I’m taking Bowie’s advice, putting on my red shoes, and dancing the blues. In fact, the red shoes are already in place, and I’m ready for my long weekend to begin in 9 hours or so. Catch you all Monday.
BAKE-OFF UPDATE So, an update on the QWC Bake-Off and my quest to win the hat of awesome. The Good News: We’ve hit our $1000 target, which means that should I win the Hat of Awesome, you’ll definitely be getting HIGHLY EMBARRASSING video of me dancing to a song selected by the most generous of the supporters who chipped and vote for my Sri Lankan Love Cake in the bake-off. Currently that honour is held by my friend Craig, who was last reported using phrases like “Beyonce” and “Single Ladies” and “If you like, you should have put a ring on it.” I am, it must be said, a little nervous about what might happen next. Of course, all this OUTRIGHT HUMILIATION only occurs if I win the bake-off, and I’m currently only $70 ahead of the gratuitous stunt-baking of my workmate’s Cherbumple. Given the pace that donations have been coming in, I could be in second place by the end of the day. There’s ten days to go and anything could happen, which is why I demand nothing short of FLAWLESS VICTORY before I hand over the tattered shreds of my dignity and get my groove on while wearing a silly hat. NEXT BIG THING There’s an awesome piece of web-meme going around writer’s blogs dubbed The Next Big thing meme. Every writer involved answers some questions about their current project and pings another five writers to be involved, thus creating a massive chain of emerging writers talking about their work. It’s very
There are days when I feel insufficiently geek. Don’t get me wrong – I do plenty of things that are geeky as hell – I play, on average, 1.5 face-to-face RPG sessions a week, have a semi-regular influx of graphic novels appearing in my mailbox, and the staff at my local Fantasy, SF, and Crime bookstore know me on sight. I can just about make it through an entire week of wearing shirts with pictures of C’Thulhu on them without having to do laundry. When I run out of Lovecraft inspired T’s, I’ll move on to my collection of web-comic shirts without missing a beat. That should keep me going for a month or so before it’s time to hit the washing machine. Two of my favourite TV shows are Justice League: Unlimited and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. I just dropped a whole buttload of cash on the reprints of Larry Hama’s classic GI JOE series from Marvel in the 80s and 90s, and should you feel the need to question *why* I did that, I will fucking school you on why that shit is awesome beyond belief (hint: it’s so not the series you’d expect after seeing the words GI Joe). The fact that I cannot find volume 7 of said GI JOE reprint series still bugs the hell out of me. Plus, you know, there’s that thing where I write science fiction and fantasy short stories. And over 200,000 words of imaginary pro-wrestling fan storytelling that’s related to
We’re in the midst of a competitive bake-off at work this week, endeavoring to raise money in support of International Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. QWC staff have diligently unearthed the most impressive cakes they can, pitched their merits via facebook, and asked people to donate and vote for their favourite baked treat. Funds raised will go towards supporting the ongoing work of the Garvan Institute and the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative. That’s the serious bit. The not so serious bit is that the staff member who raises the most money will be required to wear the Hat of Awesome, which I’ve been assured is an actual hat, and therefore MUST BE MINE. ‘Cause, you know, hat…awesome. I can spend an entire day pretending to be a Jäger, speaking in a German accent and generally befuddling my colleagues with random Girl Genius references. I may also declare myself LORD OF THE CAKES, simply because I can. Now I suffer a disadvantage in this contest ’cause I’m pretty much limited to a two-cake arsenal – I make a pretty good chili-carrot cake and a mean Sri Lankan Love Cake with Honey-Ginger Cream – and neither of these cakes photographs well ’cause I aim for damn fuckin’ tasty rather than pretty when it comes to food. Meanwhile some of my co-workers have brought out the big guns, such as the dreaded Cherpumple (think Turducken, but made with cake and pie), in order to ensure the hat is theirs. There’s no beating the Cherpumple in a fair bake-off – it’s
So we ended our Mutants and Masterminds hiatus last night, although in retrospect I wish I’d waited an extra week or two – working a whole bunch of weekends in a row means I don’t get a lot of time to prep sessions and, man, I really wish I’d had time to do a little more prep work on this one. On the other hand, while the lack of prep hurt the session, the counter-argument is that the holidays are coming and there’s usually disruptions to gaming schedules anyway. Getting back into the groove of regular gaming is probably more important than running a perfect game session at this point. In either case, what’s done is done, and I’m sitting here doing my post-session debrief, trying to figure out what worked, what didn’t, and how the campaign world is destined to change in the coming sessions. This is something that I’ve always done fairly informally and in a free-form kind of approach, but it occurs to me that I’ve spent much of this year adapting my writing process to the fact that I no longer have the vast expanses of free time to spend on it, but I haven’t actually done the same thing with my gaming. I’d ordinarily make these kind of notes mentally, and over the space of a couple of days, but given that I’m now running games far more often I’m figured I might try compressing them into a short blog-post after the session finished. Primarily I’m
So I had a Monday free from work this week and, in the absence of anything pressing on the writing front, I elected to spend the day flaked out in front of the Teev in a blatant attempt to recover from the worst of the GenreCon hangover. My televised tipple of choice – the first season of 2 Broke Girls, newly acquired on DVD by virtue of the fact that my local DVD store didn’t have season 2 of Castle on the shelves. I wasn’t really expecting much from 2 Broke Girls – it’s been routinely panned by pretty much everyone I’ve seen discussing it – but after mainlining all twenty-two episodes of Seasons One I think I’ve come to adore the show, just a little. Lets be clear – my adoration has nothing to do with the quality of the humour. There are sit-coms that I actually find consistently funny and worth-while (Community, Rosanne seasons two through four), sit-coms that are occasionally brilliant but often problematic (glares daggers at Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother), and there a sit-coms that I regard as a guilty pleasure for reasons I don’t particularly care to examine (early seasons of The Nanny). 2 Broke girls fits into neither category. Instead, the quality of the jokes in 2 Broke Girls is pitched at the level I’d associate with, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men, where everything is largely based on the clash between stereotypes that range
