A Good Turnout

Yesterday, I got the kids to school and then reported in to the Democratic HQ here in Beloit. They sent me out on a lit drop, and I hit every house in the northern part of the Town of Beloit with door hangers that reminded people just where their polling place was.
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Go Vote

I spent the day Saturday canvassing part of one of the wards here in Beloit with my eldest son, on behalf of the local Democratic Party. We had a wonderful time, despite the weather. We skipped lunch and walked for over four hours before we finished our assignment, and he barely complained a peep because he knew we were doing something important. I couldn’t have been prouder.

Tomorrow, I’ll drop the kids off at school, go vote, then volunteer to help again. I’ve done this every election day since I moved back to Wisconsin. To vote is one thing, but to put some real effort into mobilizing others to vote means just as much to me.

If you can at all (and happen to be an American citizen eligible to do so), be sure to vote tomorrow. Make your voice heard. No matter what else I might do here locally to get people to vote the way I think they should, there’s only one vote that I can be absolutely confident will be cast exactly the way I want it, mine.

Do that for yourself. Your country deserves it, and so do you.

Tidying Up

You may notice a few different things on the site. I took advantage of upgrading to the latest release of WordPress to tinker with the site a bit. I made a few cosmetic changes, and I also added links under the “Subscribe” header to my Amazon plog and MySpace pages.

I’m not sure I’m sold on the all-white background, although it makes things look cleaner. What do you think?

Beautiful BattleLore

On Wednesday, a preview copy of BattleLore showed up on my doorstep, courtesy of my friends at Days of Wonder. It’s a fantasy battles miniatures game based on Richard Borg’s Command & Colors system, also used in Memoir ’44. That alone would be enough to sell me on it.

I haven’t gotten through it all yet, but it’s beautifully done. Plus, it’s a dense box, full of all sorts of cool bits that collectively weigh several pounds. Sure, it’s $70, but for that price (roughly the same as a next-gen videogame) you get a lot of great stuff. It reminds me of the great Games Workshop boxed games in that way: chock full of toys and potential.

Manifesto Reviews

I just turned in my first game review for Manifesto Games. It’s a new website that sells downloadable computer games of all sorts–from independent developers. They give me a free copy of the game and then pay me to tell people what I think of it. This sounds like a sweet gig–until you remember how long it can take you to play through a full game. Still, getting paid to play games isn’t something you’d ever catch me complaining about.

I’ve been following Manifesto since it was a gleam in the eyes of its founders, Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson. Each of them is an industry legend, both in computer and tabletop games. Best of all, Johnny’s a fellow Alliterate, so I’m rooting hard for them to succeed. The state of innovation in computer games could be at stake–or so they believe–and they’ve staked their entire business on it.