wilw: @ptevis are you running Penny For My Thoughts at OrcCon tomorrow? Can I play if you are? Please please please pretty please?
Now, a bit of history: Wil and I were both Guests of Honor at RinCon last fall, and we ended up spending a reasonable amount of time together1. Wil was interested in Penny because there was a game of it going on2 during a D&D game he was running, and "it sounded like they were having a lot of fun." Sadly, our schedules didn't mesh that weekend, so he wasn't able to play in the game I ran3. He did buy a copy, however, and asked me to sign it for him4.
Back to Friday. I see the Tweet in question and reply in the affirmative. I had planned on stopping at home before I headed down to the con, which was a good thing, as I didn't have my demo kit with me. I finally got out of work late, made a quick stop to pick it up, and drove to Los Angeles. Saturday morning, however, I wasn't quite sure when Wil would be there or how we would meet up. Fortunately, I ran into Andrew Linstrom, who had seen the exchange on Twitter and came to the convention to meet me and for a chance to play Penny5. I ended up demoing a game design I'm working on for him, and when I was done, who should appear but Wil and his friend Cal. We made arrangements to meet after lunch and play.
So, we sit down in the lobby, and Wil says (roughly): "I emailed Andrew Hackard to figure out how to get in touch with you, and he suggested I just post something on my Twitter feed. So I did. Then I pulled up your feed in a tab and kept hitting reload to see if you'd reply. It was weird; I felt like some sort of Internet stalker."
We all just let that hang in air for a moment, and then we played6.
1 This was aided by the fact that I was rooming with Andrew Hackard, Wil's friend and editor, whom I had met through my past association with Steve Jackson Games.
2 Run by the incomparable JD Corley
3 Which actually turned out to be three separate games but I digress.
4 Cue the cognitive dissonance.
5 Yes, my ego is going just fine at this point.
6 The game turned out to be insane, full of hunchbacks, and a lot of fun.
]]>Bonus short funny thing: I recently discovered notes I'd taken on an improv show, including a scene that was summarized as "Joseph, Mary, and the awkward marriage counselor."
]]>What I read was first this (emphasis mine):
"Foote is a novelist who temporarily abandoned fiction to apply the novelist's shaping hand to history: his model is not Thucydides but The Iliad, and his story, innocent of notes and formal bibliography, has a literary design. Not by accident...but for cathartic effect is so much space given to the war's unwinding, it's final shudders and convulsions.... To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again." —Newsweek
and then this:
"Further afield, but no less applicable, Richard Lattimore's translation of the Iliad put a Greekless author in close touch with his model." —Shelby Foote
What those passages made sense of was Foote's tendency to use certain phrases to decribe the same thing again and again. At first I ascribed it to an author running out of interesting synonyms over the course of a 3,000-page narrative, and frankly, I found it a little annoying. These two passages made me realize, however that when Foote repeated descriptions like "the Father of Waters" (the Mississippi River), "the red-haired Ohioan" (William Tecumsah Sherman), or "his taterdemalion army" (Lee's Army of Northern Viriginia), he intended them as epithets in the Homerian sense. And somehow, by knowing this, I didn't mind those repetitions. Instead I started to read them with an almost poetic cadence.
It's funny how a little context can change how you see something.
]]>No more.
I've talked before about the fear of "running out of awesome;" how in roleplaying games I would hold onto my cool ideas until exactly the right moment out of fear that I wouldn't come up with new ideas. Improv taught me that those fears were groundless, that awesome begets awesome. A year ago I did my "12 (or 14) Days of HG,WT: FAFGM-mas" experiment. Looking back, it was both the extreme in bursty creativity and probably the best work I did in that format. So, while I'm not a fan of New Year's Resolutions (at least of the behavior-changing-accomplishment variety, for reasons that really are their own post), in this new year, I'm going to strive to make hay while the sun shines, creatively speaking.
]]>The tone of some of these messages, however, makes me think that they're eulogizing me. Rest assured, I'm still here.
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