By the time you read this it will have been a little over a week since the inaugural AWM GenreCon ended. I’m going to specify this upfront, ’cause a portion of the content has been written before, during, and after the con, fitting into the little slices of time where I have sufficient brainpower to write. Some of these fragments made sense. Some of them did not. Such is the nature of running conventions. Point the First: GENRECON ROCKED I can scarcely believe I’m able to say this, since I spent so long fretting about the various ways that the conference could have gone wrong, but GenreCon proved to be a smashing success. Attendees were happy, guests were happy, my boss was really happy. We got a massive response rate to the pitching program (and a really high proportion of pitchers got asked to submit partials), the program was packed out, and for once I was at a con where you couldn’t actually find people in the bar when panelling was taking place. If you’re looking at my definition of success, based on a couple of years going to SF cons, that’s it right there. We spent weeks arguing about the program trying to achieve that no-one in the bar effect, and I’m really glad it was all worthwhile. ‘Course, me being me, I’m not entirely happy with the way things went. There are so many little things I wanted to go a little smoother, a bunch of tiny gaffs
It’s been five days since we wrapped up GenreCon and, well, I’m yet to bounce back to my normal self. Cons are mentally and physically exhausting, doubly so when you’re running them, and you always have to pay your body back for the sleep debt and three days you spend operating on adrenaline and caffeine. Net result: another short hiatus for my Mutants and Masterminds campaign while I regroup, catch up on sleep, and rediscover the mental capacity for after-work activities that aren’t marathon games of Masters of Orion II on Shifty Silas the laptop. All of which put me in mind of the following topic for this Friday Superhero Gaming Post: 5 TIPS WHEN RETURNING FROM A CAMPAIGN HIATUS 1) START WITH A BANG It’s easy to lose track of things during a hiatus: hot subplots grow a little dusty, character traits get forgotten through lack of use, and long-term plots are harder to follow when you’re not engaging with them regularly. It’s easy to forget that when you’re running the game, ’cause GMs are the types who live their campaigns twenty-four-seven, constantly adding details and sparking ideas. Players, well, players aren’t quite so involved, which is why I’m a big fan of getting the players into a fight scene as soon as possible after a hiatus, and the amount of time we spent not-playing is often directly proportional to the amount of time I leave between okay, guys, lets start the game and roll for initiative. The logic behind this is pretty
It’s relatively rare that I turn this blog over to someone else to make a guest post, but for the last few months my friend Steve has been putting together a thing called The MESSAGE. Given that he’s tackling one of my personal bugbears – the tendency towards misogyny among gamers – I wanted to amplify his message and asked him if he’d be interested putting together a blog post explaining things. With that, I’m going to hand things over: My name’s Steve. I’m the creator and co-director of the MESSAGE. That’s an acronym that stands for Men Ending Slurs and Sexist Attitudes in the Gaming Environment. We’re a world-wide online-based campaign group dedicated to encouraging, supporting and educating men in order to make all types of gaming more welcoming to women, and other minorities. You can find us at www.gamermessage.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Please do – the movement can only work with lots of support. I decided to set up The MESSAGE earlier this year after a series of events revealed that gaming culture had become even more inveterately sexist than it once was. Along the way, the world of online gaming had removed any pretence towards civility, leading to a culture that constantly, savagely, and endemically attacked women in gaming, a larger culture that cheered it on, and an industry that profited from it. I could point you to some links that exemplify the kind of thing I’m talking about, but they are legion
Sorry folks, I’m off to Sydney this week to run this piece of business: which promises to be wild and crazy and just a little exhausting, but also kinda time consuming. If you’re in Sydney over the weekend and interested in genre writing, come along and say hi. If you haven’t heard from me by this time next week, odds are I’ve either been torn apart by wild genre writers or my flight home from Sydney has been delayed.
For the most part I’ve been writing about superhero gaming while my regular game was on hiatus due to a player being in the UK, but as of last night the hiatus is over. We got together despite some jetlag and played the thirty-first session of Shock and Awesome, which involved some call-backs to the very first sessions of the campaign in addition to the events of session 30. The character’s school trip to the Museum of Natural History was interrupted when Doctor Jurassic and his three Demon Dinosaurs (velociraptors with superpowers) attacked and made off with the prize of the museum’s new exhibit – fragments of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs several billion years ago. It was probably the most fun I’ve had running bad guys in a long while, which is a sign that the villain audit I talked about last week is doing it’s job. I don’t think I’ve got my problems with combat licked yet, but this certainly *felt* like a very different fight compared to a lot of the other villain battles we had prior to the hiatus (admittedly, it was also marred by some abysmal die rolls for one of the players, which meant one of the dinosaur powers didn’t quite get the play it should have). The other reason the fight was fun comes down to the choice of bad guys: Jurassic and his henchmen were geekily fun to stat up and create, largely because they appeal to the part of
I’m kinda pinned down by the crushing weight of my to-do list this week. Apparently running a convention will do that to you. In my absence, I leave you with some vintage Beastie Boys to keep you company: See you all Friday.
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