Slickriptide's Random Musings

Front row: Grace, Carole(Daughter), and Krystyn (Granddaughter)
Back row: Garret(Grandson) and Jerry(Son-in-law)

Today (Friday) a woman I admired is being remembered by her family at a memorial service, and I felt it fitting that I should also take some time and remember her in my own fashion.

It was a little more than two years ago that I first figuratively "met" Grace Morimoto. My friend Krystyn Chong likes to post about her life periodically, and she devoted a significant amount of energy to documenting her family's preparations for their New Year celebration.

The heart of the preparations was her grandmother, Grace. Everything from the arrangements of the food to the plants making up the centerpiece to the ingredients making up the Shogatsu (primarily a lobster surrounded by many tasty hors d'oeurves) had a reason and a method and Grace was the arbiter of what to do and how to do it. 

Those first photos, blogs and videos were destined to become part of a record of Krystyn and Grace over the next couple of years, with Krystyn's gentle teasing and inquisitive nature playing the foil to Grace's dry wit and amused exasperation with her grand-daughter and her constant requests to know "Why?" instead of just accepting that Tradition is spelled with a capital T because you aren't supposed to question it. :-)

Grace became one of Krystyn's favorite topics to write about and those blog posts and photos quickly endeared "Grandma" to all of Krystyn's many friends and followers in the online social media world. Grace herself liked to act aloof or indifferent most of the time, yet the questions she asked at times showed, I think, that she enjoyed the attention and took a certain amount of bemused amusement from the fact that so many strangers seemed to be interested in her doings. 

At the age of 90, when I first heard about her, she was leading a life that would have been the envy of many elderly people who were many decades younger than Grace. Krystyn made no bones about her Grandmother's accomplishments. They were a source of great pride to Krys, something that I'm not sure that Grace truly appreciated. Then again, Grace had lived a long and active life, and she didn't seem to be think of herself as something special just because of her accomplishments. It might have seemed odd to her that anyone else would consider her to be a role model to look up to. Perhaps not. 

Those accomplishments were many and varied, and stretched across her long life. Her family was one of those affected by the "relocation" of Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans during World War 2. She endured that period of her life with the grace implied by her name, and during that time she first learned the art of Ikebana; or "flower arranging". 

I don't know if that training awakened a love of flowers within her, or if her love of flowers inspired her to pursue the craft. Whatever the case, she would eventually achieve the highest levels of accomplishment within her craft. She put her skills to practical use as well as artistic. She opened her own floral shop in 1957, and operated it for twenty years before selling it to a Japanese woman who operated the shop for another twenty years and still has it open today, as far as I can tell.

Ikebana is not just a way of "arranging flowers". At its heart, it's an art form; a way of expressing visual poetry. A flower arrangement isn't just random or "pretty". The components are symbolic. This led to an interesting video discussion between Krystyn and Grace last year, wherein Krystyn questioned Grace's choice and complained that the centerpiece was dreary, while Grace attempted to explain that it was a winter arrangement and that it was meant to represent death and rebirth. Such verbal sparring was par for the course between the two of them and those of us who enjoyed watching it vicariously could only shake our heads and smile. 

Grace's talents didn't end with flowers. Wood, and other natural pieces were used in her artistic endeavors and Krystyn proudly showed her friends her Grandmother's creations, sometimes with her own embellishements added. 

Grace was an avid golfer and as Krystyn showed us, a talented one as well. If the shelves full of trophies were not evidence enough, her accomplishments were recorded publically as well. For instance, the Sacramento Golf Council reports that she won the 1982 City Mixed Scotch Tournament. According to Krystyn she won every tournament she entered and she certainly has the awards to back up that claim.

Grace's contributions to the local sporting scene did not end simply with winning awards, however. She was a regular benefactor to athletics in Sacramento. The newsletter of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation lists her on its donor rolls going back ten years and one suspects that if the records were available that they probably go back for as long as there was a SASF to contribute to.

