they just laughing at me?  Annoyed at the interruption?  Vaguely amused that I refused to take a week off?  I don't know!  I do know that I feel better when I get my muscles sore though, so I am going to keep on doing this as a way to cope with a lack of a proper gym.

As much as I enjoyed my time there though, I am glad to be home.  I need my own space, my own kitchen, my own computer, and some quiet and silence.  No matter how great people are, at some point I gotta run away.  I certainly am not an extreme introvert, but I trend that way without a doubt.

Awake once more

Pinkie Pie's return to school has been going well so far.  It isn't perfect and full of rainbows and unicorns, but it is working.  That is good enough, and after a year of struggling with homeschooling I will take what I can get.

It is an improvement in her life, no doubt, because staying home with me wasn't ideal.  I have the knowledge to teach her the things she needs but our dynamic was a mess and she wasn't learning all she needed to.  She is still having challenges though, and probably will continue to do so.

But for me, her return to school is a tremendous relief.  Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a year - I got back to designing games.  It wasn't much, but I spent time creating new cards for FMB, altering and balancing others, and printing them out.  A lot of my time ends up being about simple, concrete things like cutting up paper with scissors and putting those slips of paper into card backs so they can be easily used.

I felt something inside me that hasn't been there in a long time.  A powerful desire to build, to create, to continuously improve.  I have been a long time now just coasting, trying to get by.  I have been self medicating by watching too much Youtube and letting images of other people's game experiences be my way of spending time.  That isn't so bad as self medicating goes, but it isn't the joyous flow that I can get from creating my own things.  Youtube marathons will never get me in that zone where time vanishes and I wake up having made something new and wonderful for myself.

This makes me want even more to do whatever it takes to get the school experience to work for Pinkie Pie.  It will be good for her in the long run even if it is a struggle at times, and her being out there will give me the mental space to do things that bring me joy.  It will likely cost me on the sleep front because when I am playing or designing games intensely I find it hard to get the thoughts to stop, to convince my brain to finally shut down.

Given a choice though between the numbness of scrolling videos and the gritty eyed tiredness that comes with creation and flow, I will take the latter every damn time.

The science of dungeons

I am currently filling out a survey about a game I play - Dungeons and Dragons.  Many of the questions on the survey were reasonable to my mind, as they asked about things like how well I fit with the group, what sort of player I am, etc.  I think the creator of the survey will be able to get interesting data out of it.

But some of the questions are badly written at best.  For example, there is a question asking about how often I get certain feelings.  Do I feel like 'humans are basically good' once / week, 2-3 times per week, or every day?  What?  I don't suddenly get struck with a 'humans are good!' feeling and note that down.  I certainly can't give you a rate per week of such things.  But the survey doesn't have a 'this doesn't apply to me' answer, so I have to click a rate in order to move on.

It also had a really silly question about how long it takes me to feel like I belong in a gaming group.  Is it 1-2 sessions?  3-4?  5-6?

How in the world are you getting any kind of real data out of this?  I don't join a new group every month and then count how many sessions is it until I get a 'belonging' feeling.  When I joined my last group I got along with the people fine.  We have had lots of sessions, but I certainly never got a 'I belong' feeling.  When joining my previous group I knew most of the players for a decade or more so clearly I wasn't going to suddenly feel like I belong after 4 sessions - that sense of being comfortable with those people was already there.  Really, do we actually expect that people who click 7-8 sessions are in any way different from those who click 5-6 sessions?  This is a complete guess, with people clicking randomly.  The players and the game style matter in this way, the number of sessions does not.

What I actually want is an answer that says '1 or infinity, depending on if the group is people I like or not'. 

It feels like answering a question 'Do you like jobs?' without any context.  Sure, you will get answers, but the information given is so vague that the answers will be totally random and worthless for digging out useful data.  I like some jobs, but I hate others, just like nearly everybody.

The design of scientific experiments and surveys is critical.  When you build surveys foolishly, or design experiments badly, you end up falling prey to Garbage In, Garbage Out.  All the fancy statistics in the world won't fix your conclusions when your data is rubbish at the outset.

