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25 More Random Things About Me

Tom — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:12:58 +0000

Another meme from Facebook..

Once, you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things. At the end, you choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I’ve done this meme before (see previous note) but have been tagged a couple more times since I wrote the note. So here goes. Again I’m not tagging anybody even though I love reading friend’s random things.
I’m not what you call a morning person.
I wish I could play the guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughn.
I wonder what life would be like marooned in space aboard a spaceship with a hologram of my best buddy, a life form evolved from a cat, an android and a hyper-intelligent computer that runs the ship.
I took remedial reading in grade school; there I discovered my talent for computers.
I once met a guy whose legal name was Tiger Love. He freaked me out.
Books that contain over 400 pages intimidate me.
My favorite author is Ray Bradbury.
I refuse to watch movies in which Bruce Willis stars.
I’ve held the Daredevil’s and the Kingpin’s prop canes.
I’ve pushed the button at the Milwaukee convention center that reads “Push to play Polka”.
I know the secret phrase to enter the Safe House in Milwaukee.
Tony Dungy signed my Gen Con Indy badge one year.
I have a profile on an online dating website.
My father loved “The Screwtape Letters”; it’s on my book list.
I have so many unfinished video games that if I completed one a week, I wouldn’t finish until July.
I don’t understand the appeal of televised poker.
It seems like I spent a majority of my 20s working inside a cubicle.
It’s almost 2010. Where’s my rocketpack?
I had a high school crush on a couple Facebook friends. Of course if you’re wondering, then yes, it was totally you, darling!
I have a propane grill and intend one day to master the art of the BBQ.
I like chili esp Cincinnati-style chili.
I ask people about the jewelry they wear; there’s always a story there.
I’ve been to the Chicago Blues Festival three times; ran into the guys who run the Creepy Crawl in St Louis there one year.
My mailbox has 121 Mb worth of messages; just 1% of what Google mail has allocated.

Gen Con 2007 Report, Part 5: Sunday

Tom — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 06:40:18 +0000

Last month I attended a gaming convention known as Gen Con. The following is my recap what happened on Sunday, my last day there.

:: SUNDAY

After I settled the bill with the hotel I had breakfast with BYOV guys. I really appreciate the effort Jay put into letting us share the room with a BYOV game master. Everybody was tired. I was a little sad that it was over.

Squash and I headed back to the vendor hall for one last pass and to say our goodbyes. I talked to folks at Kayuda Maps. They are producing a advertisement-driven map editing web site for fantasy gamers. When they mentioned that they told me they planned to add icons to represent items on their maps, I asked them if they considered using icons that professionals working the logistics industry use. They had not considered it, but seemed open to the idea.

I watched a patron demo a MMORPG called Age of Conan. The game was gorgeous. But it is definitely for mature players. I wonder if this will limit the success of the game when it hits the market in late October.

I bought a copy of Kill Dr Lucky from the Paizo Publishing booth. I have not yet played this game but I look forward it.

Kentucky Fried Gamers with Mullets

Signgirl and I love to play Fluxx. I noted that Looney Labs plans to publish Zombie Fluxx in early October.

That wraps up my recap of Gen Con. Once again I had a good time. It was over too quickly. If you enjoy gaming, you and your family should consider attending next year’s convention which will be held August 14-17, 2008. Watch the Gen Con website for information on how to register for games early next year. Or better yet, check out the Gen Con Community Forums.

Gen Con 2007 Report, Part 4: Saturday

Tom — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 05:00:19 +0000

Gen Con Indy happens every year sometime in August. This is my recap of Saturday, my fourth day there and the last full day of this year’s convention.

:: SATURDAY

I completed the Mayfair Games Ribbon Quest. It worked like this. For every Mayfair Game you demoed in the vendor hall or attended in one of the game halls they gave you a badge ribbon. The badge ribbons were different colors and read “Ore”, “Wood”, “Sheep”, “Clay” and “Grain”, one each of the resources found in the Settlers of Catan game. When you collected all five you received a Knight of Catan ribbon, a Catan-related goodie and a coupon good for 50% off of a Mayfair Game of your choice. I bought the Kids of Catan game to play with Signgirl and her son D, who loves the game.

While I was there I also picked up a copy of Patrician. It is a well-balanced game of tower building that I enjoyed playing with Squash, Brian and Mike.

I helped Squash with his ribbon quest by demoing another game. We played Shear Panic. It is a cute game that involved maneuvering sheep for the most points while preventing your neighbor from getting his points.

Cpt Squash and I went to our next event, the Amazons LARP. Once again I crossed gender lines to play a Amazon magic user. The character who really the actress Lucy Lawless in disguise and did not have any magical abilities. So my goal was to keep my disguise and not to draw attention to myself. A ceremony was planned at which my character was supposed to perform real magic. Fortunately events unfolded so that I was able to meet my goals.

