works of wanderlust

game: civilization seven

Would you say that I got this game for free?

I mean, I didn’t pay for it. I ordered it using points. AirMiles(TM). So it wasn’t strictly free because, I mean, those points have a kind of real and tangible value, but they are not money in the sense that I could buy anything but whatever random crap is listed on their catalog on any given day. I didn’t pay for the game, I guess is what I’m saying, and using points made it feel like something I got for free (even though I didn’t really, I suppose) and I mention it because I’m still very torn on how I feel about this latest insallment in the Civilization series inasmuch as I’m feeling pretty smug about not having spent real cash on the game.

I’ve been playing Civilization VII.

And shortly before that I had been playing Civilization 6, which was both a mature game which had been tweaked and refined and bug-squashed long since, and which I picked up up for literally a few bucks on a big digital sale lowering the stakes dramatically for what turned out to be an excellent purchase and investment of my gaming time.

And? Before that I’ve played every other installment of this game going back to the original in the 90s.

All this is just me setting the stage and suggesting my bonafides when it comes to a player of this particular game series and type.

If you’ve never played a “Civ” game let me elaborate as best as I can bring it down: It’s like a big game of Risk on a huge interactive video game map of a randomly generated world—except rather than just rolling dice and moving armies you need to build the cities and grow the economies to raise and support those armies, ensure that they have resources to fight, negotiate diplomacy with other societies, fend off natural disasters, counter religious uprisings, research and build new technologies and so on and on and on into a kind of complexity that is hard to explain in a single paragraph.

Look up 4X games which stands for eXplore, eXpland, eXploit, and eXterminate, and which in a vague sort of way truly summarizes the core of the gameplay.

I play Civilization and have played it for pretty much my entire adult gaming life as a kind of slow, serious, strategic gamer’s pursuit. Civilization is like the chess of the video game world: that is to say a lot of people take it serious as f.

So it is a big deal when a new installment ships. Civilization VII shipped just a few months ago in early 2025 and generally—well—people hate it, frankly.

Personally I’m torn.

Here’s the thing about that. I play it with seriousness, but I am not serious about the game. I just dabble in seriousness, and in saying that my stake in the game is not about the fine-tuned mechanics of a elaborate and complex simulator leveraging the raw strategy of a well-honed plan of tactical gamers pursuit vibes. I’m just playing to go with the flow. I don’t just click and click and click some more. I think about my moves, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that on a scale of hard-core Civ-ness, I’m like a 4 out of 10.

I’ve played three games of Civilization VII since I got it for not-exactly-free from my reward points, such a middle aged dad thing to do by the way, ordering video games on a physical disc using your airline rewards, and three games in I’m like… hmm… uh… yeah. It’s… okay. I mean, I like the innovative thinking. I like that game companies are trying new things. I like that this is more than just an updated graphics engine smeared over the old engine. It is a new approach, and that is a awesome and we should all celebrate risk taken in the name of advancing new ideas and updates.

But there is a hitch—and an itch I can’t quite scratch.

The game is—I dunno—bumbling.

There is just something about it that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. It’s as if the game is simultaneously too complex for its own good and yet insufficiently rigourous in allowing the player to control all that complexity. There is stuff that happens, automatically, behind the curtain, out of sight, that I just simply don’t understand as I’m playing. And I write this not as a good veil-of-war kind of sense where such secrecy promotes strategic play: I say in the sense of it sometimes feels, just feels, like the game is playing itself and that I am reduced to little more than button mashing the turn meter forward. It just bumbles along, tap, tap, tap, bumble, tap, tap, tap, bumble—and I’m left thinking, like, am I playing this or watching it play? And that is the type of game that leaves you with a kind of vague emptiness when you’ve progressed far enough along.

It likely doesn’t help that I’m playing this on Playstation, to be honest. On a desktop I assume I’d do more mouse-hovering and poking around the UI to see what I was missing, read the help tips, or something. So is it a UI issue or a game issue or a hand-holding issue or—I don’t even know what is bugging me. But as it stands, I got the PS5 version with points not the other one, so that’s what I have been playing.

