Category Archives: Journal

This is me rambling about me, mostly. Current stuff: home, family, my head’s on fire… that kind of thing. This also includes everything imported from LiveJournal.

Journal

The Kickstarter is Closed

The Game Chief’s Handbrain Kickstarter is closed now. Thank you for backing it! If you missed it, and are now kicking yourself (likely in lieu of kicking us for not getting the word to you sooner) please stop kicking things¹. In a few days we’ll post instructions for anyone who wishes to pre-order screens, but who missed the project.

Hopefully the auto-posting of this alert will be timely (the project closed at 11:30 am Mountain Time.) We’re at the movies right now, devices muted and stowed, enjoying a matinee showing of Wonder Woman².

¹ That sentence was written completely innocently, with zero intent to make a “kick” pun on Kickstarter. This note exists purely to alert you to the fact that we know the pun is there, but it wasn’t deliberate. Sometimes these things just happen.

² My review will appear later today, as will my review for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

Announcements, Crossposted, Journal

PLANET MERCENARY Goes to Print This Monday

Ten days ago I finished my last big piece of writing for Planet Mercenary. Yesterday Sandra and I finished the last small piece. Today we reviewed the cover layout, and realized it’s ready to be sent to the printer.

This has taken much longer than I wanted it to, but the project looks much, much better than I believed it could. Part of the delay is due to repeated discoveries that we could be doing something better, and then deciding to do it better. And of course another part of the delay is us not knowing how to work as quickly as we originally thought we could.

If you backed the project, your book (and anything else that ships with it) will be shipped July. If you didn’t back the project you can still use Backerkit to place a pre-order, but that link will go away in a few weeks. Eventually we’ll have Planet Mercenary in the Schlock Mercenary Store, but that’s not going to happen before July.

I need to write a whole different post talking about how awesome Sandra and Alan are, and how grateful I am that they figured out how to work with, and around me. For now I’ll just say that in terms of actual work done, Sandra’s name is listed at least one position too far to the right.

Note: The cover art above is by Jeff Zugale, and was laid out (along with the rest of the pages in the book) by Mike Brodu under Sandra Tayler‘s direction. The fact that the logo I designed two years ago is still a part of all this is evidence more of the force of my personality than my skill at logo design.

Journal

Call Your Representatives

In light of the current (Jan 11, 2017) political sitch¹, and given the fact that many people are uncomfortable cold-calling their Congressional representatives, here is a script:

Hello. I’m [ YOUR NAME ] from [CITY, STATE] in the [ZIP] zip code. I want you to take the allegations against Trump seriously, and make sure that he is working for America, not for Russia.

I find it easier to work from a script when cold-calling anybody. This includes my favorite Chinese food place. There’s no shame in having a crib sheet.

If you need contact information, it’s available on the internet. Here’s a full list for Senators, but I found the easiest thing for me to do was Google my rep’s name, and the words “DC Phone number.” Then I picked up the phone and dialed.

That’s actually the hardest part. Pick up the phone and dial.

¹Any political situation that has you concerned² may merit a phone call.  

²If you don’t trust your representative, the script may simply be “I don’t trust you. I want you to start doing things to make me trust you.” Congressfolk take that kind of challenge pretty seriously.