Top Ten

I don't pay attention (much) to stats and traffic on this blog, but we've just edged past 20 years, and I got curious. There have been almost 2500 posts on this blog, and over a million views. Most of the entries have had a very short shelf life, in that people catch up on them in the first couple days, then they go into the archives, never to be seen again by mortal eyes. But the platform does indicate which posts get the most traffic. 

This Spelljammer post is the all-time winner, with 12.5 k views. Spelljammer gets attention every so often (particularly around the new release of the setting), so it has perked up.

Here's a writeup of why I left TSR, which pretty much sums up to disappointment over a project that went south (Mystara), new opportunities, and realizing it was my time to move on.

Another big one is my announcement that I was leaving ArenaNet for Amazon Games. No hard feelings on this one - I had a great time and had a great time at Amazon as well (and now I am at Zenimax Online Studios, working on Elder Scrolls Online, for those who are keeping track).

Here's a review of the 5E Player's Handbook. At the time of release I had a credit as a Design Consultant, but the Design Consultant credits were removed from later printings because of ... stuff. That's cool. I have not been asked in on 6th Edition, and that's cool as well. 

I try to wrap my head around why layoffs for TSR and WotC always seemed to hit around Christmas-time. The image to the appropriate Dork Tower cartoon is broken, but you can still click on the space to call it up. Since the Hasbro acquisition, they seem to have calmed down, and now do layoffs and staff reductions throughout the year. So that's ... better, I guess?

I use this space to work out my own thoughts on stuff, and here's one about Tekumel, in which I try to work through the fact that good things can be created by bad people. Still thinking about the separation of artist and art.

The highest-rated non-game review is a book about games - Playing at the World, which was a detailed treatise on the origin of wargames and RPGs from the dawn of time to my first GenCon. Still an excellent book. Go read it.

This post is a reprise on the earlier post about the product that went south at TSR. It was an overview of the Mystara project that I had to abandon. I gave the original manuscript away to a fan who planned to make it available to others, but they ultimately could not get permission from WotC/Hasbro legal. Ah, well. At least I got the manuscript out of the house. 

Similar to the Spelljammer posting at the top, I did one on Marvel Super Heroes as well, giving a peak behind the process of creation. I did one on the Forgotten Realms as well, but that clocked in lower on this list. 

Finally, the sole political post on this showed up, and this one was complaining about advisory votes on the Washington State ballot. I have no idea why THIS one gets the nod - perhaps it caught an algorithmic wave. Ten years later, the legislature is removing these votes from the ballot. They are supposedly making the information available on a web site, but I'm not seeing any roll-out on this. Knowing what your representatives are voting on is good, but this particular process was just sad.

So what do I get out of this? Well, posts about gaming and gaming history seem to do well. Personal stuff is OK with major moves in my life. Missing are theatre reviews, local politics (mostly), and comments about commemorative quarters. But I'm still going to do them, since, you know, I'm doing this primarily for my own benefit. 

See you folks in another decade, maybe.

More (inevitably) later,

Twenty Years Before the Blog

Not a Hopper piece, but Van Gogh -"Two Crabs" (1889)
I just liked the way it looks.

Today, Grubb Street turns 20. The first test post was made at Thursday, 14 August, at 1:50 in the afternoon, PST, followed by this one, which talked about where the name came from (with more info about it here). And it is a surprise that it has lasted 20 years, particularly in such an ephemeral media as the modern Internet.  Other platforms for medium-length writing have blossomed and faded/disappeared over the two decades - Myspace, Google Plus, Livejournal, Twitter, yet this trusty little Blogger has survived (perhaps Google don't realize they are still running it). Though even this has diminished, as the practice of blogging has receded into the depths of hobbyist activity, like model railroading or HAM radios. Those hobbies are still around, but you never hear from them anymore.

Part this reduced throw-weight is Facebook. You look at the blogroll over to the right and you see a sudden drop about in entries starting in 2011. That was about the time I started in on Facebook, and those spur-of-the-moment bon mots that I dealt with HERE suddenly went over THERE. But mostly, I use Facebook to send people HERE when I make a new posting, chiefly because there is an easy link at the bottom of the entry to do so. Ditto X/Twitter. I actually only have a Twitter account because Stan! set one up for me. And I use it to send people HERE.

But I do pay attention to Twitter, even in its now-diminished times. There are enough people that I find interesting that I follow there, in particular Gail Simone, Jennell Jaquays, William Gibson, and Paula Poundstone. And I find the New York Times Pitchbot amusing (It does headlines you'd actually believe seeing in the NYT - "Cure for Cancer discovered - Why This Is Bad for Biden" plus REAL headlines that sound like the Pitchbot made them up) If they go away, I will probably go elsewhere as well. No, I would never pay for a blue check, and have so far been spared the whackos.

I do pay attention to Facebook, and do my part to train the algorithm. I've been liking every Edward Hopper painting I see, so as a result I'm getting more Edward Hopper (and other art) links. And every so often there are a raft of promoted right-wing links pushing books of dubious nature ("Slavery - think of it as a long-term internship") - they all get reported. I put this down at the level of weeding a lawn - mildly irritating but necessary.

I am paying attention to Reddit more as well. Their /news subreddit gives me different versions of the same story of the day. And I pay attention to subreddits about flags, maps, and leopards eating people's faces. There are two Seattle subreddits - /Seattle if you live in Seattle and like it, and /SeattleWa if you live in Bellevue and want to tell everyone that Seattle is dying. 

Will I join the new kids like Mastadon, Post, and BlueSky? No idea. They may join the roster of Dead Media like MeWe and Tapatalk or not. Haven't gotten a Bluesky invite yet. And I would still use it to post links back to this blog. 

In general, though, it feels like the environment of the Internet has gotten worse. The web pages are laced with pop-ups (which are a relic of the 80s) and adverts, crowding out real content. Useful content moves behind paywalls. Wikipedia and Internet Archives have survived, but seem to be under constant threat. Library access has gone up as a result. 

