In The Elevator To Hell With The Skull Faced Woman

…taken from a dream I had last night

Stuff On The Half Shell

1: Content for the E-zine’s first 3 issues is accruing at a nice rate. Still no title for the damned thing yet and I’m trying to figure out a cover style for it. Pulp or dime novel? Played straight or go for humor? A bit of art or all text. Also, fake ads or not? Decisions, decisions.

2: As a rare change of pace from the Biblical deluge of ever mounting debt, it seems that I may be getting a few more hours at work. Still only a part time gig, but better than the pitiful hours I get now.

3: Still cold here. My garden is not getting bitchslapped as bad as it did in the great freeze of a few years ago, but it’s not coming thru unscathed, either. Might lose some of the lemon grass, which is ok, since I need to transplant most of it in the spring.

4: I have submitted a seminar proposal to DunDraCon. It’s a bitch/love fest idea called “We Loves It/We Hates It”. We shall see if it gets the nod.

Time to go earn the almighty dollar. More bloggage later.

Sixth Floor…Lingerie…Ladieswear…Shoes

…Oh, Mr. Cross. Going…down?

Ok, ok, so I ripped off Aerosmith.

CatCon2: The Trip There, Day 1

(NOTE: The following is all fictional.)

Well, more like Day .35 to be exact.

So, having gotten everything packed and ready yesterday, I slept in the house from 1pm until midnight. Everyone except me went to bed in the Magic Bus about 11 pm. At the Witching Hour, I got up, showered, ate a bowl of Shreddies and, after a quick once over, boarded the bus and started off down the road to the musical tones of snoring women (our dogsitter, Sharon, is travelling with us this year) and dogs. After about a minute of snores, I activated the music program and settled into some Tom Waits.

Our route this year will be avoiding SoCal, Arizona and New Mexico in favor of going across Nevada, Utah, Colorado, a bit of the Oklahoma panhandle and then into wildest Texas for the con itself.

We stopped in Busted Flush, Nevada for breakfast and dog walkies. The diner we ate at, The Cowboy Chowhouse, was a nice place with good food in large portions. The Girls got our leftovers and are now in a food coma. Grace and Sharon are watching “Harry Potter and the Hound of the Baskervilles”, that great Holmes/Potter crossover movie.

Wildlife spotted so far: 3 hawks, a snake and two jackrabbits.

More bloggage later.

Doc Tempest VS The Nova Mob

…from the July, 1969 issue

Well, I was actually able to run my arena battle game at ConQuest Sac on Saturday. There were only 4 players…and two of them were Sam and Paul from my regular gaming group…but it still went well.

Even better, on Saturday night I finally got a really good nights sleep, so I’m feeling pretty good.

Alas, unless I fall into a pit of money, I won’t be going to any more cons this year.

Gotta go now. More blogging later.

The Island Of The Mad Doctor Who Made People Into Animal Monsters That Eat You

…movie title from a six year old

Conquest Sac: Friday night

Got there at 9:00 PM…got badge…went to RPG room…1 RPG being played…2 boardgames being played…waited to see if anyone would show up for my game…nobody did, altho one fellow, who showed up for the other scheduled RPG (for which not even the GM showed up), said he’d play in mine if other plasyers showed…as in past years, nobody showed up…looked around the con…very small, but the wargames/minis games were all full up and going like gangbusters…came home at 10:30 PM.

I’ll be going back today, with hopes of running an RPG/Minis arena battle game. I expect it will be a bust, too. ConquestSac is not an RPG oriented con.

Starting Up Your First Dugong Ranch

…step 1: Get some dugongs

Doc Health Update: I am feeling much better, despite the odd bit of coughing and the regular hacking up of alien lifefroms.

In other news, I hope to do some blogging tonight, after putting the finish touches on the Over The Edge pulp game I’m supposed to run at ConquestSac tomorrow night,

Speaking of which…HEY, SACRAMENTO/NORCAL GAMING BUDDIES! Are any of you going to be at ConquestSac this weekend? I’ll be there Friday night and at least Saturday morning/afternoon.

Now, I must go buy tea. Will blog later.

Waldo, King Of The Snow Monkeys

…and a kindly king he is

Stuff

The polls are kaput, my little tenrecs, and the winners both won by a large margin.

So, starting tonight or tomorrow, I’ll be doing the daily People, Places & Things bit here, starting with the letter X. Yes, that’s 7 days of X stuff before we move on to the even more exotic Y. Nothing like starting Uncle Doc with the easy letters, eh?

As for the writing assignment, which I can now reveal is titled Secret Cities: San Francisco, I’ll be starting it within the next 48 hours…and I’m going to be opening up what I write to your criticisms and discussion right here on this blog. Yep, once or twice a week, I’ll update y’all on how things are going and share with you what I have been writing about. I look forward to your keen insights on how I’m either fucking up or amazing you with my mad game setting design skillz.

In other gaming news, despite the fact that our gaming group lost 2 out of 5 players back in February, we are finally getting together on Sunday to put the wraps to Part 1 of our “Return of Magic” series. Once that is over, we’ll be taking about a month long break and then starting Part 2, which will be set on the same world, but a different continent, 150 years later. Magic will be considerably more formalized, monsters will be much more common, kingdoms will be larger and the Age of Exploration is just barely getting started. The player characters will be secret agents of a non-human race who go outside their home kingdom on various assignments. I’m aiming for a fast paced pulpy sort of fantasy game here, folks.

