T w e n t y S i d e d
The year is now 2012. This is the moment that I realize I’ve made Logan just a few years younger than myself. He turns 12 as the year does (or close to it, anyway) just like my younger brother Peter did when he hit 12. This makes keeping track of time relatively easy, thank god.
Lottie’s BookNook has had some shockingly successful months, three to be exact, since they opened. Michael and Kelly had imagined a steady stream of cost or income which they would find once their store had been open a year. They assumed that once open it would be clear if they would enjoy a little boost from it, or an ongoing cost they’d have to budget for. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Some months the shop feels like a consistent bleed of money, and some they get an exciting little payout. Annoyingly, it doesn’t ever line up with when they expect the highs and lows to be. A popular book comes out and they expect more traffic, but the mall has it for cheaper and the wholesale price for a store barely makes it worth carrying. A month is supposed to be bad and then a regular D&D group rent the place every Friday night for two months. They get used to the group and appreciate the people they bring in, and then the party stops meeting because someone went to college and someone else got a new job.
Logan is getting old enough to really appreciate the free space he basically has on retainer for anytime after hours. He gets to use it for sleepovers and movie nights, making him far more popular than he would have been without the amenity. He has his first ever real fight with his parents when a group of his friends wreck one of their best selling board games. They got a hold of a copy of The Settlers of Catan and defaced the pieces in an effort to make a homebrew war game. Logan, in an effort to appease his friends did nothing to stop it. As a result, he was not allowed to use the space for his thirteenth birthday party. Logan learned a hard lesson that birthday, one his parents didn’t mean to teach him, but did anyway. Logan’s friends were far less interested in him without his shiny play space, and he spent his birthday ‘party’ learning that; alone.
This is a hard time for the whole family, but Logan leaves it -for better or worse- more grounded and mature. It sucks that it happened, but Logan chooses his friends a bit more carefully going forward.
He suggests to his dad not long after that they should offer the space for birthday parties. If the kids at school liked it so much to pretend to be friends with someone for it, maybe they’d get their parents to rent it instead. Logan sounds bitter when he suggests this, and his dad is torn. It’s a great idea, which he is proud of his son for thinking of, but it’s no fun seeing your kid hurting. He plans a camping trip for just the two of them. Father and son get to find out together they both hate camping, but both have their spirits lifted by the shared experience. When they return, Kelly surprises Logan with fliers and a sign out front running his idea, which does a fair bit to help as well. Kelly and Michael sit their son down to tell him they’re proud of him, and they’re going to give him more responsibility with their shop. He’s going to get to help choose new games, and plan events, as well as see the budgeting process. They aren’t overwhelming him with actual, real grown-up pressures and expectations, but they are giving him age appropriate jobs to let him feel involved. His first suggestion is that they get a Nintendo Wii and a TV for over the fireplace to hook it up to. His parents are skeptical, but don’t want to shoot down his first suggestion immediately.
As a compromise they suggest they put the family TV and Wii in the shop for a trial run, before they commit to the big purchase. They half expect Logan to back-pedal because it would mean the TV wouldn’t be available for the majority of most days, but he jumps at the idea.
As a result, their shop gets a sudden uptick in traffic. Feeling involved; Logan has begun advertising his project at school, and 8th graders love Lottie’s BookNook. Their parents are far more willing to drop their kids off with a family they know, and at a bookshop rather than the mall or GameStop. And, like GameStop, Lottie’s BookNook has video games; but these ones don’t just stop after a demo. After a week the family has to implement an hour limit to each kid for the console, and after two weeks they have to put a $5/hour price tag on usage. Neither seem to deter the 8th graders. Terrifying, but profitable.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Hehehe. Back in grade school they had events where the kids were supposed to run little “shops”, presumably in an attempt to teach us about running a business. But what actually happens is all the kids with parents who have money show up with giant bags of candy, and anyone who didn’t (me) felt like crap for not being able to.
In 3rd grade instead of this being a thing that was just for a couple hours on a single day, there was one running for. . . probably not a week, but had to have been at least 2 days, maybe 3. With the ostensible theme being a colony on Mars, which did at least mean the leftover kid could be given the job of selling “dust masks” and water so they supposedly weren’t left out. But that was not me, no it was not. . . For with a multi-day event, I could justify the effort of dragging in my SNES, second-hand Genesis, one color smallish tv, and an ancient black and white tv.
It wasn’t even a contest, I completely destroyed the entire thing. The whole class except for one girl doing nail painting and the kid who had to man the “dust mask” station, were all crammed as close as they could get to my “arcade.” I deputized someone to continue collecting monopoly money for me and wandered around sampling this and that leaving the money on the table, feeling entirely vindicated after the previous years of feels-bad those stupid things had given me. I don’t recall if it reached a point where people had run out of cash and had to slink back to their stalls, or if the narrow throughput meant that they basically called it off early ’cause no one was doing anything, maybe a bit of both?
Anyway, story checks out.
I was allowed 40 minutes on the computer, sometimes not long enough to get to a save point!
Ah, the days of “computer time” (we got 1 hour as kids)…imagine Mozart’s mom being like “OK Wolfgang, you’ve had your one hour of keyboard time for the day! Time to get off and do something else!”
Though in fairness to my parents, they probably couldn’t have known that I’d grow up to make a living out of programming, and kids do need to run around and get exercise sometimes.
Using video games in a commercial space for profit? Sounds like the EULA police will be knocking soon. In fact come to think of it what about board games. I have no idea what the law is, and afaik most EULA nonsense is not actually legally binding in any way. My gf and friends got into some trouble with the university when they tried to show films for charity events for their swing dance society, in lecture theatres – as apparently there is some licence they had to get but that cost more than it was worth for a small society charity event.
Ha ha! One thing I’m thankful for is that my dad also doesn’t enjoy camping, but knows it, so we never did it while I was growing up. (Like, “sleep in a tent outside” camping, we did do the occasional family trip where we’d stay overnight in a hotel or cabin, which I’m fine with.)
My mother is the one who insisted taking us camping a few times.
Though mind you, “camping” in her mind is not “going to the middle of nowhere in the wilderness and see if you manage to not get lost/die”, but rather “going to safe wilderness-adjacent but fenced camps that charged people to camp inside where the most dangerous thing around was the campfire every night and maybe a lake to fish in. (Which we never did because you had to pay to fish).”
So just a few steps removed from camping in your backyard, I guess. Which is just as well, since we never had a backyard in our entire childhood or teens.
5 US$ an hour? THAT is terrifying for me. Though I guess it aligns somewhat with the console time rental of the early 10s, clashing with my childhood/teen memories of R$1 (about 50 cents in dollars at the time) an hour to rent Super Nintendos, N64s and PlayStations. Which is all me and my brother did during vacations on the northeastern Brazilian coast instead of going to the beach. So our mother had to claw us out of the rental places to get SOME tan, plus eat crab and drink coconut water on the sand.
Which we liked. But we’d rather do it while playing Golden Eye. Heck, we almost dreaded those trips since we’d rather stay home and play Age of Empires or Heroes of Might and Magic in our dad’s computer.
One local bookstore used to have board game nights, after which you could buy the game at a discount if you wanted; I really enjoyed going to them, but they stopped at some point.