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	Daily Thought	I could have gone on for another couple pages on how awesome this month's game is, but I applied some restraint.
	2008/07/15	We have an extra special emergency edition of Devil's Advocate this month. Alone in the Dark 5 is actually still on store shelves, gathering dust, because reviewers want it to be a different game. Let's help turn it into a sleeper hit, or at least, let's everyone reading this grab it at depressingly discounted prices and have a great time with it. In other news, Blatantly Loathesome, my shameless KoL clone, is really coming along these days. It will most likely quietly slip into open beta testing next week or so. My in-game calendar for it is set up in such a way that the first in-game year officially starts in roughly 18 days, so I suppose that's a good time limit on getting it to release status.
	2008/06/15	Another month, another Devil's Advocate. I was very tempted to do something topical this month, either focusing on one of the source-games for Chaos Wars there, but it doesn't really deserve the tie-in treatment, or finding the most underrated Hideo Kojima game, but everyone else seems to have already run with the idea of pointing out how surprisingly awesome Metal Gear 2 (note the lack of Solid here) is. I also considered giving myself a birthday present by talking up Skies of Arcadia, or the original Phantasy Star. Eventually though I just said the-heck-with-it and went with Vanguard Bandits.
	2008/06/09	So, for my birthday, someone gave me a copy of Chaos Wars. It's a Super Robot Wars style crazy crossover TRPG featuring characters pulled from the most obscure collection of games you're ever going to see. To give you some idea, the most recognizable characters are from Shadow Hearts, Growlanser, and Gungrave. One would think this sucker would get an instant upgrade to the head of the line for a Devil's Advocate feature, seeing how it potentially trumps Koudelka in terms of marketting to a niche that can't have many people besides me in it. One would also think that no publisher with any clue what they're doing would ever dream of releasing this in the U.S. One would be spot on with one of these assumptions. I'm not going to say the translation is worse than Wild ARMs 2, because at least here nobody tried to add "humor" to what babelfish spat out. In other news, this browser game I'm fiddling with is starting to take form. Should be putting it into alpha testing soon.
	2008/05/21	This week, there's been a sudden spike in the traffic to this site, which serves as a reminder how badly I need to clean things up. The main navigation links on here, at the moment, are pointing to a lot of things I haven't even thought about in a good 5 years or so, and the important stuff is rather hidden. Until I get a chance to properly fix that... Hello new readers! Here's the stuff I'd like for you all to take a look at while you're here. First and foremost, there's my tabletop game publishing company whose catalog at the moment includes an intentionally cheesy RPG, and more significantly The Massive Vs. The Masses. A two player strategy game based on old Godzilla movies and such. Recently, I've also been getting a lot of feedback for my Devil's Advocate reviews. A new one goes up the 15th of every month, and the idea is to shine a light on a game that either nobody has really heard of, or has an undeserved reputation of being a piece of garbage. Recently, I've also been getting a lot of feedback for my Devil's Advocate reviews. A new one goes up the 15th of every month, and the idea is to shine a light on a game that either nobody has really heard of, or has an undeserved reputation of being a piece of garbage. My Game Talk essays don't seem to generate a lot of feedback, but if you're interested in long-winded shpiels about game design theory (or my amusingly morbid take on the plot of Silent Hill), I'd recommend them. For some freebies, there's also the simple games list. I'm always forgetting to bring it up, but I've been known to contribute new content to RetroMUD here and there. That's "MUD" as in "oldschool text-based MMORPG." It's free to play, there's a crazy amount of depth and content to it, the actual game itself is challenging enough not to degenerate into a chat room with a combat system like a lot of others. Past that, there's just a lot of weird random old stuff that may or may not be amusing. I'm the sort of person who will leave the embarassing old content from when 10 years ago on my page just in case someone still cares. Oh, and I've kind of been in hyperfocus mode for the last couple of weeks working on a new browser-based game notion which with a little luck might actually spring into being soon. No promises, but keep an eye out for it over the next month or so.
	2008/05/15	This month's Devil's Advocate manages to actually be topical, focusing on a frequently overlooked step in the evolution of the Grand Theft Auto series, Space Station Silicon Valley. There's better pre-GTA3 games from DMA I might have hit, but Lemmings isn't exactly rotting in obscurity.