I think this is something we need to train people on more effectively.  It isn't easy though, because you often have to look at things from somebody else's point of view, and you don't even know what somebody that might be.  There might well be people who feel 'humans are good' intensely 3 times per week, and that question works perfectly for them.  However, there are going to be a lot of people who just click randomly because the question is meaningless to them, and if you don't have a 'this doesn't apply' answer your data will be corrupted.  You also need to account for cultural differences and language proficiency when you write your questions.

Writing good questions and setting proper controls to make your experiment give you the information you actually want is hard, but it is critical if we don't want our knowledge corrupted and diluted by all kinds of studies that don't actually show what they claim to show.  We already have enough of that, thanks.

Sporting well

This past week I spent at the World Boardgaming Championships.  This was my fourth year, and when I arrived I was on the end of a continuous slide towards failure.  My results each year had gotten worse than the year before, and while I don't worry that much about winning it was a little depressing to fail to measure up to my own standards.  This year things looked up from a pure winning perspective as I collected another 2nd place trophy for Castles of Mad King Ludwig and a 5th place finish in Santa Fe Rails.  Better than last year, and about equivalent to 2017, though still shy of my double 2nd place finishes in 2016.

However, the real victory is how well the year went in other ways.  In all three other years I have attended this convention I ended up playing at least one table that got really unpleasant.  It isn't fun to have players get mad at you and then publicly state that they are going to do anything they can to destroy your game, nor do I enjoy having someone spend the whole game coaching, cajoling, and begging people to attack me, especially when the person doing the harassment is beating me soundly anyway.  Mostly games were great fun with pleasant people but I have definitely run into some jerks, and also a few people who are generally all right but who lost their cool and did some crappy things.

This year had none of that.  I had a good time at every table, even when things got tough.  One of my semi finals had an illegal placement of a tile that caused a seriously challenging GM ruling to come up - there were four players with really legitimate claims to having won the table depending on how the GM chose to fix the illegal play.  That sort of thing is a nightmare for the GM, and I strive to not put them in that position.

At many tables this would be a tense argument or even a shouting match, but at the table I sat at everyone had a reasonable discussion about how we should resolve it, and four players all unanimously voted on an interpretation that sent the fifth player to the final table.  The GM was surely happy to have avoided a contentious decision and just accepted our vote, and even though I wasn't the player who moved on I am perfectly content with the result.  I have made a final table at that event before and the player who moved on had not, so I am happy to have given someone a shot at such a thing.  Plus I just can't see that there was a "right" way to do this.  We picked someone, everyone shook hands and moved on, and I was thrilled that such a thing could be resolved with no animosity.

The real draw of the convention is the people, not the trophies.  I don't even think I need trophies - I put them in a pile on my bookshelf and ignore them.  It feels good to be successful, no doubt, but if I had the option to get a trophy but to have to put up with a crappy game with lots of conflict and bad behaviour I would turn that down cold, so I have to be pleased with how this year went.

Now it is time to go back to real life again for six months.  I am exhausted and my knee aches from all the walking from game to game, but it is such a joy to do.  I was asked if I would continue at WBC for more time if I could and the answer is tricky - I love it, but eventually I do want to be home.  My bed, my food, and my people here are quite the draw.

Metal Feline

On Sunday I took part in a thing called Aluminum Cat.  It is a totally unique (in my experience) online experience where four players take the part of fresh recruits on a futuristic spaceship called the Aluminum Cat.  An actor plays the roles of everyone else on the ship, and the only way each player can interact with them and with each other is by moving their icon around the screen and changing what their icon looks like.  It is hard to describe, but highly intuitive the moment you try it out.

Also it is really fun.

The actor really got into the roles, rapidly switching from person to person.  It was largely comedy, but all of the people playing with me seemed to take it seriously, and they tried to stick to the role and fit into the world being created for us.  It is funny to be able to get so much out of a single icon moving around the screen, but we were able to communicate pretty well, I found.

