The Very Busy Saturday
Apr. 24th, 2010 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
So I got up this morning and I went to the Endgame auction. As I said, I'd already kind of planned to go there, and so I kept to the plan.
There were an *amazing* number of people at Endgame and there were similarly an amazing number of things being auctioned. I'm pretty impressed by the amount of enthusiasm that's generated by relatively little marketing. I guess there's just interest that builds year by year. I had never in my life seen so many people on the miniatures mezzanine, and it vaguely made me think of my dad, who sometimes worries about the support of raised structures when he's on them.
Alex, who I often game with at Endgame ended up sitting next to me, and that made the whole experience more enjoyable as we chatted about items as they came and went. Bids were a little slow at first, but once we'd gotten three items in or so, there was a lot of competition for items.
I was amused to see how hot the blood got when people were bidding ... and how quickly it cooled afterward. Aaron (who is a brilliant auctioneer; I see why EndGame flew him back to do it) would sometimes rapid fire through prices and have everyone drop at once. Then he'd sometimes have to drop back multiple price levels before he got a bid again, as people weren't willing to commit to the prices that they'd offered just seconds before.
I got two items. First up was a collection of Arcane magazines which I lusted over as soon as I saw them on display. Aaron was kind enough to put them up before I left, and now, $13 later, I have an almost-complete set of British RPG 'zines that each have pages and pages of news about what was going on in the hobby in the '90s. Yes, that's for my RPG history book.
I wasn't planning on buying anything for myself, but I also went in knowing that I had money thanks to some recent payments and tax refunds, if I wanted to spend it. So when Rob Heinsoo's Three-Dragon Ante came up, I had to bid on it, because it's an excellent game that I reviewed a few years ago that I didn't own a copy of. That one set me back just $8 which was an excellent deal, especially as I discovered it was a brand-new copy. Someday I might want to approach someone at Wizards to see if we can get right for an iPhone version.
I only stayed for about an hour of auction, but it was fun to see the event for once. And some time in the next couple of days I should get a mail telling me how much store credit I have for the many items I dumped on the auction.
After leaving the auction, I rode down to Skotos' co-location facility. I hadn't ridden from Endgame to the colo in that direction before, so I used Google Map's new bicycling map to find me a path. They've improved the interface, so it now shows two levels of special green lines, which I assume are bike paths/lanes and bike routes.
They also seem to be improving their algorithms. The path it indicated for me was excellent, and better than the path I took when I went from the colo-to-Endgame a month or two ago after figuring out a route for myself. It sent me up Market St. for much of the ride which is a nice street with a great bike lane. It travels through some so-so areas of Oakland, but it's pretty impossible to take a direct route from Endgame to the colo without going through a so-so bit of Oakland just south of Emeryville.
(At the auction, Alex asked me if I was planning to bike this weekend given the excellent weather. I said no, due to the busyness of today--and the busyness of last night's Traveller prep--but I did get almost 12 miles of excellent riding today. I do want to get bike adventuring back into my schedule, as I've been doing a lot of riding this year, with my odometer clearing 1500 today, but most of it has been pretty mundane. I'm going to try and make a point of doing so if I have any more RPG-free weekends where I don't have other major plans.)
I'd only been to the colo once before off-hours, and I remember having a lot of trouble getting in. Today, though I just went straight to the garage, waved my card key and one of the roll-down garage doors opened. Magic! Even better, there are bike racks inside, offering secure and close places to lock my bike.
Inside the colo I needed to move some wires around, edit some files, and try and get a machine we put in on Tuesday into better working order. It went slower than expected, but hopefully everything is in decent shape now. I raced back to my house, and got back a minute or two after our 1pm start time ... but every one else was later.
Whew.
My Traveller game ran from 2-6pm or so. I ran an old GDW adventure called Death Station that I didn't have a lot of faith in because it was kind of shallow, but given the limitations of the source material, I thought it came off pretty well.
I've also made it official that I'm going to only run the Traveller once a month. That's the tempo it's been running at overall, but I wanted to make it official so that I don't feel obligated to run it more often, as it usually takes me 2-4 hours of prep to run a session, since so much of it is my own creation.
