The Truth...

 I have stayed quiet for too long. Listen here before it's too late! (Posted on April 1st, wink wink)

The Truth

Date with a Dummy

    Here is my first finished short story. I have a few books by popular authors such as, Stephen King and Philip K. Dick. Stephen King's book, Different Seasons, released in 1982 contained the short story, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which of course became one of my all-time favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption. His story in the book, Apt Pupil became a movie as well, but my other favorite story in the book is called The Body, which became another movie I love, Stand By Me, which was directed by Robert Reiner, RIP Robert.

    The Philip K. Dick book is simply titled The Minority Report, which also contained another film I really like, the Steven Spielberg film with Tom Cruise, Minority Report. It also has a bunch of other short stories. I can't remember the title of the story of the top of my head, but it became the Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman film, Paycheck. The point I am trying to make is that both of these books have a bunch of short stories in them. 

    I have been writing short stories to compile into a book, and while I have a quite a few I am working on, and ones that are far from done, I finished a really short one called, Dinner with a Dummy. It's only four pages long. I tried posting it on Facebook, but the format was kind of weird, so I thought I would post it here. I hope people can take a couple minutes and read it. It would help me be able to know what I need to do to be a better writer. Here is the story pages:

    

    I hope you enjoyed the story. Anyway, I hope that you are all doing really well and that the new year has been kind to you thus far. I hope to be able to be sharing new stories in the future, but I know I don't need a story to post interesting blog posts, so I will keep my eyes and ears open to see if I have anything exciting to write about. Until next time, I'm Nate Unck, and I approve of this blog post.

Card Game Review: Tacta

     All of you who visit my blog somewhat often know that I am really into board and card games. I actually have a half-written blog post talking about board games and how there is a huge world of board and card games where some people only think of games like Sorry or Monopoly, so of course, they say games are boring, or too long, or they don't have an interesting premise. I always felt that way up until 22 years ago when I discovered the board game company, Days of Wonder, and their brand-new game, Ticket to Ride, I was hooked. 

    I started collecting the other games from Days of Wonder, and now I have a huge collection of board and card games, and I like to recommend games to all of you when my family finds a game that we have a really good time playing. I also have the thoughts that everyone might have a little board gaming fan in them if they play the right underground game that has a theme in it that you love. Then there are abstract games that are interesting and fun to look at, as well as playing.

    A new game that we recently got is called Tacta. Here is the box cover with some of the cards coming out of it so that you can see what I will start talking about.

    

In Tacta, each player has their own color of cards, like one person has all of the yellow cards, another player will have all of the blue ones. At the top of the box, there is a black card with a lot of different lines on it. You place this card in the middle of the table, and you are going to need a big table space for this game, because what happens next will start to spread out. You have your cards, but you can only use the card on the top and the card on the bottom to play onto the table. Each card has a mix of triangles, squares and rectangles, which has dots on each card. If you have a number six card, you have six dots on that card. You must play a card onto another card on the table. Your table might start to look like this:

    Or like this later on in the game.

    At the end of the game, the players count the dots that are still showing, where some cards might have had other cards played on the original cards to cover up dots from another player's cards. Who ever has the most dots showing on their card color, they win the game. The game plays in ten minutes, and there are five variations to play, just to keep things fresh. 

    My favorite part of the game, is that the patterns always change with every game you play. It's easy to sit down with friends and family, it's interesting to look at, but I like that you never get the same placement of cards every game. It is turned into one of our new favorite games, especially because it is easy to understand and play, and you can sit down and easily play three games in a row. Here is a link to Amazon's listing. Right now as of this post, the game is close to ten dollars, but if it isn't on sale, it's still only fifteen dollars at the most. 

 Amazon.com: TACTA Card Game, Where Every Card Counts, Fast-Paced Strategic Shape Matching Party Game, Analyze and Optimize to Connect, Cover & Conquer to Win, Unique Party Game Play for 2 or More Players, Ages 7 : Toys & Games

I hope that you all had a great Christmas and New Year season and that you are all happy and excited about what's going on in your lives. I wish that I had more time to sit down and write new blog posts, but there is a lot coming up that I will have to talk about and share. Thanks for reading, and I will see you later!

