a grab-bag of bullet points

• This weekend is Flatcon, the little game convention in Bloomington, Illinois. I don't have a game on the schedule, but I plan on having dice and stuff with me. So if you're going please feel free to bug random red-headed dudes to run a game for you. In fact, just start asking random people of all sorts "Hey, are you Jeff of Jeff's Gameblog?" That would crack my wife up.
• I just noticed today that the Judge's Form for Winter War has been updated. I've submitted two games: a Friday evening Encounter Critical adventure that begins a quadrillion years after the end of the universe and a Sunday morning Empire of the Petal Throne fiasco. Should be fun!
• Had my follow-up with the doctor today about my high blood pressure. Turns out this Eat Right/Get Active crap actually works! Huzzah! And here I thought it was all a myth foisted on us by the scientific community, like evolution or gravity.
• I've changed my mind about writing a setting book for Ruins & Ronin. I've enjoyed the research and some of the initial writing I've done for it, but it just strikes me as artistically/intellectually dishonest to write a whole supplement for a game I'm not currently playing. All the stuff in the Miscellaneum and my Fight On! articles either came from or goes into the stuff I'm running right now. And while I've made a *tiny* bit of money on the Miscellaneum book (latest monthly check: five bucks and change), I still consider myself an amateur. And as such I feel like I've got no business writing anything that doesn't participate in the feedback loop of actually playing these awesome games. If I get a R&R game running in the future, I'll pick the whole pseudo-historical Japan thing back up.
• In the meantime I'm looking at a monster book as my next little project. This book will compile monsters from the blog here, various creeps of mine in Fight On! back issues, and stuff no one has seen yet. I also may seek out permission from a few other folks in the oldschoolblogosphere to reprint a few choice critters they've made. This book will be a free download. For hardcopies I plan on making a few booklets, but I'm not going to sell them. I haven't got the whole plan sorted out, but the main idea is that I will be giving them away. Perhaps to random passersby.
• Today I learned that the Chinese character for 'dung' combines the characters for 'rice' and 'corpse'. That's totally awesome. Dead rice = poop.