	2008/04/26	OK. I hate to imply anything bad about people I generally respect, but I feel obligated to make this observation more publicly. here's some photos of MvM. The game I've been selling for the last year, and spent the last few shoving in the face of every big publisher and random congoer I came across. here's some photos of prototypes for Monsterpocalypse. The game Privateer Press is putting out this fall. Now, I'm not going to start pointing fingers or anything here, but that second photo on their page has a couple tanks, a couple helicopters, a giant robot, and what's either a death ray or a dead ringer for the old-protoype-art of The Lab on the left and some random skyscrapers on the right, with some arbitrarily grassy space between'em with a road cutting through. If nothing else, I think the resemblence here is enough to warrant some serious discussion in a more high profile venue than this page. It also couldn't hurt to have some discussion in the relatively new WDL Message Boards, which oddly enough are currently a lower profile venue than my more-or-less-monthly updated personal page. These boards just need some chatter in general really.
	2008/04/15	For this month's Devil's Advocate I was originally planning to cover Dead Rising. While getting ready to do so however, I noticed that the copy I own is actually a Greatest Hits rerelease. Apparently, despite some bad first impressions here and there, at the present everyone seems to acknowledge what a spiffy game it is, making it disqualified from my feature. BoF5 would have made a great fallback, having the same main gimmick and dev team, but it'd read an awful lot like last month's entry, and I really wanted to throw in a non-RPG for a change of pace here. So this month it's going to be something you likely have played but didn't enjoy. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.
	2008/03/15	Time for a new Devil's Advocate. This week I go off on a bit of a tear on the weirdos who refuse to believe that Koudelka is the first game in the Shadow Hearts series, but hopefully make up with it by providing a crash course in RPG developer geneology.
	2008/03/09	I just remembered I had most of a gametalk essay on alignments sitting around waiting for posting, so enjoy. It's a bit of a long one, and thus divided into two still pretty lengthy discussions.
	2008/03/07	There's a new rant up on this year's NonCon and TempleCon, along with a summary of what I accomplished (or didn't) over the last year on the WDL page. They generally don't overlap. By the way, the whole Devil's Advocate notion really seems to be going over well with people, and a number of other sites seem to be launching eerily similar concepts. This of course means that I'll have to hold off on covering Dragon Quarter until everyone else is done with it.
	2008/02/15	Here's another Devil's Advocate feature. This month it's Wild ARMs. Oh, and for the curious, next month's will most likely be Koudelka. After that I'll be branching out some and covering a game that's neither an RPG nor on the PlayStation. Oh, and don't forget NonCon is next weekend, come hang out if you can.
	2008/01/15	Remember when I updated this page on a daily basis? There's no way I'm ever going to get to that point again, but I am starting a new monthly feature up this year which, hopefully, I'll be able to keep going for the next year or so. The short version- I (and possibly some other old internet curmudgeons you know and love) write nice little praise filled reviews of videogames that in most people's books are terrible, but honestly aren't bad. I'm starting off with one of the less controversal choices to ease us in, Parasite Eve. In other news, I'll be at both TempleCon and NonCon in the next couple months. I've been bad enough about updating this page over the last year that my hyping of last year's NonCon isn't too far down. TempleCon is going to be a new one for me, and I should really start properly gearing up for it. On the table for both for what it's worth, space and time allowing are MvM (all shiny and on sale), Collision (pretty nice for a dev/demo build), Red Shirt (rules fixed to be fun, dev/demo cards still nasty and smudgey), and MAYBE Starship Kyuceus if I can come up with a way of easily transporting/assembling all these maps and minis. Come to think of it, I've never even MENTIONED SK here have I? I'll have to fix that later.
	Daily Thought	Black Sheep, in addition to having a truly wonderful premise (people being killed by zombie-weresheep) also has surprisingly good execution. Lots of hat tips to stuff like Shaun of the Dead, Dead Alive, Army of Darkness, and even Holy Grail in there. I highly recommend it if that's your sort of thing.
	2007/10/31	Rant up. Demo went well. Me sleep now.
	2007/10/30	The WDL page has been a lot more exciting than this one lately. MvM's shipping, running demos in New York tomorrow and CT on the 10th. If none of that interests you, wow are you tenacious, I haven't had an update on anything else since March. I'll most likely throw something up for you tomorrow though, because it's a yearly tradition of mine to always update on Halloween... no wait, it's a yearly tradition to see how far into Koudelka I can get without saving then toss on a costume and find someone young enough to take trick-or-treating and not seem like a creepy old weirdo. Still, expect an update. Might go up at like 5 AM, but I'll get SOMETHING up.
	2007/08/26	Reading up recently about the whole online gaming table notion WotC is planning to crosspromote with 4th Edition D&D reminded me about my own Toybox Project. Have I ever mentioned this before? In any case, personally, I'm not going to have time to do anything with it anytime soon, so, seeing how the whole concept is intended as an open source, freeware program, I've expanded my concept page for it here so that anyone with enough Python experience and free time that wants to get the ball rolling can take a stab at the most basic elements here.