Rememory #2

 So, I had a lot of fun with my last blog post where I used The Storymatic: Rememory, I wasn't going to post more than a couple now and then, but I was playing with the cards and came up with something funny. It takes me back to being 14 and a scout camp. I will show you the cards here:

If you can't read the slate-colored card, it says "You". 

    So this is a story, and then a funny tidbit at the end.

    When I was 14, my friends and I were getting ready for our weeklong scout camp. The grocery store by our houses had bins of different kinds of candy. Winco still has bins that, but Winco didn't exist at that time. I had four best friends at the time and we were in the same LDS ward. As a side note, one of my friend's dad thought I was a huge bad influence. Anytime we got into mischief, I was automatically blamed for orchestrating whatever trouble we got into, which was never a terrible act compared to what the other kids in our neighborhood were into. What made things suck was my friend's dad was also our scout leader, and he would be on my case. He treated me like I was a lost cause.

    Anyway, my friends and I walked to the store, and we all bought different kinds of candy, and then we always intended to share it with each other. So, we get the candy, and we get to our scout camp. So, my friend, whose dad didn't like me, brought up a deck of cards and he said, "Hey, when we go to bed tonight, I brought a deck of cards. We should take our candy and use them as poker chips." We then decided which candy pieces were worth, for example, M&Ms were worth one, whereas the Swedish Fish were worth ten. That night we went to bed around ten, but we broke out the cards and candy and started to play poker. We agreed after the game whoever ended up winning was just for fun, and it was our way of sharing all of it. It was harmless.

    Anyway, we are about an hour into our poker game, and here comes my our scout leader, and he opens our tent door and sees us playing poker. Automatically, he got mad at everyone for gambling, and then blamed me for the activity even though it was his own son that came up with the idea and was the person who decided which candy was worth what. Well, we got in trouble, and once again was blamed for the activity.

    I always thought it was ridiculous that we even got in trouble in the first place. It wasn't like the other kids in our LDS teenage kids who were way into drugs, or jocks that didn't go to scout camps, or even church. However this is where it gets funny.

    I was using ChatGPT to look up silly laws in different states. There are some really weird laws out there. From what I understand, most of the funny laws are in place because the lawmakers have these really long and boring meetings while they are changing up different laws, so when the session is almost over, they make up silly laws that aren't really enforced, but they are still in the lawbooks. Some of them have been done away with, but in Utah, there is a funny law.

    Under Utah law, gambling is illegal, even if you are only gambling with candy. This is what the AI response was when I did a Google search to see if gambling with candy was still illegal:

"Yes, it is still illegal to bet with candy in Utah. Utah has a very strict anti-gambling stance and bans all forms of gambling. This includes betting anything of value, such as money, chips, credit, merchandise, or any other thing representative of value, on the outcome of a game or contest that is based on chance. Salt Lake City municipal code explicitly lists candy as a prohibited item for gambling purposes."

    So, whether he knew it or not, my friend's dad was actually telling us to stop breaking the law.

I don't think it was a terrible thing. We didn't see our candy as "a thing representative of value".

We just thought it would be something to make the game fun, and then equally divide the candy.

    Was my friend's dad over-reacting, I think so. Is it a law that would get us into trouble, I think not.

but even though I got in trouble for things that usually weren't my fault, and how frustrated and 

hurt feelings I had about things that weren't really anything bad at all. I think sometimes when

we get into trouble, and we feel guilty and ashamed for something not that bad, we need to forgive

ourselves and not dwell on the negative, and find the lesson, or find a way to make that bad experience

and change it into something that you can laugh at in the future, even if it's breaking a minor law.

    I hope that doing the Rememory set-up for two blogs in a row isn't annoying. I have another place where I usually do my creative writing. It's another blog that I don't share with anyone. I just use it to organize my weird creative writing.

    I also felt that since my blog is now five years old, (Can you believe it?), I wanted to change up the look of my blog, so there are two new pictures and a redesign of the "Quality Blog" logo that I actually had suggested to me on a logo app I was using at the time. Whether my blog is quality or not depends on all of you, but I like to think sharing things with all of you is a good thing.

    I hope you are all well and had a great Independence Day! I will try to post more often, as we do a lot of fun things with our family and friends that I should recommend to you all. Sometimes I just forget. Take care, and I will see you all later.

 

Rememories......

    I can't believe that it has been five months since I have posted a blog. I have been busy with so many things, and then I forget to write a blog post about it. I bought something that I wanted to try out, and I thought this is the best way to test it out. 