And lest you think I am just bagging on the newer tech, "traditional" television has pretty much died as well. I haven't been a "sit down and veg in front of the tube" guy for years, but when I do get on, there always seems to be SOME cable station that is running Harry Potter, LotR, or the Pirates movies. Those channels which used to have some sort of theme are all doing the same thing, and those that remain are just doing blocks of old content. I don't remember when the last time there was music on MTV or heres-how-you-cook shows on Food Network.  I still pay attention to television for sports, but even that has diminished with Apple+ taking the rights to Major League Soccer.

And when they split the cable feeds to create new channels, those feeds filled up with cheap reruns of old shows from the last century. Yeah, that's where the H&I, Retro, and ME TV stations came from. Cheap content. But, on the good side, Son of Svengoolie is back, who I haven't seen since WGN stopped broadcasting out here. 

I know, I'm sounding like the new age version of the old guy shooing kids off the lawn. So be it.

The blogroll has shrunk over the years. Colleagues and friends have slowly drifted off from media, but I keep them there only because they may sometime come back to life. I keep most of the other links available since I check on them semi-regularly. A lot of the local news links have soft gates - after visiting a certain number of times they cut you off and hit you up for a subscription. And the comics section is still there, though webcomics can be sporadic as well, since they're mostly run by the creatives. 

Does this environment have a future for me? I dunno. I'll probably keep going. I have a couple books in the till that need to be review. I do plays, book, and game reviews. I cannot avoid continuing my look at collectable quarter designs, which is something that I just can't seem to break the habit. Politics I tend to deal with in election season, and then keep it to stuff I can actually vote on. There are still SO many political blogs out there, so I don't think you need one more, and watching the GOP fall down the stairs yet again is SO EXHAUSTING after a while

And that's about it. I think I'm in this until they shut down the service, and doing this primarily for my own amusement. You're more than welcome to tag along.

More later, 

Another Change in the Life

 The challenge of sharing personal information is that there is an internal pressure to continue to share personal information.

Back here, I mentioned that I had a new job. Now I feel a need to post that I have ANOTHER, ALL-DIFFERENT new job.

I left Amazon for a new position with a small independent operation. Which, to be polite, did not work out. Details of woe and intrigue are only available to those who buy me a beer at a convention. Well, 1d4+1 beers.

In any event, I have spent the past two months looking for a new job. And it was pretty straight-forward, and I found a lot of opportunities, before joining up with the fine folks at Zenimax, working as a senior writer/designer for Elder Scrolls Online (ESO). I am still working from the home-office in Panther Lake, but the bulk of my colleagues are on the East Coast. 

So what did I do in my "time off"? Well, first off, I hesitate to call it time off, since what really happened was that I suddenly gained a new job, which was securing a full-time position. I hit the metaphorical and electronic pavement, renewing old contacts and scanning the linked-in for related positions. I had lunches with a lot of former colleagues. I filled out a lot of forms. I read. I played a lot of games, in particular games for companies that I was interviewing for. For example, I FINALLY uncracked the copy of ESO a colleague (now boss) gave me a couple years back. And that was all good. 

 But also I stopped blogging for a little bit, taking a break from that part of my life as well, though not intentionally. A LOT of blogs have gone by the wayside over the years, and it sometimes feels like I one of those old guys who keeps a short-wave radio in the basement. Some bloggers have graduated into paid accounts, some have moved onto youtube and twitch, and some have just run out of things to say. And that's cool. I think I'm going to stay with it, for a little while, if for no other reason than to bore others with plays, books, and collectable quarters. And the Lovely Bride has heard all my stories. 

So, new deal is that I am working with a company on the East Coast and concentrating on writing. That's good for the moment. I can use some stability for the time being. And if things change again, I will post. Or maybe not this time.

More later, 

Life in the Time of the Virus, Still Continued

I close out our third month of seclusion, and we are fine. A little tired of it all. A little worn out. A little grumpy. But fine.

In this period I helped ship a computer game. Call it my COVID project. Our entire team was working from home, and that in itself is amazing. But with shipping, even though there are about a bajillion things that still need to be done to support/evolve/fix the game, I feel that one of the great pressures on me has passed, and feel a little exhausted as a result.

Part of the recent tasks as we moved to release involved recording voices for future content. So I and my writers were all in our homes, my producer in HIS home in Southern California, our actors in THEIR homes, and our poor audio engineer in the studio in Burbank by himself pulling it all together. My audio guy says the result sounds pretty good. Yeah, I remain amazed that we managed it all.

In the larger medical world the curve is flattening, but our part of the state is not at Phase 2 yet (we are at a modified Phase 1.5, which is what happens when nerds do planning - we break things down into smaller and smaller components). We are getting there - new cases have dropped, death toll is down (but still with us). The whole point of flattening the curve has been not to avoid all risk of infection, but to not overload the medical system with everyone getting sick at once. We have succeeded, yet there remains more to do.

I hear reports that there is herd immunity. I'm not sure about that. COVID-19 is a corona virus, like the common cold. I haven't seen much in the way of herd immunity to that over the years. I am dubious.

I hear reports that the there are mutations that are making the disease weaker, primarily reports from Italy. While that appeals to me in a conclusion to The Andromeda Strain sort of way, I don't see enough movement to support the concept. I remain dubious.

And I have a nervousness that stems from the tendency to admit COVID-19 deaths only when they are absolutely sure that it was COVID-19. So a lot of deaths are now recorded as from pneumonia, with the result that we now have a PNEUMONIA epidemic as the yearly totals are now 3 and 4 times what they normally are. This echoes the AIDS epidemic of my youth, where a lot of deaths of young men were hidden under the guise of "pneumonia".

But we are finally getting the point of wide-spread testing, which is a good thing. We've been guessing for a while now, but of this I am not dubious about.