	2007/08/19	Haven't updated any of these here webpages in forever. Here's something of note though! The WDL page now has a working online store where you can pre-order MvM (which will be out soon, really!) and actually buy my horrifyingly sexist Barbarian RPG. If the latter sells well, I'll follow it up with some of these other half-baked one-shot oriented RPG-lets I have sitting around.
	2007/07/21	Let's scroll off this financial panic here. Since I last updated, I collected enough credit experience to level up and can now afford to finish funding this here game. Huzzah!
	2007/06/01	Wow... I haven't come up for air here in way too long. I generally make an effort to update this page 4 times a month at least. So uh... here's the deal. I need money. Not in the sense that I wish I had more money so I could buy some cool toys. In the sense that I have something like $10,000 in credit card debt which must be paid off in August, racked up paying for most of the costs of MvM here. That should have been enough to pay for all of it, but a couple suppliers of raw materials waited until after I'd already ordered the rest to say "Oh, we were several thousand dollars short on that last estimate we gave you, sorry." Now, those who keep tabs on these things may recall that I have no means of income, and a few people really in the know might be aware that thanks to some spinal damage from a childhood disease, I'm certifiably unemployable. So, if I can't scrape up the money, yon credit card companies get to fight over my various value holding assets. These pretty much boil down to a darn impressive library of ancient videogames, but those unfortunately go by monetary value instead of sentimental value. So... taking everything I own still wouldn't pay this debt off. So yeah. I need money. Not so much to pay off the credit card debt as to pay for the boards for MvM (sales for that paying off all the debt in theory, or I'd pay the debt off and then use the card again for the rest, either way). So... how will I get this money? Through a combination of the following: Presales of MvM- I don't really want to do this because it feels kinda sleazy, but if I presold 100 copies, that'd solve things no problem, and if I fail to get the money, I can still get at least 100 copies out there with somewhat compromised boards if it really comes down to it. Selling other things to get by- I'm doing some last minute obsessive fiddling with Glistening Chests here, to sell it online as a PDF for 5 or 10 bucks (probably 10, it's bulking up enough for it). This isn't enough to do me much good unless 500 or so people really wanna play this thing, but every little bit helps. I'll do more like this if I can swing it too. Out and out begging for money- I really don't like asking people for handouts as a matter of personal pride, but if anyone is feeling really philanththropic, and either wanna toss me cash in wads of sizes other than $10 or $50 (or you just don't want my games), then hey, knock yourselves out: Don't use that paypal link to place actual orders for games though, wait for the real order buttons to appear on the WDL site. Makes my book-keeping easier, and I have my paypal account set to take huge cuts from what people send me for reasons that made sense at the time. The best thing you can do to help me out at this point though is find other people to pitch in. This page has, shall we say, an "intimate" audience these days.
	2007/04/19	So, panicking over the cost of MvM here, and the amount of time I have in which to pay off the massive credit card bills it's racking up, the thought hits me that I really need a secondary source of income with less overhead. So what I'm pondering at the moment is taking all these little jokey "light" RPGs I have kicking around in a half-finished state, polishing them up, and selling them as PDFs for $5. There's RPG the RPG, wherein all the PCs sit around playing RPGs, there's Glistening Chests, the game that exists so the whole line of "Female armor offers more protection the less it covers" has an actual game to be a rule in, and I could have sworn there was a third. Anyone remember me rambling about it?
	2007/03/31	Coming up pretty close on what I seriously hope is going to be the release date for MvM here, I'm hitting some just plain silly road blocks. Like, for stickers to label the little plastic pieces with? First estimate I got back was $1.50 per copy of the game. Finally have some photos of the Gamorzilla prototypes though, and they look quite nice. I'd pass'em along, but at this point, might as well wait until I get'em in and can take some photos of their shiny metal glory.
	2007/03/12	New Gametalk essay up. Expounding on my thoughts about randomness. Too tired to get into it more here, so just read it.
	2007/03/08	OK, I finally have this year's NonCon report up. Sorry that too so long. I'm also getting delivery dates for missing MvM components, so I can indeed deliver on the date promised on the WDL page.
	2007/03/05	My usual NonCon report hasn't been written yet, as I'm still in a creative spurt, jotting down improvements for Collision before I work on getting it published. In the meantime, I did write a short, demo-centric report for the World Domination LLC page. Anyway though, back to adding in some of that lovely added value to Collision. More specifically, diagrams of a few different board configurations that can add some variety to the game.
	2007/02/24	NonCon has a full events schedule posted. I'll probably get around to updating mine to match it later on. I also have all my game demos ready to go, finally. I don't want to look at any primary colors for a while now.
