Shakespeare 2020

Shakespeare 2020

by Simon W.

I have decided that I'm going to be going along with Ian Doesher's grand scheme to read every word written by William Shakespeare in one calendar year. As it happens, next year specifically, 2020. I was introduced to this project by a friend who knows that I am a fan of Shakespeare and I'm gonna run with it.

Now, you might wonder why anyone would want to do this. Or maybe you just wonder why I want to do this. Let me enlighten you a bit on my personal history with the Bard.

When I was growing up I was that kid who read everything I could get my hands on. And often I would find myself without library or school books because I'd already read them and it was a weekend or something. Which meant that I'd head to the bookshelf of books that was always full of books that my parents owned. Somewhere in late elementary school I happened to be looking for something to read and I found a small volume entitled The Stories of William Shakespeare. I can't remember exactly how many it had, but I want to say it was about a half dozen of Shakespeare's plays written out in modern language and narrative fashion with relevant quotes interspersed though the re-tellings. And I fell absolutely IN LOVE with the stories contained in there. 

It wasn't until I got to junior high school that I even knew that a) Shakespeare wrote plays, not stories and b) that it was considered weird to just want to read them. I found them in my school library and started making my way through them. The language, of course, was a bit of a barrier but what I didn't pick up from context I sort of glossed over in the way that lots of 12 year olds do when they are reading.

In high school we read a few Shakespeare plays as part of the normal English curriculum. I enjoyed them and was able to appreciate being in a position where I could have someone help me through some of the linguistics. And then in college, I decided that even though I was going to an Engineering school for a Biology degree that I wanted to take Shakespeare classes at the college level.

Over the course of my first two years in college I took five different Shakespeare classes and then wrote a giant (and horribly pretentious) essay on how the personal lives of the main characters in Shakespeare's Roman plays affected their politics. What can I say, I was 19 years old; you'll have to forgive me.

Believe it or not, after all of that... I actually haven't read all of Shakespeare's plays nor have I read any of his narrative poems. So this year I am going to fix that.

I plan to talk about my perceptions of what I read here over the course of the year. I don't promise it'll be great literary review. But I hope it'll be interesting... or at least amusing.

Simon W.

Connor - A Retrospective

This is fan created fiction about a character in a Vampire: The Masquerade live action role playing game run by Mind's Eye Society. If you are a fellow player, please remember that anything you read here is considered out of character knowledge. If you are a lawyer, please don't sue me; I'm not making any money off of this and it's just for fun.

Connor - A Retrospective
by Simon W. 

Our first real conversation and our last conversation were about the same thing, the importance of Humanitas. If symmetry were important I could take comfort in this.

Symmetry isn't that important to me, alas. I could deal with a lopsided existence if my friends would stop dying... or being captured and "held indefinitely" by their Sect's internal police but that is a different friend and a different story.

Right now I want to talk about Connor, or if we are being formal Doctor Connor Villanueva, Lord of Sand and Sea. I remember when he got that title. I didn't see it; I was even then off chasing some demon or another (small d demon, I hadn't yet started chasing the large D kind); but from what I hear he stood against a Fae Lord because the Fae Lord in question was hurting people.

That was Connor in a nutshell; constantly standing up and telling people bigger, stronger, or more powerful than himself "no". It's part of why we got along, because we have... no had; I have to use the past tense for him now.

We had that in common.

Connor had his faults, mostly in the fact that he was overeager and impetuous. He also tended to lean toward self-righteousness. Again.... we had those things in common. I still have those faults. And now I'm not sure who to share them with. Because Connor was deeply empathetic and he understood what I did even while it worried him.

I don't even know why he was killed. And I don't know if I will be able to do anything about it. It's gotten to the point where my list of enemies is so long and so dangerous that getting vengeance for the murder of my friend isn't at the top. Connor wouldn't want me to get vengeance though, so maybe this is actually the best way to honor who he was and what he thought was important.

I'm going to try and be a better person for his sake. I don't know if I'll succeed.

But our first and last conversations give me hope, and right now I need all of that I can get.

Change of Heart

This is fan created fiction about a character in a Werewolf: the Apocalypse live action role playing game run by Mind's Eye Society. If you are a fellow player, please remember that anything you read here is considered out of character knowledge. If you are a lawyer, please don't sue me; I'm not making any money off of this and it's just for fun.

Change of Heart
by Simon W. 

You ever meet someone and, for reasons you can't quite place, you instantly mistrust them? I don't know, maybe it's a Fenrir thing. But for about that past 18 months now I have been what can only be called skeptical if we're being polite and downright suspicious if we're being more accurate about a person.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago, Valka One Eye now called Valka Thrice Blessed reappeared after being shoved deep, DEEP into the Umbra by Grandfather Thunder. She came back with a new rank (Legend) and a new Vision (a unified Gaian Nation) and a new plan to achieve it based on prophesy she couldn't fully explain. And the plan, as she explained it to our Tribe, was that she was going to seek to become the High King of the Garou Nation...and then change the Garou Nation to a Gaian Nation.

I have nothing against the idea of unifying Gaians. And Gods know I have not been quiet about the fact that the Tribal Council is lousy at governance. But something about Valka just never sat right with me. I thought she was seeking Glory, and power, and her unwillingness to share more of the prophesy she'd been given in depth seemed both suspicious and convenient to me.

Maybe it's being kinfolk, or possibly it's just being me, but as far as I am concerned you can take your Glory and shove it. Honor and Wisdom are what I value and Glory ranks so low on my list of concerns on basically any day that ends in Y. So when I encounter someone who strikes me as vainglorious I react very badly to them. And that's what Valka struck me as.

I watched as she made her decisions, her proclamations, her challenges. Some of her initial ideas she was willing to amend after discussions within our Tribe and I was glad to see that. Hey, even I don't like to change my mind and admit that I'm wrong... and I don't have three Incarna spirits giving me their blessing so I was willing to concede that she was, very possibly, not all bad. But still I was skeptical.

I was skeptical when we found the Great Caern in the desert. I was skeptical even though she did with it exactly what she said she would do. By that point nearly everyone I knew believed that I was all in for Valka because we are both Fenrir and I suspect that fueled my skepticism. I hate being assumed to just follow the party line, as it were.

And then we went to Russia, to the Sept of the Crescent Moon. A whole lot of Fenrir and Silverfangs in very close proximity for a week of moots, songs, stories, some grieving, and then, finally, Valka's challenge. This did not go as any Fenrir expected. I'm still not certain that it didn't go exactly as some Silverfangs suspected but, as should already be obvious by now, I'm kind of a suspicious person.

When Jonas Albrect, High King of the Garou Nation, did appear I saw something. I don't know if anyone else was looking at Valka's face at that moment. But I was and I saw hope. I saw joy. I saw relief at her friend being able to speak to her again. And in that moment I realized that whatever reasons she had for challenging for High King, Valka was not doing it for personal glory in the slightest.

So I have changed my mind about Valka Thrice Blessed, High General of the Garou Nation. I'm not sure she and I will ever be friendly but I no longer think she is seeking personal glory. And that matters, at least to me.

See, sometimes I can admit when I am wrong... but Gods know I hate doing it.