The daytime temperatures are hitting the low 100s like a boss. The nighttime temperatures are doing good to get below 80.
It’s time to do some cooking.
In the car. … Read more
Little E and I were watching Star Wars (again) on Friday night; toward the end, when the Imperial Flunkie asks Tarkin if he wants his escape pod fired up and ready, my son suddenly blurts out “ARE THEY TRYING TO TEXT EACH OTHER?”
I have no. idea. where. that. came. from. I don’t have a plan that allows for a lot of texting. Texting is something that really doesn’t go on in this house. I’m old and unhip. But, you know, if George is going to keep reinventing Star Wars for a new generation, then I guess this road only leads to one place…
Fascinating Facebook chatter about a right-in-my-back-yard local convention that I’ve written off at this point. It’d be silly not to go and sell books there when it’s half an hour away in the city where I grew up, but they’re acting like they’re running a show in Dallas (with prices to match).
Interesting that they’re being called on it out in the open on Facebook. This is a first year event. I have a feeling it is also a last year event. 🙄 … Read more
Couple of things of note today…
The beloved Kick machine sold this morning on eBay for the opening bid. No sweat there – I was happy for it to go for that much, and to a fellow arcade collector no less. I will just say that the buyer is based nearby, and I’m hoping I might be able to persuade them to bring it to OVGE one of these days. I’ll be extremely bummed to see it go – even when it hasn’t been working 100%, there’s just something about that bright, happy side art on the machine that takes the edge off of things a bit. A really happy guy (with a spiked helmet) riding a unicycle, popping balloons. If that doesn’t make you crack a smile every time you see it, I can’t help you. I’ll miss the machine though.
Other big news of the evening: VWORP!1 has apparently been chronicled in Howe’s Transcendental Toybox. Howe as in David J. Howe, co-author of all of the seven Doctor Who “Handbooks” (now out of print and hard to find) which I used as primary research material while writing the book. … Read more
I’m selling MOAR STUFF on eBay! This round of goodies, including the much-loved Kick arcade game and some very rare, very out-of-print limited edition cartridges, is being liquidated to pay my expenses to GlitchCon 2012 in Bentonville, just five weeks away. I’m not really wanting to get rid of any of it – when we start talking about games that I bought not from a faceless eBay seller, but in person on the floor at CGE or OVGE, we’re talking about stuff with some pretty specific (and usually good) memories attached to it. But I do believe strongly that, what with me being out of work (running up on month nine of that particular issue), anything I do like this should be done without hitting the “house account” that’s paying the bills. It’s a gamble: I make a sacrifice now, pay for my booth, buy more copies of the book to sell, and make my best pitch on the show floor (which is a daunting prospect in and of itself – anyone who knows me knows that there’s a reason I don’t go for sales jobs). If all goes well, there’s money to be made that I can bring home and put in the house account, but I can’t, in all good conscience, put the family income on the line for that kind of crap shoot. So here I am on eBay again.
Quite a few of the leftover white bucket games from OVGE will wind up on the block before it’s all said and done.… Read more
I didn’t accumulate much of a stash at OVGE this year, because I was worried about spending too much time away from my table where I hoped to be getting rid of the stash I brought to sell. And the past couple of years have really been a bit of a “break even” proposition, because I sold stuff and then turned around and bought stuff. With me out of work, that just wasn’t in the cards this year. I did some horse trading and landed a copy of Super Mario Bros. Wii for Little E (he’s been begging for it since seeing his cousin’s copy of it), I got Brett Weiss’ new book (which I’ve been glued to here lately, because it delves into systems and games that I’ve only bothered with in retrospect) and one of Deann Stone’s hand-decorated Christmas ornaments (I’m gonna have Q*Bert cussing on my tree this year – top that!). And then there was one last item that was handed over to me for free. … Read more
It would appear that the Doctor Who News site has run a blurb on VWORP!1. This oughtta be interesting… 😯
EDIT: thedoctorwhosite.co.uk gives it a mention too:
Hello blog, nice to see ya, it’s been a long time, you’re just as lovely as you used to be…
Well, okay, it’s been maybe all of three days, but that’s a three-day break in my effort to blog every day, which I’d been managing to do somewhat successfully since mid-April or so. Now, I’m not sure that every post could lay claim to being something substantive and worth tuning in for (good grief, did I just say “tuning in”?), but it was sort of a discipline thing: making damn sure I wrote something every day. And I did… for about two months.
