Author: tomgoldrick

Bonnaroo 2018 – Day 1: Move-In & The Great Fire of 2018
Traveling from our cabin to the local Walmart in Tennessee is part of our yearly Bonnaroo ritual. The parking lot fills to the brim with festival goers and locals alike, creating an interesting mix of hippy aesthetics clashing with the southern backdrop. If you’re not in the network of people tracking official notifications on their phones, it’s just as easy to wait in Walmart for the crowd to start moving if you want to get in the front of the line to get in on Wednesday.

“Good morning, Manchester Walmart!”

In reality, what pod you end up in is kind of a crapshoot. You can do your best to get there early and line up on the highway, but there will always be people ahead of you and there will always be the chance that you will get the best spot of your life and the worst festival experience or vice versa. Shout outs to pod 10 in 2015. You should go in with the attitude that you get what you get and you make of it what you will. Any other strategy will result in disappointment eventually.

Case in point: the first thing we ran into after getting into Bonnaroo was seeing the Great Fire of 2018.

Our first impression was that we were going to have to pack up all of the things that we had just unpacked because the festival was canceled. How could a fire that big not be bad news? Well, thanks to Reddit, we found out that it was actually an automotive plant that was on fire, not Bonnaroo itself. With that mystery solved, we proceeded to unpack our stuff and set up camp.

I always suggest moving in on Wednesday if you get the chance. Not only is it less of a hassle, but you get a full day to explore the campgrounds, vendors, and the secret sets/smaller shows that pop up in the pod tents.

Last year, I spent most of the evening in the House of Yes’ barn near Pod 3. The House of Yes is a Brooklyn-based theatre production that set up in their campground venue and was promoting their dress rehearsals on Wednesday. I went in expecting a dress rehearsal and instead got one of the most entertaining experiences of the whole week. Here’s a little taste from my Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bjtb8IdnQ2C/

Needless to say, Wednesday was a resounding success! Not only did we see one of the best shows of the event at the House of Yes, but we also had the chance to relax after setting up camp and enjoyed a few leisurely walks through the campgrounds. If you can take the extra day off, arriving on Wednesday will make your entire Bonnaroo experience better.

Next week, I will go over what happened on Thursday, the first official day of Bonnaroo proper. My goal is to have a post for each day of the festival and then one for our trip home.
For those curious, here are a few tips for moving in and setting up camp at Bonnaroo:
- Follow Instructions: Don’t be a jerk to the volunteer staff and always follow instructions.
- Claim Your Ground: Once your vehicle is parked, get out and unpack your biggest stuff first. This will help claim the ground around your car, just in case nearby attendees feel inclined to encroach on your space. It’s always a good idea to radiate positivity, but there are also practical things you can do to make your experience better.
- Set Up A Marker: Unless your vehicle is a giant neon orange truck, you may want to set up some sort of land mark or flag for your campsite. This will especially help at 4 AM when you and your friends are crawling back to bed.
- Check Your Exhaust: Unless you brought a separate generator, you may need to turn on your vehicle to charge batteries, etc. In that case, you want to ensure that our exhaust is not blocked or headed straight into someone else’s camp/tent. The way that Bonnaroo has been setting up camp lately, this is less of an issue, but it is always a good thing to check on just in case.
- Secure Your Valueables: Yea, yeah… radiate positivity and all, but also lock up your crap. I have been robbed at Bonnaroo before (nothing more than a few bucks, but still a bummer). Lock your valuables in your vehicle if possible.
- Get Some Rest: This is especially true if you’ve just finished a 1,500 mile road trip to Tennessee. Your legs are going to thank you for it in the long run.
If you’d be interested in reading more about my experiences traveling and visiting music festivals, feel free to shoot me a comment to let me know.
February 7, 2019
On the “Do the Thing” Mentality or On Unremarkable Advice

When I venture into the unknown territory of a new hobby, my first course of action is to gather up and subscribe to as many relevant newsletters, email reminders, and social media outlets that produce quality content on the subject as possible. Writing wasn’t any different for me in this regard. I was immediately drawn to Medium as a great toolkit for honing my skills and learning from other writers. Little did I know just how much unremarkable advice about writing is out there.