My plague beard has graduated from "scraggly" to "grizzled".

The robocalls are returning to their natural habitat. One woman keeps calling to tell me there is nothing wrong with my credit. That's nice.

The Lovely Bride and I have succumbed to baking. She has been trying to refine a Kaiser roll recipe that has been kinda of weird on her.  We are making pizza dough, the type that rises overnight, using a recipe from the newspaper. This recipe is clearly meant to just be read, but not implemented. The LB disagrees with about every step of the recipe, so discussion result. Fortunately, after it is all said and done, we get to eat the evidence (and, after all the prep, it really wasn't bad at all).

But people are tired of all this. I get it. I'm not particularly happy myself, and I've got it really easy. I still have my work and talk to my co-workers continually over the 'net. Shortages have been spotty (the latest - shower cleaner and mushroom soup). People have been distancing. Masks are more common than not, particularly at the farmers' markets that are slowly coming back. Less so at the Fred Meyers.

And yet I feel this low-level irritation and agitation. I have less patience on the road, going out for sundries, even though there is less traffic. I have less patience behind the inevitable person at the grocery store paying in loose change. And while I am sure no one has turned the traffic lights to red longer just to peeve me off, but peeve me off they do.

I feel a little bad feeling this way - as I say, I got it easy. No, I've got it REALLY easy. While I was in the basement recording voices long distance, workmen peeled off my back balcony and replaced it with a larger, wider, sturdier, non-rotting version (our other COVID project). Two weeks to get it to the present state, where a base coat is drying. We are delayed because the flooring guy disagrees with what the engineer had put down on his drawing for flashing, while the local municipality agrees but will only authorize doing it the contractor's way if the engineer buys off on it. So we are stalled for the moment. But seriously, this is the worst thing happening? We have it as dead easy.

We endure and we continue and we thrive.We row on.

More later,

State of the Blog

Wow, it has been a long time since I talked about the Blog itself. I have been on this for over 15 years now, and still don't have anything worth saying.

The landscape has changed. Blogging is regarded as a bit old-fashioned in the face of newer tech, sort of like the fate of CB Radios and HAM stations. Not quite dead media, but really subdued. Everyone has gone over to the Facebookery and the Tweeter accounts, but I like blogging. It forces me to organize my thoughts a bit better, and to create a meaningful narrative through-line. Facebook is a great place for that one-off bon mot, and I use it that way, along with "hey, look at this link". But that in itself steals some of the utility I used the blog for.

And I use Facebook like I used to use Google+ for increasing the bandwidth for what is here on the blogspace, and that's OK as well. Occasionally something blows up big and I get hundreds of hits, but most of the time it is a fairly comfortable amount of reads and reblogs. I'm really not doing it for the popularity, but for me (though the rest of you are welcome to tag along).

Ditto for the Facebook. It is for me, and have no problem unfollowing problematic people I know IRL and unfriending outright bozos, who are usually strangers. I have a wide variety of people on the Facebook spanning the political spectrum, but have avoided the ones that repost Russian memes and write in all-caps. And as a result, my Facebook is pretty stable and positive - I have not had to bounce anyone for spoiling Rise of Skywalker before I saw it. Thanks, folks.

I miss Google+ by the way. I used it to line up all of the other blogs that I followed, and had a good mix of posting. MeWe isn't doing it nearly enough for me. A friend got me a twitter account (grubbstweet), but I rarely remember to cross-post to it.

My biggest limitation is a lack of spare time. I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but it is about an hour drive to the day job nowadays, and that leaves precious little time to do anything else. I get home, do a few chores, have dinner, crash early, get up early to start the process again. It gets in the way of other things, and when I DO have the chance, I read, play games on the iPad or watch comfort-videos (Great British Baking Show, of course).

And there are things that I have always posted about and will probably continue to post about - collectible quarters, local elections, books, theater. As we move into the presidential election year, there will probably be more of that, though it is a grisly task and most folk know where I lean already. I'd like to do an overview of American Presidential Elections, and how each one was the WORST ELECTION EVER. I'd like to talk about the weird histories of our holidays (I would start on March 1, which SHOULD be the first day of the year). I'd even like to post some actual honest to god gaming content here, but that's unlikely given the rest of my life at the moment.

And that's about it. Happy New Year, folks, and see you around.

More later,

Reading the Realms

One of the advantages of blogging as opposed to living solely on the Facebooks is that Facebook doesn't really have a sense of permanence. You put something up, and within a day it is buried beneath a huge pile of other posts.

So, here's a note that I did an interview for the Reading the Realms podcast.  Max and Paula have been reading the entirety of the Forgotten Realms novels, and have had ancient authors such as Jim Lowder and myself in for interviews to talk about our work. True old-school goodness viewed through a modern lens.

Here's the link for the entirety of podcasts on Soundcloud as well.

More later,

Dyvers Blogging

So Charles Akins has nice little blog called Dyvers, and he has put together the Great Blog Roll Call for RPGs. And in addition to the Roll Call, he also targets the Best Reads of the Week. And this is great thing, even though that a lot of the description in the roll call has the horrible line "Dark since XXXX", meaning that they are rarely kept going and may have closed up shop entirely.

This is the fate of a lot of gaming blogs, and there are many reasons. A lot of cool stuff has already been said. People are in abeyance with diverse systems until the next D&D arrives. But most importantly, I think that is it because there are a lot more different platforms out there for communication. Long form blogging is a bit more of a challenge in a world where you can slap up an image, a link, or a stray thought at a moment's notice.

But there is a extremely comprehensive listing here, complete with additions and notes. here's what he says about Grubbstreet:

Former TSR author Jeff Grubb's blog. This bad boy mostly focuses on his life and on the world around him, though on occasion he will stray into old tributaries.Updates: Depending on what's going on in his area, between two and twenty entries a month. 

