Anime Madness

In the fall of 1993, two of my brothers, Erik Weswig, Matthew Johnston and I were riding home from the anime group we belonged to when Erik came upon a grandiose idea which was so very typical of him. With anime and collectible card games exploding in popularity in the U.S. at the time, we would combine the two into what we thought would be a fun and entertaining combination.

After some further brainstorming, we had a base idea of how the game would work and better still, we had a name.

We called it Anime Madness.

Being all of 16, and having a hard enough time getting through adolescence intact, we were incredibly green but undaunted and rather than go to classes and do the usual high school grind, Matt and Erik spent many an hour in the computer lab at Sunset High School designing the cards on truly draconian programs installed on a Mac SE/30 and I helped come up with rules, ideas and the occasional quote which actually ended up on one of the finished cards.

Erik's first idea for a card that started the whole thing was one called The Ugliness Compensator, which allowed the player, if they thought their opponent was rough on the eyes, as it were, the player didn't have to look at said opponent for the rest of the game.

We were 16. Maturity was still a ways off.

We had planned this to just be a fun thing we could use for the anime group  as a substitute for Magic: The Gathering, which had totally taken over our weekly meetings. And despite the occasional setback, we were having a ball putting it together when Erik died on March 5, 1995.

With the man who'd created the concept gone, Matt and I weren't sure what we planned to do with everything the three of us had put together. We wanted to finish it, and after some long talks, decided not only would we see it through but we were going to go all the way and turn this into a full-fledged, marketed game sold around the country and maybe...even the world.

So, we kept going. After graduation, Matt and I continued to get the rules codified. We even brought in his mom to help play-test it after we figured if she can learn to play it, ANYONE could.

*Editorial Note: To her credit, she did learn how to play it and in the first game she ever played, she beat me. I regret nothing.

Even when he went off to college, Matt continued to also refine the card design, thanks to the semi-improved technology available at the University of Oregon when we realized we needed one more thing.

We had a card game based on anime, but we had no anime to put on the cards.

So enlisting the help of some of our friends at Northern Oregon Vancouver Animation (NOVA for short), and after contacting the major U.S. anime distributors of the day, Pioneer, Viz, Streamline, U.S. Manga Corp  and AnimEigo, we supplied the gang with a couple of sample decks and instructions and let them go down to Los Angeles to meet with them at one of the many conventions going on at the time.

As I recall, Viz looked at it, but balked then walked out and Streamline wasn't even there. AnimEigo's head Robert Woodhead, though, was intrigued enough at the potential of what we'd done to let us have the licenses to three titles, Bubblegum Crisis, Riding Bean and Genesis Survivor Gaiarth. We were both stunned and enthralled and with laserdiscs in hand, YES, LASERDISCS I SAID, we went back to work finishing the game, spending many an hour with Matt's dad's laserdisc player plugged into a computer and running even more draconian video capture software over every millimeter of them to get the images we ended up using.

*Editorial Note #2: Keep in mind this was 1995-96. AOL was still around version 2.0 and Netscape still existed. Otherwise, there was no Google Search and therefore, no proper internet.

Despite that, by the time Matt was finally done after many, many hours of slaving over the damn things, we had our final designs and were ready to unleash it upon the world.

We had investors backing us and after setting up a deal with a card printer and the largest distributor of cards and comics in the country at the time, off it went into the great beyond. Matt and I were 19 years-old and still had the belief that we would indeed conquer the world with our game. And of course, we got nowhere close. 

In the end, we barely broke even on it, but our investors got their money back. While we were called as a massive Magic clone, and rightly so, we still managed to get recognition in major publications of the day and even won an award. Inquest Magazine named one of our cards one of their picks for 1996. Sadly, I don't remember what exactly it was, but it was something.

We were actually in the planning stages for a new set of cards, which I was much more involved in, when Matt and I made the decision to finally shut it down. To have done it once, at our age and with everything we would've had to do in order to make it work again, was just not possible anymore.

