Roads, Occupations, and Books

Rode in to Endgame today via Telegraph Avenue, because I wanted to see the state of the road. When I came home last week I discovered, much to my delight, that the five or eight blocks north of 51st--which had been horrendous for the three years I've been biking to Endgame--had been repaved. Except the pavement was an inch or two below the old level, which made Telegraph's occasionally very wide gutters very dangerous.

I'd hoped that the project was still in progress, and today ... sure enough! That whole bit is repaved and level now and a much nicer and safer riding experience! Yay. Of course as soon as I passed south of 51st I was reminded there's lots more crappy Telegraph, just nothing else quite as bad.

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As I rode south, I saw quite a few bikes. As I neared MacArthur Blvd, there were huge flocks of them, and I began to wonder what was going on. That was when I realized that they must be heading to the big Occupy Oakland event today, to try and retake the town square that they'd been evicted from on Tuesday morning--due to plague, pestilence, and violence, all stuff just making the Occupy movement look really good.

Here's the astounding thing: almost all of the bicyclists that I encountered going southward and a couple more that I saw on the way home STOPPED for all the lights. We were at the light past the Fox Theatre, and there was no one coming from the other directions, and the clump of three cyclists I was with all stopped and waited for the light to go green.

Finding three other cyclists who stop at lights in the Berkeley-Oakland area is flabbergasting. And I think I actually encountered six total over the course of the evening. Go figure. That's the sort of thing that could make the Occupy movement look better.

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At Endgame, one of the other gamers was worried that there might be rioting. But, most of us old pros just didn't sweat it. Anyway, like I told him, when people riot in downtown Oakland, they're drawn to the BART stations like magnets. Endgame was thus unlikely to be on their hit parade.

I glanced at the live blogging of the Occupation thing while I was gaming and was most amused by the entry that said something like, "Protestors are arguing. There are still no police in sight." Yep, that's more what I expect.

Heh, and just reading over the news now I see, "More than 1,000 others marched through Oakland after police prevented them from entering BART, which also shut down its Embarcadero Station in San Francisco."

Yep, I called that :).

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And the other exciting news is that my book was out at Endgame. That's Designers & Dragons. Endgame had originally ordered a dozen of them, which seemed like a lot, but they ended up selling 22 preorders. Woot! By my count, they still had 50 pounds of RPG historical goodness sitting in their hold-area when I got there tonight.

And they've still got some on the shelves too, so if you're in the area and you haven't gotten one, I highly suggest visiting them and picking up a copy. 

I've now signed half-a-dozen copies of the book, which is a slightly novel experience. This is, I think, the fourth major book that I wrote half or more of. Well, fifth if you include my unpublished Aldryami manuscript for HeroQuest, and that's not counting a couple of books that I organized, put out calls for articles, then edited. I think I've signed a couple of those older books, but I haven't seen the level of enthusiasm that this one is producing. Which is great! There was always a lot of enthusiasm online, and I was hoping that it'd transfer to the real world. So far, so good.