Monthly Archives: September 2010

The More Things Change…

by

3

Yes, it’s a cliché, but “the more things change, the more they stay the same” is really a good summary of my experience at Grand Masquerade.

On the one hand, it was all-new. The event is the first of its kind ever, bringing together five different fan organizations under one roof with a number of White Wolf/CCP employees. It was the first time I’ve been to a White Wolf fan convention and focused on panels and fan outreach.1 I met a lot of awesome new folks as well.

On the other hand, it was like coming home. It was the thirteenth time I’ve been to the International Camarilla Conclave. It was a chance to reexamine and represent some panels I’ve done over the past couple of years. I had a lot of great conversations about the past, the present, and the future. And I was able to not only share a few drinks with old friends, but also reconnect with some friends I haven’t spoken to in years.

The amount of cooperation going on between the various White Wolf fan organizations is incredible. If you had told me a year ago that One World By Night members would have been drinking and laughing and having a great time with Camarilla members, I would have called you a liar. And yet, I saw that very thing over and over, repeated in a wide variety of situations. It was awesome and humbling, and I ended up staying out until 5am most every night just because I lost track of time (which is something I almost never do).

Kudos have already been given to my hard-working friends and coworkers at CCP for the event, but any community event is only as good as the community that participates in it. This incredible event revealed just how incredible the White Wolf community can be. For a few days, I’ve been trying to find the best words, and all I am left with is this:

Thank you.

  1. Which is the polite way of saying “the company pays me to have drinks and talk with people.” ↩

The Grandest and Masqueradiest Show

by

4

The Grand Masquerade is next week.

This is, in many ways, a unique experience. It’s absolutely the first time we’ve gotten a lot of different World of Darkness communities together. Live-action, tabletop, card games… all of them are together under one roof in a gorgeous hotel in New Orleans. It’s a great chance to get together and talk about the past, present, and future of the World of Darkness. I’m sure I sound like a shill, but fuck it; I’m the World of Darkness Developer now, and this is an entire show about the World of Darkness. I’m pretty pumped.

On the other hand, I’m nervous as well. We’re going to make some big announcements – maybe not earth-shattering in the grand scheme of things, but certainly we’ll be talking about stuff I haven’t been able to talk about for a while now. I’m doing my usual yearly panel of new LARP theory, as well as reprising the last two I’ve done, and I’ll probably be on a few other panels as well. I’ll likely be audio recording whatever panels that we won’t videotape and post on YouTube. I’m sure folks will have lots of questions, and I want to make sure to do my part to make myself as available as I can for the community to answer the questions I can. Plus our usual slate of awesome parties. It would be great if I could actually get some gaming in, but it’s a lot of stuff going on.

I’m sure I’ll see a lot of folks there that I haven’t seen in a while, and meet new folks for the first time. It’ll be weird to have many of my social networks interacting under one roof as I bounce from being “Eddy the guy I used to game with” to “Eddy the WoD Developer” to “Eddy the person” and back again about a million times over the course of several days. Being an introvert (even if I am a very social one), that’ll take a lot of energy out of me. Normally, I wouldn’t be too worried, but I’m going to roll from the convention right into a lot of work stuff, and then another convention, so I won’t have a lot of time to recharge. I may just say “fuck it” anyhow, but we’ll see how it pans out.

So, yeah. Excited, nervous, and weird. I’m in as crazy headspace right now. This show will be memorable, though, that’s for damned sure.

Cyberpunk Literature

by

9

Like most blogs, my site attracts its fair share of spam. I recently shut down one avenue, but once in a while I still get the odd bit of misdirected, self-promotional crap. Yesterday, I got another one through my “Contact Eddy” page, asking me to post a link to bestcollegesonline.net. I was about to delete it, when I noticed it was about cyberpunk literature, and the link turned out to be… well, actually interesting.

20 Essential Works of Cyberpunk Literature

It got me thinking (primarily about how little cyberpunk literature I’ve actually read), so I thought I would share my thoughts the books I recognized on the list presented, starting with the fact that the writer lumps way more than 20 works into a single list. It’s really closer to 27 works.

