Theory From the Closet

Gen Con recaps seem popular; I want to be popular, so I wrote this post full of name-dropping for you. Warning: I add the letter s to words that don’t need it to be internet cute. Also there are inside jokes and mystic writings. You’ve been warned.

This year my back wasn’t completely ruined, so I got to do the full Gen Con experience, as opposed to last years 24 hour experience. This means I got a couple interviews, a couple of games in, and lots of hanging out. It was a really good experience, and as always I feel more charged up about gaming and podcasting. On to the diary form of the post!

Wednesday:
This is the day I left. 3 to 4 hour bus trip to Chi-town’s Union Station spent mostly staring out the window. From Union Station I was scheduled to take the Amtrak to Indy, which dumps you right by the convention center. This is where probably the coolest thing happened for Gen Con. I met up with the inventor of role-playing, Major David Wesely, Ret., and his friend, The First Dwarf, Ross W. Maker. I conducted a interview with David, for just under two hours on the Amtrack, and we talked much of the way to Indy. It was really awesome to get insight into our hobby from back before I was born. I arrived in Indy at was technically Thursday, so….

Thursday:
I arrived about one in the morning to the Embassy Suites, and picked up the keycard my roommates the BG’s kindly left at the front Desk for me. Remarkably Josh was still up and was chatting with Fat Patroller, Luscious Myers. I talked to them for a few minutes, Luscious left, and Josh went to bed. I left the room to do something…. Drugs? Something like that, but it was sold by Steak and Shake, where I arrived just in time to catch other people going to bed. Lead by Luscious’ partner in podcasting evil, David Adam was backed by the Hand-mangler, Johnathon A.K.A Stingray02, so I let their posse get away, as I waited for my too-thin-burger plus Banana and Chocolate shake.

After food in the belly, I made sure to copy Wesely’s interview over to my computer so it was in two places. ’cause I care about you, friendly listener. Bedtime about 4 a.m.

I got up around 7 a.m. got a shower, then some bad food from the Embassy Suites buffet breakfast. Free is as free does, or so my Forrest used to say. I went and got my press pass, with the BG’s two, and then checked in at SorenCrane Industries as is my wont. Handshakes, hugs, and insults for to win. Then I did stuff, saw peoples, checked in on folks I was scheduled to interview, and found out there were no video game companies this year. Which sucked as I wanted to hunt down Mythic and Bioware people for interviews, figuring I’m harder to ignore in person than via the emails. Escaped again, but the hunt isn’t done.

This is about where my chronological memory breaks down. We gained two more roommates, Ms. Jennisodes, and Rich Nolastname. With impossible blue eyed baby, Meg BG, plus Josh BG, that equals 6 gamers in two rooms.

I think I played two games of Ascension with Josh and Rich. Then did some other things.

I believe this is the night where we played part of Misspent Youth, and then Fat Patrol. Made characters with Kevin Eye, and some other folks. We made characters and played about two scenes, by the end of which, my character was raped and so there was no reason to go on. Or something… forget why we quit.

I ran into Luscious, after refusing to partake in evil with the kids. So of course we formed Fat Patrol, and went on the quest for 323, and slayed the mighty notebook. We did not engage the bottle-throwing demon, however, as we needed to med up at Steak and Shake, for too-thin-burgers and shakes. Plus we were afraid. Bedtime about 4 a.m.

As an aside, I can’t sleep well at cons and tend to get 3 hours a night until I can finally sit down to a roleplaying game at which I promptly fall asleep. I should figure out how to deal with this.

Friday:
I got up after my wonder three hours sleep, ate my bad food, and went and interviewed Matt Synder, and Keith Senkowski. We said things that are going to make people angry, and likely said the word fuck a lot. Another outstanding interview.

At some point I went to find out how SorenCrane makes donuts.

I’m not sure what happened after this… how about you?

Saturday:

I ran into my friend Mike Holmes, and dropped him off at Games on Demand, which I like to eyeball every year, but never use. I went back to the hotel room to do laundry, with the plan of attending the Extreme Dungeon Mastering seminar afterwards, so I could judge the words of the devil for myself. It took me too long, but I had a really cool conversation with Rich about American Parkour LARPS, whoops, I mean American Parlor LARPs, and why their tabletop derived rules are dumb. Do I have better ideas? Seem to… so did Rich. Hit me up with that email address, dude? Then it was on to the Game Design is Mind Control seminar. If you’re into Game Design, attend this in the future, and arrive early as the room wasn’t big enough for everyone.