My last game was Crafty Games’ Ten Thousand Bullets LARP. I was a little apprehensive that a LARP set in a prison would not be very much fun. They did some interesting things with the game. To start with they put us in “cells” which were a series of chairs arranged in small groups. If you wanted to talk to a prisoner in another cell, you have to go to imaginative lengths to keep the conversation private. One player wrote messages on paper and threw it when the players playing the guards had their backs turned. My character had an escape plan that kept me engaged in the game until the very end. I enjoyed this game a lot more than I thought I would.

Tom and Jason at the RAM

Squash and I met up with another gamer buddy and his female friend and went back to the RAM. We hung out at the RAM for a while talking about the past week. We discovered that our buddy’s friend had her Masters in Mathematics. When I told her I had considered going back for a Master degree, she encouraged me to pursue it. It really made me consider my decision not to commit myself to getting an advanced degree.

I dropped by Mike B’s room party. It was hot and cramped in there. I met a gamer who lives not more than twenty miles from the town in which I grew up. Small world! I didn’t stay long and left to get some sleep.

Gen Con 2007 Report, Part 3: Friday

Tom — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:52:10 +0000

Every year for the past six years I have attended Gen Con. What follows is my recap of Friday, my third day there.

:: FRIDAY

I had lunch with Jay of BYOV, Cpt Squash and other members of the Atomic Squash gaming club. We went to an Italian place named Buca Di Beppo. I recommend it highly. We got a laugh when Brian made a big deal about his serving of lasagna was smaller than his buddy’s lasagna. So somebody mentioned it to the waitress who in turn summoned the manager. Brian was very embarrassed. Of course we gave him a hard time about it.

I found myself with time to kill before my next game. So I went to the convention center and checked out the Gen Con Auction. I bought an auction card and watched for a bit. They were auctioning off items from some obscure role playing systems and later cards from collectible card games. I walked over to an area they had set up with used games and related items at a fixed price. It can best be described as a garage sale for gamer stuff. I found and bought A Merry Kobold Christmas, a campaign I did not have for the Kobolds Ate My Baby roleplaying game.

Next I walked though the miniature painting area. I keep meaning to try the paint and take when I am there. Ah well, another time. I went to the vendor and demo some games at the Mayfair booth. First I tried Age of Discovery. The game had a lot of little pieces and took a long time. The worst part of the game was at the very end you could affect your score with a multiplier that was not easy to understand.

There was a giant-sized Kragmortha board game set up. I was pleased to see another Atomic Squash gamer and his family join the game. While the game was interesting, it quickly became boring. In a way it reminded me of the late Gregory Horror Show game.

I played a quick game of Elk Fest. Do not call it Elk Hunt. Shame on you. The game has a simple mechanic. Your elk must pass from one ice shelf to another by using stones that you flick into place on your turn. If you fall off the stones you must start back from the beginning. It plays quickly and can be entertaining, especially if somebody else is bumping the table.

The last game I demoed was Hey! That’s My Fish!. In this game players are penguins was move around a grid of cards. The trick is that once you land on a card it is removed when you move off of it. In this way you can strand other players on their own ice floes. This is a type of game where you get to mess with the other players. The rules were easy to learn. I really enjoyed this game.

I spun by the Mongoose Games booth. I learned that they did not yet have the Spycraft World on Fire. That was disappointing. This is the system on which we based this years Spycraft LARP

I bought a copy of Kobolds Ate My Baby Deluxe Hard Cover for Signgirl. She promised to help me write a new Kobolds LARP. I am so excited to have her assistance! She had some great ideas that helped me spice up the characters for the aforementioned Spycraft LARP.

Lastly I picked up Gloom, a card game from Atlas Games. Squash tells me it is fun game. I cannot wait to play it.

I went to my scheduled game, the Harry Potter LARP. This year’s game focused on the students of the Slytherin house. A player or two took this game too seriously. C’mon now; it is a game. Lighten up and have a good time. If you feel you did not get the character you wanted, you should not make all of us listen to you whine about it.

Tom J, the game master, talked me into playing the game again this year after my sour experience last year. Mission successful! I enjoyed the game.

This video features Slate’s take on gamers. There are quite a few scenes from the Harry Potter LARP including an interview with Tom J the Snape-looking game master and Henwy playing the evangelist.

Gen Con 2007 Report, Part 2: Thursday

Tom — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:44:01 +0000

During the third week of August I returned to Indianapolis for my sixth Gen Con. While not everything went off without a hitch, I am choosing not to dwell on those things. What follows is my recap the first full day at the convention.

