Bill Bodden's Blog, page 12

Another Road Trip!

Just got back this week from attending PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia. My buddy Matt McElroy is employed by Onyx Path, so he and I took a van full of Onyx Path books on the road to stock the company's booth at the show. The weekend before we left, Chicago got hit with a decent amount of snow. All we really had to deal with on the way out was the aftermath: plows out salting, a few cars abandoned in the ditch, but nothing major, and really no active weather issues to speak of. Lucky...

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Another Opening of Another Show!

As you read this, I'll be on the road to the PAX Unplugged gaming convention, taking pace at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia from November 30 through December 2. I'll be driving a van full of Onyx Path books and booth supplies to the show and back again next week, and it's an 1800-mile roundtrip -- not as long as my drive to Montana last month, but long enough to take two days without pushing too hard. This time of year in the north-central US there are always weather concerns, and that's the part that worries me the most about this trip: running into heavy snow. So we're leaving half a day early, just in case. MY kittens have been supervising me as I pack, and they seem particularly needy, as if they know what the suitcase means. I'll have to...

http://billbodden.com/2018/11/26/anot...

Stuck In My Head

Did you ever have a song stuck in your head? It happens to me frequently, though rarely for very long. Today, for example, I had two songs fighting for headspace: The Who's "Baba O'Reilly", and "I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart" as sung by Peggy Lee with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. I can't imagine two more different pieces of music, but the brain is a complex engine. I kept bouncing back and forth between the two, consciously thinking of the other as I got to the end of the first. Steely Dan became one of my favorites while in high school -- the time when that band was as it's peak.

I was never a big fan of The Who, but a couple of their songs stick with me. My brothers listened to The Who a lot when I was little; the Tommy album(s) got a LOT of play around our house: so did Neil Young, the Beatles, pre-Cetera Chicago, and the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack. I owe a lot of my appreciation for music to my family: my dad was a fan of the Big Band sound, and he was particularly fond of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. I developed a taste for...

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Convention Burn-Out and the Year to Come

Just wrapped up my stint at GameHoleCon . I spent a lot of my weekend running demos of the Scarred Lands material for gamers at the show, and I can't tell you how tiring it is to run games for strangers. I feel wiped, even though I was sitting for most of the weekend. I had a good time at my first GameHoleCon, but it will likely be my last GHC for some time -- despite being in my hometown -- for reasons of my own.

In fact, GameHole Con is the first of three conventions this month. This weekend I'll be attending the premiere event of the Steampunk year, TeslaCon , in Madison, Wisconsin. The following weekend is...

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A Helping Hand

In honor (belatedly) of National Author's Day (November 1) I'd like to share with you links to some books I recommend. They are by author friends, works I enjoyed, and a couple are even my own work. With the Holidays coming up -- and one just past -- these make perfect gifts for someone on your list. Some of them are horror-related: I try to keep the Holiday Spirit in my heart year 'round. :)
Please note that these links generally lead to sites where you can purchase e-books: if you prefer dead-tree editions, please consult your favorite local, independently-owned bookstore. I'm sure they'd be happy to get copies of anything they have access to for your reading pleasure. Here's a couple of my favorites: A Room of One's Own , Mystery To Me , and Starcat Books .

First and foremost, I'd like to recommend...

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The Road to Montana (part two)

[caption id="attachment_2543" align="alignright" width="300"] Waterfall in the Great Falls Holiday Inn[/caption]Once I arrived and checked in, I was greeted by a lobby full of waterfall, fake rocks, and taxidermied animals. I actually found it sort of charming. I checked in with the con folks at the pre-con party to meet them in person and confirm that I was on-site. I was pleased to finally meet Connie and Robert Thomson, with whom I'd been interacting on Facebook for a couple of years. I also met Don Walsh, co-chair and my main point of contact for arranging All The Things, and Drew Lovec, the other Co-Chair. After that, I headed off to the hotel restaurant to have some dinner. The food at this Holiday Inn turned out to be decent quality: I wouldn't regret it if I had to eat all my meals here.

Friday dawned, and I made my way to the dealer's room. I had a box of my books I needed to drop off. A local store -- Kelly's Komix -- had agreed to sell them for me in exchange for a cut. ...

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The Road to Montana (part one)

Last year I was invited to be the Gaming Guest of Honor for 2018 at Great Falls Gaming Rendezvous in Great Falls, Montana. I accepted, and ever since had been planning my trip. I'd never been to Montana before (or the Dakotas for that matter) so there were things I surely needed to experience along the way.

There had been indications I might have a passenger to help keep me company: that turned out to not be the case after all, so I'd be driving alone. It would be a 1,300-mile round-trip, most of that along the I-90 corridor, so I'd need to plan my stops ahead of time. I'm prone to sleepiness on long drives, so it's best if I don't push too hard to cover extra miles in a day.

My first stop was Sioux City, South Dakota. It was about seven hours' worth of driving time from home, so it was a good...

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End of an Era

I’ve worked at Pegasus Games for a really long time. So long, in fact, that years ago I was immortalized in the Dork Tower comic strip as Bill Blyden, Manager of Pegasaurus Games.
But ‘time waits for no one’ as the saying goes, and as I grow older I find that I have less patience for some things. More importantly, I’ve discovered that, in my 50s now, I no longer have the body of a twenty — or even thirty year-old. Even a half-day of standing on the carpeted concrete floors so common in retail establishments and convention halls is tough on my feet. I still walk to work most days, but lately, walking home has been a real chore, tired and footsore from standing for long periods.

I added up the time I’ve spent working at Pegasus. It came in three stints: from 1984 to 1993, I went from simple cashier to assistant manager to manager, and was partly responsible for opening Pegasus’s second store on Madison’s west side — the only Pegasus location still operating today. Seeing years of retail work stretching out ahead of me, I left in early 1993 to take a graphic design job in Texas. That ended badly, and I moved back home, living with my parents for the first few months until I found a rooming arrangement I could afford. I reapplied at Pegasus then, and in a couple of months a shift opened up, and I was back at it from 1994 to 1999. At that time, I was offered a full-time writing job of a journalistic nature: I researched and wrote articles on...

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Too Much Media!

I was looking over the list of things I wanted to experience: films, books, TV series -- all of it. It turns out that there's more I want to see, read, and do than the time that exists to do it in!

I can't keep up with all the films I want to see. We still haven't seen Solo, only just saw The Force Returns recently, and though we've kept up with the Marvel franchises pretty well, we missed many of the DC Comics-based offerings, including Batman vs. Superman,though we did finally see Justice League (which I thought wasn't as bad as many made it out to be.) We've been catching up by watching things via streaming service; it's much cheaper than going to a theater, but the experience isn't quite as robust.

I'm so far behind on reading books it isn't funny. I haven't even...

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Enter the Kittens

We'd been talking for some time about adopting new cats. The house has been cat-free for the last 20 months or so, and it seemed empty. We debated adopting a dog instead: T. and I both grew up with dogs and love them, but dogs are a lot more work, and neither of us were sure of our ability to give a dog the time and energy it needs day in and day out.

I've written before about my heartbreak -- HERE and HERE at losing my Siamese cats, Buster and Chyna. They captured my heart so completely that when Buster grew too ill...

To read the rest of this post, please visit: http://billbodden.com/2018/09/17/ente...