	2007/02/13	Found out the more permanent bits of my schedule for NonCon, updated my NonCon page accordingly. I also just realized that I never mentioned getting board samples for MvM in. They're just plain amazing.
	2007/02/06	OK, the Gamorzilla pieces are still distressingly in limbo, but all the army pieces just arrived today. 60,000 little plastic pieces are stacked up in cardboard boxes behind me right now. Rather freaky. Good news on the fronts of boards and cards too. As are Red Shirt cards. Just generally good news today.
	2007/01/31	Getting MvM ready for sale at NonCon may be looking less and less likely lately, but Red Shirt and Collision are coming along great. Collision's been ready to go since like a week after getting the idea, just need to make time to make enough pieces for 12 players. Red Shirt meanwhile is coming together much more smoothly now that I've gone and invested in a 24 DVD boxed set of research material. I'm averaging about 4 new cards a day, out of a 108 card set and I'm about half done. The tricky part is going to be getting the text to fit and the illustrations to not totally suck.
	2007/01/29	OK, it seems NonCon is now a little under 5 weeks away, and I am, accordingly, Stressing The Frell Out over the state of things. There are, currently, two main things delaying Massive Vs. Masses' actual retail release. One of these is an internal issue, the result of a massive chain of bad rolls on the encounter table of life keeping files from getting to people who need them so they can start printing things. The other is the disturbing silence coming from the studio sculpting/casting the Gamorzilla pieces. Sent the down payment back in February, haven't heard a thing since. That's the one really worrying me. Printing delays aren't a biggie, because I should at least have samples, maybe rush an order on a few copies. The pieces though are worrying.
	2007/01/17	So, with NonCon fast approaching and 3 or 4 games needing my attention, what does my personal muse pester me to work on? Legends of Ardeas. The RPG which won't be ready for public consumption until I write another thousand pages and contract a bunch of artists to do a truckload of illustrations. Of course. This past weekend's efforts yielded a much needed pile of mythology, monsters, and historical events which should provide future GMs with plenty of fodder for adventure hooks.
	2007/01/16	Today I officially an order through for the Army pieces for the first Massive Vs. Masses print run. In addition to pushing me that much further into the realm of horrifying credit debt, this means that tomorrow (or so) 60,000 little plastic pieces are being packed up to be mailed to me. They will then be shoved into a corner of my bedroom until all the thousands of boards and cards and so forth finally arrive, and then comes the fun of packing everything into boxes to ship out to people. Sadly, it's looking like all those other things won't be here until a week or so AFTER NonCon, so I'd better make darn sure these other games are polished up nicely. I should still have samples of everything MvM mind you, so you'll be able to see what you'll hopefully be paying for later, I just won't be able to sell copies at the con (well, preorders maybe).
	2007/01/03	For a fair deal of time now, I've been having this conversation: "I have this rather ambitious RPG I'm working on, but at the moment, it's sidelined by a need for some thousand year old census data." Then they ask why, I explain, and they look at me funny. Tonight though, the other person actually happened to have a big stack of books on the subject on hand, so, yeah, that worked out quite nicely.
	2006/12/16	OK, it seems I have finally reached the point where I'm sending e-mails around between various printers and Silk hashing out details about image resolutions and such. This is, in a way, far more stressful, but much much less scary than the previous phase of trying to pin down reps I can establish such dialogs with, and working out a budget. Everything should come together around late February, as I've largely been banking on here it looks like, unless some really horrible complication comes up. Also, NonCon's website has been down since the very day I confirmed I'd be a guest speaker again this year. Today they tossed up a temporary page to look at while waiting to get noncon.net back up and running. Nothing really on it at the moment, but it did give me access to their mascot, which let me make the pseudo-banner on the WDL page more amusing (or possibly even tackier looking, I really need to get more outside opinions there, having turned off my own sense of aesthetics years ago to design THIS website).
	2006/12/14	I smacked the World Domination LLC site around a bit today. It's still very ugly and placeholder filled, but at least I made the top row of navigation links look passable. Possibly even good. Incidently, this was one of those things that would have taken 5 minutes in a real graphics program, but was an arduous one-pixel-at-a-time using my Vintage 1988 Technology.
	2006/12/12	OK, so way back when, I went and officially filled out the paperwork to start a company with a name I found quite amusing. I haven't mentioned it here though because, well, I wanted to make sure I had the matching domain name registered first. That, of course, I was putting off until I had a website to attach to it, which would have been another few months, but I needed an url to get me an ISBN to slap on my games when they come out. So the good news is, I can finally tell you all that I have a company called World Domination LLC. The bad news is, that there link goes to a fairly embarassing wad of placeholders.