Frankly, I’m still a little bit brain-lagged from OVGE, which sounds kind of improbable, but I haven’t been sitting idle. I took 15 copies of VWORP!1 to OVGE and came back with 11. Not too bad since it was anything but a sci-fi convention (though the gigantic display of Star Trek games and the table full of mouth-wateringly rare Firefly memorabilia helped to blur the line a bit). So I had a moment of crazy and thought: hey, what if Tulsa Trek Expo isn’t the only sci-fi convention I could hit with this book? A visit to a really handy site called the Southern Fandom Resource Guide revealed that there were two sci-fi conventions, in August, practically in my back yard.
As a result, I can safely announce that there’ll be a table for theLogBook.com at GlitchCon 2012 in Bentonville, Arkansas, August 3rd, 4th and 5th – the first showing at a sci-fi convention for the site or its owner. (I know that sounds terribly unlikely, but it’s true: I’ve never been to a sci-fi or general-geek-audience convention. You’d think I would’ve been all over this sort of thing, but I’ve never been to one. It’s almost a pity that I’ll be stuck behind the table for the whole thing.) Since it’s kind of an all-interests geek gathering – bliss! – I’ll have both VWORP!1 and the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs, since I’ll be dealing with a whole new audience. I’m just a little bit excited about it.
There’s another convention two weeks later in Fort Smith that I’m less sure about – the lack of response I’ve gotten from them is a little too eerily reminiscent of my experience with the Trek convention in Tulsa. It seems a bit silly to miss a convention in the town where I grew up, but much like Tulsa, I can’t procure a table if they won’t even talk to me.
Other things worth a mention…
Hitchhiker’s Guide: The Live Radio Show. I can’t figure out if this is an awesome idea or ghoulishly exploitative. Honestly, I’m coming down on the “awesome” side of the fence, simply because the returning original cast members all seem to have a long-standing love of the material, and I’ve never once heard any of them complain about how the Hitchhiker’s Guide association was going to lead to typecasting. If anything, Simon Jones has spent so much of his career in a bathrobe (sorry, Brits: dressing gown) that he seems to relish it almost too much. I also don’t begrudge the Adams estate for finding new ways to repurpose and cash in, not one bit. I have yet to see any of the posthumous projects damage the story or Adams’ legacy*, so… when’s the American leg of this tour?
Days of Thunder. It’s bad enough going up against Miami, but going up against Miami and the refs? Sorry, OKC. Give it another shot next year. Getting into the finals is nothing to sneeze at.
Slim notsogoodbody. Obi is going to the vet today. He’s recently been losing weight, muscle tone and hair – the doofus cat is many things, but he should not be going bald, that’s my job. Thyroid issue? Food allergy? Parasite? Finally became too stupid to remember to eat? Whatever it is, I hope the big dumb cat errs on the side of cheap maladies. We need him around, but I’m worried that an expensive vet bill could be the other shoe that tap dances on our heads.
I’ll try to get back to routine blogging, but as you can see, I’ve had my hands just a little bit full.
* any more than “Mostly Harmless” already did.… Read more
I’ve shown off my photos of other people’s stuff. Turns out that other people were taking photos of me and my stuff too. Be warned, you can’t unsee it. … Read more
I still have several copies of VWORP!1 on hand, so I may see about doing another event at some point… when my brain is done melting, that is.… Read more
… 
… 