The production values aren't high.  The costumes are simple, there were a few technical glitches, and the backgrounds were just basic drawings.  However, it turns out that none of that lessened the experience at all.  That simplicity and the rough edges aren't surprising because it is still a new sort of endeavour, but the joy of the show was undiminished on that basis.  It was the interaction that was the fun part - it kind of reminds me of old BBS games in that way.  Even though the view wasn't that exciting, the experience overall was great fun.

The overall effect ended up being somewhere between a play and a roleplaying game.  Much of the plot had to happen, but we did have some real choices, especially near the end.  We also got to set the tone and pace and have some fun with it which I enjoyed.

I don't know that I would do this on a regular basis.  I do know that I am glad I tried it, and it feels great to be part of an experiment in new ways people can interact with technology.  I would recommend giving it a try to anyone, really.  Pinkie Pie was intrigued by it for sure, and even younger kids could certainly play.

Link:  https://escape-character.com/

One thing I would note is that if you sign up, you just need to check your email a couple minutes before it starts to get the link to click to join the group.  I missed that originally, and spent some time searching trying to figure out how I actually do the thing.

The end of all farms

Over the New Year holidays I went to Farmageddon for the first time.  Farmageddon is an event held by a gamer buddy of mine, Umbra, where people from all over Canada and the US show up to play board games at Umbra's place.  The name comes from the fact that about half of the games played were Agricola, a game about building a farm.  It is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to do with my life when I was younger, and if I had enough money to actually own a place that could manage this sort of thing I would totally do it myself.

Unfortunately given that I live in Toronto and I don't have a house worth a couple million, that dream is not happening for now.

Fortunately I got to do it anyway, even without the ludicrously expensive house.

It felt a lot like the World Boardgaming Championships.  Farmageddon isn't the same thing because it isn't at the same scale and isn't as focused on structured competitions but most of the people at the event were people I knew from WBC and the vibe was very much the same.  We weren't competing for trophies though, just playing great games with people we like and trying to learn as much as possible from all the talent in the room.

The story of Farmageddon for me, in terms of raw winning, is 2nd.  I got some 1sts, and some 3rds, and a few 4ths, but by and large I came 2nd.  In that crowd I will take that record without any worry - I was learning a lot of games for the first time and we were playing a version of Agricola I had only glanced at once, so I certainly didn't rate to win a lot of games.

Winning wasn't really the goal though, the goal was learning, and I did a ton of that.  I learned a bunch of new games and determined that I really need to own several of them.  I got a lot better at the new version of Agricola too and that feels good.

The food was done in a way that was kind of hilarious.  Umbra bought a truckload of food and the shelves were groaning with it all at the beginning of the week.  People were welcome to just grab whatever they wanted and so people would randomly pull stuff out of fridges or out of pantries and fill themselves up when they needed.  Also we did a bunch of cooking so that many meals were some giant thing put together for the group to share.

This led into one of my struggles during the week.  It was clear that Burbling and Umbra were doing nearly all the kitchen work, and they weren't getting the help they needed.  I get that people don't want to step into a kitchen they aren't familiar with, but the cooks shouldn't have to do all of the dishes from the previous meal to start cooking the new one unless they are getting paid... and they aren't, in this case.  My response was to help cook a handful of meals and do all the dishes a similar number of times, but though I was disappointed that so few people were willing to help out in such a fashion I didn't try to push chores on anyone.

I wonder if me being a homemaker really changes my view on this.  When I see a meal being prepped, I see those dishes.  I know that *somebody* is washing those dishes, they aren't getting clean by magic.  Maybe if you aren't the one who is always going to have to wash the dishes you kind of ignore that stuff... I don't know.  What I do know is I absolutely cannot stand by and watch someone get buried under work that other people should be helping with.  I know how I would feel if it were my house and I didn't get to play because I spent all day washing, so I assume other people feel the same way.