By that time, Pioneer, who had scoffed at our design, had gone with a competing design that was also at the same con, and eventually became Ani-Mayhem. They ultimately proved more successful than us, but really only just. By 1997, the CCG bubble had become so saturated that all it could do was burst.

I was disappointed, to be sure, but I got over it. 

To this day, I still have three packs of the game I helped create more than half my life ago now, and I'll never get rid of them. I haven't played an actual game of it since we first brought it out, and while it was an interesting novelty I'd show at job interviews for a while after that, in the hopes it would help show what I could do, that eventually stopped as well.

Honestly, I felt like we'd failed somehow and that while it was a nice ride, I couldn't really call it mine because I wasn't the one behind it. I felt like I was more along for the ride than anything and what we'd create next was truly going to have been my proverbial baby.

For the last three years, they'd been tucked away in one of my many boxes in my storage room, buried under other things I'd decided I didn't need to see or think about anymore.

But as I was going through my yearly Spring Cleaning, I remembered I had them so I went digging until I found them again. And as I've been sitting here flipping through them, the embarrassment and sense of shame I'd somehow latched onto these cards are gone. 

This is my game. I helped create it and I can say so because my name is on it. 

Matt and I could've quit, but we didn't. While our classmates were freaking out over geometry homework, SAT's, college applications and who they were going to prom with that Spring, we were doing the same thing and starting our own business, before we'd even gotten our diplomas.

That's not something to be ashamed of. Rather, I should be damn proud of it. And I am. Regardless of what anyone else can say about me, I helped create something both tangible and lasting, and not many people get to say that in their lives. If I can do it once, I can do it again with the novel I'm writing or anything else I choose to create.

We also never forgot Erik, either. It was his idea that started this whole crazy ball rolling and as his friends and brothers, we were crazy enough to see it through to the highly improbable conclusion. And we let everyone who ever put their $15 down on a deck know that when they opened it up for the first time.

I miss those days. I miss them a lot. For all the craziness of it, we also had a lot of fun putting it all together and then seeing the result of that be shared by other people. Apparently, we were a big hit in the Midwest. How many people can say that?

My Valentine

I have to admit my disillusionment with this day started at an early age and as I've gotten older, not much has altered my rather bitter and cynical view of it.

I get how we like to give ourselves a day to really celebrate something. After all, we have Christmas, New Year's, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, Presidents Day and even Flag Day.

Hell, St. Patrick's Day has gone from an Irish priest getting the snakes out of the country to people who have no hint of Irishness in them getting downright piss drunk before having to try and show restraint the other 364 days of the year.

Valentine's Day is supposed to be the day we set aside to both show and tell the significant other in our lives how much we really love them. And I guess therein lies my problem with it.

For me, one day just isn't enough for that. That's something to spend the rest of your life doing because if you really love someone that much, it should be fairly easy to do.

I've been single for three years now and despite that, I find myself not wanting to be bitter or angry today, because I remember how good it felt on the days when I could tell the someone I hold dearest to me that I still loved them that much and always will. And even though right now, it hurts a whole hell of a lot to know that I can't anymore, the fragile little optimist of my Yin is always telling me that maybe someday...if I'm lucky, I might.

Pink Slip

So yeah...this happened.

I had just gotten off the phone with a local city council member, after spending the better pat of two days running around talking to people, tracking down information and taking photos for the group of stories I was working on for the week, when I was summoned into my boss's office.

Ten minutes later, with my few possessions in tow, I was escorted out of the office I'd worked in for the last two years.

I didn't get an official answer to why I was being let go, but based on the previous two weeks and the sudden about-face which had taken place, it doesn't take much to figure it out.

I'd been notified at the end of the month that my productivity had fallen off and I needed to pick it up again quickly. Not an unrealistic demand to make by an employer and I knew that. And since we were having a change in management, the overall tenor of the office had changed somewhat and the word was given that we were all going to be held more accountable for our impact on the company, both good and bad.

So the following week, I did so. I got off my butt and out from behind my desk, of which I admit I'd grown a little too comfortable with, and tracked some good stories down. I didn't complain, didn't fuss or fight them on it. In fact, I didn't say much of anything to anyone.