Grace was more than just a grandmother (or mother or sister), you see. She was a person who contributed to the community and gave of her time, energy and knowledge. She was a successful business person, a recognized artist, an accomplished athlete and a landlord. She was the mother of Carole, Krysten's mother, who is a woman recognized as a "strong, quiet and unsung hero" in her own right. When Sacramento politician Ryan Chin listed his endorsements in the 2010 election, the list of "Community Leaders" included the name "Grace Morimoto". Krystyn's pride in her grandmother was not simply familial pride. Her grandmother led a life of accomplishment that would make any person proud to be a part of her family.

Krystyn's stories of her Grandmother took a more melancholy, yet still hopeful and uplifting tone as her Grandmother suffered a recurrence of cancer that she had fought off a decade before. As Krystyn and her family became responsible for helping Grace care for herself as she declined, we followers of Grace and Krystyn were allowed a small glimpse of the simple grace with which Grace herself bore the illness and continued to even try to care for Krystyn as much as Krystyn cared for her. She was an independent spirit to the end.

That end came without fanfare last Sunday morning. The only notice of it to us, Krystyn's long-distance friends, was that she vanished from her usual online haunts like Facebook and Twitter. As people individually inquired about Krystyn and her grandmother, the word spread - Grace had passed on. 

It perhaps sounds odd to characterize Grace's loss to me (and by extension, to Krystyn's other internet friends) as the loss of a friend. Certainly, I was not a personal friend of Grace. If she had met me, a pleasure I sadly will never have now, I would simply have been one of Krystyn's many friends and admirers. 

To me, though, Grace was a living, breathing person who I knew well, or at least knew OF well. Krystyn brought her to life in her writings and in doing so, she endeared her to all of the friends who followed her stories of her colorful Grandmother and Grace's often sardonic view of her granddaughter's antics. Krystyn created a place in each of our hearts for her Grandmother and each of us who took her into that place will have a gap in our lives now that Grace has passed on to whatever waits on the other side of the Veil.

To Krystyn and her family, as well as Grace's other children and grandchildren; we outsiders could not know the depth of your grief, but still, we mourn with you. The condolences we offer are heartfelt ones. The world is a little dimmer for the loss of Grace. Please know that you have our sympathy and our thoughts and prayers in your time of loss.

Krystyn, thank you for sharing your Grandmother with us. Each of your friends are better off for having known her. I don't think that your Grandmother ever pursued immortality or celebrity but by sharing your love and respect for her with us you made sure that she had a little taste of each. We will miss her.

Have you ever heard a news report about the management or mismanagement of a charitable fund and thought “They could have done so much better if they had used the money for X?”

I’ll wager that we’ve all played armchair philanthropist at one time or another. We look at the way that big money is spent and say to ourselves, “If I had that money, I would do X with it and really make it count!”

Well, if you live or work in King County, WA then the Gates Foundation is giving you the chance to get out of your armchair and decide for yourself where they should spend their money.

Here’s how it works:

Starting today, October 5, you can walk into any King County Starbuck’s store and ask for a DonorChoose.com “gift card”. I put that in quotes because it’s not really what you think of when you usually think of a Starbuck’s gift card. You don’t put any money on the card. It’s pre-loaded, for all intents and purposes. Based on my experience, this is a little confusing, even to the Starbuck’s employees. When I asked for the card, the girl attempted to swipe it before realizing that it wasn’t swipable. One of the other employees had to explain it to her.

So, be prepared to say “No, just give me the card.” You don’t pay any money yourself, and the card is not a “gift card” that you spend at Starbucks. The card is intended to be spent on the charitable causes that you’ll find at the web page listed the card: http://www.donorchoose.org/kingcounty2011 .