I think that's a pretty fair cop, and a warning that sometime, somewhere, I REALLY should start talking about gaming again. But if you're looking for real content, here's a great place to start.

More later,

A Late Anniversary

So without much fanfare or notice, we passed the ten-year mark here at Grubb Street, which was longer than a lot of my employment at most places over the years.  The first post was a modest one:

This is a test. This is only a test. In the event of real content, enlightenment would be provided. 

And real (well, mostly real) content followed. The next post was about the history of the original Grub Street. The next entry I learn how to do headers. By the end of the first month, I'd done a restaurant review (Canlis), a book-on-tape-review, made fun of a local politico, and called someone a pinhead. After that I was off to the races.

Over ten years. According to the sidebar, over 2000 posts. Mostly the same backdrop and organization as we started with. Most of the same spelling and grammar errors. It has slowed a bit, and part of that is because one-shot comments or pictures now go out to Facebook or Google+. But for long-form tomfoolery I keep coming back to blogging.

This is not, and was never intended to be, a successful blog. Blogs that survive by bringing traffic back again and again do so by selecting an audience and a theme and sticking with it. If you want to talk about broccoli, every post is about broccoli, and your audience comes to your blog because of your broccoli knowledge, and both you and your audience self-select. Similarly, if you hatge asparagus, and your blog is filled with every asparagus recall and health warning about asparagus and crackpot theories about how asparagus was responsible for the Fall of Rome and again, you end up with an audience of asparagus haters. ("Yeah, I hit all the red lights on the way to work today. Thanks, Asparagus")

But I find that boring. It is tough enough for me to get through a full political season, or a theater season, or talk about collectible quarters on a yearly posting without freestyle medication. But I will confess that I am sympathetic to those who follow this blog in the faint, faint chance that I will get back to talking about games. And we will. Sometime.

By the same token, this is hardly a personal therapy blog where every problem is suddenly blog-cast out to the rest of the world. I don't write anything I don't want my Mom to bring up when I call home. But I do like the sense of variety. If this blog is selling anything (other than my most recent book or game - say, did I mention that Scourge is a really good Star Wars novel?), it is selling my public persona - amused and amusing (I hope). Thoughtful and on occasion thought-provoking. Not scary. Creative, capable, and available for the creative odd job.

Anyway, with the non-anniversary, I finally went back to the Google Dashboard and starting looking at feedback. I don't take comments on this blog (I do take email, but since that denies the public posturing of comments, I don't get a lot of them), but I can scan the number of hits particular entries have received. Here's what the top scorers since 2007 (which is when the feature apparently came on line) are:

An article about Spelljammer.
An article about Christmas Layoffs at WotC.
A political article about the recent Advisory Votes. Seriously, what's the deal here? Was I the only guy in King County writing about this?
An article about how D&D always competed with itself.
An article about the original Marvel Super Heroes game.
An article about the Forgotten Realms comic books.
One of my "DOW Breaks" articles, which became a regular feature where I pretend I know anything about economics.
And article about Lovecraft, and the difficulty of loving the writing and hating the writer.
A review of Playing At The World.
A link-filled summary of the first year's anniversary of Guild Wars 2.

So, were I smart guy, I would obviously fill my blog with stuff about the "Good Old Days" and not deal with anything else. But I don't, because this blog is for me, which means that sometimes I will talk about interesting stuff, and sometimes I will talk about interesting stuff FOR ME. And I'm pretty happy with it, and you know, the Internet is a big place, so you asparagus-haters can go off an find some other blog to follow.

And oh yeah, I'll get back to talking about gaming any time now. Really.

More later,

Light Blog-Keeping

So, I've done a little housekeeping here at Grubb Street. No, not on the appearance - it is just as clunky and old-school as the day I made it, and I am still hoping that it will soon slide into the real of kitschy and retro-cool before I have to actually do any real graphic design work on it.

No, I've finally gotten around to updating the blogroll on your right. Dating back to those primeval times when Livejournal was actually a thing, it has been in serious need of an update for some time. Many of the blogs listed have not been updated for months if not years, as their owners switched over to other media such as Facebook or Google+ or simply became confused and wandered off into the sunset. Heck, even the Alliterates site now sends you their Facebook page. So that's gone, and the guys I actually read are folded into the "Friends and Colleagues" heading. So look there for them.

"Stuff I'm Reading" is pretty unchanged, with a couple blogs that have laid fallow for a while removed and one called "What If" by the guy behind the xkcd comic added.

A new, large, category is "Local Media" which summarizes some of the major and minor blogs in the region. As we move towards November, I'm going to be checking out a lot more of these, so these are for my reference more than yours:
    The Seattle Times, also called "Fairview Fannie" (the NYTimes gets "The Grey Lady", which is much cooler), is the surviving daily paper. More conservative than most of its surroundings, it would be considered moderate and mainstream in most other cities. Loves Boeing, Microsoft, the 'Hawks, Soccer, the environment, conservative thought local ownership of the media. Hates unions, Mayor McGinn*. Its political blog is pretty good for baseline information and the conventional wisdom.
    The Stranger, on the other hand, is a foul-mouthed weekly that has through some dire alchemy turned into the better paper for reporting local politics. A good mixture of art and politics, and its multi-contributor blog maintains the writers' unique voices (you can tell Paul Constant from Charles Mudede from Goldy without checking the byline).
   The Seattle P-I used to be the other daily paper in town, more liberal and sensational in its reporting. It is no more, and its website is a shell of its former self. Its political cartoonist, Dave Horsey, known for frequent nudity in his cartoons and winning numerous awards, now works in LA.
   The Seattle Weekly, which pretty much crashed and burned creatively when it was bought by the conservative Village Voice Media (don't let the name fool you), has been making a slow and painstaking recovery under its new management, a Canadian company called Black Press (the owner's name is David Black). Still doesn't endorse candidates, but it is at least paying attention to the decision-making policies.
    Publicola was once independent, but now operates under the purview of the Seattle Met, the local entertainment/food/art magazine for the upscale. It is politely liberal, is stocked with people who used to work for the Stranger, but are not as shouty.
   Crosscut is a bit more growly, and was a place where old Seattlites can kvetch about how good it used to be, and runs articles by former GOP chair Chuck Vance telling the Dems how they should be doing things. Also home for a lot of vets from the media listed above.
   Seattlish is by "three mouthy broads" and is pretty amusing, though I think they are trying to compete with the Stranger at being the most NSFW.
   And lastly, the Kent Reporter, which, like the Renton Reporter and a number of other similar papers in the region, including the Weekly, have been gathered by the Black Press (it sounds like the newsletter for a Space Marine chapter, doesn't it?) under the heading of Sound Publishing. A friend of my mine noted a few weeks ago that it has been caught committing "real journalism" recently as opposed to the local-business friendly announcements of ccout troop meetings and charity car washes normally found in suburban papers. They have been the ones with the most detailed coverage of the recent mess involving the Kent City Council candidate stealing large sums from his own mother, and as a result I am paying more attention.

