Thoughts and things
Despite a little voice in the back of my head saying things like “too early” and “not enough time to come up with anything cool,” I’m going to make an effort to be an exhibitor as the Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo on Saturday, April 26th in OKC. The event’s being put on by the Oklahoma City Community College’s Computer Arts & Technology Society, and will be held at the OCCC campus near Will Rogers World Airport. Or at least I’ll be there if I can get the event’s organizer to respond to my e-mails – I’ve promoted this thing on a couple of retrogaming/computing forums that I belong to, which may or may not have been a mistake because everyone’s got questions about admission costs, vendors, trading/swapping of stuff that I just can’t answer…and there seems to be no site where this info is being given out. :-/
One word of caution, though…anyone expecting anything as elaborate as the Phosphor Dot Fossils displays seen at OVGEs and OKGEs past might not want to get their hopes too high. I’m still all for doing these shows, but with the kiddo on the scene now, the thought definitely occurs that unplugging and uprooting the entire room for these shindigs is getting a little old. As of 2006, I did have a few TVs and monitors gathered that were set aside for “expo use only,” though in the absence of a 2007 OVGE, I started giving those away, figuring they wouldn’t be needed. 😆 (The general feeling in 2007 was that OVGE wouldn’t be back anytime soon, and with a baby on the way too, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable assumption that my exhibiting days were over.) At any rate, with something like three weeks to prepare, I can’t guarantee a really elaborate display – I’d say expect some Coleco tabletop goodness and the PDF DVD, as always. (After doing this for a few years, I know what the crowd pleasers are.) Actually, did you know that the first year I brought the tabletop games to Tulsa, it was because there was a behind-the-scenes freak-out about whether or not there’d be enough power for every exhibitor? I started bringing the battery-powered Coleco games as a way to hedge my bets against the possibility of not having enough power for stuff with screens and power supply wall warts. They turned out to be incredibly popular items because one just doesn’t see a complete collection in decent shape everyday, and as popular as they were in their day, they just haven’t worked their way into the public retro-video-game subconscious the way that the Atari 2600 and NES have. But everytime someone sees my little stack of these puppies, they always go “Oh yeah! I remember those!” And that’s what makes it worth it for me to keep buying fresh batteries and bringing these guys out to play year after year.
In other news, anyone trying to pay a visit to GreenhouseFX.tv may notice a slight hiccup in the next few days; I’ve gone for a bit of belt-tightening and moved the site to a directory at thelogbook, and have made changes to where the domain points accordingly. If things really take off later, maybe I’ll reverse that, but for now, I’d rather be paying for two domain names (relatively cheap) and one hosting account (not cheap) than for two of each (really really not cheap), and it’s hard to justify a second hosting account when the first could handle the traffic, storage and bandwidth just fine. I only wish I’d thought of all this a year ago.
I’ve got other Exciting Stuff I’m working on that’s related to thelogbook, but I prefer for things to be at a slightly more advanced stage before I commit to making an announcement. Stay tuned.… Read more