The “Do the Thing” mentality, movement, whatever you want to call it, works under the basic premise that success comes to those who work hard and believe in themselves. All one needs to do is “do the thing” and all their problems will wash away and their true life’s calling will be revealed.

The trick is that life’s just not that simple.

So, you can imagine my surprise when my email inbox was suddenly filled with headlines like “How Writing Everyday Helped Change My Life” and “5 Habits from Successful Writers” despite neither of those articles offering any actionable advice or information other than “Writing good! Do the thing!” For those looking for actual, factual advice, there is plenty of fantastic writing advice floating around the web, you just have to know where to look. In this case, I prefer to stay away from these vapid, faux-motivational fluff pieces that serve only to inflate their author’s ego and needlessly fill up your inbox.

Here is a good rule of thumb if you want to quickly and easily identify a piece of unremarkable advice:

Is the lion’s share of the article’s content summed up in the headline without any additional information that might help better illustrate the author’s point of view?

Ding, ding, ding!

Underneath it all, it’s undeniable how relatable these articles are. Humans happen to like things that relate specifically to them and their experiences, so it makes sense that there would be a market for articles that do little but offer a brief, albeit overtly circle-jerky, reprieve from staring at a blank page, wracked with writer’s block.

“Writing good! Do the thing!”

After the fourth or fifth article like this, it starts to feel more like a pep talk after an exhaustive hot yoga session rather than a clarion call to aspiring authors to pursue their passions.

January 6, 2019
Bonnaroo 2018 – Day 0: Preparation & Travel
When I graduated college in 2014, I promised myself that I would be more accepting of new experiences and opportunities. I was going to say “yes” more and see what happened. Almost immediately after deciding to follow this path, my older brother walked upstairs and announced that we were going to Tennessee.

Music is an essential part of life in Tennessee.

Fast forward to 2017: I had already attended Bonnaroo twice by the time that I suggested the trip to my girlfriend. She was hesitant at first, given that we had only just started dating and the fact that it would be her first big road trip without her family, but soon warmed to the idea and began gathering things to bring with us.

We planned to leave a few days early to visit family on Long Island and get a headstart on our caravan companions so that we could stop along the way. It didn’t take us long to realize that there wasn’t going to be much reason to stop through Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia or the small slab of Georgia we snuck through. We made it to our destination in Tennessee in record time and ended up renting a motel room instead of sleeping in our Kia Sedona so that we could shower and chill before our 5-day stint in the tent-city music festival.

Relaxing in Tennessee is undoubtedly one of my favorite parts of the Bonnaroo experience. Each year we coordinate travel plans with our group of around 8-10 people and converge on a small motel to prep for the festival and enjoy some of the luxuries that the surrounding area has to offer. While it’s easy to get dirty looks as a new-age hippy, nevermind a Yankee, in the South, Manchester has always been welcoming to us.

Next week, I will go over what happened on Wednesday, the day before the festival officially starts. My goal is to have a post for each day of the festival and then one for our trip home.
For those curious, here are a few items we brought with us that came in handy (I will be writing more about how to make music festivals as hassel free as possible soon!):
- A Solar Shower: Although Live Nation has made Bonnaroo a much more hygienic experience in recent years, it’s always nice to have a solar shower with you in case you’re desperately in need of a warm shower.
- A Reflective Tarp: Tennessee is HOT in the summer. We used a reflective tarp to help keep the sun from warming up our tent area and car too much during the hot days and offer protection from the inclement weather.
- A Hammock: Although I thought I would have more opportunities to use it in Bonnaroo itself, I found the hammock really useful for finding a quiet place in the woods to relax. Thankfully, Bonnaroo already has plenty of hammocks set up throughout their campsite and festival grounds so this may not be as necessary as other items.
- Lots of Bungies: While I hope our sleeping situation is better designed next year, we used lots of bungies to keep our supplies and luggage from falling on top of us while we slept on our mattress in the back of the van. Once we arrived, the bungies were great for setting up camp and keeping things from flying away.
If you’d be interested in reading more about my experiences traveling and visiting music festivals, feel free to shoot me a comment to let me know.
December 14, 2018
Autobots Roll Out! Transformers TCG Autobot Starter Pack Review

I’m a huge sucker for new games. It doesn’t particularly matter whether I am attached to the developer or license. Unsolved games present a dual opportunity for me to explore new puzzles and adopt game design lessons learned to my own projects.

