One Week Later

Well Dave and I got back from GenCon in Indianapolis very late Sunday, so late that I ended up staying home from work on Monday to rest and because I was just completely spent from four days away from home and around so many other people.

GenCon was simply amazing, a really great experience and not just because I got to meet online friends like Phil, Yax, and the Stupid Ranger crew (all fellow RPG bloggers), but because of all the D&D I got to play, other games I got to check out, and just the general atmosphere of nerdiness that was pervasive throughout.

You can check out all of the coverage Dave and I did over at Critical Hits. We got to talk to a lot of Wizards of the Coast employees, as well as a few other publishers about tabletop / card games. It's all there, or will be in the next week or so.

I'm running adventure 4 of my ongoing D&D game on Sunday, and as usual I'm quite excited for that. Way too many games need to be played before the end of the year!

Off to Indy

Dave should be here in a little bit, then we're heading out to GenCon in Indianapolis! I'm very excited, not just for GenCon but also for the trip itself which hopefully proves to be quite fun. We're staying in Columbus, Ohio tonight and then heading to Indy tomorrow morning.

If you want to keep tabs on what we're doing, I'm delving into the realm that I won't dare enter alone and using Dave's Critical-Hits twitter account while we're at the con, so feel free to check it out and see what we're up to!

http://twitter.com/criticalhits

AUGH!

Damnit, it happened again!

I looked at Twitter for about a minute and immediately thought, "hey I should join this!"

It's almost being used as a sort of instant messaging service now, which shouldn't really surprise anyone but I still think it was an unexpected result.

In actual news, work (like, the paying job) is picking up this week and happens to coincide with the week where I have my 3rd Adventure of my D&D campaign to run this Friday. I'm actually doing really well with working plus overtime, sleeping at least 6 hours a night (never too difficult for me), doing other activities, AND planning for the adventure. Talking to Phil regularly seems to put me on the lookout for when I'm being overly paranoid, perfectionist, or worrisome for stupid reasons. How long does it take before you become paranoid about being paranoid?


Crap, already there.

On Twitter - Brilliant!

In his comment to my last post asking opinions about Twitter, Jared shared this link with an excellent analysis of Twitter that rings pretty true with my feelings on it. Here's an excerpt of the beginning pretty elegantly sums up my feelings on the service:

Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic--contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

There's a lot more intelligent and insightful analysis of why Twitter can be simultaneously fascinating and really quite frightening. I'm pretty sure I will continue to avoid using it or even signing up for it, except I'll be using Dave's twitter while we're at GenCon so that we can torment those who aren't in attendence / aid those that are there in stalking us.