	2006/12/11	Various minor updates here. The NonCon crew have arisen from their year long slumber, so hopefully I'll have some semblence of a schedule to post soon. I've managed to collect the required materials to get Collision here playable by up to 12 people. The first Massive Vs. Masses set should be back from the printers in time to be selling copies for the aforementioned con, and Red Shirt... I really need to buckle down and get playable. Same with this other game... I should probably get my official Game Company Type Website up and running soon too. I was planning to get some Actual Content ready first, but I don't think there's room in the schedule.
	2006/12/04	That game I mentioned 2 days ago? I just ran a quick test game with a few people. Quite fun. It's definitely coming with me to NonCon. I should really start throwing together a list of these things. <
	2006/12/02	Yet another game has sprang unbidden into my head. Theoretically I should have a whole box full of new toys to show off at NonCon this year, which would seem to be from March 2-4 this year.
	2006/11/30	Even more progress on the front of getting everything ready to go today. Sadly, nothing I can take pictures of yet though.
	2006/11/29	OK, things are really moving on the MvM front lately. Cards and pieces have gone into production, so in a month or two, there should be plenty of actual final product type things to post pictures of.
	2006/11/27	This is funny. The day after I finish sketching out the basics of all the mission cards for Red Shirt here, a whopping 4 channels (most rather local) simultaniously start showing Classic Trek marathons. Would have been better if that happened a week earlier, but still, it's nice to be re-exposed to what may or may not be the primary inspiration for the game. In other Red Shirt news, preliminary testing proves that the rules are simple enough for even non-gamers to pick up on instantly. Good sign that.
	2006/11/10	MvM cards should be going off to the printer within the next week. In the meantime, I've been doing a fair bit of Red Shirt work recently. Half the card list is in the can (featuring such horrible mission names as Timmy Z, Monster in the Mine, and Where Nobody Else Has Been Yet). It's looking like it should be playable by NonCon. Speaking of which, isn't this around the start of NonCon hype season? So far I don't see a website up yet for this year.
	2006/10/29	You know, there's a fine line between an e-mail to a friend of mine, and a new rant. Honestly, that's how this whole site game into existence to begin with.
	2006/10/27	Here's the first batch of Ardeas Racial Overviews for you. I was planning on throwing more into this collection, but I was distracted by fixing typos and formatting issues. Not happy with the wording of a lot of these too, but for a sample of a work in progress, I think it gets the point across nicely. At least it gives some idea of just how odd it's going to be playtesting the Faerie book.
	2006/10/26	A few people have been hungry for new peeks at projects of mine. I'd post some samples of finalized MvM pieces in all their 3D plastic glory, but I can't find the firewire for this digital camera. So instead, I'm working on a nicely formatted collection of the basic overviews of several Ardeas races. This was something I had to do eventually anyway, as they will eventually serve as both basic teaser material, and art reference material, when I get around to publishing the sucker. Should be up in roughly 24 hours.
	2006/09/30	Yet another notion for a one book gag-like RPG recently sprung to mind. It's a horribly embarassing premise inspired by the style of a particular artist who I'm hoping has a good enough sense of humor when it comes to his own work down the line, because I would honestly love to have him illustrate this.
	2006/09/17	It's been quite some time since I've posted anything in Simple Games, but here's a new one for you: Engliti
	2006/09/08	I've been gearing up to officially launch the website for my game publishing company for a while now, but there are two slight hiccups in the way. The first is working out what I'm going to do in terms of domain registration. First there's the fact that I suppose I'll have to actually go and work out the details on where I'm going to host it, and what channels to go through to get the domain properly pointed. I should have all this stuff down pat by now I know, but oddly, it's never come up for me. The other issue is more practical. The basic site layout I have here looks rather awkward when there's only one game listed in the sidebar (mainly due to the big Our Games header). Therefore, I need something else to stick under it. Additional MvM sets are a given, but A- I'd like to hold off there a bit to get the first set well established, and B- I'd like my second publishing venture to be something that doesn't cost so much to produce. Various RPGs are tempting (I'm sure there's some demand for a major Tyranny revamp, and I'm having a lot of fun working on Ardeas lately), but in order to release something I could really be proud of, these all need to stew for another year or five. The prime candidate therefore because this little project I've been keeping under my hat thus far. Here's the condensed pitch: It's a lighthearted card game with a somewhat black sense of humor. It's called Red Shirt (with all that implies). The basic way it plays out is that everyone is fighting over, well, Red Shirts, whose lives they then throw away to accomplish other goals. If the notion appeals to you at all, let me know, and I'll try to get a playable set made up for when I'm carting around the finished version of MvM. Don't expect much from the prototype's quality though. Expect better than the original MvM demo set, not nearly as nice as the current demo set. Think Battling Business Cards with color.
