Bar Band's V-Clip is ready to ship. The website is live and I'm taking orders! [link]

You may notice there's a promise of instructions on how to make your own. Right now, I still have not completed the tutorial, but there is a preexisting tutorial under another name. I'll note you with a link if you request it. Until I get some time, the official Bar Band tutorial is on hold but it will get uploaded someday soon.

Of course you don't have to buy. If you're reading this and you're a member of Deviant Art and you live in North America... I'm still offering to send you one for free! The offered items are prototype packages in an early version of the label and the product inside is identical to that inside the packages being sold. I have exactly 7 prototype packages left, and all you need to do to get one is note me with your address. It's that simple!

I've still got plenty of other freebies as well, so check out the freebies post and see what's up for grabs [link]


Cheers!

So I spent a little time tonight watching Zombie Love. The film: [link] The IMDB link: [link]

It's a short comedic musical, running just under forty minutes. It tells the story of Dante, a zombie with a romantic's heart (no telling where he got it) and his living lover Claudia. The lines are a little cheesy and far less than subtle, but I can't imagine this movie being funnier or more serious no matter what the actors have to sing. The film grabs your attention and keeps it through the fantastic singing and the perfect pace of it's gags. This is an amateur film, but it's probably the Grease of amateur musicals.

During the epilogue they probably take it a bit too far, but in a good way. It's one of those flicks that takes you to the conclusion and then the whole cast and crew just start having fun. They use the opportunity to do a couple songs they couldn't have fit in anywhere else in the film and you can see they just have a blast.

Anyway, I just thought I'd give a shout out to that 2007 release because it was so good. It made my Halloween night fantastic and I highly suggest you buy a copy for next year or just place an order now and maybe you can have Zombies for Christmas! I pirated it, but I now want to devour the film on a much deeper level so I'll be ordering mine ASAP.

Happy Halloween!

It's no secret that the one thing I want most for myself is to one day soon stop working for a while and to sequester myself away in order to spend some time writing. Ask anyone in the Canadian literary community that's involved with grants or loans... I've applied for anything I might be even close to eligible.

It's also no secret my feelings about my job, but because this is public I'd rather not get into the nitty gritty. Still, I'd like to say a few things:

Lately business has been picking up, which is great because I like to feel like I'm doing something and it certainly doesn't hurt my job security. It'd be awesome if I started to see something resembling full-time hours with regular commissions. Maybe we could then justify making some improvements in the local branch of the business, and eventually I could turn this job into something that's going to support me for the rest of my working life.

Of course it hasn't been going that well. The patterns of behavior that I observed early on are presenting themselves more strongly in this busier season. Lack of planning, backwards ideas, poor communication, and general lack of effort. Mind you that this is not unusual for any business, but we're at a point where we're trying to expand which was the whole point of hiring me and another peer. Opening a new branch or two requires a great deal of effort and consistent management. We're not getting that.

Anyway, obviously the stress levels are rising, and given my present opinions on the future of this career it's hard to say what's going to happen next... but I predict rough seas ahead. I'm hoping that I stumble across another option, but I've resolved that if I should eventually lose this career I'm going to have to do something drastic to keep sane. I'm thinking about a backpacking trip across the continent, living off my wits for a while and seeing if there's prosperity someplace else. Of course there's a small matter of a large outstanding debt that needs paid before I flee the country...


In other news, I now officially charge $6 a word to all those who read my journal posts. If you've gotten this far you owe me $2298.

ps. Payable in cash, alcohol, or sexual favors. Add $72 for reading ps.

---sorry, this got WAY long winded... go to the very bottom if you just want to help without hearing me drone on---

My latest project is a solitaire card-based role-playing game. Yeah, that's a mouthful... but it's a trail blazed by Zombie in My Pocket ([link]) and others. I need some thoughts, but first a little plug for the genre and for ZiMP.

Board/card game RPG's are great fun and a slightly-more tactile way to enjoy a little adventure and strategy. Single-player games of course have the huge advantage of not needing any additional human players. There are thousands of solo RPG board and card games out there, and they have a huge following throughout board-game-geekdom.

Zombie in My Pocket is fantastic, portable, and can be played (carefully) on a surface as small as a mousepad (smaller if you're a really hardcore boardgamer with a few tricks up his/her sleeve. I highly recommend printing off a set. It's highly customizable, but if you want the most professional-looking version with all the trimmings: On the linked page, look under the "files" section for Zombie in my Pocket - Complete Game Package (revised). Currently it's the most popular file, so it should come up first if you click on "hot" to sort by popularity. Print the PDF on cardstock for a good set, but plain paper will work fine for a temporary set. Give the game a try. It's easy to learn but still a challenge! There are tonnes of expansions, accessories, and extensions available so browse around the files section and/or go to the wiki for additional content (I personally recommend the latest tuckbox).