    On a different blog I have that I don't keep up or really even think about anymore had a blog with a box called The Storymatic. It has a lot of gold cards, and a lot of rust-colored cards. It depends on you, but the idea is you choose one gold and one rust card and the gold card gives you a type of character, and the rust card has a plot, and then you write a short story, or a long one, where you take those ideas from the cards and write a story. It's meant to be used to help you learn to write better, and I have loved it. (By the way, if you tried to write a story for every single combination of cards, it would have six trillion, that's right, six trillion different combination stories. 

    Now, the same company has given us The Storymatic: Rememory. Rememory gives you three different colored cards. A slate card, it's a blueish gray card with a person you may know, like your mom, or your grandfather. Then there is a brown card that tells you a season or a time period in that person's life, and then an event that happened in that person's life. So, I figured I would test this out in this blog. 

Here are the cards I got...

If you can't read the cards in the photo, they are You, Summer, Where the Money Went.

So, here is a very short story using these cards as a reference.

When I was an early teen, my cousin got me into west coast punk rock music. The difference between the west coast and east coast punk rock is at the time, the mid to late 80's and early 90's, east coast punk rock had more hardcore bands that just yelled and played with so much noise that it was hard to hear any lyrics. On the west coast, there was a prominent record company called Lookout! Records. Yes, the ! is part of the title. This was the record label a very young Green Day started out. Any of the Green Day records before their 1994 smash hit album, Dookie, was released by a bigger music label who called them a "Grunge Band", like Nirvana, and took away the punk rock genre from them. 

Lookout! has some of my all-time favorite punk rock bands like: The Groovie Ghoulies, The Mr. T Experience, Screeching Weasel, The Donnas and The Hi-Fives. I saw these bands countless times over my teenage years, and even some after my LDS mission. The true punk rock movement that started in England with The Ramones and The Clash, slowly slipped away as Pop-Punk took the USA by storm. There are bands that I really like, like Blink 182 and Sum 41, but I also feel that they kind of sold out, and once a band sells out and gets a lot of money, it gets extremely popular and only a shadow of it's former self. I know there are those that will disagree with me on this, but it's what I saw in Rolling Stone Magazine and MTV. The days of dank dark basements of small clubs where there are only about fifty people tops at a punk show were gone. Again, I like those other bands, but the feeling and rebellion and passion that I felt at those punk shows were gone.

I felt like I had to explain that stuff to get to my short little memory story.

In the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, my family took a little trip to Mesquite, Nevada. It's a little city about twenty-five minutes southwest of St. George, Utah. The hotels we stayed at when I was younger were also casinos, but they had awesome swimming pools, and the particular hotel we stayed at also had a movie theater, a bowling alley and as awesome 1950's decorated diner Called Peggy Sue's Diner, which was always my favorite part of the trip. The hotel was kind of pricy, but at the same time, the bowling and movie theater were free. My parents let me bring my best friend, Nate Mulford, (It's awesome we had the same name and interests.), and my dad gave us both $50 to spend on the trip. 

The other thing about Mesquite, Nevada was that it is about an hour and twenty-minute drive to Las Vegas. One morning, my dad woke us up early and asked us if we wanted to go to Las Vegas. We both shot up and got ready quickly. in those days, the late 90s, we didn't have streaming music. It was also very rare to find a music store that had punk rock music. Hot Topic had a very small selection of punk rock CDs, which we did buy my first Mr. T Experience album, but that was it in Utah. In Las Vegas at Ceaser's Palace, there was a huge Virgin Music store, and they had all of the punk rock albums I wanted and didn't have access to unless I ordered the CDs directly from Lookout!, I bought two Groovie Ghoulies albums I wanted really bad, but as a negative, I spent all of my $50 on the two albums and one meal at Peggy Sue's Diner. I was out of my money after that.

I still have those CDs and I love them, but that's where my money went for my summer vacation that summer.

If you thought this was kind of cool, here is the Amazon link and picture of the box....

The Storymatic: Rememory

I hope this was a fun blog. I know personal stories can be boring to other people, but I also think this box and all of the different combinations it can have will help you remember things that aren't really at the front of your mind or may have forgotten. I think it could be something to use as a kind of journal that you could print or create a manuscript with to pass on to your kids and grandkids so they can know what your life was like at different times in your life, or a family member or friend's lives, were like. 