"Funny Pixels" sees the sunsetting of Superhero Girl (wonderful, done, and now in a collection) and Gutters (OK, on a break, also in collections), but the return of Stan!'s 10' by 10' Toon, plus the addition of Finding Chaos, Questionable Content, and Scandanvia and the World, all of which can be NSFW. Just so you know when you're browsing this at work Monday morning.

And that is about it. I probably should update this more often.

More later,

*Just about every other blog on this list has noted that the Times has engaged in a "organized attack on the mayor", to which the paper responded "We aren't that organized".

Fall Cleaning

So I've made a few tweaks to the blog - no, I'm not screwing around the formatting, since the one thing that irritates people more about a poor, boring design is CHANGING that poor blog design, but I have made a few tweaks to the blogroll off to house right.

The Alliterates are pretty much all there, though to be honest I'm tempted to winnow through them, since many of them haven't been updated for a year. Ditto on the Friends and Colleagues, as some of them have devolved into little more than twitter relays. And some are just hanging on the borderline with only a few posts in the past few months. And some have changed addresses without sending out a note, and I've caught up with that. Y'all know who you are.

Stuff I'm reading is just that: stuff I'm reading. When I stop paying attention, that's when they go (and since I get this question: Mt. Lebanon PA is where I grew up and how I knew they had a massive windstorm this past week).

Larger changes are in the funny pixels section. Gone is Doodlestan, only because Stan! has stopped doing it for a while (he is still doing 10x10 Toons). Added to the list are:
- Abominable Charles Christopher I put this next to Freakangels, since it is a weekly, but has great art and has talking animals and is something I don't normally follow but it is really, really good. All the talking animals are presented as real animals with human problems, while the protagonist is a mute bigfoot of a creature. Worth following from the begins.
- Scenes from a Multiverse is daily Mon-Fri, and very weird and enjoyable, each cartoon taking place in a different plane of existence. Except when they repeat. Like the stuff with the Empress of the Universe who is about to invade a planet just for the antiquing.
- Surviving the World is similar to the Tree Lobsters and xkcd in that it deals with science. In this case it consists of a guy in a lab coat with a baseball hat and chalkboard. Wonder where he could find a chalkboard in this age of whiteboards and markers.
- 9 Chickweed Lane I know what you're thinking - "Hey, this is a newspaper strip!" Well, it's not in MY newspaper anymore, and is one of the sexiest strips still in the business, along with one of the few that actually runs longer story arcs. At its best when it is talking about dancing, arts, and the hallmarks of felinity.

That's about it. It is a rainy Sunday afternoon and, despite their best efforts, the Seahawks won against the Chargers. And I know I'm going to have to start talking initiatives Real Soon Now - just don't rush me.

More later,

Housekeeping

I've done a little housekeeping here on Grubb Street, which matches the ongoing clearing of all the old game material I keep in the archive room (the room in the basement with the "Beward of the Leopard" sign on it).

You might notice the difference in either, since I am not engaging in too great an overhaul on this site. It always bothers me when I go to a regular site and suddenly everything is changed and the backdrop is sudden pink and the fonts change. No, I'm pretty much happy with my simple arrangements here, and figure that you are as well.

Most of the changes happen over in the right hand side of the blog, where I've dropped a few blogs and sites that were not producing any new content, and added a bunch more. One major piece I've added is the "Stuff I'm Reading" header, which are sites that I find I am checking daily. They include
Kobold Quarterly - Currently running the King of the Monsters contest which I helped judge.
Cliff Mass Weather Blog - An excellent blog on weather in the Pacific Northwest, which consumes only 68% of our conversations out here.
Bad Astronomy - Sponsored by Discover Magazine, Phil Plait deals with science issues at large in addition to Astronomy, which I started reading during one of this new century's frequent asteroid scares.
Ken Levine - Baseball announcer and comedy writer who has written for M*A*S*H, Cheers, and Frasier, as well as the Tom Hanks movie Volunteers.
Mark Evanier - Well known comic book author and animation scriptwriter, best known for attaching the words to Segio Aragonnes' drawings in Groo.
Andrew Sullivan - My favorite pot-smoking gay conservative, has the best coverage of the Iran Uprising of anyone in the business. Anyone.
Edge of the American West - A group blog on history and philosophy. I don't remember how I found it, but I just keep coming back.
Making Light - A long-standing blog here, moved to this new location, this is the personal blog of Teresa and Patrick Neilsen Hayden, with frequent quest.
Blog Lebo - A blog reporting on my original home town, Mount Lebanon, PA. Still trying to find one of similar quality for Kent, which will become my new home town come middle of this year.

