• You are a leader. Others soon will need your inspiration.
• A new relationship is about to blossom. You will be blessed.
• An interesting musical opportunity is in your near future.
• Your random act of kindness today will spread quickly to others.

Bonus short funny thing: I recently discovered notes I'd taken on an improv show, including a scene that was summarized as "Joseph, Mary, and the awkward marriage counselor."

• Anyone who owns and loves their cast-iron cookware (like I do), should bone up on their seasoning technique.
• Still on the cooking front, my friend Tim Newsome wires up an Arduino control for his Alton Brown smoker.
• I just love idea of Cold War spies collecting jokes as intelligence.
• McSweeney's offers Seven Rejected Improv Troupe Scenarios, which are made so much better than the usual bad suggestions we get by the inclusion of additional, unnecessary clauses.
• You've probably seen this already, but I desperately want to perform Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.

• Merlin Mann reminds us to make the clackity noise as often as possible.
• Practitioners of allegedly unlike disciplines can learn a lot from each other, as these surgeons and F1 pit crews demonstrated.
• Chip and Dan Heath take that idea a little further in A Problem-Solver's Guide to Copycatting.
• Lynn Cherny glosses some of Ed Catmull's ideas about creativity and innovation at Pixar.
• And, Doyce Testerman should have called this "What I've learned from bowling."

• Matt Mulholland seems to be one of more active (and talented) participants in the YouTube multi-track scene. His a cappella cover of the Ghostbusters theme made me smile.
• The Ambassadors of Harmony, on the other hand, made me miss barbershop singing. There wasn't quite this much choreography when I was doing it, though.
• Looking for a crazy hobby? How about launching anvils into the air?
• Lin-Manuel Miranda raps about Alexander Hamilton. At the White House.
• And finally, the answer to that age-old question, "How do monks who have taken a vow of silence sing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus?"

What I read was first this (emphasis mine):

"Foote is a novelist who temporarily abandoned fiction to apply the novelist's shaping hand to history: his model is not Thucydides but The Iliad, and his story, innocent of notes and formal bibliography, has a literary design. Not by accident...but for cathartic effect is so much space given to the war's unwinding, it's final shudders and convulsions.... To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again." —Newsweek

and then this:

"Further afield, but no less applicable, Richard Lattimore's translation of the Iliad put a Greekless author in close touch with his model."  —Shelby Foote

What those passages made sense of was Foote's tendency to use certain phrases to decribe the same thing again and again. At first I ascribed it to an author running out of interesting synonyms over the course of a 3,000-page narrative, and frankly, I found it a little annoying. These two passages made me realize, however that when Foote repeated descriptions like "the Father of Waters" (the Mississippi River), "the red-haired Ohioan" (William Tecumsah Sherman), or "his taterdemalion army" (Lee's Army of Northern Viriginia), he intended them as epithets in the Homerian sense. And somehow, by knowing this, I didn't mind those repetitions. Instead I started to read them with an almost poetic cadence.

It's funny how a little context can change how you see something.

No more.

I've talked before about the fear of "running out of awesome;" how in roleplaying games I would hold onto my cool ideas until exactly the right moment out of fear that I wouldn't come up with new ideas. Improv taught me that those fears were groundless, that awesome begets awesome. A year ago I did my "12 (or 14) Days of HG,WT: FAFGM-mas" experiment. Looking back, it was both the extreme in bursty creativity and probably the best work I did in that format. So, while I'm not a fan of New Year's Resolutions (at least of the behavior-changing-accomplishment variety, for reasons that really are their own post), in this new year, I'm going to strive to make hay while the sun shines, creatively speaking.

The tone of some of these messages, however, makes me think that they're eulogizing me. Rest assured, I'm still here.

• Jim Crocker, manager of Modern Myths in Northampton, MA, calls A Penny For My Thoughts one of his favorite games of the year. I know Jim doesn't praise things lightly, so this means a lot to me.
• The Ogres over at OgreCave found room for Penny on their annual Christmas Gift Guide, in the Stocking Stuffer (i.e. less than $25) section. For the last seven or so Christmases, I've looked foward to this list. Finding my own game on it is an unexpected present.
• There was at least one game of Penny at MACE in High Point, NC, that sounds like it was both gonzo and fun. Later on in that thread, Andy Kitkowksi talks thoughfully about his experience of the game, using words that make me happy.
• And finally, the day before Thanksgiving, my mother called me and asked me to send her a PDF because she'd forgotten her copy at home. My parents were visiting friends in Plainview, TX, and on Thanksgiving Day they played Penny together and had a great time. This is pretty much the definition of win.