Frankly Speaking

Race around the board to reach your goal first, but watch out! – your opponents could change the landscape at any moment. Order now on the Gamecrafter.

Several of my games use my elemental dice to generate resources. They are available in three versions (not all of these are for sale yet): Elements Dice Lite: Includes 16 dice, dice stickers, and 160 punch-out tokens for $20. Elements Dice: Includes 16 dice, dice stickers, and 80 wooden and plastic tokens for $20. Elements Dice Deluxe: includes 16 custom-printed dice, and 80 wooden and plastic…

It should come as a surprise to no one that I updated my pocket-sized Pokémon aids for X and Y. The type chart now includes Fairy: Single index card; several per page. The PocketMods that list all of the Pokémon, their types, and Effort Values have all of the new Pokémon and the new types of 21 old ones, but still lacks the EVs for the new ones since they aren’t known yet. Naturally, as soon as…

It took three tries, but it seems like they finally found an anti-depressant that mostly works for me, so I’ve actually been getting quite a bit done in the past few weeks. So why haven’t I posted any of it? Because my precious laptop is going to die any second so I’ve spent the last several weeks getting it backed up onto our desktop and getting all of my apps installed and configured on it;…

And now you know why I haven’t posted in more than four months. It has been coming on for several years now, but hit me full force halfway through November (which is why I’m astounded that I came as close to my NaNoWriMo goal as I did). Later this week my treatment will finally begin. After that I should become more active in everything. On a lighter note, despite the depression I have gotten…

I’m Not Lazy – My Executive Is Dysfunctional

When I fail to do things it is not because I am lazy, or rude, or selfish – I was raised better than that. Rather, it is because for the past four decades I have not been receiving the mental health care that would have given me coping skills that I have instead been learning by trial and error for about two years now. Had I been diagnosed with autism and executive dysfunction as a child, my life…

Coming Out For Autism Acceptance Month

I am a sarcastic, huggy autist, making me weird even among other autistic people. It’s something I should have realized years ago, given that so many of our friends are autistic, and that my mom was a special education teacher. More times than I can remember I have said things like “my brain’s wired differently than most people, so I tend to see creative, complicated solutions, but overlook the…

Silence is Golden, but Quiet is Hell (My Journey With Autism)

*This is the first in a series of essays detailing the journey that led me to admit at the age of 44 that I am autistic.*One of my most obvious autism symptoms is misophonia: I can have a panic attack from sounds that you may not even hear, either because they are too quiet or filtered out by your brain. But with many of us autists our brains tend to take in and identify *every* sound we hear,…

A Father’s Wisdom to the Children I May Never Have

I actually wrote the first draft of this over the course of several weeks before Mother’s Day, but so that my mom and every other mom could get the maximum enjoyment of their well-deserved day, I waited to post it until now.

With Father’s Day rapidly approaching, I shouldn’t have been surprised by how often I’ve been overcome by depression this week. I’ve actually found myself curled up and…

Hillside Games Driving Directions

Because of construction, traffic at the I-26/I-40/I-240 interchange is often sitting still, so here is an alternative route to avoid being late for our Pokémon tournaments:

From I-26 take Exit 37 (Long Shoals Road). At the bottom of the ramp, turn right.

Follow Long Shoals Road to Hendersonville Road, then turn left.

Go past Biltmore Village, then turn right onto Swannanoa River Road.

Turn right…

A Cloud of Dragons

A Cloud of Dragons

© 2018 CC-BY-SA Frank Wilcox, Jr (fewilcox)

Before mounting his dragon, D’tan clasped arms with D’lar, his second in command – and oldest friend – as they have since their cadet days. As he vaults into his saddle, he can’t help noticing that his men are afraid. He stands in his stirrups and calls out, “Dragonriders! I know we have never faced a threat this large, but we can’t…

Questions (or: how my 1999 self felt about school shootings)

After the massacre at Columbine High School on 20 April 1999 – which should have been our last school shooting – I spent the next two days holed up in my dorm room, watching the 24-hour news channels rather than sleeping or going to classes. At the end of that time, as my body’s need for sleep was finally overcoming the shock, I poured all of my feelings out onto the page.

Even with 30 years of…

Goodbye, Patch

This is mostly a stream of consciousness because I took frequent breaks during Patch’s calmer moments to pet and talk to him, so expect some rough-to-nonexistent transitions between paragraphs. I’m also doing only minimal proofreading (spelling and punctuation) of what I wrote as Patch lay dying. How I said things at the time could be as enlightening as what I said.

2018-05-16,…

A couple of years ago I got back into creating math-based art I call “The Beauty of Math” after a break of more than a decade. Some of it involves drawing Bézier curves on graph paper, like this one I did back in 1994 during my Freshman year of college: Others are drawn with just a compass and a ruler, combining circles, arcs, and lines in interesting ways. I have now taken those skills and…

A month ago I announced the (impending release)[https://fewilcox.wordpress.com/2017/11/08/my-first-print-on-demand-game/] of my first print-on-demand (POD) game, Cribbage Dice. Unfortunately, once my sample copy arrived I discovered that The Game Crafter’s (TGC) d12s are nearly sequential, which means they can’t be used as randomizers. More fortunately, TGC’s (Hook Box…

My First Print-on-Demand Game is (Almost) Go

While I have been silent here for the past month, it’s not because of depression this time. If you follow me on Twitter or facebook then you may know that I have been busy getting read for the release of my first print-on-demand game, Cribbage Dance (that link doesn’t work yet). My sample copy should arrive in the next day or so. If all is well with it then the game will go on sale on November…

The first thing Lura and I did after getting home from our honeymoon 15 years ago next week was adopt an adorable stray mutt we named Meekay. Wednesday afternoon he breathed his last breath. I have of course started a tribute poem, but in the meantime here are some hilarious dog haiku to serve as a memorial. © 1998-2001 Dan Anderson Love my master; Thus I perfume myself with This long-rotten…