I also installed the gadget (tech term) for displaying followers under the "Minions" header. In other news, I have followers. Color me surprised. I'm not sure what you get for being a follower, but if it involves me sending out t-shirts, I'm disabling the darn thing again.

And that's about it. I'll continue to tinker with the site, but generally I'm pretty happy with the way it looks, so its a keeper right now. Oh, and I'm facebooking, only because that's the new hotness, and rebroadcasting this blog on that site. And that's pretty much it for major changes for the Grubb Street blog for this year.

Now watch, we'll get brain-blast technology all of this will be old and busted-down by January 2011.

More later,

Facebookery

It's been about a month since I lost my mind and started a Facebook page. So how do I like it?

It's been pretty interesting, but definitely a mixed bag. It is a living example of Your Mileage May Vary. But it is very effective because it understands the simple fact that not everyone communicates the same way.

And this last bit, I think, is the reason for Facebook's "overnight" popularity. People communicate differently, using different tools, and FB tries to get as many of those tools into play all at once.

Me? I tend to feed my blog over into the notes section from RSS. It's not a bad little method of using my FB page as a relay transmitter, picking up people who might not otherwise link to my blog (slackers). I'm comfortable with that. In addition, FB gives me a bit of control in allowing comments to friends (now that you know, don't abuse the privilege).

I also tend to use the "status" section, laying out whatever is on my mind at the moment (which is usually a song fragment or a movie quote). It is actually kind of fun just throw out a line and see how many people respond to it (if any - I'm not particularly vain about it). And it is fun to see the streams cross of acquaintances. One thread was responded to by a younger friend in Chicago, followed by a former co-worker from WotC, followed by a former editor from DC, followed by a current RPG-playing friend, followed by a former co-worker at Pokemon, USA. I think #2 and #5 know each other, but otherwise we're all over the place.

That said, there are features I do not use much. Email I am comfortable with, and see other long-time friends on. IM? Not so much, and I don't respond unless I am comfortable talking to you in person (IM is a "cold" medium which does not allow much in the way of emotional subtext - while in these entries I can consider and revise a bit, the time pressure of IM does not allow it).

The apps? I was buried initially in Monte Pythons gifts, free drinks, offers to join knighthood or a mafia gang or whatever. After thinking about it long and hard, I chose to ignore these. Dond't be offended - I don't dislike anyone who sent one (and do pick up the occasional Cthulhu Mythos bit), but I don't communicate that way. But its cool if that's the way YOU communicate. It is good to hear from you, even if I say no.

Similarly pictures. I have one. I really should get around to a Flickr account, but that picture is just about all I need. Until I get bored with it.

I like the "Home" and "Friends" pages because it gives me a way of casually stalking my friends without being intrusive. What, you don't do that as well? Again, it's a different way of communicating, and potentially one of the creepier ones.

Anyway, the numbers are probably topping out from the "new friends" list, and while I will probably keep monitoring it, I will concentrate on this blog. So I would say that it is a case of so far, so good.

Oh, and of course while I was working on all this, it comes down that Facebook has unilaterally changed its terms of service, to the tune that ANYTHING posted on the page, regardless of origin, becomes theirs. It sounds like someone was sleeping while the lawyers were making their last presentation to the board. There is a massive push-back at the moment, with people cutting accounts left and right. The brass is assuring that despite this language, they would NEVER use that information for badthings. It's just a legal thing.

Uh-huh.

Here's a little Terms of Service of my own. Feel free to attach it to your facebook notes as well.

"The information within this post, including the content, phrasing, spelling, alphabet letters used, and font choice is the sole ownership of the original poster. Reposting for any reason the original poster does not like (as determined by the original poster) can result in any and all recourse, not limited to Big Louie and Knuckles coming over and having a friendly chat with you in the dead of the night."

Not that I would EVER use this type of unilateral power. It's just a legal thing.

More later,

Update: in the face of a massive user uprising, Facebook has declared it all a misunderstanding, declared they never intended to do what they were doing, and shelved any changes until they decide how to sugarcoat it better. Yeah, the lawyers who pushed this through probably have some 'splaining to do.

Getting Faced

You know how it is - you're having a pleasant evening, and you open a bottle of wine. And you have a glass and it is quite tasty, so you have another, then another, then that bottle is running dry and you open another, less-expensive vintage because your taste buds have already been pickled and then you wake up the next morning and realize that you've done something you'd never do otherwise.

Like sign up for Facebook.

Actually, I didn't have that much wine, but I have been getting the continual pings from friends who mention that they are on Facebook, and you can come look at their Facebook and hey, the water's fine over here in Facebook! So I created an account, invited about ten people I know, and started poking around.

First, there's the networking thing. I've already got 50+ friends in about 12 hours without even telling anyone, so I guess that's interesting. And while some of them are fans, most are people I know in real life, and have talked to in the last ten years or so. And almost all are from the Hobby Industry, none from college or high school (though, of course, when I was in high school, we still had crank-handled telephones, so there may be an age thing going on here).

Still, it seems to be a low-impact blog, which for me is a bit of a challenge, since I tend to treat blogging as a full-contact sport. I don't quite understand the applications yet, and rage against the lack of customization available (I think I was looking for a place to stash my CV online - I don't think this is it). It also seems to be a timesuck at the moment, but I expect that to pass.

In general, though, it feels like a convention. You go to GenCon and wandering the floor is one of the regular features, if only to re-connect with the people you haven't seen since the last time you were at the convention. I don't know how the continual contact of networking software will affect this feature of convention-going, but I do find it interesting.

For the moment, I think I'll have some more wine, and check out this Linked-In thing.

More later,

Thanksgiving Break

So I go away for a week and no one complains? Sounds like the death of blogging as we know it.

OK, it was a holiday weekend, and I spent the bulk of it either preparing to go (wrapping up stuff) or going (to Corning, California), or coming back. And now I'm back, with not much to report.

