Today’s e-mail from my favorite online shopping site, dealnews.com, came with a listing for 100 tiny six-sided dice for only $1.90, including shipping. There’s a game in there somewhere. (I know, I know. It’s Champions.)
Better yet, they go down in price if you buy in bulk. You could get, for instance, 1,000 dice for only $13.20, plus $1.70 for registered air mail. Madness!
Last night, we accepted a counter-offer on the house we wanted. It’s a grand, old place in the same school district we’re in now, so the kids won’t have to move away from their friends, but it’s in a nicer neighborhood. It has almost twice the space of our current house—which we need, since we’re bursting at the seams here—and sits on 8/10 of an acre.
Best of all, the seven of us are moving up from a 3-bed/1-bath to a 4-bed/4-bath. It’s a good bump in our mortgage payments too, but doable. The down real-estate market meant we got pinched a bit in selling our old place, but we more than made up for that by getting an excellent deal on the new place.
I’m almost embarrassed at how cool my new office in the house is. It’s huge and features wood-paneled walls, a separate entrance, a fireplace, leaded-glass windows, and a number of secret closets, one of which contains a wet bar. It’s ridiculous.
The only real hurdle is the inspection, which we’ll conduct on Monday. Assuming that goes well, we close on Halloween. Wish us luck!
I try to follow literary trends as best I can, and it seems like we have a wealth of historical novels these days—far beyond the Michener-like epics—and a dearth of science-fiction. It’s almost as if the two genres have flipped around, that historicals have supplanted the purpose of science-fiction.
In many ways, we live in the science-fiction world our parent read about. We have instantaneous, world-wide communication. I spend a lot of my time wandering around cyberspace. We can cross the country in a matter of hours rather than weeks. The future is here.
Good science-fiction comments upon the present by showing where the future might lead us. Now that we’re in the future—nearing the singularity, the scientific event horizon beyond which predictions become much more difficult to make—perhaps we’re looking back at the past to find patterns that show us what might happen next. Or maybe we’re just using that atavistic setting to comment on our present, fulfilling a role that science-fiction used to take.
There’s a lot of talk these days in the computer game industry about user-generated content. It’s done a tremendous amount for online communities, like Second Life, which is sometimes billed as a game but is more of a toy. Case in point is Metaplace, the new venture from Raph Koster, author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design.
It’s easy to see how games and online communities are converging on each other in new and exciting ways, and the opportunity to make your virtual items portable and usable in many settings could be the killer app for such sites. Think of it as the d20 System for MMOs. (There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but as a slack metaphor, it works.)
A friend of mine, Erin Quick-Laughlin, is working on something similar to this over at www.someelement.com. His group’s vision is to bring online development to the masses—or at least those so inclined to use such tools. It reminds me of how the Mac revolutionized publishing by making desktop publishing a reality. It’s going to make for an interesting ride.
I recently began work on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Superheroes and Villains, Illustrated. This is another “how to draw” book for IDW Publishing, in the vein of the manga books I worked on with Tomoko Taniguchi. This time around, though, the equally talented Yair Herrera joins me to bring my notes to life and provide the real meat of the book.
Because we don’t have the rights to use any established heroes in this book, I get to come up with a whole new slate of characters for Yair to draw. For me, this is tons of fun. Look for the book sometime in 2008.
On Friday, we accepted an offer on our house! Now we just have to find a new one. (The contingency offer we had on another place this summer expired at the end of August, so now we’re free to look around again.)
We don’t ask for much. It just has to have four or more bedrooms, be in good shape, a great neighborhood, have wonderful schools, and not cost a mint. Despite that long list of demands, we have a handful of promising leads, and we’ve been cruising through houses all weekend. Wish us luck!
The latest issue of (fellow Alliterate) Wolfgang Baur‘s Kobold Quarterly is out. It features bits by Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams, Jeff Grubb, Robert Schwalb, Stan!, and more. If you enjoy d20 fantasy gaming and miss Dragon and Dungeon, be sure to check this out.
The latest issue of Tied-In, the IAMTW newsletter, is available for download. In this PDF, you’ll find notes about Donald Bain (the Scribe Awards first Grandmaster), BotCon, the novelization of The Twelve Dogs of Christmas, news from (fellow Alliterate) Steve Sullivan, and my con report from Origins 2007.
Via my pal James Wallis comes a note from Adrian Hon (James’s partner at the wailing-new Six to Start) about a project dedicated to concocting a brand-new Alternate Reality Game designed to raise money for cancer research. You can find out all the details at LetsChangeTheGame.org.
In short, they’re asking for 500-word game concepts. They’ll pick the best and give the design team £1,000 of seed money. It’s a worthy cause, and there’s a lot of fun to be had. If you have the time and inclination, please give it a crack!
Continue reading »
Fall is on the way, although you might not know it around here yet. Still, October’s started now, which means Halloween, that horrific holiday, is just around the corner. On that note, a friend of mine dropped me an interesting link for something called Fighting the Dead.
At the moment, there’s not much to see, just creepy sounds and images, but it’s a start. A little poking around brings you to an affiliated page that features a countdown until “network service restored.” That should be sometime in the wee hours of October 4 or 5, depending on where you reside.
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