I hope that you all haven't forgotten my blog and hope that you are all doing well and will come back and visit my blog from time to time. In the future, I will try some other Rememory, or a new one called The Storymatic: Synapsis, which is supposed to help you write and create stories, plays, novels, or short stories based on the cards you draw, the that is a "story" for another time. Sorry for the terrible pun, I just had to use it.

Peace out!!!

 

I'm Down with OLP (Yeah You Know Me)!

     So, I have been super busy with projects that I am about ready to reveal here in the next couple of days, but I really wanted to write a new blog post because I haven't done one in a while. I was trying to think of a subject I could talk about, but a really late-night talk with my wife, Lindsey, gave me the idea for what I want to write about. This post is me being kind of brave because it's a super weird one, so buckle up and be ready to call me crazy.

    I learned, after a ton of laughter and weird look from Lindsey, that I have a brain condition called OLP, which stands for Ordinal Linguistic Personification. So, what the heck is that? It is considered a type of synesthesia where ordered sequences like numbers and letters are associated with personalities and genders. 

    Basically, for me, I have assigned gender roles and personalities with single letters, numbers, colors, fruits and vegetables. For example, I associate 1 is a male, 2 is a female, 3 is a male, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are female, 8 is a male, 9 is female, and 0 or 10s, are male. Not only do they have a gender assigned to them, each one of them has a personality behind it. For example, 3 is a boy that has a huge crush on 4, who is an attractive person, but 3 has to contend with 8, because 8 is a little better looking than 3 is. When I apply it to my life, I am a 3 and Lindsey is a 4. I got lucky she didn't end up with an 8. 

    I have the same situation with letters, colors, and fruits and vegetables. I won't go through them, but you get the idea. 

    According to psychologists, only two percent of all people have it, and twenty percent of the people that have it are on the autism spectrum, like I am with Asperger's syndrome. Although I a very high functioning, sometimes I have trouble reading social cues and body language and apparently have OLP. 

    Lindsey and I stayed up until three in the morning a couple of weeks ago when I told her about it. I didn't know it was a thing, but we did a google search and figured it out. Some people online have even gone as far as to drawing and coloring their personalities and genders. I am a terrible artist when it comes to drawing, but it was interesting to see what other people have done with it. The interesting thing is, those assigned genders and personalities vary from person to person, so while my number 3 might be a male, to someone else, it could be a female with an entirely different type of personality.

    I've never given it much thought because I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. I am sure it's a condition with the brain, but I wonder if religiously watching Sesame Street when I was little has something to do with it. I clearly remember sketches on Sesame Street that had letters as Muppets, or puppets, it was Jim Henson, so I just call them Muppets. That could be part of it, or not at all, but I find it interesting.

    Anyway, that's all I really have to say about this topic. I'm not an expert. It's just something I learned about myself that I have done all of my life without a second thought, and it turned out being something interesting that I thought I would share, even though it makes me seem even more weird than I already am.

    I hope you are all doing well, and that you have had a great January. I have a big announcement coming up, but I still have a small hurdle to jump over before it's a done deal, and I want it to be a done deal before I start talking about it. 

Anyway, Take care, and I should have a new post in the next few days with my bigger announcement. 

    

I Have Fallen Way Behind

     So, I have been writing movie reviews and stuff like that, but I haven't posted a blog in over two months. It seems like ever since I got married in January, things have been a lot more busy than they used to be when I was single. I thought that I would just post about the major things that are happening in my life, and then I will really try to make more of an effort to blog more often. I know I say that a lot, but I really want to.

    So first and foremost, in January when Lindsey and I got married, we got married in an LDS church building. Contrary to popular belief, no, we weren't messing around and doing married adult activities. Since I was sealed in an LDS temple before, there is one of two different things you have to do to get sealed to someone else in the temple. There is what is called a Cancelation, where if you have been divorced for five years or sooner, you have to do a lot of paperwork that takes a while to get done. However, I have been divorced from my ex-wife for twelve years, so the Church has what they call a "Clearance". A clearance is where I meet with my bishop, he asks me questions, like what led to the divorce. They just want to know if you had basically had an affair with someone while they were married, which I did not. Then the bishop sends it to the stake president, which then asks the former spouse, so my ex-wife, the same questions. I won't go into details about what was said on "her" part, but it was ridiculous enough to make Lindsey, our stake president and me laugh pretty hard. Anyway, after a few weeks we got the clearance from the first presidency of the church that we are free to be sealed for time and all eternity in the temple. Our sealing date is on December 28th. So, that is the most exciting part of my life right now.

