Post Before Bedtime!

Been pretty busy with stuff over the past couple of days. Lindsay and I have been out entertaining Lindsay's friend from the UK this week - and that was OK. We went down to the Galleria in Houston on Thursday and wandered around looking at stuff we could not afford in all the high end shops.

Thursday night saw the playing of another session of Beyond the Mountains of Madness and finally the game starts to feel like Cthulhu to me. It has taken far too many sessions of messing about and me reading stuff out to get to this point but now we have had explosions, gun play, running, screaming, shoggoths, abductions and all kinds of stuff in the space of 3 hours. This is what Cthulhu is meant to be. Not checking cargo manifests and listening to the Keeper reading endless rubbish about how nice the sky is on your sea voyage. I have to say it was the first session of this adventure that I have truly enjoyed running and I think the players actually enjoyed as well.

Managed to secure a copy of DnD 4e as well, which is great. I was going to go with Will at Enigma's but unfortunately he seems to be having some cash troubles and this means that I am not 100% certain he will be able to get it for me on the day it is released. I had thought of Amazon but then that would likely mean I would not get a copy until the day after it was released. So I have gone with Fat Ogre, a local store that seems to have its shit in order. The guy has said that I will get a call when he gets the books and I can run up and get them - even if they are early and prior to release date. Which is rather excellent I do think.

I have plans to do a session of character creation on the Friday it is released and get that to the site (Patrons and Main Site) along with the first session of Keep on the Shadowfell with any luck. I have primed the players so we are good to go and then hopefully 4e will take over when Cthulhu draws to a close on our regular Thursday night slot and we can have lots of fun playing through the published stuff and seeing how broken things can get.

Tonight I have been playing with setting up a RSS feed for the Patrons Area. I have managed to get it so that it is password protected and so that every Patron can have their own password. This means that if anyone wanders away from the fold I can just remove their access. It also means I can monitor the access for any folks that might have handed their passwords out (though I am sure that's not going to happen as they are all lovely folks). I really really must get the donations block on the site working again. Since I was forced to turn it off due to the bug it caused the donations have once more dried up. I guess you have to be blatant in order to make this sort of thing work. I have not had a new paying advertiser in rather a long time and that makes me sad as well. I think a lot of personally run gaming sites are going to start to feel the bite fairly soon. Things are not looking too great here and I think it will be felt everywhere as people start to watch what they spend their cash on. I just hope we can manage to weather it through to the other side.

Been thinking about the new podcast we are trying to give birth to and I am hoping that Lindasy will agree to give it a crack this week some time. That way we can cut in all the nice bits and pieces I have all prepped for it and see where we end up with a first episode. It is going to stay audio and not be video as video is not the greatest medium for gaming stuff. There is really very little to show people and the filesizes are much more demanding.

I have also managed to get a print out the Labour of Love PDF. All it needs now is for me to correct some typos and ensure the layout is looking good and then it is going online for those who deserve to get it. I will hopefully be uploading it tomorrow and sending out the email to the folks that made the lovely donations way back in the dark and distant past. I feel awful leaving it this long but with such a hectic year and not having the right software to get it all looking pretty it just fell by the wayside a little. Hopefully folks will be pleased with it.

Exciting news for Lindsay yesterday. Singstar for the PS3 is out on the 20th of this month. We will have to get our copy saved at Ned's game store and then we will be singing the night away. I am hoping that it is as good as the PS2 version was as it always cheered Lindsay up when she was feeling down. Poor little babe has been a little under the weather lately and has been getting blue. Hopefully some bad singing on my part will help her out. Can't be any worse than my Rock Band drumming skills.