Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — conventions

I got very little sleep Friday night. This wasn't a surprise, necessarily; I discovered last year that I sleep very poorly when I travel, and that each day of a convention gets harder than the one before it. So while Friday morning saw your humble narrator bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Saturday morning found him a little punchy. Bob and Travis were setting up Meltwater, so that left Matt, Marcus, and myself to our own devices. They thought a Winsome game would be appropriate - there had been precious few trains in this iteration of Trains and Chit - and I readily...

A full day of gaming commenced Friday morning with Time Agent. This is the game that Marcus really, really wanted to play last year, but that never got to the table for a multitude of reasons, first and foremost being his very serious dedications to the duties of playing host. There was a running gag going into this year's con that we actually had played Time Agent last year, we just don't remember it because someone jumped back in time and reversed the event.  If you're unfamiliar, here's the hook: there are six civilizations in outer space, one of which...

Thursday morning my plane landed at Dallas Love Field. I called Mary when I touched down and asked after the cats. Monster didn't put up much of a fuss about her pill; she's been on thyroid medication for over a year now. Claws, on the other hand, just recently started taking three different kinds of medication for his heart. Even with the three of them crammed into a single larger gel capsule, it's a struggle to get it into him and to get him to swallow. Even then, he's found a way to hold the pill in his mouth while...

During our first year in business, Mary and I would buy banner ads for some of our titles. It was, after all, a Thing That Publishers Did in order to let people know that their products existed. But when we looked at the actual numbers, we saw that it didn't really make much of a difference. All other things being equal, the games that we advertised didn't sell better than the games that we didn't, and traffic from a given website didn't appreciably increase when we advertised there. That being the case, we felt it made more sense to keep...