The Beloit International Film Festival

No joke. This year, my little hometown of Beloit, Wisconsin, hosts its first annual international film festival. It starts January 19th and runs through the 22nd. I’m looking forward to squeezing a few screenings in.

The most interesting should be The Real Dirt About Farmer John, a documentary about a local farmer who runs a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm called Angelic Organics. The farm is not even ten miles from my house as the crow flies. If you get a chance, come on out and join us.

Nodwick vs. Spider-Man

My pal Aaron Williams, creator of one of my favorite comics, Nodwick, landed a gig writing an issue of Spider-Man Unlimited. It hits stands today, so get yourself down to your friendly local comics store and snatch up this collectors-item issue! To whet your appetite for this slam-bang combination of Aaron and Spidey, you can read a free five-page preview (just scroll down the page a bit until you see Spidey’s back.)

Great Games, Cheap

The fine folks at Titan Games liquidate older games and supplements at every show they go to. They have this “buy one, get three free!” deal that draws in gamers like kids to day-old donuts. Now they’ve brought that bit of brilliance to the web.

One of the secrets of games is that they never really die. Sure, they can go out of print, and the publisher can stop supporting them. As long as you have the core books, though, and some friends willing to play, you’re all set. These games may not be the hot new thing, but they can still be great fun.

Marvel Heroes Battle Dice On Sale!

Playmates Toys tells me that Marvel Heroes Battle Dice is “starting to appear in Target stores now.” It should be on the shelves of all mass retailers by mid to late January. (That includes Wal-Mart, KMart, Target, Meijer’s, Toys-R-Us, etc.) You should also be able to find it at your friendly local gaming store right about then too. Woot!

Daryl Hannah–Game Designer

I just completed an article for Games Quarterly Magazine about Daryl Hannah and Hilary Shepard’s new board game LIEbrary. (It’s their second published effort, believe it or not.) It tells the true story of how Daryl Hannah cost me my job and saved my marriage. You’ll have to wait until GQM #8 hits stands this spring to find out exactly how.

My Office

Over on his blog, Lee Goldberg mentions a coffee-table book he has about writers and their workspaces: The Writer’s Desk by Jill Klementz. Lee (who’s the VP of the IAMTW) posted a shot of his desk and challenged other writers to do the same. It struck my funny bone, so here’s mine, on a fairly uncluttered day.

Office

I try to keep things ergonomic and straightforward. This is my office, which is one room located over an insurance business near downtown Beloit. On the desk, you see my iBook, which I carry with me just about everywhere.

On the left wall, that’s my good-bye card from Games Workshop: a copy of the cover of Deathwing put on a pasteboard and signed by the whole Design Studio crew. On the right wall, that’s Patriot’s mask in the museum display box. David Ross wore that at Gen Con 1999 for the debut of my Brave New World RPG. We produced Patriot’s public execution in Pinnacle Entertainment‘s booth, and David played Patriot. I still have the manacles around here somewhere.

What you don’t see here are the filing cabinets, my couch, a few other bits of artwork (including the originals of the pictures of me as Fasthands Freddy) and the overflowing bookshelves. I have one bookshelf on which I keep one copy of everything I’ve written or designed–or much of it, at least. It’s crammed full. This year, I should probably break down and expand the collection into another of the bookshelves.

Space Hulk Recap

The illuminating John McLintock wrote a two-part article about the old Games Workshop board game Space Hulk. As I read it, the memories flooded back.

I haven’t played Space Hulk in years. I don’t even have a copy lying around any more. But I loved that game.

While at the GW Design Studio, I worked on Deathwing and Genestealer, the two supplements for the first edition of the game. These were some of my first professional credits. I found out later that Genestealer won the Origins Award for the Best Science-Fiction/Fantasy Board Game of 1990, which makes it my first major award-winner too.

John’s comments on the game are spot on. If you’re interested in one of the most elegant miniatures/board games around, check them out.

Edit: John’s up to three parts on the article now. Be sure to read them all.

New Photo

I just updated the photo on my “About” page. Just so you don’t have to go digging for it, though, here it is. If you click on the thumbnail, you’ll see an even larger version too.

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DC Comics Battle Dice Away!

I just finished the first draft of DC Comic Battle Dice for Playmates Toys. This uses the same system found in Marvel Heroes Battle Dice, which should be in stores this month.

Coming up for the stats for the DC heroes challenged me a bit more this time around. Marvel has published a set of encyclopedias that features numerical statistics for their characters, but DC doesn’t have such a resource. Sure, there are the Who’s Who sets from way back when, but I need something more modern. I relied on The DC Comics Encyclopedia from DK Publishing, supplemented by a lot of my own reading.

Being forced to read comics for work? Ah, it’s a rough life. 🙂

Words in My Mouth

The Stateline News, a free weekly newspaper published here in Beloit, ran a “People You Know” article about me in the Sunday (12/31/05) edition. If you’re a local, you already have it. If not, my apologies, but there’s no web link to any such piece.

Mostly, I’m happy with it. I always appreciate free publicity, even in a publication with such a clear right-wing bias. (It regularly runs statement papers from the Cato Institute as editorial pieces.) However, the article did liberally misquote me in a couple places. For example, “Our young people need to understand the value of education and hard work.”

While I don’t disagree that there’s value in education and hard work, I would never have given this quote. For one, I never refer to those under eighteen as “young people.” Second, to imply that only the young need these values–and that merely by being older I’ve climbed some kind of mount from which I can dispense my hard-earned wisdom–strikes me as condescending. It’s one of those clichés along the lines of “kids these days” that’s grated on my nerves ever since I was a kid myself. It’s right up there with walking uphill to school–both ways.

I’ve seen all sorts of misquotes and inaccuracies, though, in just about every article I’ve been close to. The speed at which local news is reported means the papers rarely have a chance to go back and check facts. The mistakes are rarely worth getting bothered about, so most of the time people just let them slide. Normally, I do too. As long as there’s no malice intended on the part of the paper or the reporter, it’s usually harmless.

I’ve done a bit of journalism myself, after all. I used to write for InQuest, and I still write an article for each Games Quarterly Magazine. Accuracy doesn’t come easy. It’s a goal you must continually strive for if you care to achieve it.