Corning is a pleasant town at the head of the Imperial Valley (that big green thumbprint in the middle of the California topo map). It is best know for its olives, and eating new olives will spoil you for more traditional vectors forever, so be warned. We had T-Giving dinner with my sister-in-law (who lives there with her husband) and mom-in-law (who was visiting there and is now visiting here), sat on the veranda overlooking the almond and olive groves, taunted the cats and played tug with the dog. A pleasant time.

And the weather cooperated - very warm, very sunny in CA, only a few showers coming back north. Even the trip wasn't bad - brother-in-law lent me a set of lecture takes on genetics, which always have been a weak spot in my knowledge base (most of my knowledge on the subject being limited to the Astonishing X-Men).

Back home, and Seattle is fully in the grip of fall - grey, drizzling, roggy, and with too much leave clutter being tracked into the house. Ah, it is good to be back home.

More later,

Play: Faw Down Go ...

boom by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Directed by Jerry Manning, Seattle Repertory Theatre, through Dec 14.

Here's a little plug before we get down to cases: The Seattle Rep has a blog. Promotional and bits of backstage stuff, and worth checking out.

So, where were we? Ah yes, boom is a play about the end of the world. And while not all end of the world plays are science fictional in nature, this one is sufficiently so that the Lovely Bride said upon leaving the theater, "You know, there should be more science fiction plays."

I'm not sure about this sentiment, but let me get back to that after the summary.

boom is about the end of the world. Mad, muddled, ichthyologist Jules (Nick Garrison) has proof of the upcoming extinction-level event and comes up with a half-assed plan for humanity to survive, which includes selecting his Eve from an online ad. Acerbic Jo (Chelsey Rives) answers the ad and shares his bunker, but isn't looking for anything beyond a story to tell. And then there is Barbara (Gretchen Krich) who plays god (and the tympani), unseen by the other two actors. Barbara is guardian spirit and embattled bureaucrat and storyteller, and much of the resolution of the play is about how stories are told and what the heck we are really seeing.

And part of this is because this is a science fiction play, and in saying that you create a set of values and expectations. When you say something is a murder mystery, your mind immediately locks into the mode of identifying the victim, and later the villain, in the piece, such that it can overwhelm the rest of the story. Ditto a lot of science fiction - if all those decades of Twilight Zones and Outer Limits have taught us anything, it is that sf has a twist and moral message and you're suddenly looking for the trick instead of concentrating on the story itself. And part of the craft hinges of pulling off the trick without cheating the reader/viewer.

Nachtrieb pulls it off, such that I was looking for the trick, then got pulled back into the characters and the multiple levels of the play, so that the trick (well, tricks) became part of the fabric itself. And Nachtrieb (and director Manning) plays fair with leaving out all the clues so when the reveals are made, you are neither astounded nor indignant - rather, it is sewn into the flow of the play itself.

Garrison makes a soft, sad sack Adam to the new world, having a plan but lacking the heartless nature needled to carry it out. Rives is his Eve, sharp-tongued and angry, both at her captor and her life. And Krich, decked out in a flowing pantsuit that looks like something from the Star Trek (Original Series) garage sale, sells the point beautifully as we realize that her goofy, new-agey mannerisms are not that goofy after all. She is a slapdash Wizard in her elevated Oz above the stage, with percussion and switches and a lit panel answering to greater powers.

The other thing about SF is that we expect all the pieces to fit together. And not all of them do, here, but then its not QUITE the science fiction play. Good theater opens other doors, and the questions of storytelling and legacy filters into this play about Armageddon. So I will disagree with the LB - It is not quite an SF play, but it is close enough for army work, and it carries itself off well.

It was the end of the world as we know. Yeah, I feel fine.

More later,

Novel-Gazing

So I'm lost in personal introspection at the moment. Have a meme instead - Typealyzer - What Type is Your Blog:

ISTP - The Mechanics
[ISTP]
The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generelly prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Housekeeping

It's a bit chill and overcast in the real world, so I've been doing some clean-up on the virtual Grubb Street today. In the process I've taken everything over from Blogger's old busted-down "templates" to their new-fangled "layouts". And in doing so I am striving to make the new version look pretty much like the old version. And I think I'm close.

One thing that really bothers me is it feels like there is too much space between the body copy of these entries and the sidebar column. (Or to be more accurate - the sidebar column is too wide). I'm not sure about how to tighten this up, and if anyone has the knowledge, drop me a line.

Also, I'm taking recommendations on counters. I had one up here as an experiment, but it just measured concurrency (number of people looking at the page at any one time), not hits. The old one did have a nifty "heat" map, which said that most of the people tuning in were the US East of the Mississippi and small patches in the Pacific NW and Northern Europe. Which was cool and all, but not what I was looking for.

The new draft has many of the old links in place, and along with that a bloglist for new entries for some of the contributors. We'll see how this one works out.

So if you're not getting this in any sane fashion, or have further suggestions, drop me an email (under the photo) and I'll see what can be done.

More later,

Funny Pixels

So as part of the general futzing with the page, I'm chosen to engage in the most dangerous subject first - messing around with the comics page. Any dead-tree newspaper person can tell you, you can move news of national importance to page A5, or hire a troupe of syphilitic baboons to run the editorial page, and the readers won't care. But drop "Marmaduke" and watch the pitchforks and torches come out.

The general rule - is "I read this stuff, you should too", but I recognize that some of it will offend more delicate or reasonable sensibilities. So I'll add both ratings and how frequently they update.

Girl Genius is the best of the lot, from Phil and Kaja Folgio. The comic is a steampunk adventure where the world is divided into Mad Scientists and the rest of us. The strip melds both outlandish inventions with interesting characters and tops it off with some of the best dialog in the biz (Rated G, Three times a week, regular like clockwork)

PVP started off as a gaming strip but has gotten more about the characters over time, which I guess is a mainstream move if there were comics that still did character-based comedy (OK, outside of Crankshaft). Saga of the staff of a computer game magazine and their mascot troll (Rated PG (fart jokes), daily, pretty dependable, misses occasionally, and sometimes relies on "guest artists" (like now)).

