The 11th annual Oklahoma Video Game Exhibition (OVGE) has come and gone, and as has been the case since the first year of the show, I was there with goodies from my game collection for everyone to try out, as well as some stuff to sell.
The whole schedule can be seen here, and it’s full of events that are smothered in awesomesauce and seasoned with a liberal sprinkling of amazeballs. For those curious, I thought I’d “zoom in” briefly on my marathon triple-threat panel-o-rama on Saturday night. 😆
So it’s like this: I’m going to be speaking for three hours straight. 😯 Here’s what I’ll be blithering and blathering about… … Read more
We like to buy into the notion that there’s no limit to what we can achieve, but the truth that we run into more often is that there are limits – very finite limits – to how much time we have to pour into achieving the amazing. Things have come up recently that made me realize… I simply don’t have all the time that I thought I had to pour awesomesauce all over the universe. Projects that I had hoped to start and finish… I’m going to have to let them stew for a good long while, or watch as someone else finishes them. Other things already in progress will need to be simplified out of necessity. Time is really my biggest obstacle here.
This summer, the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD set will be going out of print. The reasons for this are numerous, but it basically boils down to “too many problems in trying to move inventory of physical things out the door”, whether it’s Paypal payment notifications winding up spamqueued (and then me being contacted by buyers wanting to know, quite rightly, where their stuff is), to making it to the post office in a timely manner (the recent heap of ice storms certainly hasn’t helped in that regard), and the gut feeling that, quite honestly, DVD has had its day (it’s like continuing to sell cassettes in a compact disc world, though I still maintain that the imminent arrival of 4K makes Blu-Ray little more than DAT by that analogy). I don’t have the time or resources to re-create the entire project in HD (as much as I’d like to fix some stuff with regards to video and sound quality).
In the place of the physical DVDs, I will be instituting a download service very soon, which I am beta testing right now. It will allow those still interested in acquiring the material on the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs to obtain either MP4 video files or a downloadable DVD .ISO file so they can burn their own disc if they absolutely have to have a physical copy. The physical copies remaining in inventory will become “convention exclusives” or something that can only be obtained by special arrangement. Once those physical copies are gone, even the “special arrangement” goes away: I won’t be burning any more of them.
As of 2014, it’s been ten years since the earliest versions of a PDF video project were edited together (much of which was revised for the first PDF DVD); it was originally a running, looping display-only DVD which appeared in OVGE’s second year, featuring music by 8-Bit Weapon, with the agreement that it would never be sold in that form. That’s really not a bad run. And I’m still very proud of what I was able to do with the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs. In terms of what most people probably think of as a documentary, the format may be a little strange (and current and upcoming projects, such as Game Play and The Video Craze, will fulfill the more traditional documentary niche for most folks), but I’m very fond of both volumes, especially the second one.
After Phosphor Dot Fossils relaunches in this format, Best Of CGE ’03 and Best Of CGE ’05 will go digital-only. With those, I have a very specific game plan – you’ll be able to buy the entire contents as a bundle of MP4s or a 
burnable DVD .ISO file, or you’ll be able to just download the panels you want to see without having to pay for those in which you have no interest. These are already more or less out of print – I have tiny number of them on hand for conventions (2 copies of each) and otherwise they’re burn-on-demand as orders come in.
The same infrastructure will also be used to sell ebooks of VWORP!1, VWORP!2 and my other books. I’m still planning to have physical copies available through Amazon/Createspace and at convention appearances (probably in more limited numbers than in the past).
I’m a dad with a lot of stuff on my plate, and it’s time for me to let this other stuff that I’ve already done make a bit of money for me with less ongoing effort. Think of this as the nephew of the decision to stop hand-coding my pages and switch to WordPress several years ago: it’s a move to spend more time creating and promoting, and less time on back-end grunt work.
So is anything falling by the wayside? Yes, sadly. I’ve made little secret, in recent years, of the work I was doing on getting a video-based webseries up and running. What’s rapidly becoming apparent is that I’ve run out of the kind of time it takes to throw my entire life at a project like that. Much of the material I’d already written for that will be transferred to an upcoming book/ebook; as for the basic outline of doing it for TV or web video, I think it’s still sound. I might get back to it in that form, or I might let someone I trust run with it. Time will tell.
That’s where things stand at the moment. Consider this the shout of “last call!” for Phosphor Dot Fossils in its DVD incarnation. Make way for the future.… Read more
Glitchcon has come and gone again, and for the second year running, I gotta say, man, is this ever a neat little show. Except that there’s nothing little about it. This year’s show moved to the Springdale Holiday Inn, which is a really nifty space – the artists’ area (where I had a table for theLogBook.com) was in the atrium, and there were several panel rooms, gaming rooms and a video room. It was a really classy space to be occupying. I’m totally cool if they want to stay with this venue for a while.