Just type in the code on your card (Mine is blacked out because it’s MINE! Get out of your armchair and get your own!) and then choose one of the 1200(!) projects that have been listed by King County teachers in need of funds. The website helps by letting you choose from broad categories if you have specific interests that you’d like to promote.

I donated my ten dollars to a class that needed supplies for a band/orchestra program for young kids. Well, I donated Bill and Melinda’s ten dollars. ;)

The interesting thing about this whole business is that it’s grass roots philanthropy. You can’t get any more democratic than telling teachers “You tell people what you want/need” and telling average people “Here’s the money. YOU decide who gets it.”

It’s not going to put the Red Cross, Salvation Army  or United Way out of business by any means. It does, however, let each of us have the opportunity to think about what is actually important to us and then do something about it. If spending Bill and Melinda’s money makes you feel good then you can always decide to forgo one or two lattes and donate ten dollars (or whatever amount you find agreeable) of your own money. Like I said – Grass roots philanthropy. The experiment here is not just in answering the question as to how ordinary people would manage a charitable fund. It’s also an experiment in inspiration. How many of us will there be who decide to “pay it forward” for real after playing at it with someone else’s money?

I’m not here to preach so I’m not going to tell you what you should or should not do, except that you SHOULD get out to a Starbuck’s and get a DonorChoose.com gift card and donate to the classroom project of your choice. Even if you normally can’t afford to be a philanthropist, this program will empower you to take control and say “Yes, THIS is what I support” and then take action in support of whatever it is that means something to you. The empowerment here is not just for the teachers. It’s a way to empower the people giving the money as well, with a power that many might found themselves ordinarily unable to exercise.

What are you waiting for? Get out to Starbuck’s already. Just remember that it’s a King County promotion so you will only find the cards available in Starbuck’s locations in King County.

What do you think of a program like this? Feel free to leave a comment. I’m interested in what people think of this.

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of an institution in the world of hobby gaming in the Seattle area. American Eagles closed its doors on Saturday. The venerable old grand dame of the hobby trade has gone to that great shopping mall in the sky.

American Eagles was one of the last of the old time sources of gaming supplies, with its roots in the hobby shop trade rather than the comic book or board game trade. I turned 50 yrs old last year. My first visit to American Eagles came when I was 16.

That was when Dungeons and Dragons was a subversive new idea that caused parents and educators to question the sanity and moral uprightness of the high school and college-aged kids that were engaging in it.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was considered to be a radical new departure from "classic three book" and there were just beginning to be a ton of imitators attempting to fix D&D's problems with new problems of their own invention (heh) as well as to cash in on the burgeoning market of pen and paper RPG's.

Mind you, nobody called them "pen and paper" back then. There was no reason to qualify what you meant. The only comparable computer games were MUD's that were primarily available only to people with internet savvy and that was a very restricted set of people. The handful of games on personal computers were generally called "adventure games", after the grand-daddy of such games, Colossal Cave; commonly referred to simply as "Adventure". Most of those games had yet to even be created.

No, the only question anybody had when you said RPG was whether or not you were running around in steam tunnels under campus waving sticks and playing make believe, or practicing satanic rituals and perverting the minds of your friends under the guise of playing a game.

In a time and place where mainstream bookstores didn't know about RPG's and wouldn't touch them if they did know, American Eagles was a kind of Nerd Mecca. I remember meeting my gaming buddies and catching the county transit for ninety minutes of travel, what with transfers. I didn't know what to expect that first time, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer awesomeness that was American Eagles.

Eagles was not really a "game store" in the sense that businesses nowadays are sometimes focussed mostly or entirely on games. It was a hobby shop that expanded into war games and military miniatures battles, and from there into RPG and some other related games.

People tend to forget that D&D itself was a kind of expansion of the game Chainmail, which was no more or less than a set of battles rules for mideaval European lead miniatures armies. Miniatures war games are a very old pastime - amongst his other accomplishments, H. G. Wells is credited with publishing the first book of rules for tabletop war game miniatures. While Wells' rules were intended for children, the hobby was very much an adult one running the gamut of naval ship battles and armed forces of various eras.

