Bum Scoop

Other than the occasional post here and there, I haven’t been too talkative on the internets at all, so I figured I would bring anyone who cares up to speed. So here’s the highlights:

- Back last year I was named the Head of Programming for ConFusion 2013: Immortal ConFusion, and that has been ramping up steadily all year. We changed hotels to something a little closer to the airport, which we hope goes over well, and so far we’ve got something like 40 confirmed author guests. Very exciting. In related news, back in March I was elected to the Ann Arbor Science Fiction Association board, and last month I was named the Deputy ConChair for ConFusion’s 2014 installment. Lawrence Schoen recently said to me, “You can be a SMOF [Secret Master of Fandom] or a pro, but not both.” And I say, “Eh, fuck it, let’s try.”

- In “pro” news, “A Militant Peace” by Tobias Buckell and me was nominated for the WSFA Small Press Award, which was awarded at CapClave this month. We lost out to “The Patrician” by Tansy Rayner Roberts. I decided to attend CapClave because, well, why the heck not? And got to see me lose in person. Got my picture taken with the certificate which, I suppose, is floating around the interwebs somewhere, but I’ve yet to find it. Of course, I haven’t looked very hard, either.

- I’m off to Germany and the UK next month for the dayjob. Very excited about the possibility of meeting my UK-based friends Katie & Gordon and Tanya in person for the first time.

- On the gaming front, I’ve helped take the reins on a Play-by-E-Mail role playing game I’ve been involved in the last several years, to take up for the founders of the game who have been inundated by their own lives. Not that mine seems all that less hectic, but it feels like a fun and interesting challenge that I can sink my teeth into. Don’t worry, it won’t cut into writing time on my own stuff. Probably.

- Still working on two different novels. There’s about 100k in words between them, but the overall target is something like 230-250k, so… yeah. Behind the game a bit. Someday maybe I’ll start posting the little progress bar thingies. That would be cool.

And that’s it for now. It’s been a tumultuous year on a personal level, but I’ve already got high hopes for 2013 to be much more awesome.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

1. I’ve seen in myself the tendency to go through phases with things; not with the bright burning intensity of fannish devotion or anything, but with a sort of inertia that gets me moving in one direction or another for a while until something comes along to disrupt it. It’s one of the reasons I think I have a hard time getting into a serious fitness regimen. As soon as the inertia is broken, I can’t get much emphasis behind it, and I get distracted by something else. Also, the thing itself can break the inertia by getting burnt out on it.

In what is nothing resembling a coincidence, I fell off the NaNoWriMo wagon about ten days in.

2. What’s taken the place of writing for the last couple of weeks has been Lord of the Rings Online. Yes, that’s right, I’m so awesomely cool I’m into one of Turbine’s redheaded step-children of the MMO genre. Today they’re releasing their “Mines of Moria” expansion, allowing you to go on the original dungeon crawl, which is pretty cool. If it holds out, they’ll make playable the whole of Middle Earth in phases that follows the progress of the novels. It’s pretty interesting and, very attractively to me, it features no Player Killing. You think that’s a lot of fun, more power to you. Personally, I’d rather enjoy my leisure time rather than watching some hooting dickhole teabag my corpse. Rich Perna taught me a long time ago that there are several orders of magnitude in skill and determination between me and the best video game players out there, which means in head-to-head match-ups, I tend to find more humiliation than enjoyment. So, if I’m going to go larking about some huge sandbox world with a big social aspect and a regular expansion of the playable world, I’d rather do it in a place where the dude standing next to me won’t randomly chop off my head and shit down my neck just for the lulz.

And that goes double for Eve Online.

3. I told my mom today it was probably safe to read my blog and follow me on Facebook and whatnot. I hope she sticks to Facebook.

4. The Genius playlists in iTunes 8 are pretty darn close to Genius. There’s a certain element of just lumping together songs by genre and decade, but while there’s nothing I can point to definitively, it seems a little smarter than that. There are plenty of rock songs, for instance, listed as “Soundtrack” in my library that it nevertheless picked up and plopped in the middle of other, similar songs. Whether that’s just some huge database correlating choices Amazon-style, or some actual analysis of the song’s audio fingerprint, I couldn’t tell you. But it is pretty cool.

5. The office is almost done. Electrical gets finished Wednesday, and hopefully move-in to the new space and a general rearrangement of the house over the weekend. More pics and narrative this weekend, I hope.

6. Some dude named Matt has a nice post up about appropriate use of the word “hate.” I share his sentiments, though not about the schlub he refers to in the middle of the post. Disregard that stuff.

The irreplaceable Jonathon McCalmont of SF Diplomat took issue the other day with my enthusiasm for the new Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition (complete with nifty, Web 2.0 interactivity built-in!) Well, okay, he didn’t take issue with my enthusiasm as such, just the concepts that I’m so enthusiastic about.

And I get, very much, what he’s saying. In reality, when I have gone gaming, we have very rarely relied on miniatures, nice maps, or anything like that, even though it does seem to form part of the backbone of Wizards’ and game shop’s business. If absolutely necessary, we’ve scrawled out sketches or arranged pencils on the table or something to lend illustration to the current situation. Sarah, when she was still in Michigan and running out Saturday night D&D game, had a couple of nice big hex maps that must have been about a million years old, just to show us our general environs.

The trouble is, we still want to game with Sarah, and sketching maps and whatnot is no longer so feasible, what with her being 2500 miles away. Or so. Thus we rely on OpenRPG. The new D&D stuff, assuming it’s not three bucks a minute to use, or some other unholy pay scheme, could do what we do with OpenRPG, only a lot better. The proper rules would be built in, and we could spend more of our precious time online playing the game rather than trying to figure out the technology.

Again, not that I’m suggest that Jonathon thinks I have no imagination. (He might think that, but I’ll assume he gives me the benefit of the doubt.) The backlash among old-school gamers might well be significant, especially since it’s going to be almost impossible not to assume that Wizards won’t be dropping Fifth Edition on us in another three-to-five years once sales of the core books for Fourth Edition slack off. And when they finally give up the pretense and make the miniatures full animated, and the dungeons fully rendered, and then make the dicing completely automated and invisible, just based on what you click… and…

It has a chance to get out of hand, in other words. But for now, for those of us who find the people we prefer to game with frustratingly out of reach, it’s nice to have this kind of option coming up.