At the end of the day I settled for calling people out in a positive way on social media and asking for people to help out next year.  I know how hard it is for big events to keep volunteers, and a critical thing to making this sort of stuff continue is making sure that people who help don't feel taken advantage of and that they see everyone pitching in. 

Maybe next year I will really go for it and make a sign up sheet for chores.  That way nobody can avoid realizing that there is shit to do and somebody's gotta do it.  If I really want to hit people in the guilt I will just fill in Burbling's name for all the chores and then ask people if they want to cross her name off and add their own for something... or if they think she should just do it all and leave the sheet as it is.  Depends on how passive aggressive I am feeling, I guess.  I could put my own name on all the chores instead, but I think people would just leave my name on an awful lot of spots.  The penalty for being a loudmouth with a penchant for shouting "BRING IT", I suppose.

All this said, Farmageddon was grand and I am looking at next year already because I want to be back there, doing that thing again.  I want it to continue year after year, and the best way to do that is make sure that the people that make it happen feel appreciated and supported in the work they do.  I want all this because Farmageddon felt like the Comfy Lounge at UW, or WBC - it felt like home;  Doing stuff I love with people I adore.

Discipline

I have been struggling these past few weeks with structure.  I have been playing Civilization 6, and it has had me One More Turning late into the night at times.  I have also been unable to keep on top of my duties at home, and have found myself desperately rushing off to the store to get ingredients for dinner and serving dinner late because I was too absorbed. 

It isn't good.

I mean, the game is great.  I get so into it, and that feels wonderful.  But I gotta stop throwing the rest of life by the wayside to get my fix.

Pinkie Pie has been in a similar situation.  She struggles with mornings and so she wants to watch a few videos when she wakes up.  I am fine with her doing this, but it always ends up being a mess.  She watches too much, and doesn't want to interrupt a video in the middle, and we get stuck where I run back and forth between what I am doing and her, trying to get her to do things.

Also not good.

So we are embarking on a new program.  Both of us will have to do all of our daily chores before we can do our computer based goofing off.  Reading, writing, exercise, and learning for her.  Writing, weight lifting, cleaning, and shopping for me.  Unless all those things are done I will not be doing my internet goofing off.  I can't cheat - I have to find something significant and clean it every day, even if nothing is sticking out.

I feel so much better having set this up.  I want to lose myself in a game, and if I consistently make sure my chores are all done beforehand I can do so without remorse or regret.

Pinkie Pie is less enthusiastic.  I think us doing this together will help though, as I won't be enforcing rules on her that I am not willing to follow myself.  Hopefully we don't have to fight too much about it.

Partying with the kids

In four days I will be going Back To The Lounge.  Every year on Good Friday I invite everyone from my gamer group at the University of Waterloo to come back to the Comfy Lounge and play games for a day and that time is once again upon us.

You should come join us!  Comfy Lounge, Math and Computers building, UWaterloo campus, 11 to 11.  Do it.

Originally it was all a bunch of recently graduated gamers but now a significant number of the people coming are kids.  Lots of the Comfy crowd have spawned rugrats or otherwise acquired them and they like games too, it turns out.  Up until this point I have always left Pinkie Pie with the inlaws because we wanted to party hard and not spend our day following a toddler about.

But now Pinkie Pie is plenty old enough to play games for hours and really enjoys them, so this year she is going to come Back To The Lounge with us.

I have invited people to join me at the party before who weren't part of the original crew but it never worked out.  The trouble was that I wasn't willing to commit to spending a day with someone at the event - I wanted to go to the event, and I was happy if they wanted to attend too.  But I am going to randomly end up in a three hour game of money Bu, and I won't be quitting early.  I am going to want to reconnect with people I only see once a year, and even some I see less often than that.  It isn't exactly a great invite "Hey, want to come to a party with me, where I will largely speaking ignore you?"  I love the idea of inviting people but I want to spend a day in hedonistic delight with no responsibilities.  Those invites probably sounded as messy as they were.