Where the local comic book store might raise an eyebrow, and the local B. Dalton Bookseller would pass on it entirely, Eagles accepted RPGs as just another variation on what it already did and they stocked a little bit of pretty much everything that was available at the time.

Imagine, now, being a sixteen-year-old red-blooded American Nerd, who has had a taste of a fantastic and strange new way of playing games; one that frees the imagination and actually puts you in the role of DESIGNER and arbiter of your imaginary worlds. Imagine that finding the frustration of having no access to the books that fuel your designs, and that the handful of places that you do find them, they are in such limited supply that you can never find anything NEW.

Now, step out onto the sidewalk at 85th and Greenwood and walk the half-block to the American Eagles storefront. Your first impression is, well, impressive. The storefront is all glass, with large military stripe running across the windows and the store's eagles heraldric-style logo out front. This isn't your typical game or comic store struggling to survive in a dark forgotten corner of some little strip mall. You can see right off that this place is big. Bigger than some dime stores and drug stores. The wonder strikes home when you reach the door and pull it open.

Shelves. Rows and rows and rows of them. Full shelves. Packed to the tops and bottoms and end with things that you had never even imagined before.

Plastic models of every ship and airplane ever used in a military conflict.

Thousands of wargame miniatures.

Hundreds of paints, glues, rule books, terrain pieces.

And that's just the UPSTAIRS.

The Holy Grail, though. The Mecca. The El Dorado of your Nerd Heaven, is the back left quarter of the store. That's where the games are.

Sure, some board games and some of these are pretty weird and interesting in and of themselves. Cosmic Encounter. OMG! The original edition of Cosmic Encounter! I still have it with all of the expansions there were.

The real treasure, though is the RPG section. Not three feet and three shelves of "modules" and assorted stuff. No, this was ROWS of stuff. ROWS of books. ROWS of miniatures. ROWS of brain-melting, mind-bending role-playing sweetness that only began with Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons.

No, here we had a role-player's wet dream. The Arduin Grimoire, with all of its "we're better than D&D and we make everything as complicated as possible to prove it" holier than thou goodness. Traveller. Spacequest. Dragonquest. JUDGE'S GUILD! Oh, mercy! In a day when "modules" was still a new idea, the Judge's Guild was one of the first organizations to put out a whole campaign world with new content on a regular basis and real maps and accessories and story seeds. The City-State of the Invincible Overlord was one of the most wonderful purchases I ever made. heh.

As time went on, Eagles continued to carry most everything published. A lot of it wasn't all that good and ended up in the back room with the discounted stuff. Somewhere along the way, they moved from Ballard to their current place in Lake City. I grew up, married, taught my kids about RPGs, but mostly lost the time and desire to play them much myself. I was into MMORPGs by then and CCGs and most of my college friends had scattered to the four winds. RPG's had always been somewhat pricy but nowadays they have become downright expensive. I mean, $40 or more for a single book? Seriously? What kid is supposed to be able to afford that?

In a sense, scattering to the winds is what happened to American Eagles' customers. The generation or two that had supported the games portion of the store grew up, but they weren't really replaced by new players. I visited the store a couple of years ago, out of nostalgia. I picked up some TORG books that were in the back clearance room, but otherwise I didn't see anything I wanted to buy. The couple of times I visited over the years, the store was always empty or nearly so.

I suppose that at some point, the military gamers must have all moved on and aged away also. The newer generation is being brought up on computers, not on lead miniatures. Those that do play miniatures games are more into Warhammer than they are into Napoleonics, and Games Design Workshop helpfully grabbed all of that market for themselves when they opened their own stores and shut out the game shops.

