Preparations for Home Con Visit

The preparations for the Home Con appearance on saturday has brought progress to a halt. I have several articles tumbling around in my mind wanting to get written, but I am spending my time packing, inventorying and getting set for the trip. Sunday I will be spending that work day unpacking, sorting and putting away the con supplies. Late Sunday night I will be Manufacturing the Monday shipments.

While I enjoy seeing people and doing these shows they do cost a lot of creative time. Thus I am faced with a quandary. If we travel and sell, we create less. If we do not go the creative work has a reduced value. The trick is to try to balance these. Somehow to get my full 60 hour work week in and spend 3 full days dealing with the trip. That amounts to doing four 15 hour days before the go-be-return three day trip. One of the tiring aspects is that saturday is our day off. Therefore we will have no day off for meditation and companionship this week. I do get an amazing recharge from having a day to share with Sue, and I will miss that very much this week.

The faster I go, the Less I seem to get done.

It actually seems that as I dig out more of our DS stuff it reveals more that needs to be written to make it go.

I have gotten a good start on translating our elemental concepts into something that other people can use. It should appear in Alpha form on the Madness blog by the end of the week. Since I put the Fire Elemental on the Elethay Prayer PDF I figure I need to start the explanations.

I am kind of surprised by the lack of DS response to the Elethay Prayers. It provided a slew of e-mails from AD&D players wanting the AD&D translation, but not a peep from the DS world. I have no idea what that means, and I'm not going to think on it much.

Now I am off to tend to my mother this afternoon. I need to call her and she if she is up to a new adventure.

Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?

Last night Sue and I were talking about why economists and planners keep using, and endorsing, failed methods. Why would one stick to a policy, or method, that was shown to be a failure? Why would you spend all of your resources in a destructive campaign rather than a constructive discussion? I proposed that the problem was two fold. First, they were not experienced with the real world and simply never received the data (they live in a fantasy land), and second, that they were unable to overcome there irrational faith in the obviously failed policy.

Then Sue found this extremely interesting article you should read:

Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?

While reading this work I began to see where some of the resistance to the open design of Dragon Storm comes from. Sue created a flexible creativity driven RPG system. Some people understood this at a fundamental level and played the game happily. Other people started looking for, and even imposing, strict rules. Those rules generally came directly from earlier rpg systems. They moved to take the creative element out of DS and put it back in the box. That attitude has always confounded and confused me.

That makes me wonder about future game designs. Do we try to restrict them to be more palatable to a larger audience, or do we continue to argue for individual creativity? Not an easy decision. Obviously from a commercial point of view there is just one answer, but what about from a cultural point of view? Which is more important to the society? Which is most important to us?

Now I will get off of my soap box and wait for a response.

I am Cranky

I suppose I should say I'm cranky and angry. Being a growling bear here in the clanhold. In the past I would have gotten my hands on a half dozen donuts and a bag of chips and used those drugs to wrench myself out of the bad mood. Now I am being eating "healthy" so I can't.

I am really tied down with work that has to be done and I am not managing to free up the time to do what I want to do. Podcasting, writing and game design are all getting side tracked as I plug my way through the paperwork, coding, printing, shipping and web updating. Very frustrating.

I really want to create new content for the three games we have sketched out, Dragon Storm itself and DS/fantasy podcast stories.

Now I need to stop this fun work of complaining and get to editing material and answering e-mails.

Life is never normal

I have been busy working on a lot of projects, so I have neglected my blog posting, sorry about that.

Right now my "extra" time is being used to pamper Sue. I will be getting back to regular updates, really I will.