But this time I am bringing Pinkie Pie.  She will want to play games with me no doubt but I think she will also be happy playing games with lots of other people, and at worst we can park her in a corner with an ipad or a kobo and let her do her thing by herself for awhile.  We had a trial run this past weekend when I had a board game night and she played many games of Santorini in a row and was eager for more so I have some degree of optimism that she will enjoy the event without dragging us down any.

So now it is time to pass on my tradition to the next generation.  The tradition of going to a smelly old lounge with crappy furniture to play games all day, once a year.  It is so random, as traditions tend to be, I suppose, till they are around long enough that people forget why they started and just continue to go through the motions.  Then they are just a part of life, not something strange.

Foooourth!

Supplies report, Day 11

The world boardgaming championships is over for 2017 and I am home again.  In terms of raw winningness I ended similarly to last year.  I made two final tables in both years, though my results of 2nd and 2nd last year were better than my 4th and 3rd this year.  I am still immeasureably happy to have gone and it was wonderful to reconnect with so many people.  Playing games or even just kibitzing games with people so talented is great times indeed.  Those final tables were made along with a total of eight semi finals, so my 25% advancement rate is right on schedule.  I still haven't won an event outright, but clearly it is just a matter of time if I keep up this rate of getting into semi finals for various events.

My food plan worked out really nicely, as I brought only a little bit of my supplies back home.

I brought 64 granola bars, and only 6 came back.  Of my 2 jars of pickles, half a jar returned.  The peanuts were the only real failure as I hardly went through any of those.  Thankfully I can just eat them over the next few months.  All of the meat and fruit and cereal all got eaten and I went to the buffet twice, just enough to stop me from going nuts from not having a hot meal for days on end.

All in all I managed to stay at a nice hotel for a nine day convention and have an absolute blast for a cost of under $1200 CAN in total.  As far as entertainment dollars go that is a steal.

I am really lucky to be able to do this.  My inlaws and Wendy taking Pinkie Pie for ten days is required for me to attend and some people don't have that offer on the table.  The ability to attend WBC this way really makes parenting overall a much more rewarding and enjoyable thing - knowing that every so often I get to run away from my responsibilities and party like it is 1999 (seriously, WBC is an awful lot like 1999 was for me!) is a critical release valve.

I am exhausted but deeply happy.  Already looking forward to next year.

Report on supplies

I am at the world boardgaming championships this week.  So far it is a highly enjoyable affair, particularly the part where I get to get reacquainted with a bunch of smart, interesting people that I met last year.  It is wonderful to be able to so easily step into really intense strategy discussions and debate with people who are so talented at this thing I do.

My actual gaming results so far are pretty mediocre, but that isn't surprising considering the schedule.  I played a lot of Agricola but I am not one of the sharks in that game - to be good you need to know every one of the hundreds of cards and also know just how good each of them is and how they interact with all the other cards.  I know a few of them.... but I am nowhere near a strong player.  I have enough skill to beat a lot of the randoms that show up but I am not the best player at the table.  I ended up with a 2nd, 2nd, 3rd set of results, and I feel like that is reasonable because I think I was the 2nd, 2nd, 4th best player at the table in those games.

It isn't often I sit down for a strategy game thinking that I am the worst player at the table, but it happens in Agricola at WBC.

My food strategy for last year worked reasonably so I am following it again.  I bought a ton of fruit and vegetables that would keep and lots of granola bars so I don't have to go to restaurants.  I just can't convince myself that paying $25 US for a buffet is reasonable.

It is Day 2 so far and I have eaten more meat than I bargained for.  My meal plan calls for half a package of meat per day, and the first day an entire pack went away.  Cereal and peanut stocks remain full though, so total calories for the week is probably okay still.  Last year I bought 4 pounds of carrots, and after 3 pounds I was DONE with carrots.  This year I went with 2 pounds of carrots so it should be fine.  I budgeted for 6 granola bars per day for the duration and I am on schedule there.  My suspicion is that I will end up with peanuts left over but that the rest will all get consumed.