It was probably inevitable that the store would eventually close rather than be passed down to a new generation of the "Eagles Family". Eagles had become something of a relic. It had not changed visibly in almost forty years, other than changing location. Eventually, time was going to just pass it by altogether, and that time has finally come.
American Eagles was an institution of the Seattle gaming scene. It's the last of its kind, as far as I know. I suppose that's a natural progression, now that we live in a world where kids pore over AD&D at the local Barnes and Noble and their parents look on indulgently instead of uttering a quick prayer and trying to find something less dangerous for their kids to be interested in.

That's the problem with growing older. The world becomes more interesting in some ways, but rather less interesting in other ways. So long, Eagles. You may be gone, but you won't be forgotten. Hopefully, that makes it all worthwhile in the end.

The New Year is a time for making overly ambitious resolutions and then slowly sinking into a pile of regret as each is eventually broken as time goes by.

Today, I'm going to help you out, Dear Reader, by offering you a resolution that is both easily achievable and that will leave you feeling good about yourself for having aided the aspirations of a fellow member of the Twitter community.

The resolution is simplicity itself - All you have to do is resolve as follows: "I will vote for @ActionChick to be the BusyGamer.Com Gamette of the year this week and next week."

That's all there is to it. Two votes. Two weeks. Before January is half-over you'll be able to say "I succeeded at keeping one of my resolutions!"

What's not to like?

I'll even make it easy for you. You can cast your vote right now, in the embedded frame below.

Just check the circle next to "Katrina Hill", click Vote! and you're done. Come back in a week and do it again.

Congratulations! You are a New Year's resolution stud! Or a, uh, well, whatever the woman's equivalent of "stud" might be, if you happen to be a woman.

If you want to make sure there's no hanky panky going on with the page in the window, you can go to the voting page instead.

Now, if you're not one of my regular followers or if you're somewhat new to the "local" Twitter scene, you may be asking at this point: "@Slickriptide, who is this @ActionChick and why should I vote for her instead of one of these other sexy young women who also want to be the Gamette of the Year?"

I'm glad you asked. I'll do you a favor and try to be succinct.

@actionchick is Katrina Hill, otherwise known as Action Flick Chick. She's the power at the center of http://www.actionflickchick.com where, among other activities, she reviews action movies and gives her particular slant on the action value of the current crop of action films. As @actionchick on Twitter and now on Facebook, she regularly talks action movies with thousands of followers. She also hosts frequent giveaways of movie swag and she regularly takes the time to post her list of #twittertips to help out Twitter newbies have a positive first experience with Twitter.

When she isn't Twittering, she's interviewing famous people, and hosting panels at places like San Diego Comic Con. She was last year's G4 Woman of the Web 2010, and the December Busygamer.com Gamette of the Month, which brings us back to the current task at hand.

Now, here's the thing - Everyone of these women might deserve to win the title (and substantial cash prize) based merely on "cheesecake value". If you take the time to browse through all eleven months worth of entries, you'll find that there is some very sweet cheesecake here, indeed. I can't tell you what YOU should like. Katrina would tell you to vote for whoever you truly like best; just vote for someone. She's a good sport, on top of her other qualities.

For me, I'm at an age (*ahem*) where I've seen enough cheesecake in my time that the novelty value of semi-nudity isn't all that great. If I'm going to vote for a woman in a contest like this one, I need something more than just the fantasy value of imagining that she'd be dressed like that and thinking about playing with my joystick. From the standpoint of physical beauty only, I need something that grabs my attention and tells me what this woman is about.

In my opinion, this picture says it all. If I didn't know anything else about @actionchick, I'd see this picture and I'd know just what she was about, and I'd still be enjoying the view.

The real reason to vote though, whatever your gender or opinion of beauty/popularity contests, is perhaps best illustrated by a recent tweet I saw go by in Katrina's timeline:

I don't have a clue who @ZebluePrime is. What matters here is that he was nobody in particular, pretty much like most of us who use twitter on a day to day basis without having many thousands of followers or any minor or major amount of celebrity attached to our names. Despite that, Katrina remembered him, saw that he had been absent for some period of time, and made him feel good about having come back.

