Remember back in my ComiCon-Way post-mortem when I asked:
I wonder if they got any photos of Artoo, stormtroopers, or Vader at this machine?
Looks like the universe takes requests. … Read more
Five years ago, a bunch of my buddies and I drove for hours – some for quite a few hours – to invade a retro arcade in Springfield, Missouri. It was quite a unique destination at the time – an old-school arcade, complete with pinball machines and nostalgic items all over the place, where you could get in for five bucks and play to your heart’s content. It’s not a bad business model: once inside, they have a concession stand to keep you there (and keep draining your wallet), and they’re probably counting on their patrons only sticking around for an hour or two. Which, with the three-hour one-way drive time to Springfield, was a bit enforced in our case – we had real lives and crap to get back to.
If I had a buck for everyone I’ve ever heard in the arcade collecting hobby talking about how they’re going to start their own version of 1984, I’d be able to start my own version of 1984. Fortunately, some local collectors have beaten me to it and opened up shop last weekend in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and it’s gotta be said, the 40-minute drive (instead of a 3-hour tour, a 3-hour tour) may just make Arkadia Retrocade the happeist place on Earth for me and mine.
What a long, strange couple of weekends it’s been.
Last weekend I went to Darkon in Tulsa (a first-year horror-themed event put on by the folks behind Tulsa Trek Expo), and this weekend I was at another first-time event, ComiCon-Way in Conway, Arkansas. But more than just the latest stops on my tour of nearby conventions to promote VWORP!1, these were Little E’s first conventions. Whereas previous conventions were “daddy is gone this weekend,” now he wonders what we’re going to do, and what we’re going to see, next weekend. … Read more
There’s a terribly good article here about what I spent a lot of my life doing between 1999 and 2007. I miss the ol’ collection sometimes, but recently got back into a fray in a small way to accumulate some GBA games for the boy. I’d forgotten how entertaining the hunt was – almost as fun as actually playing the games.
I’ll post some photos soon; I didn’t exactly take a glut of pictures because my hands were full of presents and goodies. He got quite a haul of clothes and goodies, and to everyone’s amazement he seemed genuinely jazzed about all of it. No “oh… yay… socks” from him. Not yet anyway. To my not-inconsiderable shame, I think he knows we’re struggling a bit financially, and the sheer amount of clothing he got was a Good Thing. I hate that he’s aware of that struggle at the age of five. But he’s also very happy about all the goodies he got, whether they were clothes or games. I’m very grateful to all the family who showed up for the big oh-five bearing gifts. I wasn’t expecting that.
theLogBook.com hasn’t been terribly active lately; I’ve had my head buried in a project that is, ironically, related to theLogBook.com. The project started out as supporting research for the webseries idea I’ve had, and then it struck me, a few days into that research, that the webseries project had indirectly provided me with an answer to the question “What’s your website about?” Which has been an elusive question, you know, for a long time. (Pretty sad when the thing has been operating in one form or another for over 20 years.) That’s when it hit me: the thing I’m working on is going to become the new main menu for the site. There’s nothing egregiously wrong with the current one, mind you, but after all this time, I’ve figure out what the site is about, and so it’s time to jump in with both feet and do this main menu revamp that nails down precisely what that is. Because it’s kind of neat.
And at that point, after all these years, I think the time will have finally come when I give up the ghost on saying “Yes, there will be regular daily/weekly updates, like clockwork,” because even with me being out of work, that’s just not happening like it should. Real life intervenes. And I’ve found that when I’m trying as hard as I can to maintain that schedule, it becomes a chore instead of a joy. This site should never be like that. It will still be updated – probably quite a lot, actually, in support of the book projects I’m working along in parallel – but the notices that “hey, I posted something new” will probably happen in the forums after that, since the main menu will be taking on quite a different form. A “most recent updates” widget will be added to Episode Guides so everyone can keep up with the most current stuff.
What exactly that form is… you’ll just have to wait and see. As usual, I hope everyone enjoys using it and reading it as much as I’m enjoying putting it together. As always, the site’s not going away, just entering a new phase where I can add stuff at my leisure.… Read more
On this day five years ago, my life changed. I had a brand new, huge responsibility. These days, I have a huge responsibility, a gaming buddy, a Star Wars-watching buddy, a music-listening buddy, a reading buddy, and just the best kiddo in the world.
I’ve mentioned before that my mom used to make my birthdays a blowout extravaganza of stuff. I can’t really afford to work on the sheer scale of present-procuring awesomeness that she used to, but here’s the thing: I know the boy’s interests, they’re pretty close to my interests, and I know… well… everyone else in the world who collects this stuff. That helped in swelling the ranks of his game collection a bit. … Read more
Let us speak no more of this.
