I know I said (nearly a month ago) to watch this space. For those of you that have, thank you. I apologize for not actually giving you anything to watch.

The big news, I suppose, is:

REDBRICK LICENSES D&D 4E UNDER GSL

(AUCKLAND, New Zealand) June 20, 2008—RedBrick Limited are pleased to announce they have successfully concluded the signing and acceptance of the first Game System License for Wizards of the Coast’s DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® 4th Edition Roleplaying Game.

James Flowers, RedBrick’s Managing Director, said “This is an exciting opportunity for us. We have been looking forward to working with Wizards of the Coast for some time. Now that Wizards have accepted RedBrick’s application for a Game System License, we can move forward with our plans for publishing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® 4th Edition compatible products. Once details of our forthcoming product releases have been finalized, we will make a separate announcement.”

RedBrick Limited are headquartered in New Zealand, and also publish the popular Earthdawn®, Fading Suns™, and Blue Planet™ roleplaying games under license from FASA Corporation, Holistic Design Inc., and Biohazard Games, respectively. RedBrick’s company web site is http://www.redbrick.co.nz. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast in the U.S.A. and other countries.

I think this is pretty cool. Not really sure exactly where we’re going to run with this (and at this stage I can’t talk about it even if I did), but what I’ve seen of D&D4 has intrigued me, and I can’t wait to actually get my hands on the books so I can get into it in a bit more depth.

So, it has been a long time since I posted anything to this blog. There has been a lot of stuff going on in my life the last couple of months, and this site has suffered because of it.

Something that a number of notable podcasters and bloggers have been doing lately is a “post a day” challenge — where they try to post or update something on their blog/feed/website every day.

I don’t know that I’ll be doing that, exactly, but I do want to try and post a bit more often than I have been. Please, watch this space for further developments.

Watch this speech.

So it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted… what’s been up with me?

Well, I’ve been in training at my new job for a couple of weeks now, and it’s going well — if a little piecemeal, for reasons I will get into later. I’ve been having intermittent computer troubles — surely a sign that I need to start putting money away for a new one.

(Mary’s already taken the plunge, and we have a beautiful new iMac sitting on her desk… it’s made me set my eyes on a MacBook or — funds willing — a MacBook Pro. I have to go with a laptop of some stripe or other.)

More details will be coming out in the near future, but I wanted to share a strange little idea that came to me. At work this morning, some of my co-trainees were having a discussion about the various theme parks in and around Orlando, Florida (you know, Disney World and the like).

I’ve been to Disney World — it was years ago (back when I was in high school), but here’s the thought I had…

One of the sections of the Magic Kingdom is TomorrowLand, which is a kind of 1950s, idealized view of the “future”, which is to say a bunch of pipe-dream fantasies that bear little to no resemblance to what has actually happened in the intervening 40 or 50 years.

What if (my brain said), they redesigned TomorrowLand to be more in line with… more recent science-fiction sensibilities.

The juxtaposition of that kind of image — the garish, neon-splashed landscape of Blade Runner, for instance — in the middle of the happy-family Mickey Mouse stereotype gave my brain a happy tickle, and I had to share.

Talk to you all soon (I promise)!

I totally suck at managing my time. I have three or four projects going, and rather than spend time working on any of them, I futz around on message boards, play video games, post to my blog (*grin*) and generally waste time.

Part of this, no doubt, has to do with being tired much of the time. I work until 9pm or so, get home closer to 9:30, and then only have a couple of hours before I go to bed… or at least, that would be the plan.

I don’t tend to get to sleep until 1:30 or 2:00, and then Ty tends to wake up at the crack of dawn (6:30 or 7:00), and I need to feed her and take her downstairs. She’ll play in her playpen, and I can generally get another couple hours of sleep, but I’m not getting a full, uninterrupted night.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s a price I’m willing to pay, because Ty is such an adorable little munchkin (getting bigger every day). Still, there are times that I feel like I’m not accomplishing anything… aside from bringing in the money necessary to keep us all clothed, housed and fed (which is worthwhile, but not terribly fulfilling, creatively speaking).

Maybe once the new job starts in a couple of weeks, and I’m on more of a daytime schedule, I’ll be able to manage my time a little better, and actually get stuff done…

Yeah, right.

According to the latest post from United Hollywood, there are information meetings planned for the guilds this upcoming weekend. When coupled with the rumors that a deal is close, are we looking at an upcoming end to the WGA strike?