Then I got over to the Adept Press booth to grab Vincent Baker for Dinner. We went to this awesome Cajun place, that was like 50 miles from the convention center on foot, with Anna Kreider, Graham Walmsley, plus a passel of British folks whose names I can’t recall. My god, the Brits mastery of sarcasm had me rolling, and the Cajun food was good. It wasn’t low-fat high-brow crap, but straight up Cajun. You could taste the grease, and that was a good thing.

On the way back to the hotel I pissed Vincent off with political talk, and we found several strong common grounds, which is interesting, since I’d define myself conservative, and I believe he would define himself liberal. We did the interview and it worked out much better than I thought it would. I wasn’t as prepared for this interview as the others, and I was worried I was going to waste Vincent’s time. Turns out? Nope, another excellent interview.

I think afterwards I played a lego game with James Brown, and friends. It was okay. A Knizia game, themed on Egyptian Pyramids, and Mummies, that balances hidden information versus open information. I’d prefer to play it with kids I think, not really deep enough for adults, but would be fun with kids.

Things happened after this, with a bedtime of maybe 5:00? Then….

Sunday:
Got up around 9:00 a.m. Got good food at Einstein bagels as I was tired of crap breakfast. Went to the free internet spot, and ran into Dave Spoonbender and Tim Jensen. Finished breakfast and walked around the show floor. After walking the floor with them we parted ways, and I walked the floor again with Dro Kielbasa, Thor the Editor of the Gods, and Ken “Fuck” Sentowski.

I bought Ascension. It’s a deck building game, similiar to Dominion, but with a bit smaller possibility space. Your methods to winning are a little easier to compute, but there’s enough space for it to still be interesting… at least over four plays. We’ll see how it does as I play it more. It sets up a ton faster than Dominion, and puts away quicker too. It won’t replace Dominion, but it doesn’t need to as Ascension occupies it’s own space.

I also bought Apocalypse World. The reasons for this will pop up in the interview with Vincent, suffice to say, shit is tight, yo-box. That was it for Gen Con purchases. I was loaded down with equipment, and didn’t want to add much weight.

Thor encouraged me to sit down with Ron Edwards, which was good, as he shared some of that belly-fire he’s got going on. I spent most of my time nodding. Talked to James Brown some more. I thanked Greg Stolze for City of Lies, which I finally bought this year. There’s good game design stuff to build on in that boxed set that folks don’t seem to have grabbed yet.

I went to Dinner with New York, which was Terry Hope Romano, John Wrestle-opolis, Crane, Thor, Dro, Keith, and Alexander. They argued about something silly, and we all ate overthought Mexican food.

Later we went to the Embassy suites for the Sunday night showdown. Sunday is a cool night as the weak have been weeded out, and commerce is over, so you get to sit down with all those people you missed. I took a 3 hour nap, and then saw everyone, but Macklin and Will off. Those two were up when I left at 5:00 to catch a cab to the Amtrak station.

The Amtrak train was delayed 4 fucking hours, and I had to sit in that dirty fucking place and wait. Note to Indianapolis, hire better janitors for your Bus/Train station. They haven’t swept under the chairs in forever and the bathroom was disgusting. I eventually got home. The end.

This is cut and pasted from a post I made on story-games, anyway….
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I’m planning to do an interview with Vincent Baker on Saturday May 30th 9:30 PM (21:30) eastren, 8:30 central, 01:30 GMT. The plan is to take questions, we’ll be focusing mainly on Creative Agendas (GNS), but there might be some clouds and boxes questions, and perhaps a few other things. I don’t want questions here. I want to hear peoples voices. More about that later, but for now if you are interested you can look for Clyde Rhoer on Facebook, or follow radiofreeclyde on Twitter.

The plan right now is to use Skype. I can’t include a bunch of people as there is no control over who can talk, every person you add seems to increase the editing difficulty tremendously. I’ll announce via twitter and facebook when we’ve started talking, and again when were ready to start taking questions. Questions should be about Creative Agendas as that’s the focus of the show, if this works out perhaps sometime in the future we can talk to Vincent about something else.