(Yes, that’s what my kid is actually sleeping on/under right now. I had them in my game room for quite a while, took them down to clean them and realized they didn’t need to go back up, and the rest is history.)… Read more
A while back I asked for help in rounding up some classic Mario and Zelda related carts for the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance for my own game boy, who’s turning five in less than a month. I want to thank everyone who responded and had stuff on the list that they were willing to part with – the list really got whittled down significantly, much faster than I was expecting, and with much less expenditure on my part than expected. … Read more
Grab some popcorn and pull up a seat for this one.
There’s been raging controversy lately about female gamers being harrassed or even threatened via in-game messages for daring to encroach on the online gaming boys’ club, to the point that you could do a Venn diagram heavily overlapping “macho” male gamers and frat-boy rape culture.
I’ll fess up to one thing: I don’t “do” online gaming myself. The last time I bothered was over ten years ago, but even then the number of guys on there trying to overcrank the macho bugged me – I’m a guy, and it took me right out of the game. These days, I don’t have time to devote to massive gaming sessions; if I’m going to be playing with someone who’s operating on the level of a child, I’m going to play some more Super Mario Wii with Little E.
The companies running the games and servers have remained deafeningly quiet on the issue. Of course they have: most of their audience is male. The last thing they want to be seen to do is let the terrorists, erm, sorry, “people who know that there’s a way you’re supposed to act toward everyone,” win. Never mind the fact that, had some of these in-game messages and harrassment been delivered via text message, phone call or e-mail, the sender would have the cops knocking on their door within a few hours.
I understand that the anonymity of the internet is a great playground for those who understand the basic rules. For too many others, though, it’s a perfect breeding ground for creepiness: people get away with saying things that they’d never get away with saying in person, most likely on pain of getting their asses kicked. I’m of A Certain Age, so I don’t really do the whole anonymity thing: if I tried to maintain a different person for every venue, I’d suffer catastrophic out-of-memory errors in record time. Too much of that real estate is taken up by more everyday concerns like “I need to fold clothes” or “I have books to write” or “Oh, I was supposed to clean litterboxes yesterday, wasn’t I?” I admire people who can “stay in character” until it becomes creepy and stalker-ish.
What the hilarious and yet deeply disturbing blog Fat, Ugly Or Slutty hopes to accomplish is to expose some of these demeaning communications, complete with the screen names of the senders. In places it’s funny. In places it makes me want to take a hot shower with lots of soap because it gives glimpses into a culture of guys who spend too much time playing games and not enough time accruing the kind of (occasionally bruising) life experience that tends to melt away the misguided prepubescent notions about women and sex to which these guys cling.
Question is… will the companies running the servers do anything about it, or are female gamers going to be told – again – to just “put up with it”? It’s bad enough that women are having to fight against ridiculously outmoded legislation – proposed almost entirely by men – involving reproductive health. Now the boys want to lock the ladies out of their secret clubhouse too?… Read more
Seems like it was only a couple of weeks ago that I was announcing Dalek Checkers would be played at my GlitchCon booth – oh wait, it was only a couple of weeks ago – but there’s a bit of bad news: in trying to work out the details of the actual board, I quickly came to the realization that it’d take more than half of the entire table. If this were OVGE, I’d say “hell yeah, buy an extra table just for this!“, but the tables cost four times what they did at OVGE. The idea here was to bring money in by selling books… so that’s gotta take precedence. My apologies for all three people who may be disappointed. 😆
The concept may resurface somewhere down the road, perhaps at OVGE. We’ll see.
I may bring a few display items to GlitchCon, but I’ve gotta keep the focus on the books and DVDs I’m there to sell. (And considering how past OVGE crowds have been about display items that aren’t for sale, I’m not even sure how much of that I plan on doing here.) I don’t want to have a bare table, but I also don’t want what’s on the table to completely obfuscate the fact that I’m trying to sell some books. :p… Read more
On Sunday, a couple dropped by to load up my dear old Kickman arcade machine to take it home. I have to admit I was being a bit of a “helicopter parent” to a machine that was no longer mine: I was practically grilling them about whether or not they had the necessary gear to load, secure and transport it home. “Do you have straps? Have you seen the clouds building overhead – do you have a tarp?” How they resisted the urge to tell me to shaddup and go inside, I have no idea. The point is: thanks to an inept employee of North American Van Lines, I never got to get the full enjoyment out of the machine, because he damaged it all but ramming it through the walls of my house when the machine was delivered to me years and years ago. The wording of my auction was pretty strict: don’t bother to bid on this unless you know the proper way to get it out of here. I’d rather keep the machine and not have the money than watch it get beaten up even more on the way out the door. … Read more
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