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Author: Bryant

Parochial

The Boston sports world is a weird place. Intense, fanatical, whiny, hopeful — it’s the kind of place that can support two sports radio stations without any problem whatsoever. Very macho world, of course. Sports. So the cool thing of the morning is this: Steve Buckley, who’s one of the reasonably big names in Boston sports journalism, came out. He writes for the (conservative) Boston Herald, and he has a frequent guest spot on (fairly conservative) WEEI, so that makes his environment just a little bit more unwelcoming than if he wrote for the Globe. Big kudos to him.

The comment section of his article isn’t quite a cesspool, although there’s a lot of hostility. Lot of praise, too. Also a lot of deleted comments. I expected worse, all in all.

One event closer to equality.

Stuff I Watch On The TV

We recently cut the cable cord. It turns out that you can get an HD antennae that feeds a Tivo well enough, and that covers anything on Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CW. AMC is the big exception, but it’s cheaper to buy the episodes on iTunes than it would be to maintain the cable bill. I was gonna get HBO in the spring to watch Game of Thrones, and HBO does not do downloads for non-subscribers, but c’est la vie. Also I lose a lot of the NBA playoffs. Thankfully there are sports bars.

Anyway, for the sake of the decision-making process I thought hard about what I actually watch.

eBooks and Agents

Two interesting ebook questions: when will publishers get around to releasing the backlist as ebooks, and who will be the quality gatekeepers in a world of self-publishing? You may think the second question is a moot point, and can be answered by some form of collective criticism, aka Metafilter, but I’m going to throw out some relevant news anyhow.

As I understand it, part of the problem with the first question is that publishers don’t own the ebook rights to their backlist. It wasn’t part of the standard contract back in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. This means authors can do it themselves, if they like. Please take a moment to read this post from John Scalzi before continuing.

This summer, literary agent Andrew Wylie realized that he had a bunch of clients who had great backlists which could be profitably released as ebooks without the added cost of involving a publisher. We’re talking people like John Updike, who do not need as much marketing for their backlist as others. So he tried that. Alas, it did not work out entirely well.

However, the (primarily) SF&F agency JABberwocky recently did the same thing. So that’s kind of interesting.

Coming Towards the End

Year’s just about done! I will do a retrospective post at some point in January, although I will not bother with stats. I will also finish up the last four or so games I played and ran in December. I might do a post for DDXP if I feel moved. I will not be cataloging all my 2011 LFR games, because I don’t think I’ll be playing as much LFR in the new year. More on that in the retrospective, or possibly in its own post, depending on how I feel.

116. Silver Lining (AGLA 1-5)

We finished up the day with Silver Lining. Mark B. ran; Colin, Pamela B., Matt B., Stacey, and Marc were the other players. I played Veil, my cranky deva avenger of Vergadain. You try getting hijacked by some dwarven god of merchants and thieves on your way to serve the elven pantheon and see how you feel.

By this time we were pretty punch-drunk. Matt’s barbarian pummeled everything. I cannot for the life of me remember who healed… it must have been Marc, cause Stacey was playing a Magic Missile-happy wizard and Pamela was playing a psion. This was absolutely fun and reminded me what it is I like about H1 play. As did How To Hunt A Demon, for that matter.

115. How To Hunt A Demon (IMPI 1-5)

Colin ran How To Hunt A Demon for our second game of the charity gameathon. I played Cine; the other players were Pamela and Matt B. (who run a Columbia game day that we wanna go to sometime), Stacey, Marc, and Mark B. This time we played low and Colin complained about it the whole time until he accidentally killed Mark’s warlord. I told you so, Colin!

I think possibly part of my earlier crankiness about Cine was because Spellgard was getting a bit claustrophobic, because this time he was pretty fun. Moving people around the battlefield continues to rock.

114. Shadows of the Knights (LURU 2-2)

Games & Stuff does a charity gameathon every year after Thanksgiving, so this year instead of waiting in line for Black Friday sales I went down to Glen Burnie to play a bunch of LFR. We set up three adventures for the day; I ran Shadows of the Knights to kick things off. My players were Colin, Mark B., Mike McK, Stacey, and Marc.

Playing high was probably a mistake – any second year adventure, you should take the high/low distinction seriously. I wound up underplaying the final fight a bit to avoid demolishing the PCs, which normally I wouldn’t do but who needs a bad start to a charity event? I like the mod a lot, though. Plenty of room for roleplaying.

113. Enemy of My Enemy (CORE 2-8)

I ran Enemy of My Enemy online last night for Matt, Oskar, Dareus, DanMathMan, Genolen, and Joey. I was pretty interested in seeing how the module held up under the assault of Matt’s wizard. Answer: pretty well, given that I spent some time thinking about tactics beforehand.

I dropped Matt once thanks to a lucky critical, and came very close to dropping him again towards the end of the second fight. If I’d thought a bit harder and pushed him into the Stinking Cloud rather than the Wall of Ice, I suspect he’d have gone down. I also had Genolen’s cleric nearly dead, and all in all things went quite well. The module is challenging but not overwhelming for optimized characters.

Minor rant: someone who will go unnamed was all “I want to cast a ritual to let us take an extended rest in ten minutes.” I was pretty sure that was a bad idea given that there was a big fight going on and time was limited, but just to make sure, I pushed a bit and found out what the ritual was. Turns out he wanted to cast Solace Bole, which is a great ritual, but there are two flaws with his plan.

First, it takes ten minutes to cast, but you’re pulled out of the world for an hour. They’d have failed the module doing that. Second, it’s from a Dungeon Magazine article, which means it’s not player-legal in LFR anyhow. So, um, cut that out, nameless dude.

112. The Sign of Four (CORE 2-11)

Susan, Mark B., Peter S., Noah S., Amanda, Jimmy, and I playtested The Sign of Four last night. Jimmy ran. I won’t talk about the adventure at all because, you know, playtest. I think, however, I can legitimately say that it rocks even in the non-final state. I picked a couple of nits and made some suggestions cause that’s how I am, but you could publish the sucker right now and you’d have a fine module.

Note to self: 11,760 XP, and full bundles/gold at low tier. Also, I bought two Potions of Resistance (cold) and only used one.