This past September, Wizards of the Coast and their parent company Hasbro released a brand new trading card game based on the Transformers IP. When I heard the news on Mark Rosewater’s podcast, Drive to Work, my ears immediately perked up. Apparently, WotC brought Mr. Rosewater on board because it had been so long since they had released a new TCG that they needed the guidance of someone with enough experience designing collectible games from the ground up.

Like many of WotC’s entries into the genre, The Transformers TCG borrows a lot from Magic the Gathering. Cards tap (turn sideways to signify that something has been done to change them in some way), characters attack one another, items are equipped and spells are cast fairly similarly. Even the namesake mechanic, transforming, was also borrowed wholesale from Magic after the Innistrad expansion proved that two-sided cards could be successful outside of Wizard’s other flagship product, Duel Masters.

That is basically where the similarities end, thankfully. Unlike in Magic, you start a game of Transformers with your favorite set of bots already in play. Players take turns drawing cards, attacking other their characters and upgrading their bots until all of one player’s characters are KO’d. For a game aimed at a younger audience, I was impressed with how much flavor and fun could be packed into a relatively simple design.

A mechanic that I particularly enjoy is the ability for each card in the game to offer bonuses in combat, regardless of whether the card itself affects combat at all. When a Transformer attacks, that player reveals two cards from the top of their deck. If the revealed cards have orange pips in the top left corner, they add +1 damage to the bot’s attack. The same is true with Transformers blocking and blue pips. While I’m sure it will play heavily into deckbuilding, at its bare bones, it acts as a workhorse to keep an otherwise simplistic combat system dynamic and engaging.

My main gripe with Transformers (despite being outside of the target demographic by a significant margin) is that I wonder whether or not the game truly justifies being a trading card game over other popular alternatives. In its current form, players can purchase the Autobot Starter Kit and individual Booster Packs. The Starter Kit comes with enough cards and transformers for one standard deck but also offers an alternative play mode where the deck can be shared with another player for a more simplified version of the game.

While I appreciate the flexibility, a part of me wonders whether the whole package would have been better off as a living card game (LCG) or something similar where the cards are available for purchase, rather than won through what is essentially a lottery. While collecting is an essential part of games like Pokemon or Magic, the same doesn’t seem to be the case with the Transformers intellectual property. For a franchise about selling an endless amount of toys, the roster of bots doesn’t offer much in terms of a roster for people who aren’t diehard fans outside of Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream, and Bumblebee.

As it stands, I don’t think that I will be purchasing more than the Transformers TCG Starter Kit because I don’t have any interest in chasing rares by buying boosters, a habit that I’ve already had trained out of me in regards to Wizard’s other products. If they end up releasing a more contained product (perhaps a duel deck-style kit with two standard playable decks), then I may be interested in jumping back in to give it a try, but unless I can add it to my growing collection of tabletop games, I don’t think I’ll be participating much in this new trading card economy.

If you’d like to learn more about the Transformers TCG, you can do so at Hasbro’s website here.

November 28, 2018
5 Traveling Tricks I Learned From My First International Trip

Although I consider myself a seasoned road tripper, I’ve only spent a few weeks outside the United States. Those fourteen days were spent traveling Japan with a good friend on my first international trip. Not everything went as well as we had planned, but it was a life-enriching experience and a lesson in what to do and what not to do while visiting another country with little international experience. Here are just a few of the things I picked up along the way.