The absolute best thing about this year though?  Instead of losing my phone at the hotel before the convention and spending days in a panic trying to figure out how to find it and get it back, I have my phone in my pocket and I am focusing on the fun bits.  What a mess that was.

The rest of my life

The past while I have been mulling over what to do with the rest of my life.  Of course what that really means is that I need a new obsession for a year or so, it isn't really about the rest of my life, but it seems more interesting if I phrase it that way.

I have been thinking about what I do and the level of satisfaction it brings.  I am a homemaker, but I think I am an odd one.  Most people in that role either really love things about being a homemaker or just love raising children.  They change their artwork on the walls to be seasonally appropriate, bake special cookies for different times of the year, take up crafts, or do other similar sorts of things.

The idea of me changing my artwork seasonally makes me giggle, and seasonal baking and knitting are much the same.  Not that I deride anyone who wants to do it, but it sure ain't my thing.

Most of the time I talk about the things I do as not feeling important.  Wendy gets to run off each day challenging herself, chasing her dreams, learning amazing new things and meeting all kinds of like minded people.

I get to do the dishes.

The dishes are not inspiring.

However, the dishes are a thing that is worth doing.  Some of my previous jobs were almost entirely worthless from a 'making the world better' standpoint.  One even made the world worse.  It made me so frustrated to be doing work that might as well not be done.  The dishes, though, those need cleaning.  It isn't exciting work but I do feel a sense of satisfaction from doing it.  When it is done I know I have finished something relevant, something that definitely isn't making the world worse.  The dishes also don't take up all my time and they leave me room to do many other things.

I know deep down that an awful lot of work that people do is completely worthless.  They attend meetings that bring no value.  They fill out forms for no reason.  They try things they know are counterproductive because someone above them wants to look good to someone further up yet and they don't care if it pans out because they will be promoted by then.  Most people do work that has some real value, but everyone does a lot of totally pointless timewasting crap.

Shopping, doing the dishes, cleaning the sink, these are real things that need to happen.

What they don't offer is flow.  Nothing in my basic duties does, unfortunately.  I can't get into flow because all of the stuff I have to do is trivial.  It won't challenge me.  It doesn't make me push myself to be more than I was before.

This is something I have only just realized.  I need to stop thinking of things as having utility to my mental health in general, but rather as having utility either as being good to do or hard to do.  I need both.  If I spend my life doing hard things but bring nothing to the world I won't be happy.  This is why I would struggle as a professional poker player, say.  I would love the play, it would bring me flow, but I would also feel like I was leeching off the world and being worthless.  Whereas if all I do is sit at home knitting and cooking and cleaning I will not find flow, and though I will be useful I will not be fulfilled.  There will be something missing.

I need both things.  There isn't any real chance of me changing my profession at the moment so I will have plenty of useful things to do.  That is well covered.  I need to shop and scrub the toilet and make dinner.  Those things aren't interesting, but they have real value to me in terms of feeling like I am bringing something to the world.

What I require is a better source of flow.  I am currently playing World of Warcraft a lot, and sometimes that brings me flow but a lot of the time it is just a time sink much like a TV show that is interactive but with a crappy storyline.  An enjoyable time sink, but not something that makes my life better, really.

I remember years ago I spent a ton of time modding Civilization 5.  That was a task that definitely brought me flow for a great span of time.  It was a combination of creating, analysis, and play that was superb.  Other times when I have been building games have been similar.  Perhaps that is what I need to return to - not any attempt to monetize game design, but just pure creation.  I need another game that isn't quite there to seize me and force me to fix it, tinker with it, make it perfect.

The easiest way to achieve this is to start a new game from scratch, I suspect.  In the past my games have always begun with a small moment of inspiration followed by months or years of grinding my way towards completion.

I suppose my conclusion is that I need an intense moment of inspiration, some moment of tremendous imagination, to give me a new thing to smash my mind against.  I wonder if that is a thing I can just create, or if it is simply random.

