Friday Mea Culpa: No Excuse Edition.

Mea culpa, mea culpa...

Okay, look. I know going over two weeks between posts is total bullshit. I know I've let down my tens of readers, and for that I'm sorry. I don't really have a good excuse, not one that holds water anyway. Let's just say that I took a little hiatus, and I'm in good company, but now I'm back. Instead of boring you with what I did on my hiatus, I'll just skim some important points, starting with what caused my absence, the train-wreck that was Origins.

So, I had this long-ass post all ready to write when I got back from Origins, then once I started I just couldn't finish. I didn't have the heart, didn't have the energy, couldn't be arsed, etc. So, I'll give you a taste of the opening. This is how it was to go down...

Cthulhu was my co-pilot

I have returned from the hinterlands, brothers and sisters. I've returned from the state of my birth with a full report on the absolute train-wreck that was Origins 2010. Marvel at tales of scheduling cock-ups! Gasp at the sheer audacity of running a major convention like a pack of Ritalin addled tweens! Look on in horror as no one shows up and attendance numbers go in the toilet! All of this and more were the wonders that awaited me when I rolled into Columbus on Wednesday night.

 Good, eh? Okay, so maybe it wasn't that bad. It was pretty disorganized, though. I won't go into the details, since I'm pretty over it now. I'll say this, though.

[rant]

GAMA needs to get their shit together, and pronto. Whoever is running that chicken shack needs to hitch up their pants like a big boy and make some major changes. Origins and the Gama Trade Show need to be rolled together into one big party. GAMA needs to hire a goddamned web developer who can get a navigable and easy to read website with a usable event sign-up live more than a month before the con. Origins is a good con, a great con, a con with over thirty years of good will and positive feelings attached to it by the hordes of people who usually attend. GAMA seems to be unable to leverage this into anything meaningful, and is apparently content to dither around like a pack of hens while they piss their con away.
[/rant]

Whew, now that that's over, lets talk about some other stuff. In no particular order, here's what's been eating up my time lately.

• Pandemic - The wife and I and our friends play a shitload of board and card games along with our dice-throwing trad games. Usually it's Settlers of Catan or Flux or one of the brazillion versions of Munchkin, or something like that train game that Mayfair does. Recently though, we can't get enough of Pandemic. Seriously, ZMan games hit it out of the park with this one. It's one of the best designed games I've ever played. The gameplay is fast and brutal, it requires the ability to work quickly and smartly with other players, and punishes you for a lack of planning and foresight. Seriously, there are more ways to lose this game than there are to win it. Also, there's a version where someone gets to play an invisible bio-terrorist wherein hilarity invariably ensues. Go out right now and get the game and its expansion, you won't regret it.
• Holiday Travel - Over the Independence Day holiday, the wife and babby and I all packed up and headed out to the west side of the state for a weekend at ace GM Munin's folk's place. Once there we had a hard few days of fireworks, shooting guns, going to the beach, floating down the river, playing airsoft, playing disc golf, eating a lot, playing, well, shitloads of board games, watching Zombieland, and generally having a good time. While there, I took the opportunity to talk game design with Munin, Selnaric, Namaimo, and the wife, and familiarized with Dream Pod 9's interesting mech game Heavy Gear. Of course, that leads me to...
• Design/Book Stuff - So, remember that novel I keep telling you about? I'm currently in the process of getting the world, which is a hard-science real world setting set 400 years in the future during the human diaspora, straight so I can write in it. I'm also toying with making some of my other settings (AEGIS vs. SPIDER and my Paranormal Police games) into ruleless settings and selling some PDFs. There's also a non-fiction book about gaming that I'd like to write, and I'm looking into that as well.
• Bringing up Babby - The Kid is nearly four months old now, and dadding is becoming increasingly labor intensive. Eventually we're going to have to get some kind of daycare so that I can actually get work done during the day. Speaking of...
• Work - I'm down to only one Rogue Trader assignment for Fantasy Flight, but more are probably on the way along with (hopefully) more stuff for Deathwatch. Despite Origins being mostly crap, I did have an opportunity to talk with Tara from Catalyst Games about some possible freelancing for Shadowrun 4, along with the guys who do Cthulhutech. Fighting the great old ones? In space? With lasers? Sign me up! I also need to get back into doing those quick essays for Demand Studios, no matter how bad their editors are.
• Rogue Trader - Since our Shadowrun/Cthulhu/In Nomine game finally ended, now it's time for me to run my Rogue Trader game. My man Zorak has put a Wiki together for us, wherein we're putting our characters and ships and NPCS and lots of other background stuff to give the game some flavor, as if Rogue Trader doesn't already have enough flavor. 

Welp, that's it. That's how I spent my hiatus. Now I need to get back to, you know, writing so that I can pay my bills and buy The Kid shoes. In the coming days I'll probably post to elaborate on all that stuff up there, or maybe I'll just talk about spaceships and motorbikes and space-motorbikes.