Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The Best blog You Are Not Reading!

Next week I'd like to run a week long features of "The Best Blog You Are Not Reading".

I have run this in the past, off and on, but I really want to get some focus on some blogs that I enjoy that you may not know of yet.  I have five ready to go but I also wanted to give you all the chance to send me your recommendations

Preferably the blog should be newer and/or have only a few subscribers.  Alternately it can also be one that is far outside the normal reading you usually do.

Yes of course you can choose your own blog.

So let me know in the comments below and I'll take a look.  If I like it I'll mention it next week!


Monday, March 18, 2013

The Freedom of Nonbelief: Asking For it

A post over at my other blog that is not entirely appropriate for this blog.  BUT I wanted to let you know about it all the same.

The Freedom of Nonbelief: Asking For it

Leave any comments there.

The Rise and Fall of Grognardia

Content Warning: Pre-coffee navel gazing.

A couple of interesting posts this past week on the subject of James, Grognardia and Dwimmermount and how much a reputation can take before it is trashed beyond repair.

The posts are here and you can read them at your leisure if you haven't already.

Let's use Gorgonlilk's term and say this is the post Grognardia era. What does that mean (whether true or not, or descriptive or not) to the OSR blog reader in general?  
Well. We certainly have lost a voice, a cheerleader as it were.

And he was very vocal.  
Here is something I found interesting,  The daily visits to Grognardia are still about 1000 a day.   Not too shabby for a site that has not been updated since November really (and one post in December). 

Many people came to his site and then found the rest of this corner of the internet, but now I feel that many are going to his site only out of morbid curiosity.  

On one hand really, he is only late on a project.  If that were a crime then 80% of the gaming industry would be guilty of that.  On the other hand though he is on the line for nearly $50k, no communication and no paid free-lancers.  Which is some cases could be a crime.   While I have seen people and companies come back from worse PR problems, it hasn't been very many.

In those cases there is a lot of goodwill usually between the person/company and the community.  I think that the goodwill is being burned up here.

I don't know.  What do you all think?  Can James still pull himself out of the abyss and comeback?
Is there an OSR Oprah he can go to, sound contrite and get forgiveness?



Sunday, March 17, 2013

Palace of the Vampire Queen

Ran Palace of the Vampire Queen yesterday.

It went great I felt.  The kids had been playing D&D Basic all day, so I didn't have to explain the rules to them at all which was cool.

We might be doing this all again in August around Gen Con time.  I'd like to run some other games too.  Maybe that Chill game set in 1976 I have been dying to run.


Saturday, March 16, 2013

Zatannurday: Wearing O' the Green

Zatanna has had some interesting costume choices over the years, but she has stuck mostly with the black/blue themes.  Superheroes don't change their costumes often.
So even on St. Patty's Zatanna (who I would say is predominantly Italian anyway) isn't really going to wear green.  But she hangs out with a lot of people that do.

Here is Zee with a collection of "Green" Heroes.











Happy St. Pats!

Friday, March 15, 2013

Friday Updates

Well it seems to be a race now between Feedly and NetVibes.  The Feedly intetface is nicer and faster, NetVibes adds a lot of nice social networking features.

As many of you know I am participating in the A to Z challenge again this year.  I am also working as an Ambassador for the challenge.  This means I'll be going over sites and encouraging them to post, comment and the like.
You can read about that here, http://tossingitout.blogspot.com/2013/03/meet-arlees-to-z-ambassadors-part-1.html

I also joined D.L. Hammons'  Blogging Blitz. This is an ongoing blog-fest to drive new visitors to your site.
I plan to use it in conjunction with my own "The Best Blog You are Not Reading" feature (which I am way overdue on) to get the word out on some cool, but under read blogs.


Here is the code to sign up!


Thursday, March 14, 2013

Well. This Sucks, Part 2

Ok.  I went from irritation to anger to irritation to resignation to careful optimism today on this.

This will give me the chance to try new readers and maybe ones that connect with Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter better.

Presently I am trying Netvvibes. Has a lot of features I like.  I'll post more later.