Month: July 2014

GlitchCon is this weekend! August 1st through 3rd at the Springdale Holiday Inn. A few notes ahead of the show…

• Death panels! Well, okay, not really. I’m doing two panels Saturday night: at 7pm in panel room 2 (the Sci-Fi room), I’m doing “Doctor Who in the Off-Season”, which will begin with the somewhat off-putting question “What will you do the next time Doctor Who is cancelled?” (Don’t worry, I’ll offer a detailed justification for asking that question in the first place.) At 9pm in panel room 3 (the Steam room, which hopefully doesn’t obligate me to do a karaoke version of the Peter Gabriel song of the same name), it’s “Beyond the TARDIS”, a look at British sci-fi beyond Doctor Who.
• D20: The Musical! Friday night between 8pm and 10pm in panel room 4 (the Anime room), the cast of D20: The Musical is doing a readthrough of their script. Quite a few of my friends are behind this show, so check it out, add +3 to your Wisdom score, and enjoy.
• Star Trek Continues! Vic Mignogna of Star Trek Continues will be there all weekend, showing the latest episodes of the ridiculously-professionally-produced Trek fan series, signing autographs and answering questions. My one stipulation to the organizers of the show was “Please, for the love of whatever gods are applicable, don’t put me up against Vic Mignogna at the same time on the schedule, because I don’t want to speak to an empty room.” 😆 These episodes have to be seen to be believed.
• Books! I will have a few copies of both VWORP!1 Second Edition and the brand-new, just-released VWORP!2 with me; hit me up at the end of either panel (or between panels) if you’re interested. Here’s where it gets funny: in order to have a chance in hell of having copies of VWORP!2 on hand, I had to “game the system” a bit and order a box full of proof copies from CreateSpace. These copies have a visible bounding box around a paragraph of text and a photo at the back of the book; for the eBook and the “general availabiity” edition, the caption for the photo has since been rewritten slightly and the bounding box eliminated. I will sign and number these because in some weird way I suppose the error make them collectors’ items (look! proof that the author was pulling an all-nighter and fell asleep at the wheel!). Due to the delay in making that fix, the print edition of VWORP!2 won’t be available until after GlitchCon. 😳 The eBooks are available NOW, including a bundle of both volumes in eBook form. I will also have the last few copies of Phosphor Dot Fossils on DVD with me, even though the video game panel has been nixed for this year.
• On the lack of the video game panel: shed no tears. While I enjoy doing the video game history panel (I can tell you the story of Ralph Baer and his industry-spawning gizmo until I’m blue in the face), it requires that I lug around something on the order of three times the amount of stuff (consoles, controllers, monitors, cables, extension cords) than just talking about British TV would. I may still have an opportunity to do the video game panel in September at Konsplosion, and there is an event in the works in northwest Arkansas that’s not yet on the schedule, and that may interest fans of video game history as well. Fear not, the Magnavox Odyssey will get its annual workout.

I’ve also decided what my quirky-and-just-a-little-bit-cheap-and-cheesy “theme” for this year’s OVGE will be (aside from the ever-popular and absolutely-necessary “Buy My Books And DVDs!”): PDF Unplugged.

But more on that after GlitchCon. 😉… Read more