	2006/08/18	OK. I think that's everything. The Massive Vs. The Masses: Gamorzilla Vs. The Army should be officially on sale around February or so, with nice fancy production values all around, for $40 or so. Just in time for... well, not Christmas, but spending checks you got for Christmas! Also, just in time for NonCon.
	2006/08/17	Here's another "Doh! I didn't post that?" update. I found a nice little program for this sort of thing (LaTeX if you're curious). Using it, I threw the Ardeas Orcs notes I had scattered about into a single, nicely formatted book. The total page count thus far is roughly 100 pages. Once there's illustrations in here, and I add in all the details I plan to, it'll most likely come out to something like 400 pages. Good thing you're only ever going to need one book at a time here. Nicer looking sample pages will probably be floating around later.
	2006/08/07	Doing a lot of Ardeas work recently. Someone got me into a campaign of a different (non-D&D) fantasy RPG whose have some Issues, but whose content bulk is great. In any case, as things have progressed to such a point, does anyone out there know a good freeware Mac program that can deliver stuff like this these days? All my old (pre-OSX) computers came with half a dozen, but I bought this one during the brief window between discontinuing Claris/Appleworks, and throwing one in to the iLife suite.
	2006/08/04	Here's a new game talk essay on the notion of pressuring people into playing games. The short form is, you shouldn't work all day so you can afford to work a second job all night, but you'd be surprised how many ways people slip into that sort of trap.
	2006/07/31	I believe I just located a source for the last component I need to start producing MvM. In celebration, I'm refocusing my efforts towards another project. Ardeas specifically. I just set up a wiki to gather research for some of the more detailed research on running/raiding cities. Publicly edittable, so feel free to poke around with it.
	2006/07/23	Page two of my Haruhi review is now officially up for those who have seen it all.
	2006/07/12	The problem with doing a ton of research is that it takes up a ton of time, but doesn't yield articles to post on this page. So today, we're mixing things up with a review of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which you should all watch by the way. Ideally while the fansubs are still in high circulation, otherwise it's the long wait through localization.
	2006/06/22	I was planning a month long blitz of MvM updates, but there's a major traffic jam of sorts at hand here. To tide you over, here's a silly little rant for you. I think eventually, everyone's going to get invited to host Saturday Night Live. You need to be prepared for these things.
	2006/06/09	Price estimates on board construction costs are STILL hanging. Dear gods. Anyone out there have a batch printer and the ability to custom make a cutting die?
	2006/05/31	I've been getting a lot more progress made on the MvM front than it would seem lately, but a lot of it is fairly confidential. I officially own a company now, and I've been doing a lot of work designing a website for it. Don't have hosting set up quite yet though, but I should in a month. I've also worked out about half the manufacturing costs, and who I'll be paying them to, with the other half in the works. Funding for all of this is iffy, but again, should surface within the next month... I suppose you're free to blow off this progress log until then.
	2006/05/30	One of the main delays in the completion of issue #1 is this panel right here, which is finally done, and looks pretty good... although it needs a fair deal of context, so you'll have to wait on seeing it.
	2006/05/28	Here's a long rant with a political tone to it I meant to upload a week or so ago. A potentially scandelous exercise in common sense. Enjoy.
	2006/05/18	I've been watching an awful lot of anime lately, and intend to revamp my anime page to reflect this shortly. For now, we have some mini-reviews of a couple promising shows that recently started airing in Japan.
	2006/05/15	New rant of sorts up on the topic of Character Designers. It's really more of a crash course than a list of grievances though.
	2006/05/06	More Game Talk to pass the time while we wait for something solid on the MvM front. I've got registration of the company pending, and quotes on half the materials. The sources I'm looking into on boards and custom designed plastic pieces though are going on a month now without replying to my initial inquiries. Feel free to make suggestions if you have a source on that sort of thing.
	2006/04/26	Here's a Game Talk posting about Palladium and their recent problems for you. It will in all likelyhood get me some hate mail, but hey, just because I'm pointing it out doesn't mean I like it.
	2006/04/15	New rant up. It's about the disturbing trend of people using 80s nostalgia who don't know enough about what they're talking about to even get the references right. Gripe all you want about people who use Optimus Prime as their go-to punchline, at least they get the name right.