Anyway, back to my project. It started life in my head as a ZiMP expansion, inspired by a certain sci-fi show that I am a huge geek for... *coff* Stargate. The thing was, Zombie in My Pocket's game mechanics didn't really suite the ideas that the show was generating. Suddenly, I was creating an entirely new game system... and I recognized that it was going to be nothing like ZiMP and that I no longer was interested in using Stargate as a theme.

My new game system offered a few perks. 1: It's nearly infinitely expandable and can be playable with as few as 6 cards or extended to infinity. 2: It takes a single player on an adventure, but leaves itself open for both cooperative and competitive group play for future mods or simple rule tweaks. 3: It is designed to be played with very little surface area, and can usually be played with all cards held in your hand.

I won't get into the details of my game system yet. I will say that it's mission-based. The game provides a set of general-purpose cards and the basic rules while a mission sheet outlines a task that must be accomplished. The game will be released with a number of mission sheets and additional cards and additional missions will be made available by myself and other community members as demand and interest rises. I will also say that it's going to be free to print-and-play(like ZiMP), but better optimized for ease of construction.

What's my problem? Well, I've abandoned the Stargate idea. I like Stargate, but that fictional universe is a little too cluttered and messy and I found myself trying to decide between different settings and enemies and characters. For my project, it was too much. This is where I need your thoughts. I'm hoping to come up with a new theme or at least a new setting. New bad guys, new places to explore, new everything. I have what I think is a great game system, but no theme! I've been racking my brain trying to find a theme that hasn't been done (or at least not over-done).

So if you have any thoughts on some setting that games and media do not frequently explore, or some villain or monster that really doesn't get enough exposure, PLEASE make the suggestion! I'll consider anything but the following fan-fictions, zombies, pirates, ninjas, cowboys/indians, world wars.

FREE PRINTS AND MORE!

To share the DA love, I'm offering your choice of free stuff to anyone in North America who visits this profile. Almost everything is a print from my gallery. You can ask for one or a whole bunch of items, I'll honor most reasonable requests.

What are the goods?

1. Postcards from Hippopost. Pick a photograph from my gallery and I'll send it via hippopost. Photos only please! These will not be signed.

2. 4"x6", 5"x7", and/or 8"x10" prints, of any photo or image in my gallery, on glossy paper. These will be signed.

3. Letter-sized printouts of any literature in my gallery. These will be printed on nice paper with good formatting and centered on the page for framing. Again, these will be autographed.

4. Surprises based on any of my gallery pieces (images and/or literature). Don't want a normal, bland print but you're still interested in owning something from my gallery? Just ask for #4 and I'll make an extra effort to construct a little surprise for you. These surprises can be based on one or many of my gallery items, either your choice or mine. The piece may be autographed, depending on the nature of the surprise.

5. Genuine Ubuntu 9.04 discs. I have a small stock of these to give away and they're live-cds so they're super-handy, even if you never actually install the OS. i386 versions only, sorry. <edit< Almost gone!

6. LIMITED OFFER One of 10 BarBand V-Clip's, valued at $3.99. It's a guitar-pick holding pendant with a premium pick included. These are not even officially on sale yet and this is the first public notice! You can read more about (or buy) them at the BarBand website : [link] , or you can just go ahead and make the request for your free one now. <edit< Only 7 left!

7. Individually-packaged short-stories. That's right, I'll spin a yarn just for you! For these, I'll need a quick suggestion from you. Give me a theme, a genre, a single word, a picture to draw inspiration from, or anything else that I can start from. I'll email or mail you a story as fast as I can write it!

How do I collect on these offers?

Just note me here on DA with a little info!

-For #'s 1-6, you need to give me your North American mailing address.

-With all the "printed" stuff, you need to mention a piece or pieces from my gallery.

-Because #'s 5&6 are limited, I request that you have commented on at least one item in my gallery OR be one of the many people in my friends list.

-If you suggest pieces for #4, I might omit some of the items on your list if I can't make them work together or if the "surprise" isn't big enough to hold them all. No pressure, you don't have to suggest anything, I'll send something random if you leave it up to me.

-#7 needs only a little input from you, but you can get as detailed as you wish in suggestions. I won't do fanfic, but I will write in almost any genre, even erotic literature. My best genres are comedy and thriller, but I'll try hard to make the story entertaining no matter what you ask of me!


Finally, please don't feel left out if you don't live in North America. I will honor a few foreign requests as long as the postage cost doesn't break me and as long as I can be certain that the media being sent is completely legal in your country.