Or should I say watching?

And even though I write all this I still want it to be good. Maybe I write all this because I want it to be good. This is a beloved franchise. This is a piece of my gaming persona. This is my chess.

I’m just torn on if I like it or not—and actually a little bit glad I didn’t really pay for it, either.

June 9, 2025
weekend wrap seven

There was a taste of smoke in the air all weekend. It has been hot and dry and the province is burning all over the place. You could barely open the window without catching a whiff of char outside.

This past weekend looked something like…

Fridey evening we multi-car-tripped over to the high school for the Kid’s final improv club home show. It was sparsely attended because of the hockey playoffs, but the parents who were there were definitely lamenting the end of an era in our offspring’s theatre careers.

The Kid herself bundled up in a van with a few of her friends right from the high school parking lot and dashed off to the wilderness for a weekend of post-graduation camping and river tubing, leaving her poor parents with a taste of imminent empty nest syndrome.

We filled our Saturday with some errands, making one of our rare trips over to West Edmonton Mall for some light shopping and then down to Burbon Street and into an excellent taco restaurant for lunch. The made-table-side guac was divine.

Somewhere in the mix we walked over to the local cafe for chai lattes, but mostly we chilled and napped and chilled some more for the rest of the day—and wrapped up season one of a show we’ve been watching before basically falling asleep on the couch.

Sunday morning I joined the usual run routine, logging not quite eight klicks in the fire smokey air, and joining the crew for coffee afterwards.

I did a bit of yard work, watered a few things after a week of rainless skies, and set up in my chair in the shade to read for about an hour.

Then we dodged off to a local pizza place. Annually on June 8 we celebrate the move-in anniversary to our house—a day on which we ate our first meal of a communal pizza delivered there with all the folks who helped us move in—by eating pizza. Sunday was the twentieth anniversary of that move-in, so we got some classy pizza at the place over in the strip mall by the grocery store.

I spent the rest of the evening fighting ants that have laid claim to the plum tree in my front yard and who are starting to do actually noticable damage. It might be a losing battle, but I know better than to give up on day one—even though the flower bed fought back and gave me a splinter in my heel. Serves me right, I suppose, for going to war in bare feet.

June 9, 2025
periodical past

Remember magazines?

There are still magazines for sale, of course, paper ones… really. I know. I’m looking at some there off to my right even as I sit here writing this—but despite the physical evidence just out of reach from me, I do honestly believe we are clearly past the age of peak periodical.

I stopped for a coffee in a bookstore this morning and wandered through the magazine rack just long enough to thumb through a few familiar titles before heading for the cafe, a free table, and my phone… which has instant access to roughly fifty downloaded-but-unread issues of various magazines (which I may or may not get around to reading someday) all buried inside apps and services to which I subscribe.

I remember magazines—and I certainly didn’t need a paper copy.

Oh, but heck if I didn’t used to be the core customer demographic for print magazines, subscribing to WIRED or Runners World delivered by postal mail, hitting up the convenience store for the latest issue of Popular Mechanics or that Playstation magazine that came with a free demo disc, and definitely buying a copy of some text-heavy serious content periodical like The Economist or National Geographic with habitual dedication at the airport before I hopped on any flight. And before you think I’m getting all high and mighty about those particular titles, I definitely still have a stack of MAD back-issues on a shelf in my office.

Yet I cannot actually remember the last time I out and out bought a print magazine.

(And to be honest I looked at the prices and that wasn’t swerving that decision any closer to a sale this morning, either.)

The answer to what happened to magazines is obvious: the internet happened.

I mean, I’m sitting in a bookstore watching people still queued up to buy print books by the arm-load, but the magazine rack is a ghost town.

That’s to say, maybe the internet didn’t kill print mediums as much as it just killed print media.

And of course it did.

