Better Living Through Kickstarter

One month in to 2013 and it’s already a bit of a crazy year. I finally got around to seeing Skyfall, I have a new manager at work, I’m helping organise a charity event in March, I even talked my father-in-law into finally upgrading his cellphone. Then there’s everything else. At least the recent public holidays (Auckland Anniversary Day and Waitangi Day) have given me a little extra weekend time.

The biggest change so far this year has been around my wife and I moving in with her parents. It’s a cunning scheme to help us save for our first house, while getting some home-cooked dinners at the same time. As part of this move, we’ve placed most of our belongings into storage, keeping only the bare essentials (clothes and the like). This has meant almost all of my gaming material got placed into boxes and probably won’t see the light of day until later this year. It was hard to do, but a lot of it was in boxes already, not having been unboxed after previous moves, and most of the stuff that had been unboxed hadn’t been touched in a while anyway due to spatial issues with out old apartment. A dedicated gaming room is high on the list of things we’re looking for in a new house, so I’m sure I’ll be able to spend some time catching up before Christmas rolls around this year.

In the meantime, I’m keeping up to date with the gaming news through sites like Tabletop Gaming News. Here are some games that have piqued my interest recently.

Branching Out – Hand Cannon Online

Having a personal blog is great and all, but it is a pretty limited way to put myself out there on the internet. In an effort to broaden my reach, I’ve decided to branch out a little and get things published on other sites around the internet.

The Year That Was

It’s past midnight here in New Zealand, and we’re already making strides into 2013. There are no signs of flying cars, world peace, or an end to news about Kardashians*, so we’re not that far into the future.

I was going to use this post to take a look back at the New Years Resolutions I made a year ago and see how I fared, but that’s too way too depressing. Long story short, I failed at most of them. I would set new resolutions for this year, but I find the process a bit arbitrary really. I’ve never been one for setting my own goals. That said, if anyone has any suggestions, I’d like to hear them.

What I do want to talk about is a lovely email I received from WordPress. The email contained a link to a 2012 summary for Geek-Life Balance. I don’t recall receiving one last year, so I’m guessing this is a new feature. It’s a funky little infographic that summarises the last 12 months. The Mt Everest analogy is oddly worded, but once you get past that there are some tidbits I found interesting:

I posted twice as much as I did in 2011. A lot of this came from MyJanWriMo, but I’m still happy with the result. I wanted to write more this year, and I’ve certainly managed that. Not as much as I might have liked, but something is better than nothing.

Taking about topical subjects is a great way to get page views. This should be a surprise to nobody, but popular topics are, well, popular. I’ve seen a spike in hits on my two Hobbit-related posts since The Hobbit premiered mid-December. GenCon bought in another huge wave of hits. I’ll have to remember this for the future.

Search terms have been a source of private amusement for some time now. Sure, there’s the usual mix of people searching for “The Hobbit Soundtrack” and “GenCon 2012,” but also a surprising number of people searching for “embarrassing erection.” Seriously. I only used the term once in a caption for a photo, but it was enough to get it into the top five.

Unsurprisingly, most of my hits came from the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. What was a surprise was how many I received from middle eastern countries – including Syria. They’re in the middle of a civil war, and someone still had the time to pay a visit. Yes, I know some of these are probably spam bots or people using proxy services, but it is still a bit of a surprise.

And there we have it, 2012 in a nutshell. Who knows what 2013 holds. Right now, for me, it holds sleep.

* WordPress wants to auto-correct ‘Kardashians’ to ‘Carpathians’ and now all I can think of is Ghostbusters 2. Maybe they’ve got a long-lost Uncle Vigo.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Price Hike

We’re only a couple of weeks out from the worldwide release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and Games Workshop have finally broken their license-enforced silence to announce a range of models based on the first film.

As expected, these models are heavily inspired by how their respective characters appear in the film, and they are some of the best looking (and realistically scaled) models GW has produced for some time. It’s not all second breakfasts and half pints of ale, however. These models come with amazingly high price tags – especially for those of us living outside the UK.

Malifaux Fiction: Life’s Work

The competition window for November’s Iron Quill competition closed a few hours ago and, for the second month running I have submitted an entry. Despite not even placing last month (I was up against some pretty stiff competition) my hopes are high for this one. Sure, a lot of that comes from the fact that there are only three entries (unless one is allowed to slip in a day or so late), but I still think I’ve put together a decent entry.

Voting has not yet begun for this round of the competition, nor have I yet looked at my opponents entries. I decided to wait until entries had closed, just in case they wanted to make some last-minute edits to their entries (allowed under the rules).

As with last month, there were four unique “ingredients.” These were:

Theme: The Power of Love

Character: Starving Artist

Line: “Well, there’s no way this can go wrong.”

Item: Jack o’ Lantern

I thought about this for a while and couldn’t really settle on a decent story. Then, a couple of nights ago, I had a flash of inspiration. A couple of hours of frenzied typing and self-editing later, this is what I had….

Tis the Season to get Pledging

Christmas is a weird time for Kickstarter projects. For starters, you’re more likely thinking about spending money on food and presents for other people, not on projects that might not bear any rewards for a couple of months or more. Sure, not everyone celebrates Christmas (or something like it), but it’s certainly front of mind for a lot of people. Despite this, some companies are still starting up projects that will be completing during the festive season. Two in particular have grabbed my interest lately.

Malifaux Fiction: None Shall Pass

I recently took part in The Iron Quill, a writing competition over on the Wyrd Miniatures forum.

Inspired by the cooking content show, each round of The Iron Quill supplies four ‘ingredients’, at least two of which participants must incorporate into a piece of fiction set in the world of Malifaux no longer than 1500 words long.

Sounds simple, right?

This round, dubbed In the Dark of the Knight, featured the following ‘ingredients’:

• Theme: Becoming the Mask
• Character: The Black Knight
• Line: “There are no coincidences.”
• Item: Soulstone Necklace

Read on and see if you can figure out which of these I incorporated into my entry….