I figured the best way to show my productivity was to actually BE more productive. Turned out that didn't work, either, as I was both written up and lectured again. This time, however, the lecturing took on a very different tone, because I was notified that I had, in effect, been spied on through social media for a good chunk of time.

Now, in this day and age of the NSA, Edward Snowden, semi-secret super-huge data collection sites in the Utah desert and everyone clamoring to be a part of the great social media engine that is Facebook, Twitter and the lot, I get why employers frown upon their people getting too immersed in it all. I do. Hell, I even wrote about my growing sense of dependency (for lack of a better term) on Facebook to have any sense of social identity at all.

I also understand that in a time where even the simplest choice of words on a tweet or a post can be so drastically blown out of proportion by those who might not understand the full context of what's being said, we have to choose our words VERY carefully. I'd like to think I did so, as I never spoke ill about my employers or anyone I worked with on Facebook or this blog and I made a concerted effort to not let either interfere with my ability to do my job.

Unfortunately, that was not the consensus agreement, and the fact that I was even using this platform to deal with everything I'm working through became an issue, which in all honesty, it shouldn't have.

I made no illusions about the fact that I am still working through my depression and other unresolved issues, and because my employer felt the need to raise the rates on our healthcare coverage to more than I could afford every month, I had to cancel it in favor of things like rent, food, electricity, gas and car payments. That said, with the passage of the ACA, I was in the process of getting my benefits back at a rate I could actually afford. Problem is, such things take time and for as impatient as I can be a lot of the time, turned out I wasn't the only one.

Then I got asked the most uninformed question I've ever heard from someone claiming to be a qualified journalist.

"Don't you want to feel better?"

Let me be as straight about this as I can be. Would you ask a person who is fighting cancer, or diabetes, or fibromyalgia, or drug/alcohol addiction that question and expect them to respond "No?"

Then why, in the name of common sense, is that considered something to ask a person struggling with mental illness?

Of course I want to feel better.

For years, the single hardest parts of my day have always been going to sleep and getting out of bed. My brain doesn't want to shut off at night, and when it finally does and I then have to get my butt up and do stuff, it doesn't want to do that either. I can't tell you when it started, but it's been a persistent battle I've had to fight for a long time.

I also don't like walking around feeling like everyone I know can't stand the sight of me, or doesn't want to talk to me, or doesn't care what happens to me. Even though I know that is completely opposite of how my closest friends and family actually feel, and I know this because they've had to remind me more times than I'm sure they'd like to tolerate.

And no, I don't like feeling so wholly inadequate as a human being that I have nothing to contribute to the world outside my door and would rather keep said door shut, locked, and dead-bolted than to let any modicum of sunshine in.

Nobody enjoys feeling this way, least of all me. Yet I do. All the time. So the question I so desperately wanted to ask in return was, "Do you honestly think taking my job away is somehow going to make me a healthier person?"

Sadly, I didn't ask it because I've been around long enough to know that in such situations, the perspective of management is always the right one and to question said perspective is akin to spitting on the Pope's shoes.

I also got the uber-patronizing consolation of, "Now don't go beating yourself up over this." Right. Like the fact that I am now out of work, in a country that's systematically taking apart its domestic support systems with the subtlety of Leatherface because it views its unemployed as "lazy and uninspired to work harder," and now have to worry about how I'm going to pay my rent, or my child support, or find another job in a still stagnant and atrophied economy, that makes it all okay. If we're still all about banging the drum of "personal responsibility," then why wouldn't I spend a great deal of time kicking the crap out of myself for losing my livelihood?

In the dictionary, under the word Hypocrite, it should say, "See: Management."

In the week since, I've already sent out about twenty portfolios across the country. I have my preferences on where I'd like to work, but on the whole, I really don't care any more. I just want out of here.

I would like to go somewhere fresh and totally start over from scratch. Leave all the bad memories and reminders at the border, plant my flag in fresh earth and chart a new direction. But to do that I need a job first.

Tally Ho.