Continue reading →

Shutting off membership option

by

0

I have an option on my blog to be a member. However, I’m now getting a dozen accounts a day of spam bots trying to become members of this site, so I’m shutting that down until I find out what functionality that provides and provide a better option for it. This won’t affect RSS and Atom feeds – only if you signed up on the site as a member.

Edit: Sorry about the slightly less clear post earlier. I was posting from my phone hastily, and the result came out a little repetitive and garbled. I’ve edited the original post above for more clarity.

Boring, Self-Indulgent Update

by

0

These days I do most of my boring life updates on Twitter and Facebook. With the rise of microblogging, self-indulgent updates about my life and interests aren’t as necessary as they once were. But once in a while, it’s nice to take a longer moment and think about what’s going on, especially when you’re deep in the flow of life.

Since GenCon, I’ve been settling into my new work responsibilities. The first thing I’ve noticed is that my responsibilities are like quicksand: just when I think I can’t get pulled in more, I’m pulled in more. Mostly, I’m learning about moving from a workflow where I could do quite a lot of my job on my own to one where I need to coordinate with a team. It’s not a manager role so much as a team leadership role, but it’s a huge step for me. Throw into this mix the triple threat of going to the Grand Masquerade, coming back for two days of job training, and then back out to GDC Online for a week, and my free time is at a premium.

Part of this reduced free time means that I had to trim down my personal projects even more, causing me to bail on some freelance work I was excited about and calling a premature end to the ICONS game I was running. In fact, the only personal project I have on my plate is my collection of essays on the Sherlock Holmes stories, and even that’s coming along at a glacial pace (one of the advantages of being my own master, I suppose). It’s weird – usually I have a lot of different irons in a lot of different fires. Technically that’s still true, but right now my irons and fires are all in one office. That isn’t a bad thing at all, but it does take some getting used to – especially when I get so wrapped up in my own bullshit that I accidentally blow off my friends.

One upside to all of this is that I’ve been needing a hobby that I can do in very short bursts and at random moments, which means I’ve had a surprising amount of time to read. I’ve been working my way through Sherlock Holmes when I have a chance to sit down with the books and a notepad or even a laptop, but I’ve also been catching up on Raymond Chandler and some short story anthologies I’ve been sitting on. I’m also going to dive into some Doc Savage in the near future, Ethan suggested I get acquainted with Clark Ashton Smith, and Russell’s been getting me interested in Fritz Leiber. One of the downsides of working with my friends is that I end up getting way more awesome book recommendations than I could possibly have time to read.

Anyhow, I expect things will settle down. My life isn’t crazy, but it is fuller than it was before. I am learning a lot about myself as I muddle through it, though.

The Cover Band Game

by

1

Before I dive into this, complete and total credit goes to the amazingly awesome Paul and Storm. This strange thing comes out of a bit they do during live concerts.

Said bit is, whenever one of them makes an off-hand comment that includes an interesting turn of phrase, the other says “[Clever Turn of Phrase] is the name of my [Insert Band Here] cover band.” For example, if one person said something about the fickle finger of fate, the other one could say “’Fickle Finger of Fate’ is the name of my Cinderella cover band.”

Over the past few weeks, an informal game has evolved around the house. We never settled on rules or made any official declaration – it just kind of happened one day. Looking back on how things played out, I can reverse-engineer some of the implied rules:

  • During conversation, someone takes another speaker’s turn of phrase, and works it into a cover band name.
  • The cover band name has to, in some way, relate to the band referenced.
  • You have to do this before someone else does it.
  • Once “called,” no one else can use that turn of phrase for their band.
  • Ideally, you should do this after everyone has forgotten about the game, for maximum effect.

Today alone I managed to use “Ghoul Vagina” and “Archdick” in the game. So if you were wondering what the hell I was babbling about on Twitter or Facebook, now you know.