Zero to Sixty: Bouncing Back

Okay, so last night I must have hit rock bottom in my "Ah, GenCon!" frustration, but some good stuff happened (I got some sleep, I talked to Clinton and he doesn't think I'm a total loser yet). Again, I apologize for all that crap last night. This isn't my personal blog and I should try to keep personal bleh from filling it up. I'll do better about that, promise.

Thanks to Annie, Ben, Clinton, Thomas, and everyone who posted comments, since all of you folks helped me get out of some rampant stupidity that I was under the influence of. Gah! Back to our regularly scheduled program.

Where things stand now:

We had a really productive Story Games thread about starting a forum that focused, initially, on bringing together people involved in different kinds of roleplaying and related creative activities (mainstream tabletop, indie folks, Anglo-Am larpers, Nordic larpers, online freeform, collaborative fic/fanfic, MMORGs, interactive fiction, etc.) for the purpose of exploring connections and learning from people who do things totally different from you. That might eventually spawn something else that works to push for more diversity of people (and not just diversity of play) in roleplaying, but that might be a seperate project. Jess "Kleenespace" Hammer's tenatively agreed to help me recruit and organize an "advisory board" consisting of representative folks from many different roleplaying communities, who'll then work together to determine what this forum/webspace will look like. This project is probably gonna be called Plays Well with Others and eventually be up at plays-well.com, but there are a few other projects to tackle first.

I've been finishing up Push stuff all week: looking up publishing info to flesh out the bibliographies, tweaking the layout, writing the descriptive section of the introduction (which I'll post here soon), and otherwise getting it ready to go. I think May will be our month for doing proofreading and collecting the side comments from our Guest Commentators, who now tentatively includes Jess Hammer, along with Annie Rush, Brand Robins, Mo Turkington, Paul Tevis, and Victor Gjisbers. Since our contributors for the first issue are Emily Care Boss, John Kim, Shreyas Sampat, Eero Tuovinen, and myself (and a few people like Rich Forest, Liz Henry, Piers Brown, and Thomas Robertson may be helping proofread), I'm totally stoked. This is one of the greatest crews ever. Woohoo!

GenCon stuff is still up in the air. Annie's really psyched for doing our own booth still, but I'm dubious about our chances of finding two more people who are interested in splitting it (since we need to put some money up by next week). Personally, I'm not especially worried about our ability to pull off something awesome, despite me having never been to GenCon before (Annie's an old pro). The money thing is slightly worrisome, but not too much. As long as I don't spend more than $500 on GenCon, I'm probably cool. Money, as they say, ain't a thing.

I might end up crawling back to the Forge booth if things don't work out, embarrassed and apologetic for my little tantrum. Personally, I'd LOVE to demo TSoY and Polaris and Breaking the Ice. That would be hot. I still feel that, overall, the "diaspora effect" needs to take place at GenCon as well as online. Wicked Dead made a good start of it, but I eventually envison a half-dozen seperate indie booths at GenCon and see that only as a good thing. I mean, the indie movement is partially about being able to do things your own way, pro-pluralism and all that, and I'd like to be a part of enacting that at the convention level. If not this year, then next year definitely.

Okay, that's enough for now. More later.