I don’t buy magazines on paper anymore, though I’ve bought my share of bound books. But those things aren’t even really equivalents after they? Books vers magazine periodicals? I buy books to have them. I want magazines to use them.

Because sure, I kept a few keepsake issues of those many hundreds perhaps thousands of paper-based magazines that I bought over the decades, but that particular ratio is likely something close to 5-10% tops. On the other hand, I still own at least 80% of the dead-tree books I’ve ever bought, and the other 20% that I have lost track of were almost certainly resold, loaned or given away.

Magazines are, after all, by design transient media. Temporary. Longer-lasting than a newspaper, sure… but not by much. Magazines were always just a means to communicate something that was mostly never meant to endure beyond bursts of momentary information or entertainment. Then? Insert big blurry line here and cross over to the other side to find the realm of more persistent print mediums like novels and other books. (Magazines often try to be books too these days—weightier and collectible—but I would argue that the effort was flimsy and doomed. To most of us, magazines are things we buy, read and then… just toss.)

I collect and read and savour books, but magazines? Far less. Magazines are disposable, fleeting, keep-scrolling kind of media.

And that kind of media, transient and temporary, is really where the internet shines the strongest: short form transient content in a digital on-demand format. Read once and discard. Consume today, gone tonite. Words tangled up with timestamps and best before dates.

Heck, you could even argue that apart from a few differentiating factors—like cost, quality, contributor count, etc—this very website is little more than a kind of digital periodical. And the one place where it is practically the same, sadly, is in readership. Sure I get some traffic, but this site is just as much a ghost town as the periodical aisle three metres to my right.

We haven’t stopped reading magazines I suppose. In fact, arguably the digital equivalent of periodical media is probably in something of a resurgence. My own personal experience is that of reading articles from these kinds of publications almost daily in my news and social feeds.

But as for that floppy bit of glossy paper rolled up and tossed in a bag, sitting in a cafe or on the couch or on a plane reading a bound anthology of that kind of writing? I recall it like a long-lost cozy sweater, but there’s pretty much no way I’m routinely shelling out fifteen bucks for something I have on my phone already—and then I’m going to throw away next week.

I remember magazines and to be honest I kinda do miss them… but probably not enough to do much more than feel nostalgic about it.

June 7, 2025
raising calvin

I grew up on a steady diet of Calvin & Hobbes.

The still-famous cartoon strip by Bill Watterson was a fixture in our local newspaper during the entirety of my teenage existence, one of the sole reasons I read the paper that I delivered door to door, clipping out my favourite strips and then later buying the collections in multiple formats of increasingly crisply bound volumes. You could say it was formative for me, and that would be an understatement by a mile.

The Kid graduated from high school this week and tho they were not allowed to decorate or bedazzle their gowns, they were given free passes to flare up their mortarboard caps. She spent a whole evening in the basement and emerged later that night proudly showing off a collage affixed to the top of her cap: it was a collection of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, arranged and glued to her lid, spattered artfully with colour and sparkles, and ready for a quick stroll across the diploma stage.

This was not a surprise to anyone who knows her.

To lay claim to some kind of parenting methodology that led us to this moment, my daughter walking across her graduation threshold literally wearing a comic strip that went out of print more than a decade before she was born, that would be foolish of me. I mean it’s simple, really. She likes Calvin & Hobbes because (a) it’s a great and timeless cartoon, (b) I had numerous copies in the house, and (c) I read them to her frequently until she could read them on her own and then she read them frequently.

Then, too, don’t forget that I even drew my own comic strip for a few years and you would not be the least bit surprised to read that one of my major influences for that effort was Calvin & Hobbes.

That influence, it swirled through the rooms of our house for decades.

Now, maybe it is that I may have internalized some of the lessons of a comic strips character who I adored because, truth be told, I was nothing like him growing up. Calvin was defiant of authority in a way that I could never muster. Calvin was wise and deep and whip smart with a purpose that I merely aspired towards. Calvin brought everything to a life lived with existential abandon that defied everything I understood about the metaphorical box in which I was raised and out of which I feared to step out. Deep down I knew that I was not Calvin, but that not just maybe, certainly, there was something aspirational in that defiant little character and his life of epic adventure and freedom.