Come Hungry

Food is such an essential part of the human experience that it would be a shame to restrict your diet while traveling abroad, but I extend my sympathies to those who have to do so for health reasons. I gave up alcohol just before heading to Japan and was subjected to ordering spiced ginger ale at every bar I ended up in. Other than my dry bar crawls, I made sure to try as much local food as possible, although I admit to going to a McDonalds more than once (they happened to have a Mega Mac burger at the airport a few months before I was able to find it the States.) Of everything I ate in the land of the rising sun, my worst meal was easily my European-themed hotel’s breakfast buffet. Everything of Japanese origin was a unique culinary experience that I hope to repeat soon.

My first uniquely “Japanese” experience after landing at Narita airport was wandering the streets of Itabashi looking for something to eat. My traveling companion and I had booked our AirBNB while waiting for a layover in Chicago and didn’t know what to expect when we arrived. For our first Japanese meal, we ended up stumbling into a small ramen shop with a pullback curtain and a menu sitting out front.

We saw that two other patrons were already enjoying their meal so my friend and I sat patiently for the chef to address us. Before we realized what we needed to do, another couple entered, greeted the chef, and turned to order their food from a vending machine just inside the door. After realizing and correcting our mistake, we handed our receipts to the chef and he began preparing our meals. I ended up eating some of the best ramen I’ve ever had in my life. You don’t know how glad I am that we didn’t just get sandwiches from a Lawson and call it a night.

Plan Only When Necessary

Life is full of surprises and part of traveling is embracing a certain amount of spontaneity. There are obvious necessities that must be planned for, such as passports, visas, and plane tickets, but you should have an open mind towards new opportunities in case you happen to run into them. For example, I had no idea where I was going to spend the night in Tokyo, but ended up thoroughly enjoying spending the night in a neighborhood that I wouldn’t otherwise know anything about. You don’t necessarily need to book your AirBNBs last minute to get the most out of traveling, but you should avoid filling up your itinerary to the brim and making no room for the surprises you’ll find along the way.

Read the Signs

When it comes to visiting a foreign country without much experience speaking or reading the native language, Japan makes things easy. As long as you stick to the popular cities, most important signage will be in both Japanese and English. That didn’t stop a lot of tourists I witnessed purposefully ignoring clearly written instructions, however. Some of them seemed to operate under the assumption that any potential social faux pas would be disregarded by any Japanse onlookers because of their tourist status.

It goes without saying to not be a jerk on your trip, but sometimes the stuff that goes without saying needs to be said anyway. In this case, read the sign. Just do the thing, whatever it is, that keeps you from looking like an ass in public.

In cases when you can’t read the sign, look up traveling tips for the specific country you are visiting. Every culture has its ins and outs, so no one is expecting you to be an expert, but doing the bare minimum will go a long way towards making your trip easier for everyone.

Take Some Time For Yourself

Your first international trip may be exhausting, depending heavily on your target destination and your traveling habits. Since flying to Japan was both my first time ever leaving the country and my first time on a commercial airplane, I was unprepared both physically and mentally for jumping time zones. I was already feeling sick just before departure and the jetlag only made it worse, but once I was able to recover, my next reality set in. I was going to be doing a lot of walking.

I should give myself some credit here as I did purchase a new pair of sneakers just before I left, but no amount of shoe could defend against me hiking up mountain shrines and walking around different Japanese cities for two weeks. The one-two punch of jetlag and physical exhaustion made me realize how important having a few minutes to relax and gather your thoughts can be. Whether I was calling another dry bar crawl early to get some shuteye or taking a walk before breakfast, I made sure to take time for myself when I needed it, rather than try to wring every ounce of enjoyment out of my trip. It always ended up benefitting me in the long run to know my limits.

Make Friends Whenever Possible

My trip to Japan was unique in that I was piggybacking on my companion’s work trip and ended up spending a lot of time meeting other people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I was also fortunate enough to run into other local Japanese people who were willing to help me with directions or with my chopstick etiquette. The language barrier was tough for some, but when I wasn’t struggling with American idioms, most of my acquaintances understood (or at least were polite enough to pretend) what I was talking about.

Some of my best experiences traveling have been because of the people I’ve met and my time spent abroad was no different. The key isn’t necessarily to be the most interesting person in the room, but instead to be willing to listen and learn from others. Once both parties agree to listen to one another, most barriers can be overcome.

November 20, 2018