Penny Arcade is still a gaming strip, which means is will be impenetrable for those not nose-deep in the industry. This is why I post to the blog page, which often gives some sort of framework for the strip. Local guys, incredibly successful, darn funny (Rated a hard R for language and topics, three times a week, incredibly dependable).

Order of the Stick is a D&D strip that plays deeply inside the beltway, with references to various rules in the game. A party of Fisher-Price style adventurers get involved with larger epics. If you don't know about Flumphs, you may get lost.(Rated G, Supposedly three times a week, but pretty erratic. Server clogs up every time they launch a new strip).

xkcd is stick figures, philosophy, the Internet, advanced math, and code. Yeah, its pure geekdom in its unrefined form, but it is hard not to spend an afternoon just going through all the previous ones. (PG, three times a week, dependable like the radioactive decay of a strontium atom).

Sinfest is a religious/philosophy comic with an anime style and the occasional hot babe. Jesus, God, the Devil, Buddha, a dragon, a horndog, a heartbreaker, and a drugged out pig. Best recent strip: Punxsutawney Jesus (PG-13 for substance abuse, language, occasional hot babe, Daily, pretty dependable).

Darths and Droids is a photostrip telling the Stars Wars story as if it was an RPG. Start from the beginning (Rated G, Three times a week, As dependable as R2-D2)

Diesel Sweeties is weird, since it has a paper version (which auditioned in the Seattle Times and is now auditioning in the Seattle P-I). Both are about young hipsters and robots who are drawn like primitive computer graphics, but the online version has more sex and drugs. Don't know how this plays with the traditional comic page crowd. (Rated PG-13 for drugs, sex, robot sex. Weekdays but they miss occasionally)

Don't Forget To Validate Your Parking comes out of the recent writer's strike. Mike Le writes on his laptop and takes phone calls. That's about it. Just got a gig with WRITTEN BY magazine. Yeah, I shortened the name so it could fit on the blogroll. Deal. (Rated PG-13 for language, Weekly, pretty regular, but also pretty new).

Freak Angels is the closest thing to a traditional comic book, in that it shows up in five and six-page chunks at a time. In the near future, a group of teenagers have destroyed the world. This is what happens next. (Rated R for occasional nudity and the British cursing that Americans find cute. Every Friday, regular so far).

Doodle-A-Day, also called Doodlestan, is last but not least - the daily sketches of Stan!, who is a really cool guy and always makes me smile (Rated G, Daily, Hasn't missed a day)

More later

All Fools Plus One

So yesterday was April Fool's Day, and there were mild pranks. Guild Wars turned everyone on the server into stick figures, while WoW announced its new character class, the Bard, which uses a Guitar Hero interface. One friend got me entirely by announcing she was leaving for Africa, and since she is usually such a level-headed individual but we haven't talked for a while, I bit on that one totally.

And I discovered Rickrolling.

OK, I'm going to spoil the joke right off the bat - it is a long-standing Internet tradition to send your buddies a link with disturbing information, or a picture of a duck. Over the past few months, this has evolved into sending people links to Rick Astley's one-shot hit Never Going To Give You Up.

So yesterday, the meme went completely viral, and everyone sent links about it. My first warning was when the wall to the art department started vibrating with the song. They loved it, and every time they got a link, they cranked it. But the best one caught me, labeled Hilarious Muppet Bloopers made me laugh.

Future generations will look back to this era and wonder how any work was actually accomplished in those carefree days before the robots took over.

More later,

My Bloggy, Bloggy, Life

So the hail was still on the ground when I got up this morning, sublimating into a thick, "can't see your hand in front of your face much less drive" kind of fog. But instead of talking about that (and its April Fools Day, so who's going to believe it?), let me just talk about the state of the blog.

I think I've mentioned before that I do blogging absolutely wrong. Apparently, the trick is to get a subject, and bang away at it continually, which creates a pool of individuals who tune in regularly. If you write about comics, write about nothing but comics (OK, and movies based on comics). If you feel strongly about a political policy or official, slam away at that. Your market self-selects, and will come back if they agree with you, and expect a certain type of mental meal each time.

I don't do that. I'm all over the joint. Collectible Quarters. Local Politics. The Commute. Comics. Weather. What I'm working on (usually LONG AFTER I'm done working on it). I could do nothing but push the latest cool thing I've been working on, but that's kind of boring. Ditto for the idea of covering politics - god knows that talk radio and the cable channels have seized a political viewpoint and just keep beating the drum.

But the other cost of being so wideband is that I have a lot of things I've been MEANING to say that I haven't gotten around to yet. I have a pile of books that I've been meaning to review. I have politics that I've meant to comment on that have now moved into history. I have a handful of half-written articles on holidays and imaginary states (Franklin, Kawana, and Sequoia are all on my to-do list) that have been waiting their turn. And it has been increasingly obvious that, while I don't have any great theory of game design, the old stories need to be told, to pass on to a new generation how we got here.

Another trouble from broadband coverage - I want to be as accurate as is reasonable. I have no problem being wrong - I just want to make sure I'm not obviously wrong. So I check out net links and consider sources, which takes time, which slows me down even further.

So what to do? For the moment, I'm going to try to keep up a daily dose, and not feel bad about posting multiple times a day (I have been trying to keep it to once per day, just out of consideration of my other deadlines). I need to restructure the blogroll on the side, since some of my comrades have changed their setups or fallen by the wayside. I want to find a better way of posting photos. I don't think I'm going to mess around too much with the presentation, only because, after all these years, people are used to it.

In the end, I'm pretty happy with what this blog has done - it allows people to find out what I'm doing and what's bothering me without actually having to buy me a beer.

And I'm good with that.

More later,