Do as I say

I remember reading the Berenstain Bears books as a kid.  One of the standard plots was Papa Bear telling the kids to do something but not doing it himself.  A nice example of how it is hypocritical (and usually pointless) to tell people to do something while obviously not doing it yourself.

When I talk to Elli about games and winning I send the message that it is all about doing your best.  I want her to believe in working hard and giving her all, regardless of whether or not she wins or loses.  After all, there will always be somebody better than you at anything so there isn't any point in mourning your inability to beat someone with better luck, better genetics, or better circumstances than yourself.  You only have your own ability to work with, so best to maximize it.

Stoic philosophy agrees.  Heck, probably any reasonable philosophy that has anything to say on the subject agrees.  As far as I know the science also tells us that you can't do a ton to make your kids succeed, but convincing them to work hard is pretty much the best thing you can do, if you can manage it.

Everyone should focus on maximizing their potential, not on comparing themselves to others.

But when I compete... not so much.

I want to be number 1.  2nd place is the first loser, and I am not interested in being the first loser.

When I joined a new World of Warcraft guild recently they took me on a test run to see how I would do compared to everyone else in the guild.  My damage to the enemies was really good, and I logged #1 for the night.  People in the guild congratulated me, but I wasn't satisfied.  I was #1 on one section of the night by a huge margin and #4 on the rest.  In sum I was the top, but that wasn't enough to make me feel like I deserved it.  I played well, but some people beat me some of the time.  Everyone thought I was ridiculous for not accepting the 'title' for the night.

Not good enough!  It doesn't matter that I played well, or that I did as much as I could.  I must be first, always.

No matter how many times I tell Elli to focus on herself, to only worry about doing her best, I can't make myself believe it when I am playing games.

I am sure that working hard to do your best is the healthiest way to live for most people.  Makes me wonder though if that absurd drive to win is a necessary thing for those who are competing to be the best in the world.  If there isn't another player forcing you to push harder, if you only look at your own development, can you ever be the best there is?  I suspect not.

Being the best there is is a path to sadness, mostly, so I don't recommend it, but I think I might be programmed to do that anyway.

The machines are here

Every time the machines beat humans at something new there is a big kerfuffle.  It was a huge deal when Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess years ago, and last year Go was finally dominated by a computer.  Now it is poker's turn.

There are many kinds of poker and various kinds have been beaten at various times but no limit heads up Hold Em was taken down just now, and that to me feels like the proper benchmark for computer dominance.

I recall when chess finally fell many people said that Go was simply too big, that machines would never beat humans.  They laughed at the idea of machines defeating the best poker players, because poker is so much about reading human expression and mood.  They were wrong.  The machines will beat us at everything.

And I do mean everything.  Not just mathematical games like Go, but far more difficult to quantify things like reading facial expressions and predicting behaviour.  They are even going to beat us at sex.  They aren't there now, not by a long shot, but eventually the robots will come for sex just the way cars came for carrying goods, computers came for chess mastery, and factories came for making shaped pieces of iron.  It is just a matter of time.

I am reading the Ancillary series of books by Ann Leckie, which is a science fiction series set in the distant future.  I recommend the series both as science fiction and as commentary on gender and sex, though the actual story and characters we never that compelling to me.  In it there are extremely powerful AIs that watch people all the time and learn their patterns by speech, facial expressions, and more.  They know when people are upset before the people themselves know.  This is going to be a reality given enough time because every time we have set ourselves the challenge to build a tool that will be better at something than a raw human we have succeeded, or are on the way to succeeding.  Reading and predicting human behaviour will be no different.

The idea of AIs watching me through myriad cameras and knowing what I think before I do isn't frightening to me.  Maybe it should be, but I honestly just shrug at the thought.  The machines already do pretty much everything better than me and my life is shaped by the rest of the world already so somehow it doesn't feel like it will be all that different.  Would machines watching me, trying to predict me really be that different from humans trying to do the same thing?  The only difference I see is one of efficiency.

Drop out and get big

2016 shall be remembered as the year I dropped out and got big.