The first order of business, of course, was to haul in my somewhat modest setup and… well… set it up. … Read more
I’m confirmed as a panelist at Konsplosion, this September in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The scheduling here is a bit tricky: I’ve been committed to this year’s OVGE since… well… last year’s OVGE. This year’s OVGE is the tenth anniversary show, the tables are already reserved, and I can’t really not go.
So the trick here is this: Konsplosion runs September 20th through 22nd. I will do three panels – probably back to back! – on the 22nd: Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, Brit Sci-Fi that isn’t Doctor Who, and the Early History of Video Games. I will have my books and DVDs there to sell/sign between panels. (The books and DVDs will also be available at OVGE the day before.)
I will not have a table at Konsplosion, but my good friends at the Facebook group River Valley Time Lords will have one. Basically, if you’re anywhere in the western half of Arkansas and you like time traveling police boxes, you probably need to be joining that group rightaboutnowish. Big Things are being planned in this area. This area needs cool geeky stuff, and I’m proud to have even a small hand in helping to make some of that stuff happen.
Anyway, that’s the update. Stay tuned!… Read more
Some quick notes on the book front, for those interested. … Read more
I’m going to be at Glitchcon in Springdale next month, showing off the various fruit that falls off of the multifarious branches of theLogBook.com – the books, the DVDs, the podcast, the ‘zine, the site itself. Heck, you can probably talk me into letting you hear some Kasatochi. I’ll have a table in the vendors’ room – drop by and say howdy! (Fear not, there are faaaaaaar more interesting things than me to see, including Steve Downes, the voice actor behind the helmet of Master Chief in the Halo games, sneak-previewing something perhaps Halo-related at his panel.)
I’ll also be hosting a panel of my own, though it’ll be unconventional to say the least. I’m going to do an early-history-of-video-gaming panel, and allow everyone to get their butts out of their seats and try stuff out hands-on. … Read more
I haven’t been blogging very regularly, for which I apologize. Many things have been occurring.
Konsplosion was the weekend of August 17th/18th/19th in Fort Smith, and while I was there (in my first gig as a guest speaker) for all of two hours, it seemed pretty packed. In the weeks leading up to Konsplosion, I had a bit of difficulty getting the show’s organizers to respond to my multiple attempts to pitch myself as a guest speaker; I literally didn’t know until about 72 hours out if I was going or not. My presentations were outlined but not practiced in any way (every speech or drama teacher I’ve ever studied under will no doubt be revving up to about 3,000 RPM in their grave right about now), and then, to my horror, I got up in front of a crowded room and discovered that the outline I’d printed at home about 10 minutes before leaving the house… … Read more
OVGE is less than 48 hours away, and I’ve finally got the legendary OVGE price list ready for all the stuff I’ll be selling; you can read or download the PDF version of it here. Hey, it’s a PDF .pdf!
I’ve also gotten confirmation that the DVDs have arrived in Ohio for CCAG; if you’re going to be in Cleveland this Saturday, go see everyone at CCAG. There’ll be old video games aplenty, up and running (and for sale too, of course!).
I’ve spent this week and much of last week getting ready for OVGE full-time; literally all that’s left to do on my end is print the above price lists for folks to pick up from my table, pack up the car, pick up Kent at some ungodly hour of the morning, and head west. I guarantee plenty of fun for those who head west at a marginally more godly hour to visit the show. 😆
Leave your troubles and your swine flu paranoia behind, and catch some Pac-Man fever. See you there!… Read more
I’m coming down the home stretch on this year’s Phosphor Dot Fossils video for OVGE, which will be close to 3 hours long (and will be available on DVD at the table this year), and this morning I hooked up my Fairchild Channel F and RCA Studio II consoles, both of which I acquired last year, to grab some of the last footage before I start editing. (I’m also going to grab some Vectrex stuff today, though that requires hooking up another camera for obvious reasons.)
The thing about the Channel F, when you hook it up, is that you quickly realize why, despite it being the first cartridge based video game system, it quickly fell to the Atari VCS. It has some unique controllers, but that’s about all it has going for it; the sound still comes from a speaker in the console itself (whose volume is permanently set at “too loud for something that just sits there and beeps”), and the games…well…they’re interesting academically. Which means that once I get the one-minute-or-so of footage that I need, that machine gets unplugged and put away again.
The Studio II, sadly, is an even worse story. It’s got a completely byzantine hookup – the machine gets its power from the RF adapter, which is where the AC adapter plugs in as well – and after all that, I find…that my Studio II doesn’t work.
Now, this is my own damned fault. I reeled in a massive haul of old games and consoles on eBay last year, and just due to time, I had never plugged this puppy in before. I’ve got a ton of games for it, but no working console to play them on. (By all accounts, I’m not missing much – the thing may be powered by the same processor that drove the Pioneer and Voyager probes, but you’d think this one had been a lot closer to Jupiter’s hard radiation than the spacecraft’s chips had.) Like the song says, all I get is video ga-ga. … Read more
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