Dear Mr LaFond,

Hearing you on Myth 20c and on various youtube productions, there was a degree of surprise by your gaming endeavors. Although not total surprise, as `if one were to create a venn diagram of "gamer" "martial artist" and "historian" there would be some degree of overlap, as my own experience that many of my friends meet two of those three categories. Are you still developing games?

If you still need a collaborator, I may be your mechanical yen to your developmental yang. Of course there's no money in table top gaming, an industry where 1 cent a word is common. It was somewhat surprising to see you listed on boardgamegeek from your Pizza series. It seems they do not know how much of a wrong thinker you are.

Sincerely,

WF

Sir, I never heard of a venn diagram and thanks to you I am now curious as to what one is.

It is no surprise to meet a mind willing to think outside of the media social box we come packaged in, who has once unpacked a game, learned the rules, set out the pieces and begun playing the scenarios. Four of the ten homes where I stay across the nation are gaming homes. Table top games, beginning with chess are great developmental tools for the mind.

There is another purpose that games serve, particularly pattern immersion games such as playing cards. This latter form of gaming, which we might call distraction gaming, or focus gaming, depending on whether or not we are simply tying to preserve our sanity or compete, is an area that gamers of our stripe tend to overlook and even look down on, such as cards and dominos and checkers—connect four even. I like rummy, cribbage and dominos, games that have served as an excellent competitive bridge between myself and normal range humans who do not wish to go passive in their down time.

I have witnessed, as I travel across the nation, that there is an aspect of gaming that is about face-to-face sanity, an aspect that is unreachable for certain people who hover very close to insanity.

Interestingly, men involved in real gaming situations, such as hunting, fighting and working as a lawyer, or who have been conditioned to those pursuits over time, very often just can't focus on a table-top game and seek mental rest in their down time. This speaks to the importance of gaming to people who have boring, compliance-based jobs in order to achieve balance.

Currently, most women cannot engage in such gaming, though card clubs were once things that women engaged in. This has to do with negative passive distraction having hijacked the rhythmic center of our brain, literally colonizing our soul. Where women once engaged in card playing quite often, as they have been increasingly subjected to sorcery by the media mesmerists, they have lost this ability. This is quite a shame in light of the fact that playing cards and dominos and such games as scrabble, are venues in which men and women can compete in a rhythmic way.

Such gaming that does not require extensive rules knowledge and gets right to rhythm and pattern recognition is therapeutic. The war gaming group where I met Sensei Steve, my land lord of 8 years, is now gone because of Brovid-Jiveteen and three of the men I know of involved in it are losing their minds—sharp and once bright minds. The gaming mind is the only mind capable of looking at such a vast lie as modernity and making sense of it. Tamerlane played chess for a reason.

Mister Grey, a YouTube-Bit-Chute-Rumble vlogger has noted that only Varg, Vox Day and this hobo have any consistent ability to predict outcomes where the rest of the dissident bad-thinkers out their simply preach unpopular ethics as they wallow in surprise. He also notes that we three are all game designers.

Even more disturbing is the inability of some of the more emotionally damaged minds I know to engage in this useful tool of human connection, concentration and pattern recognition represented by such simple and therefore highly nuanced games. The emotional casualties of gaslighting are myriad across the nation.

I speak to a man who is considering violence as a way out of life and suggest we play cards and he cannot, because it is trivial. He is obsessed with the big picture and must either intoxify to bear it our fight it in his mind and is robbed of all peace—the price for not submitting to the Holy Lie. His mind is not to be diverted from the wounded world tilting on its access as it wobbles off through the cosmos. One of the more powerful minds I have met is hence made into a spectator of a world-sized train wreck, strapped into his seat and unable to look away.

I meet with a woman I have known for 45 years who used to love playing cards. She is addled, hyper, flighty, unable to concentrate, driving her son crazy with a constant manic need to do something, anything, even if that something makes problems rather than solves problems. I say, Punky, “Let's play cards.” She says, “Honey, I used to love playing cards, but I can't.”

She can't because CNN is blaring insanity into her mind and disables her from concentrating on something that is not a world-bending matter for long enough to be human, to simply count what is in her hand and try and match it up with what by deduction should be in the deck.

Sensei Steve is angry, robbed by the blaring world insanity of his interactive meditations with rival minds across the gaming table, even as these men skulk, and gibber and wane behind sterile doors.

The toxicity of media induction is doubly cruel and effective as the most supple minds are infected to a greater degree than the simpler minds.

None of these three people can take the simple step of stopping the rampant wheels in their minds from turning.

I understand. I have never been able to go a second without a thought. My mind is rampant. But my mind is my own—I do not let the news in but in small dosses. Simply put, I have no smart phone. When I suggest we play cards and they all glare at me as if I am insane—It is not they that glares, but the media virus that is colonizing their brains angry at me for trying to reach them. You see, if they just counted cards or dominos they would develop the ability to repel some of the programming being sent through their fraying minds. The people who cannot play cards or dominos or checkers are the most haunted, most angry, most suffering souls. The pattern invading their minds is jealous of the space it takes and wards off any use, mundane or not, that might loosen its hold on their sanity.

There is a reason why prisoners play cards and dominos, it is to keep from going insane and not let their mental powers wane.

Furthermore, for a person divorced from patterns, a modern person who is not part of the plant and animal cycles, who has no surrogate patterns to challenge his mind like wrestling over laws in court—such as in a card or dominos game—that person becomes increasingly vulnerable to manipulation by media programming. His instinct for pattern recognition has been strip-mined and now everything is a surprise, a surprise that startles, than angers, then lingers as disappointment and sourly embitters...

Please, that person in your life that is unable to sit still and is ever more anxious and angry at the news blared into their mind from the TV or smartphone, unless being drugged—particularly if a child—engage them in a simple game. If they cannot, then they are colonized by the programming that they think they merely observe as it merely absorbs them.

Those who cannot game, tend a garden, or engage in some small act of creation, perhaps even baking a cake, tread ever close to the precipice of the insane. Men spent ages involved in the cycles of animals and competing men as women did—some of us gathering, some of us hunting, all of us practicing pattern recognition. Gaming is a way to preserve that mental acuity and maintain our perspective against the artificial “reality,” of the Lie that is Modernity.

My creative interests continue to wane and narrow. I no longer have the desire to design or develop games.

My entire extant body of game work, about 477 pages, has been given to a young man to develop and publish, a man it seems, like yourself.

There was another young man, Jake, who I was developing Feudal Estates with. Feudal Estates is a card game based on the simple and boring game of War, which uses a castle and three fief placements for each player, with a side deck for reinforcement cards and random value cards for battles. We played single deck, two deck and three deck versions.

It is a fun game.

Jake died a few months back.

I then lost the heart to develop it, though I will sometime play again, I think.

Jake had an idea on using a tarot card deck for random events, which was rather brilliant.

WF, Feudal Estates is yours if you want it.

No components need be designed. All that needs done is play-testing and rules writing.

I think that a 48-to-64 page rule booklet should do it, between 5 and 10, 000 words, with half being the tarot option.

Thanks for your interest.