I started off the year pretty badly.  My kickstarter for the game I made, Camp Nightmare, failed.  I didn't try as hard as I could to make it go, though honestly I don't think I stood much of a chance in any case.  Whether I should have just not done it at all or sucked it up and thrown a few months of time at a project I wasn't wholeheartedly behind isn't clear to me.  It wasn't great.

It was a good learning experience though.  I confirmed that entrepreneurship isn't for me.  I don't want to be a small scale game publisher.  I want to make games on my own time and I want to make them for me.  If I am going to make money I will do it directly, rather than trying to blend game design and work.  That conclusion satisfies me.

Camp Nightmare ended up being published on a website where people can just order it.  I got 100 copies made myself, and the reception was good.  I have a few left, but mostly they are gone, and this is a fine place to be as far as I am concerned.  I don't care about being widely distributed - I made a thing, (though Nathan Nun, the artist, also put in a ton of time, love, and effort, to be sure) and that thing is out there now.  This pleases me.

I started working out in 2016 and it stuck.  Partly it was to get ready for my Tough Mudder event in the summer but it was also about vanity and health.  If I am honest, vanity is probably top of the list.  I added on 12 pounds of muscle, increased my strength by roughly 80%, and I look better in ways that I enjoy, whether or not anyone else does.  My cardio is vastly better too, though I don't have that result measured the same way.  I am definitely fitter, stronger, and healthier than I have ever been before.  I intend to continue lifting weights, and I have a new goal to work towards - 200/300.  I want to add on another 15 pounds of muscle to get my weight up to 200 pounds and be able to bench 300 pounds.  I don't know that this will happen in 2017 because progress is slow at this point but that is where I am aiming myself.

Running the Tough Mudder was a blast.  I ran 14 kms solid but eventually my knee succumbed to an injury from earlier in the year and I had to walk the last 2 km.  That felt fine.  I pushed hard, had an opportunity to reinjure myself, declined to do that, and I feel good about it.  Doing stuff with my brother is a thing I really enjoy.  It cost a ton of money though and I am not sure that investing that amount of money in Tough Mudders is really the thing I want.  If I found a group of people I liked in Toronto doing it I would be totally on board to run it again, but I don't want to travel as far as I did in 2016.  Maybe I can convince my brother to come down here to do it this year....?

I went to the World Boardgaming Championships and came home with a couple second place trophies.  I found new games I love, met a ton of fantastic people, enjoyed a holiday away from kid and responsibility, and I want to go again.  I have not been playing that many board games since but I don't think I actually care that much about placing well in the coming year.  I want to go, to play, to be in the atmosphere of WBC, and trophies will come or they will not.

I started dating four different people.  Three of those ended in a breakup, but none was angry or bad, and I am on good terms with everyone and have a couple of friendships.  It makes me happy to be able to maintain the good bits of a relationship even when romance isn't going to work.  The fourth person is the Flautist, and she makes me all kinds of happy.  I can just say whatever is in my brain and it works.  I don't have to hide or be constantly on my guard, I can be with her and just exist.  This is looking like it will go a long time, and I definitely look forward to that.  The fact that it is a long distance relationship is not ideal, but it is so worth it.

Parenting is getting easier, generally.  Pinkie Pie has struggled this year in some ways, but as she gets older I have more and more fun with her.  I love watching her reach out and be more independent and I enjoy having challenging conversations with her.  I look forward to teaching her many things and watching her make leaps to new ideas.

Wendy and I are the same, really.  We have different sorts of adventures we want to go on in life, but there is a lot of overlap, and honestly being apart at times makes me appreciate her more when she is around.  My life is good, and she is a big part of that.  We chose well.

I got awesome tattoos!

They make me feel happy and I smile every time I look at my shoulders in the mirror.  I have plans for many more, though cost is a huge factor.  Hard to say.

2016 has gotten consistently better as it went onward, and I am in a great place in my life right now.  Here's hoping 2017 continues the trend.