She is not a celebrity in an ivory tower, chasing some grand number of followers to prove how great she is.

She's accessible. She interacts with her followers, not just on a mass level but on an individual level as well. I know that if I mention her in a tweet, that she'll likely recognize my name and respond to me. I've seen her do the same over and over with others who are in my tweetstream, and there are many more I never see because they are not in my tweetstream. More than that, she regularly puts out the effort to give advice for Twitter newbies to get them steered in the right direction. She gets it.

In my honest opinion, she'd deserve to win the contest based purely on the cheesecake value (I like large tracts of land, but I like a mysterious smile even more). However, her personality and her dedication to being open to her fans/followers is what puts her over the top.

There's one last reason why you should vote now. You are the cavalry. Lots of people voted in the first two weeks, and of those, some number have contest fatigue now. You know what I mean: the people who vote once, and then somehow never find the time to vote again.

You, however, are fresh and raring to go, or so I hope at this point. All you have to do is click once now, and once a week from now. However, those two weeks of votes will mean that you are the fresh blood that boosts her numbers over what she's already got instead of holding it steady. You are Rooster Cogburn riding into battle with the reins in your teeth. You are Mal and Zoe, showing up just when the villagers are about to set a match to River and Simon. ("Looks like we arrived just in the nick of time, Zoe. What does that make us?" "Big damn heroes, Sir!") You are John McClane tossing the C4 down the elevator shaft and blowing up half of the terrorists and the building along with them!

Your vote matters. Go ahead. Click that checkbox next to Katrina's name and click the Vote button. If you really feel inspired, you could even retweet the tweet that led you here, so that YOUR followers might get inspired to join in. 

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for your support. Good luck with the rest of your New Year's resolutions. :-)

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After a few hours at Pax, I'm finally thinking I want to own a BIG plasma or LCD monitor. heh.

The hilight, which doesn't really come across in photos for obvious reasons, was the Nvidia booth with their Razer 3D glasses technology. They were showing Guild Wars 2 and it was astounding. There were multiple depths of field. The rain looked real. The graphics were amazing. I may just end up investing in a whole new video setup just so I can play Guild Wars 2 in 3D when it comes out. Yowza!

The award for best booth design has to go to Fallout: New Vegas. Gotta love the T-Rex.

I was quite interested in Marvel Super Hero Squad, which is a kids' MMO/mini-game kind of online game. It's look is very much like Free Realms, but there doesn't seem to an actual world. Like Clone Wars Adventures, it's more like there's a hub for choosing games and some stuff like housing tacked on. I liked what I played of it, but it's definitely for the casual/kid demographic.

I didn't get to play Lego Universe MMO, but my son got signed up for the beta test. He had good things to say about it. I'm going to see if I can get into the beta when it hits. Graphically, it looks like what you'd expect from previous games.

Final Fantasy XIV was one of the standouts for me in terms of graphics and what I could see of the game play. I may be giving Square another chance to get things right this time.

There were a lot of other games, of course, enough to fill a month's worth of reviews. Suffice to say that Pax is worth it even if the exhibit hall is all you see. (and, hey, I got a WoW TCG loot card too. A good one, at that. ;-) )

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I don't think I've got the stamina for this kind of game but it was interesting to watch the guy play it. He seemed to be getting a workout. Ha ha!

It reminds me of the motion detection systems that they came up with for the SNES back in the old days. The technology seems a lot more refined nowadays from back when you needed to sit within a couple of feet of the screen and hope it could figure out what all the waving around actually meant. Ha ha ha!

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Made me wish that @krystynchong had come, to burn up the drums and show the casual players what's what, or that I'd had the presence of mind to get in touch with my friend @gothess and her boyfriend (who were also at Pax) to see if they wanted to form a "band" for a demo.