On one last gaming note, I’ve still not heard from the folks at Conquest Sac about rescheduling my 7:00 game on opening night, so I guess I’ll have to poke them with a stick. Assuming they do reschedule it to 9:00, it will be a Pulp Era game using bothe the Over The Edge rules and a variation of the Al Amarja setting.

I’m outta here for now. More blog-o-rama soon.

The Kitty Cats Star In A Reality Show

…on the cat channel

Stuff!

1: I missed the deadline for this months A&E because…well, because I’m a dummy.

2: I now have the outlines/partially written manuscripts for 10 writing projects sitting in front of me. Some of them are about 5 years old, while some are from this last weekend. I’ll be having Grace lock me up in my writing cage every night this week after I get home from work. We’ll see what comes of it.

3:Still not 100% sure what my GMing status is at ConquestSac. The website hadn’t noted any changes the last time I checked.

4: Looks like lotsa rain for NorCal this next week or so. That can only mean that
Spring is near and soon the gardeners will begin their annual migration outside.

Of Crawdads, Rain And Battling Bovines

…and exploding elevators

So, I got home from Dundracon today around 3:30 pm. We left the con around noon, being tired, sore and in my case, nearly voiceless.

Despite leaving 2.5 hours later than normal, Arn and I made excellent time and got to the con at about 6 pm on Friday. I managed to get into a Creeks & Crawdads game titled “The Starfish Are…What?”. It was a CoC riff on the whole crawdad experience, with Lolcats and bucketless walruses subbing for Lovecraftian horrors. It was great fun, especially since everyone remembered to play their crawdads as stupid/hungry/sleepy, which pretty much sums up a crawdads life. We did manage to invent a new Crawdad Philosophy of Life: “Food Lies!”. And then we fell asleep and forgot it.

Saturday night, I ran my 20th anniversary TOON game for 14 players. It was big fun and full of much mayhem, including the big fight between Clarice and Berniece Cow in an elevator full of toxic and flammable insect spray. There was an explosion:)

After the game, a bunch of us sat around talking about games for a while, until I started riffing on…stupid things men and boys do…stupid things women do…why I’m surprised mothers don’t kill their kids at some point…snoring…farting…dogs & cats…why men are like dogs…camping and many other subjects. There was much laughter.

All I bought at the con was about $5.00 worth of dice and a copy of Creeks & Crawdads for $4.00. Oh, damn you, shitty economy!

I did other stuff…talk to folks…watch anime…go to a seminar…etc, etc, etc.

So, anyway, next year, I’ll be running Dungeons & Toons…or maybe Toon Munchkin…in my usual Friday night 8 pm time slot.

And now, I’m gonna eat & sleep.

An Elasmosaurus In The Bathtub

…it’s a really big bathtub

Damn…too many empty days on this LJ so far. Kinda strapped for time right now, but I can do a…

Doc Update

1: We are all doing ok here. Winker has become a bit more of an attention hound, but that’s ok, cos we have lots of love for her.

2: Gotta do a zine for A&E #401 this week. It will contain content not found on this LJ, so you can either subscribe to A&E or wait about a month for the content to pop up on here.

3: We are going through our annual “warm and sunny January” days here in the Big Tomato. This Natures attempt to instill a false sense of hope in gardeners, because soon will come the pounding rain and cold and winters last assault. Me, I’ll wait another month or two before doing any real gardening.

4: Unless I get hit by a comet, I’ll have my annual Subject Line review up by Friday.

5: Working on the PC and NPC characters for the Dundracon Toon game, as well as assorted Stuff and what might loosely be termed a “plot”. Lots of old favorites from past games will show up, plus a couple of new loony toons.

6: Made DocBurgers for dinner last night. They were almost too damned good to eat, but we ate them anyway.

7: Time for lunch, then work. More bloggage later.

The Ten Blue Budgies Put On A Musical Show

…in an old barn and starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney

My Dundracon Toon Game

I’m officially scheduled for my 20th annual toon game at Dundracon. Here is the info from the wensite…

414 20th Anniversary TOON Bash

Saturday 8 PM in Room 156 for 4 hours
GM: Doc Cross
Type: RPG
System: TOON
Edition: Deluxe
Players: 10
Provided: All characters provided by GM
Power Level: varied
Variations: Oh, yeah, you betcha
Rules Knowledge: Useful
Game Content: Mainstream

Twenty years of running TOON games at Dundracon? You betcha! If you’ve ever played in one of my games, come play or just say hi. If you’ve ever WANTED to play, come on by and try your luck. If you just want to watch, that’s ok too.

Note: This game session may or may not include cream pies, Nazi Hegehogs, frying pans, explosives, the Kreep Family, Superduperbowl style football, Clarice the Cow and her imaginary friend Mr. Eyeball, the Army of Neat & Tidy Robots, Foogle Birds, clams with guns, monsters of all sorts, CarToon Wars autodueling, Great Catchoolu, one or more members of the Schwemp Family, Robot DeNiro, swineosaurs, aliens, huge balls of goo, the Black Hole Model 3000 Shop Vac, fire, donuts, Altoon Brownie and other Foodie Network stars, firearms of all sorts, Squidzilla, bears, fluffy bunnies, Uncle Spud, sticky stuff, dungeons, moose, The Toonimator, toon fu, grease, giant aunts, mummies, daddies, the insidious Doctor FuFu Manchew, carnivorous plants, carnivorous pants, dangerously insane penguins, wet cement, Small Round Paisley Things That Go Poing, gazebos, Duck Cross, portable holes, giant battle meks, Steve Jackalope, fish, bad French accents and mud.

I hope some of y’all can show up and play in the game or even just watch. It should be lots of fun.