It would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath. There is a lot at stake here, and while I would like to see some shows return (or at least, know that we’d have new episodes coming up this fall), I’m willing to trade that to see the right kind of deal offered to the writers.

Still… here’s hoping!

I know, amazing, huh?

But Mary pointed me to the Baby Blues comic from January 16. It describes my life.

Baby Blues is (c) 2008 Baby Blues Partnership, distributed by King Features Syndicate. No challenge is intended to the copyright.

Wow. That was a great game. It is somewhat disappointing that the Patriots weren’t able to attain the perfect season, but full credit has to go to the Giants, who played some phenomenal football, especially their defense, who kept the pressure on Tom Brady, keeping things close right up to the end.

It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that the Patriots were able to produce anything resembling the level of play they’d been maintaining all season. Kudos to the Giants, who pulled off what many thought was impossible — beating the 2007 New England Patriots.

As for the Patriots… there’s always next year. *grin*

Quick update. I went into work this afternoon, and received some good news.

I got the job in the customer service office upstairs. Training starts sometime in February.

This makes life easier. The pay is about double what I’m making now, and is a M-F 9-5 type of job. No more nights and weekends for me!

I need to vent a bit.

I have been a member of the Camarilla for many years. I have (mostly) enjoyed playing in the game. The two characters I have created and played in the game have been a lot of fun, and have drawn many compliments. My tenure as local Mage storyteller was well received.

On the other hand, I have often hated the stupid, petty, niggling administratrivia that cause no end of frustration when it comes to dealing with most of the larger aspects of the organization.

Case in point… I was the administrator for the Cam’s Northeast Regional e-mail list. It is a position that I as given back in 2004. It was a position that I had until yesterday.

It was a position that, in the end, I got no credit for.

History lesson… back in the first half of 2004, all of the Camarilla list moderation — national, regional, and domain level — was overseen by a national officer in the coordinator chain (one of the ANC-Techs), and the list moderators reported to that individual.

In the latter half of 2004, the List mod overseer changed how it all worked, consolidating the national lists among a smaller group of moderators and passing oversight of the regional and domain level lists to the appropriate coordinator levels: a domain-level list was overseen by the domain coordinator, etc.

I was given administrative control of the NE-Regional list in the first half of 2004. When the changeover happened, I contacted the NE Regional Coordinator at the time, explained the changes that were taking place, and asking what she wanted to see from me in terms of reports and the like. I got a response indicating that she had no problem with me continuing to moderate the list, and that I would continue to receive prestige (the Camarilla’s administrative ‘currency’) for the job.

That was the last successful contact I had with the RC staff for nearly four years. I sent multiple e-mails to the RC trying to get some kind of response, with no luck. I didn’t consider it a big deal — it was a pretty easy job, wasn’t worth much prestige, and I wasn’t in it for the prestige anyhow.

Then, at the tail end of last week, one of the current ARCs posted a message to the regional list asking for information about the active regional lists, who was in charge of them, and so forth. I contacted her, telling basically the same story I just related above, and got the following answer:

I spoke with… our current RC, and unfortunately he has no record of you as the list mod or your hiring. Therefore, he cannot validate your claim. I’m sorry.

This was the beginning of the end. Mildly annoyed, since anybody who had been paying any attention the past three and a half years would know I’m the list mod, and a simple check of the administrative info for the list (available to any member of the list) would show that I was the admin, I replied with several pieces of information that supported my claim, stating that the lack of administrative record on the RC’s part didn’t mean I wasn’t the mod, and hadn’t been doing the job since 2004.

To make a long story short, I was not only told that I was out of luck, but it was implied that I was making the whole thing up, and fabricating evidence (in the form of multiple emails I had on record) to support my claim that I had been trying to get this whole stupid mess sorted out with regional for the past four years.

It is precisely this kind of tin-hat emperor attitude that always bugged me about the Cam. The insular buddy-buddy nepotism that so often taints the relationships in the game, and drives otherwise rational people to react with such heightened emotion that everything gets blown way out of proportion to its actual importance (I mean, it’s a game, people).

So anyhow, this whole affair has soured me on the Cam (at least, for the foreseeable future). I haven’t been to a game since last April as it is, but my membership is set to expire in March, and I have no interest in renewing, because returning to game, ultimately, means having to deal with all the administrative crap and out-of-game interpersonal politics that I have no interest in.

Anyhow, there’s my first post for the year. How about those Patriots, huh?