Posted on September 20, 2020
Sunday Sunday
After a few crazy weeks of smoke and staying inside, it was great to have a fun day like today. We kicked it off with brunch at Front Porch, around the corner from our house. It was our first time eating there since the pandemic started, and it’s one of the few places we’ve eaten in the past six months. It was really mellow, the tables were outdoors and separated with cool looking dividers.
Afterwords, we rode bikes, got some sun, and picked up chips from La Palma.
I also got some time to play a few games of Deep Space D6, with some new metal dice that were custom made for the game.
Posted on September 13, 2020
Orange You Glad The Sky Is Normal Again?
This week we had very strange weather. Massive fires in California and Oregon filled the air with so much smoke that the skies turned orange for a few days. It was very disorienting.
Christine was ready for it
Posted on September 6, 2020
All my work on KnifeTank led up to this moment…
After a year of work, KnifeTank finally started reaching the hands of my Kickstarter backers. Watching this play out on Twitter has been fantastic. Like seriously, all that work lead up to this exact moment:
It’s amazing seeing these photos start to come in, but what I really appreciate are the stories and photos of people who have already started playing the game.
Thanks so much to everyone who has been sharing their KnifeTank stories and photos with me. It really is amazing to see these games out in the real world.
If you’d like to pick up a copy of KnifeTank, you can buy them on my site here.
Posted on August 30, 2020
Juggling Giraffes with Mikl Em
San Francisco lost another amazing artists today. Mikl Em passed away this morning after a year long battle with brain cancer.
Mikl was a doer. I have many talented friends, but what set Mikl apart was his ability to follow through and make things. He’d always tell you about some crazy idea, then a month later you’d get a call from him asking if you could help run the door or fill in some specific role that he needed.
Seriously, of all the qualities I admire in an artist, the ability to follow through and make things happen is at the top of my list. He was an organizer, a writer, a people person, a visionary, a performer, a planner, and a marketer all wrapped up in one package. He was also prolific as hell.
I helped perform at a few of his projects over the years, mainly as a visual artist. He was really into exquisite corpses, a surrealist writing challenge where writers start a story, then pass it on to other writers to work on. Each writer can only see the last sentence of what the author before them had written, so the stories can often get quite silly. Mikl had heard that some friends and I had developed an exquisite corpse-style portraiture process, where an artist folds a sheet a paper into thirds and then draws 1/3rd of a person’s portrait, before passing the paper on to two other artists to complete. Mikl loved this idea and had us come to quite a few of his exquisite corpse plays to draw “corpstraits” during the intermission.
All of our visual artists loved these events and would frequently ask when we could do our next one.
We hung out a lot throughout the years and he was one of the most supportive artists I know. My only regret was that we never got to work on a whole project together. Start to finish. Not that Mikl didn’t try to make that happen. He tried several times, but I always felt too busy to take on another project. Especially something as ambitious as what Mikl would often dream up.
I could barely manage one project at a time, but Mikl could be in the middle of 4 other big projects (plays, events, immersive installations, public art performance) and still find time to be plan something new.
We did manage to make one thing together though. Something small, but I love listening back to it throughout the years. Really it was Mikl doing the hard work. I just hit record and played guitar while he improvised this strange story about the sounds giraffes make when being juggled.
Despite being the most prolific artist I knew, he somehow managed to come out and support so many other folks in SF. When you spotted Mikl at an event, you knew you picked the right place to be. He will be missed so much by all of us that were lucky enough to know him.