As we were driving home from the ceremony, I racing to get her back to the house so she could dress for prom, she was holding her cap in her hand and she turns to me and says something like “You know why I put this on my cap, don’t you? I’m basically Calvin, you know that right, Dad? You raised me to turn into Calvin.”

And what does that even mean? Are you a mischievous troublemaker? Are you a socially misaligned youth? Or are you a creative soul unbound by rules? A philosophical genius wise beyond her years? A dramatic soul unleashed by existential undercurrents? Or maybe a bit of everything all rolled into one?

Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me because while I was not Calvin, then too I could pretend to be that guy, act the part, read the strips and embody the spirit of this quirky kid, not so much unlike a neurotic rule-following father-figure guy in not but a mask and striped shirt. But whatever I made of myself, there could be a chance—a risk—an epic possibility that I influenced something else. Did I actually parent my own Calvin into being?

Formative, indeed. Formative squared.

June 6, 2025
leaning positive

Angry sells.

Have you noticed? You probably have. I mean, isn’t that why we are living in these unprecidented times? Angry people, rage, fails, and violence all seem to generate more clicks, more views, voter turnout?

I wrote a couple weeks ago about the weird fluctuations in my traffic. Some days I get a lot of clicks and some days almost nothing. I tossed some advertising modules up on the site because, hell, if I’m going to start needing to deal with increased traffic I may as well turn that into bucks to pay my hosting fees.

But, truth be told, I’m probably not angry enough. Not even close.

Look. It’s simple.

I’m not picking fights with other bloggers or accusing people of hate crimes or committing hate crimes (I hope) or tearing apart the creative works of others for my own self-agrandizement. (Although this is sort of a critique of the social zeitgeist, so there is an argument that I am being negative about negativity to promote positivity, blah, blah, whatever.) I’m doing none of that. I could. I mean it’s so easy to be mad and pissy and negative. And I’d get a helluva lot more traffic.

It’s an angry world and anger sells.

The roaring twenties are roaring cuz everyone is pissed off all the time and roaring negative about damn near everything. It is almost performative. Like, people are hating on others for the lolz and the clicks. Literally.

I do catch myself playing that game, too. Creeping into being mad.

And I mean, look, honestly, you can be part of that obtusely unaware crowd of people who think rage and anger and being an asshole are somehow flags of independent thought rather that what they really are—the soup of the day—but I see through a lot of it, personally. That’s such an easy clear path to follow. It’s like lazy af and lit by a neon casino glow. It’s fake and wonderful and terrible and always so fucking lazy. But then what do I know. Maybe that’s just age writing. Hell, I’m creeping up on fifty. How did that happen? Yeah, maybe I am just naive. Maybe I just don’t want to lean into the clicks, huh?

My truth is just that, as I wrote above, angry sells. And I’m not even close to angry enough to bank on this blog…

…which was never the point when I started writing it. Still isn’t.

If you have stumbled upon this site, congrats. The Algorithm doesn’t want you here. You have entered a place where there is nothing to be sold, nothing to be bought, nothing about which to tear off your shirt in a spitting rage. I have been trying—not always succeeding, but trying—to lean positive.

That is not performative. That is just me. I’m not inclined to rage on differences, or tear down effort in any form or demand a level of quality that I could not first deliver myself (which is virtually never.) I am most just here to point and say huh, isn’t that thing that happened a thing that happened and wasn’t it mildly interesting?

That doesn’t sell.

But you are here reading it, so maybe there is hope for the world not being completely sold out to hate and anger, right?

June 3, 2025

about

Welcome. I’m one of those weirdos who still writes a personal blog. In fact, I’ve been writing meandering drivel online for decades, and here you’ll find all my recent posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, travel, and overthinking just about anything and everything …since early 2021.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me. Enjoy!

There are currently 449,420 words in 589 posts.

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