	2006/04/09	Here's the first snag in getting MvM out the door. The pieces. While I could probably cut the number down, what with how I've never seen as many units out on the board as I have in my prototype sets, there are 52 pieces in an MvM box. Plan A was to make every single one of them a nice little mini, made of plastic or metal, which would look nice, and make this a game that's good for supplying RPG props. However, I really don't want this sucker to have a price tag over $40, and based on current research, that would give me a profit margin of uh... -$10 or so per set. So... feel free to give me some input on which is the most appealing Plan B: 1- Raise the price to $60 and hope it doesn't scare everyone off. 2- Have all The Army's units be some sort of cheap little illustrated wood/cardboard discs. 3- Have said units be those "standee" deals. You know, where you punch out a strip of paper, fold it into a triangle, and use that for your piece. It worked for Battletech if I recall. Personally, I'm leaning more towards C myself. Not only are they the cheapest option, they're also not flat. My current prototype sets all use wooden discs for units... which then sit on OTHER wooden discs at certain times, making things rather confusing. A little triangluar folded bit of paper though, while somewhat arts and crafts-y, stands out from the board, is easy to grip, and I honestly think they look better than the disc concept.
	2006/04/08	It seems I'm going to be forming my own game publisher to get MvM out there. The reasons for this are as follows: 1- I have some really nice card art which other companies would ditch for stuff by their own artists... and I like what I have here more. 2- While I don't really think it would be an issue, there's a lot of piece of mind to be had when you have complete creative control (and legal rights) concerning your own stuff. 3- As it turns out, I have decent connections in terms of producing all the necessary materials without paying an arm and a leg, and know some crazy freaks willing to help with sales. 4- In addition to doing all this great artwork, my artist friend suggested an excessively amusing name for a company, which is as good a reason as any to found one.
	2006/04/07	I took a new game from abstract concept to a first draft of the rules over the last day. More details on it should arise shortly.
	2006/04/06	This is one of those times where I'm too busy working on stuff to keep you up to date on what's going on. Major work being done on the front of getting Massive Vs. Masses published. Unfortunately, today's efforts, while quite time consuming, yielded an end result I can't talk about publicly yet. Give it a week or so.
	2006/03/22	Working on a crazy Retromud based project pretty heavily this week, more info when it's done presumably.
	2006/03/21	Now that I seem to have very good odds of getting The Massive Vs. the Masses published within the year, I should really shift my focus to a new project. Therefore, I'll be doing some serious Ardeas work unless anyone wants to see progress on something else.
	2006/03/20	Bit of inactivity around here. After NonCon came the flu, after the flu came GTS. In any case, I now have a number of potential publishers for The Massive Vs. The Masses. I'll need to send some e-mails around tomorrow.
	2006/03/06	Another year, another NonCon report. The short form is, I had a blast, and feel a lot more confident about heading to GTS.
	2006/03/03	Off I go to NonCon for the weekend.
	2006/03/01	OK. After much extensive testing, I am now reasonably certain that all 6 Massive Vs. Masses sets have 50/50 odds of beating any of the others, with chances for come from behind victories. Woohoo.
	2006/02/23	Making travel arrangements and other such preparations for next month have kept me rather busy lately, but a question which may become a rant later is on my mind. Is there a term for this phenomenon yet? The internet has spawned a great many odd little sub-cultures, and most are quite vocal about their existence. I've never heard anyone talk about their great love of turning videogame/anime characters into girls though, people just frequently send me pictures like this. Frequently. That directory just contains those which I found cleaning out direct file transfer dumps. Oh, and incidently, you people do all see the mailto links at the top and bottom of every page on this site, right?
	2006/02/20	As NonCon is less than two weeks away, today I worked out the full list of demos I plan to run. My NonCon page should be updated tomorrow to reflect it, but for now: Massive Vs. Masses, Tyranny. I was pondering Ardeas, but there's no real point teasing something that won't see daylight for so long.
	2006/02/19	Pretty decent response to my Uncompromised Thoughts notion. Now to pick one. We have a movie I haven't seen, we have chess, which I've covered fairly well in a Game Talk essay... ah, here we go. The Shin Megami Tensei Series.
	2006/02/16	Here's a proposal folks. Getting unbiased opinions these days is hard as heck. Professional reviewers aren't really allowed to tear into a lot of things, because the backlash would hurt them professionally. A good percentage of man on the street reviews are really ads placed by plants. All you can really trust is word of mouth, and honestly, odds are your friends don't have the proper grounding to really know what they're talking about. Now, I'm told I write a good review. I've gotten paid to do so many a time, I don't recall ever having someone chew me out for making a bad recommendation about anything, and I'm the obsessive type who won't give an opinion on, say, a weird head-trip anime series without first researching their history and seeing several others. All you have to worry about with me is me compromising my integrity to keep from upsetting publishers/authors/directors/raging fanboys, and I'm pretty sure none of those sorts pay any particular attention to this page. So here's the proposal. Send me an e-mail asking me about something. Anything. Game, movie, TV show, web site, company, person, type of food, whatever. If I have the appropriate experience to do so, I will then post, to a new section here, My Complete, Uncompromised Thoughts on whatever it is. If I think it'll hurt feelings, I just won't post it. If I can't afford to review something, you might be able to paypal me what it'd cost me to cover it, but no promises. I won't, for example, watch the House of the Dead movie even if you pay me, and I don't have the time to go watch every single episode of Dr. Who. There's a catch though. Nobody is allowed to complain about the end result. Not to me, not to your friends, not even to yourself. If I say I couldn't stand your favorite movie, you can't get ticked off. Just accept that we have differing opinions. If I say your favorite game is a piece of garbage, you have to accept that you have irrational affection for a piece of garbage. I don't throw around that sort of language unless there's non-subjective, demonstrable evidence that it is, in fact, garbage. If you can't deal with that, don't read the reviews. So, assuming you want some truly honest info about something you want to check out, tell me where to start.