Tomorrow, I rest.
There were an *amazing* number of people at Endgame and there were similarly an amazing number of things being auctioned. I'm pretty impressed by the amount of enthusiasm that's generated by relatively little marketing. I guess there's just interest that builds year by year. I had never in my life seen so many people on the miniatures mezzanine, and it vaguely made me think of my dad, who sometimes worries about the support of raised structures when he's on them.
Alex, who I often game with at Endgame ended up sitting next to me, and that made the whole experience more enjoyable as we chatted about items as they came and went. Bids were a little slow at first, but once we'd gotten three items in or so, there was a lot of competition for items.
I was amused to see how hot the blood got when people were bidding ... and how quickly it cooled afterward. Aaron (who is a brilliant auctioneer; I see why EndGame flew him back to do it) would sometimes rapid fire through prices and have everyone drop at once. Then he'd sometimes have to drop back multiple price levels before he got a bid again, as people weren't willing to commit to the prices that they'd offered just seconds before.
I got two items. First up was a collection of Arcane magazines which I lusted over as soon as I saw them on display. Aaron was kind enough to put them up before I left, and now, $13 later, I have an almost-complete set of British RPG 'zines that each have pages and pages of news about what was going on in the hobby in the '90s. Yes, that's for my RPG history book.
I wasn't planning on buying anything for myself, but I also went in knowing that I had money thanks to some recent payments and tax refunds, if I wanted to spend it. So when Rob Heinsoo's Three-Dragon Ante came up, I had to bid on it, because it's an excellent game that I reviewed a few years ago that I didn't own a copy of. That one set me back just $8 which was an excellent deal, especially as I discovered it was a brand-new copy. Someday I might want to approach someone at Wizards to see if we can get right for an iPhone version.
I only stayed for about an hour of auction, but it was fun to see the event for once. And some time in the next couple of days I should get a mail telling me how much store credit I have for the many items I dumped on the auction.
After leaving the auction, I rode down to Skotos' co-location facility. I hadn't ridden from Endgame to the colo in that direction before, so I used Google Map's new bicycling map to find me a path. They've improved the interface, so it now shows two levels of special green lines, which I assume are bike paths/lanes and bike routes.
They also seem to be improving their algorithms. The path it indicated for me was excellent, and better than the path I took when I went from the colo-to-Endgame a month or two ago after figuring out a route for myself. It sent me up Market St. for much of the ride which is a nice street with a great bike lane. It travels through some so-so areas of Oakland, but it's pretty impossible to take a direct route from Endgame to the colo without going through a so-so bit of Oakland just south of Emeryville.
(At the auction, Alex asked me if I was planning to bike this weekend given the excellent weather. I said no, due to the busyness of today--and the busyness of last night's Traveller prep--but I did get almost 12 miles of excellent riding today. I do want to get bike adventuring back into my schedule, as I've been doing a lot of riding this year, with my odometer clearing 1500 today, but most of it has been pretty mundane. I'm going to try and make a point of doing so if I have any more RPG-free weekends where I don't have other major plans.)
I'd only been to the colo once before off-hours, and I remember having a lot of trouble getting in. Today, though I just went straight to the garage, waved my card key and one of the roll-down garage doors opened. Magic! Even better, there are bike racks inside, offering secure and close places to lock my bike.
Inside the colo I needed to move some wires around, edit some files, and try and get a machine we put in on Tuesday into better working order. It went slower than expected, but hopefully everything is in decent shape now. I raced back to my house, and got back a minute or two after our 1pm start time ... but every one else was later.
Whew.
My Traveller game ran from 2-6pm or so. I ran an old GDW adventure called Death Station that I didn't have a lot of faith in because it was kind of shallow, but given the limitations of the source material, I thought it came off pretty well.
I've also made it official that I'm going to only run the Traveller once a month. That's the tempo it's been running at overall, but I wanted to make it official so that I don't feel obligated to run it more often, as it usually takes me 2-4 hours of prep to run a session, since so much of it is my own creation.
Tomorrow, I rest.
Iphone card games
Date: 2010-04-29 08:56 pm (UTC)