:: THURSDAY

Thursday is the first full day of Gen Con and the official start. The vendor hall opens at 11 AM to the masses. I slept in this morning and had lunch so I missed the giant nerd herd of gamers who storm the vendors looking to be the first to get their hands on the shiny new games and demo this year’s latest and greatest offerings.

The vendor hall was massive this year. There are thirty rows inside where in years past there were twenty two. Most noticeable for me are the companies that were absent. Chaosium was not at Gen Con this year.

The big news was the announcement by Wizards of the Coast of the long rumored Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. That was more exciting than their sad attempt at social networking called Gleemax. Is this is their way to reach out to the role playing community after booting non-Wizards games from the RPGA?

Signgirl and I have been playing Magic: The Gathering lately. So I stopped at the Dave and Adam’s Card World booth and bought two boxes of Magic cards. Come to find out they were in Chinese! Fortunately they later let me exchange the one unopened, sealed box of cards for credit toward the English version. Signgirl is selling the opened box on eBay for me. Any takers for Chinese Magic cards?

My first game was the Torchwood LARP. Torchwood is a British sci-fi series that is best described as a combination of X-Files and Angel. In our game I played a military leader who was illegally running a black market operation out of the Cardiff base of operations. I had the best time with this group of players. Everybody was played their parts superbly. I reveled in my role of troublemaker as I set up distractions for anyone who got to close to my operations.

Next Cpt Squash and I played in a Fey LARP loosely based on the writings of Laurell K. Hamilton. Fey are fairy folk. Theirs is a world of acrimony that rivals the Vampire: The Masquerade or the writings of Anne Rice.

I played a female assassin who was a human monk. My role was to assassinate the visiting Pope. This was not my last trans-gender roleplaying at the convention. Fortunately, the female players were terribly offended by the way I choose to play my character. I did get an education on the sisterhood of shared governance which I mistakenly called a cabal.

Here is my only picture from the Fey LARP. Mar was showing off the pirate puppet he bought earlier that day. This picture makes me smile.

Gen Con 2007 Report, Part 1: Wednesday

Tom — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:00:00 +0000

This year was my sixth year attending Gen Con. It is a large annual gaming convention attracting over 25,000 attendees. What follows is my recap of the first of the five days at the convention.

:: WEDNESDAY

I met my buddy Captain Squash at his place. We loaded into his vehicle and headed out. On the way we listened to several podcasts. The first was Fear the Boot. We listened to their recap of this year’s Archon including coverage of the R-rated Furry panel. They ask an interesting question: who invited the anthropomorphic fetishists into the gaming subculture?

Next we listened to an episode of Diggnation, a show where two guys that used to be on TechTV talk about the top stories posted on the digg.com social bookmarking news site. Basically these guys sit around drinking beer and riff on new articles. It is pointless really but they did use the words “poon palace” which made Squash and I laugh.

Lastly we listened to an episode of This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte, another TechTV refugee. I quickly got bored with the endless prattle about Apple’s iPhone. I wonder what Laporte thinks of Apple announcing that they will cut the price of the iPhone by $200 just two months after introducing it to the market. Suckers!

Thanks to Jay of BYOV we stayed at The Hilton this year. The room was nice. Even though the hotel is not one of the ones attached to the convention center by the skywalks, or hamster tubes as we like to call them, it is decent place to stay during Gen Con.

Cpt Squash ran off to watch a minor league baseball game. I wandered down to the RAM to see if I could get into a session of Wednesday Gaming there. The meeting room was packed wall-to-wall. While I was bummed that I couldn’t find a game, I was pleased to see that Wednesday gaming was popular. I bought a mug from the RAM while I was there and left for the convention center to pick up a swag bag.

Later Cpt Squash and I made our way to the Fourth Annual Gen Con Forum Stink, a gathering of regulars who frequent the Gen Con online community forum. When we arrived they gave us a bag of swag — free promotional items and other stuff.

They had a passport game as an icebreaker. They had several categories such as “Veteran Stinker”, “Attended 10+ Gen Cons” and “Played True Dungeon”. When you found a player that matched a category you could ask them to place a sticker in your book. I ran into a bunch of old friends and met some new ones.

After the Stink several of us wandered over to the RAM. Since it was packed, we decided to trek to Rock Bottom instead. I have to say it was just as fun as the RAM. They had specials on drinks. Squash and I tried a sampler of their beers. They were good. The consensus was that Rock Bottom may become the new Wednesday Post-Stink place in the future.

We left there to go to a place that had karaoke. After listening to somebody massacre Creed’s “Arms Wide Open” I had a massive headache. I took some Tylenol and hung out until our buddy Otter took her turn at the mike. She blew everyone away and ended up taking home a cash prize for placing in their karaoke contest.

The 100 Best Meme

Tom — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:28:04 +0000

Since I have been back from Gen Con real life obligations have colluded to prevent me from posting the planned Gen Con recap blog entries. Or, maybe it was the mullet I borrowed from Kentucky Fried Gamers. My IQ dropped the moment I put it on and has not yet recovered.