Now if I can get it figured out and Vincent is okay with it, I’d prefer to use Talkshoe.com, as that would allow everyone to listen via streaming, and perhaps have more cogent questions.

This isn’t intended to be an argue with Vincent (or Clyde) show, you can do that later on the internet via whatever methods you normally employ, so approach this positively please.

Creative agenda is a lot more complicated than the other theory shows I’ve done. It’s going to be an additional day.

Show046: State of the Podcast 2

Another year down. Here’s the state of the podcast for this year. I’ve finally decided to halfway pursue turning podcasting into a job, so you’ll likely be seeing changes soon, as I gather the money I need for more hosting, possibly professional software, and gain knowledge. I’m not sure what else to say, except expect… holy crap those two words are beautiful together… anyway… except expect  a Ron Edwards interview on Monday the 19th and a theory episode on Monday the 26th.

Links

Brilliant Gameologists

Narrative Control

Atomic Array

I installed Disqus  for the site today. Disqus turns the comments into something a little more like a forum, but not quite. Think of it as working somewhat like Vincent’s anyway blog,  but with the ability to track what the users say, across other Disqus enabled blogs. It’s fairly easy to start an account,  you can use a sign-in you likely already have, if you are like me and get frustrated by having to record another password.

You can read more here.

I was recently on Stabbing Contest again. I had contacted Ogre because there were some things I wanted to talk about publicly but didn’t feel Theory From the Closet was the appropriate vehicle. We talked about how not letting girls in the group doesn’t always equal misogny, the ethics of podcasts and money, how roleplaying is used as an exclusionary term, and frustration in the creation of a game. I think it was a pretty interesting show.

I recently talked with Ogre from the Stabbing Contest podcast and blathered so much that I have the distinction of having the first show he had to cut in half. We talked about games, punk, and perhaps touched on their crossing a bit. I insulted a good portion of punk rock and perhaps some other people, including myself. We also touched on some dirty words like Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism. I enjoyed it and it ran about two and a half hours long. Here’s a link to the post for the first part.

Theory From the closet will be offline for a few days starting November 1st, so I’ve been holding off putting out the new show. The computer this site is on is being switched out for a new computer in a new data center. My host is going through some changes, but the new computer should be faster so it’s worth a few days of inconvenience. As soon as I see that we’re back up I’ll be posting the show with Darren Watts from Hero Games, and we still have Jeff Lower, Ram Hull, Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, and Jason Walters. After that Gen Con will be officially over. Heh. Then we get back to my lonely monotone.

I thought I’d do a little maintenance on the site real quick and found out I’d been hacked. Thankfully while it was a little aggravating, whomever got control, redirected the site to a place that explained the hack they used. They got in through my tikiwiki page which had an exploit that could be done through the tiki graph which did not properly sanitize user input. Shame on them.

Anyway… I’d link to the site that Theory From the Closet was being redirected to… but it’s running Javascript and I don’t trust the site enough to send you folks there. Especially since I imagine most of you aren’t using Noscript for Firefox, or SandboxIE on Windows like you should be, or running in a virtual machine like I should be. If you aren’t you should take a look, it’s a minor inconvenience for a great gain in security.

So thanks Mr. or Mrs. Hacker for not being malicious. Now I’m off to change all my long passwords just in case someone had better access than I thought and is running some Rainbow Tables. They should be salted since it’s Linux, but you can never be too safe. Not that anyone would bother.

What sucks is now I have to think about what I’m going to do wiki-wise, as the wiki was where I would plan out my shows. It’s not like anyone but my friend Tim was using it to give me suggestions, but I still like the idea of planning the shows openly.

Gen Con was tiring. I did around 12 or 13 recordings. Those interviews are going to be coming fast, faster than the normal once a week, be prepared. I’m working on getting some on the computer right now. I want to get back to boring you with my monotone theory discussions as soon as possible. Otherwise I’ll never get to it as I am likely to have more interviews coming up in September for Geek.kon here in Madison, perhaps OshCon, RockCon, and Dreamation.

Hungry Hungry Hippos equals a bloat.