	2006/02/15	Today was spent sending e-mails to various people in the interest of furthering causes that benefit you guys, so yay.
	2006/02/14	Tomorrow is the last day I am scheduled to be programming stuff. I think I am now officially behind schedule there.
	2006/02/13	Today I got a form rejection letter from a publisher I first courted over a year ago. On the one hand, this sucks, since I know they won't publish it, but on the other hand, I no longer have to keep saying "Well, I'm still waiting to hear from company X, but..." when talking to other people.
	2006/02/12	Much less boring coding stuff today. Something compiled!
	2006/02/11	Lots more boring coding stuff today.
	2006/02/10	Lots of boring coding stuff today.
	2006/02/09	Two rants in two days I know, but this is sentiment really needed to be voiced.
	2006/02/08	I'm going to tease this here rant with a small quote. "It's rare that you'll see a cookiecutter romantic comedy for instance, where 70 minutes in, a futuristic biker gang starts rampaging through the city and kills most of the cast."
	2006/02/06	This here is a Battling Business Card. If you participate in my demos at this year's NonCon, you can get one. Fill it out, and you get to pull an item from The Box of Free Crud!* *Box may or may not contain the surplus from my anime auction.
	2006/02/02	Let it never be said that I am not above plugging stuff for spiffy people: In affiliation with No Such Convention From Squire to Knight - WORLD PREMIERE Classical Compositions on a Console RPG theme Erica Kudisch, Vassar '06, presents a concert of her original music using texts and themes from the Final Fantasy Series, Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Suikoden, and Chrono Trigger. In addition to performances by prominent classical musicians Todd Crow, the Tourmaline Quartet, Sylvia Buccieli and Ann Churukian, the concert features students of the college. 2 PM, Saturday March 4th, Skinner Hall.
	2006/02/01	Got about halfway done loading one of the newish MvM sets into The Intesive Playtesting Apparatus. AKA the java version of the game. You'd be surprised how much it helps to have a computer shuffling cards for you when you're still fine-tuning things.
	2006/01/30	Updated (would that be the right term?) the maps from my last D&D campaign to reflect that the next one will be set in the same world roughly 2000 years earlier. This has only the vaguest possible impact on the life of anyone reading this, but they can't all be productive days.
	2006/01/29	Some time ago, I started throwing notes onto this page regarding a particularly long running D&D campaign I ran. The good news is, I'm expanding on those quite a bit today. The bad news is, I'm yanking them off the site for now, as they contain massive spoilers for players of the campaign I'm starting up when I return from the GAMA trade show this March.
	2006/01/28	The thought process leading up to it is rather complex, and will likely be the topic of a rant soon, but for now, assuming you're mature enough to handle such images, please enjoy this picture of the girls from Anecrophilia reclining on a wall, completely topless.
	2006/01/27	Finished updating these archives. All the links and images should be working now.
	2006/01/26	More work on fixing the site up. While I was at it, I added the links in for issue 1 chapter 3 on the Anecrophilia panel index.
	2006/01/25	Doing some major site maintenance this week. Step one, taking the year and change worth of updates crowding up the index and archiving them properly. Also added a new little feature to the top of the page.
	2006/01/24	Lots of dusting off of various projects. Expect some interesting updates soon. Oh, and my massive financial crisis seems to be dying down to something more managable now, but you're welcome to keep tossing cash at me if you feel like it. Everyone who tossed me some so far has, of course, been added to the future free stuff recipient list.
	2006/01/15	For the last few years I've been meaning to make these. "Battling Business Cards" I call'em. You'll see what they are if you come to NonCon.
	2006/01/14	That donation drive there managed to get me some non-ramen meals and just barely managed to restore my internet access. To celebrate, here's a new rant. Now then, it's January, so I suppose I should see what's going on with NonCon this year.
	2005/12/Ar	Full Archives

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