     Last year for Christmas, Lindsey bought us tickets to go see Green Day, The Smashing Pumpkins and Rancid, three of my favorite bands, but the concert happened the first weekend in September, and it was in Denver. We flew to Denver, went out on the town and out to eat. The concert was amazing. Our favorite part was our hotel was a mile and a half away from Coors Field, which is where the Colorado Rockies MLB team plays, and so we rented two of those green Lime Scooters you see sitting on sidewalks in busy places in the city. They were so much fun, so Lindsey bought her and me electric scooters, which are a blast to ride on. Lindsey has even ridden hers to work on some mornings when it hasn't been as cold. But we had a great time in Denver.

    Our kids have been busy. Quinton was playing on the JV football team on special teams, so kickoffs and punt returns, but now he is wrestling. Michael has been busy working with our neighbor who owns a Pinewood Derby track, and they travel all around Utah for people who want to do a Pinewood Derby activity. He is making some good money doing that. Garrison was running Cross Country for his Junior High School, although the season is done, so he spends a lot of time building things, both at school and at home. We are turning into a big Lego house, and Garrison is awesome with Legos, or just building little things in general. I think he would make a great engineer. Elliot is still living with his mom in Kansas. Lindsey and I had him for June and part of July. I wanted to take him to see The Aquabats here in Salt Lake, but his mom wanted him home two days before the concert, so Lindsey and I flew with him to Kansas City, Missouri. We went to see the Diamondbacks MLB team play the Kansas City Royals. We had great seats, and a lot of fun at the game. Then the next day, I took him to an amusement park called World of Wonder, where they had some excellent rides. We had a blast there. Then the next day we went to the Negro Baseball League Museum. It was incredible, and had so much, I think it would take three full days to go through it and read everything, however, we only were there for about two hours. Then we went and had some famous Kansas City BBQ. It was delicious. Then that evening we went and saw The Aquabats in Kansas City, so we still got to do the concert. It was awesome. We were next to the stage, and I caught a guitar pick that the lead guitarist for the Aquabats threw out into the crowd and gave it to Elliot to keep with him. Then the next day we drove two hours to get Elliot home in Kansas, then Lindsey and I drove to Wichita and flew home. It was a great whirlwind of a trip.

    Now that we have our own NHL Hockey team, I have been bit by the bug and am now a huge Utah Hockey Club fan. I want a jersey, but they are expensive and will probably have a new name and mascot for the team next season, so I am going to wait. I did sign up for SEGPlus so that I can have the games on demand. We went to a preseason game and then my dad and I went to a game a couple of weeks ago. I know that we have had the Utah Grizzlies for a while now, but the level of hockey they play matched up to the Utah Hockey Club is incredibly different. It's boys among men, athletic wise. They are still fun to go to, but I love the new team. 

    I don't know if I have mentioned on my blog before that Lindsey is a Special Education teacher at a school about a mile away from our house. Also, when I started my blog back during the pandemic, I posted one of my favorite songs in one of my posts, Here to Mars by Coheed and Cambria. Lindsey came across it, and sent me a message telling me she loved the song, and that she had divorced her ex-husband, so in a way, this blog helped put her back into my life. We dated 20 years ago, but she eventually broke up with me and got back with a previous fiancé'. But things are great with us. We are super happy together, and I have to thank this blog and Coheed and Cambria for writing an incredible song that sparked the conversations up. 

    So, there we are. That's what is happening. Oh, I forgot. I wrote a short story and am in the final editing phase for it. I will announce when it is finished and available to purchase. I am only going to sell it for three bucks. It's been a short labor of love, and it's only a few pages long, but I think the story is worth three bucks, lol. I will even give you the title now. It's called "Icebergs", but I am keeping the plot a secret. With a short story, the information you give away is huge compared to a longer synopsis for a long novel. 

    Anyway, that's what has been going on with me lately. I hope that all of you, my readers are still interested in what I have to say and talk about. I promise to try and make time to blog more about a whole lot of different topics and things. I hope you are all well and happy. I will post again soon.

Uncky Nate