Currently the internal network is down at work leaving me with a moment to crank out a quick entry.

One of the cool things I missed at this year’s Gen Con was Green Ronin’s Hobby Games: The 100 Best book. The following meme lists the hobby games found in the book and asks the blogger to indicate their level of personal experience.

Boldface if “I own this game.”
Italics is “I have played this game.”
Italic and Bold are “I both own and have played this game.”

Bruce C. Shelley on Acquire
Nicole Lindroos on Amber Diceless
Ian Livingstone on Amun-Re
Stewart Wieck on Ars Magica
Thomas M. Reid on Axis & Allies
Tracy Hickman on Battle Cry
Philip Reed on BattleTech
Justin Achilli on Blood Bowl
Mike Selinker on Bohnanza
Tom Dalgliesh on Britannia
Greg Stolze on Button Men
Monte Cook on Call of Cthulhu
Steven E. Schend on Carcassonne
Jeff Tidball on Car Wars
Bill Bridges on Champions
Stan! on Circus Maximus
Tom Jolly on Citadels
Steven Savile on Civilization
Bruno Faidutti on Cosmic Encounter
Andrew Looney on Cosmic Wimpout
Skip Williams on Dawn Patrol
Alan R. Moon on Descent
Larry Harris on Diplomacy
Richard Garfield on Dungeons & Dragons
William W. Connors on Dynasty League Baseball
Christian T. Petersen on El Grande
Alessio Cavatore on Empires in Arms
Timothy Brown on Empires of the Middle Ages
Allen Varney on The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Phil Yates on Fire and Fury
William Jones on Flames of War
Rick Loomis on Fluxx
John Kovalic on Formula De
Anthony J. Gallela on The Fury of Dracula
Jesse Scoble on A Game of Thrones
Lou Zocchi on Gettysburg
James Wallis on Ghostbusters
James M. Ward on The Great Khan Game
Gav Thorpe on Hammer of the Scots
Uli Blennemann on Here I Stand
S. Craig Taylor, Jr. on A House Divided
Scott Haring on Illuminati
Dana Lombardy on Johnny Reb
Darren Watts on Junta
Greg Stafford on Kingmaker
Lester Smith on Kremlin
Wolfgang Baur on Legend of the Five Rings CCG
Marc W. Miller on Lensman
Ted S. Raicer on London’s Burning
Teeuwynn Woodruff on Lord of the Rings (boardgame)
Mike Breault on Machiavelli
Jordan Weisman on Magic: The Gathering
Steve Kenson on Marvel Super Heroes (Jeff Grubb version)
Gary Gygax on Metamorphosis Alpha
Greg Costikyan on My Life with Master
John D. Rateliff on Mythos
Chris “Gerry” Klug on Napoleon’s Last Battles
John Scott Tynes on Naval War
Erick Wujcik on Ogre
Marc Gascoigne on Once Upon a Time
Mike Bennighof on PanzerBlitz
Steve Jackson on Paranoia
Shannon Appelcline on Pendragon
JD Wiker on Pirate’s Cove
Richard H. Berg on Plague!
Martin Wallace on Power Grid
Tom Wham on Puerto Rico
Joseph Miranda on Renaissance of Infantry
James Ernest on RoboRally
Paul Jaquays on RuneQuest
Richard Dansky on The Settlers of Catan
Ken St. Andre on Shadowfist
Steven S. Long on Shadowrun
Peter Corless on Shadows over Camelot
Dale Donovan on Silent Death: The Next Millennium
Matt Forbeck on Space Hulk
Ray Winninger on Squad Leader
Lewis Pulsipher on Stalingrad
Bruce Nesmith on Star Fleet Battles
Steve Winter on The Sword and the Flame
Jeff Grubb on Tales of the Arabian Nights
Shane Lacy Hensley on Talisman
Douglas Niles on Terrible Swift Sword
Ed Greenwood on Thurn and Taxis
Mike Fitzgerald on Ticket to Ride
Thomas Lehmann on Tigris & Euphrates
Warren Spector on Tikal
David “Zeb” Cook on Toon
Mike Pondsmith on Traveller
Zev Shlasinger on Twilight Struggle
Kenneth Hite on Unknown Armies
Sandy Petersen on Up Front
R. Hyrum Savage on Vampire: The Eternal Struggle
George Vasilakos on Vampire: The Masquerade
Kevin Wilson on Vinci
R.A. Salvatore on War and Peace
Jack Emmert on Warhammer 40,000
Chris Pramas on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
Steve Jackson on The Warlord
John Wick on Wiz-War

Clearly I have more gaming to do! I will attempt to post the recap entries later this week.