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This week's caption contest

Opinion Polls & Market Research

With so many people on vacation, the weekly caption contest could use a boost. Vote for your favorite.

9.1 4.2 2.1 8.1 0 4.3 0 2.1 6.1 0 3.1 6.3 4.3 6.2 4.1

4.2 3.2 5.3 5.3 6.3 0 4.2 6.3 6.1 3.2 5.3 2.1 6.2 3.1 0 7.4 3.2 2.3 8.2 7.3 4.3 8.1 9.3 1 0 2.3 7.3 2.1 2.3 5.2 3.2 3.1 0 6.1 9.3 0 2.3 6.3 3.1 3.2 0 9.3 3.2 8.1 5 0 9.3 6.3 8.2 0 2.1 7.3 3.2 0 9.1 6.3 7.3 5.2 4.3 6.2 4.1 0 3.3 6.3 7.3 0 2.3 6.3 7.3 7.3 8.2 7.1 8.1 0 6.1 3.2 6.2 1 0 3.1 3.2 6.1 6.3 2.3 7.3 2.1 2.3 9.3 0 7.4 2.3 2.1 7.3 3.2 7.4 0 8.1 4.2 3.2 6.1 1 0 3.1 6.3 0 9.1 3.2 5

8.1 3.2 7.4 8.1 4.3 6.2 4.1

3.1 4.3 3.1 0 9.3 6.3 8.2 0 3.3 4.3
4.1 8.2 7.3 3.2 0 6.3 8.2 8.1 0 6.1
9.3 0 2.3 6.3 3.1 3.2 5 0 4.3 8.1
0 4.3 7.4 0 3.2 2.1 7.4 9.3 0 6.3 6.2
2.3 3.2 0 9.3 6.3 8.2 0 5.2 6.2 6.3
9.1 1

Tomorrow's Judgment Today

Last weekend, my Bonnie and I were playing Taboo with another couple and their nine year old son.  For those who haven’t played it, Taboo works like this:  one member of a team draws a card and on that card, there is a word you’re trying to make your teammates say out loud plus five words that you cannot use to help them.  For example, if the word is “James Bond,” you couldn’t use clues like “007”, “Sean Connery” “Roger Moore,” and so forth. 

During one round, we had all the males on one team, and I was drawing cards, attempting to get my friend Trey and his nine year old son to guess.  When I drew the word “Steroids,” I immediately said, “Barry Bonds.”  Within a half second, both Trey and his son shouted their first guesses. Trey was wrong with his guess of “home runs.”  But his nine year old son, who will be thinking about Barry Bonds long after Trey and I are put out to pasture . . . well. . . he guessed the word correctly.

Think about it:  a nine year old kid hears “Barry Bonds,” and the word that immediately comes to his mind is “Steroids.” 

Say it ain’t so, Joe.

Marion's Mea Culpa

Marion Jones has fallen from grace. I’m sure we’ve all read the reports about how, after years of being one of the most vocal athletes to defend herself against the armada of allegations assailing her, this record holder and Olympic medalist confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions. Marion Jones cheated. She was doped up. She not only admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs, but of knowing that she was taking such drugs even while she continued to compete, while she knowingly beat multiple drug tests, and while she knowingly denied every suspicion. Sadly, such stories have become familiar this year, which has had many terrible sports stories. She’s just another athlete who did something they shouldn’t have done, denied and lied, and then apologized in disgrace.

I really liked Marion Jones. Witty, easy to listen to, confident, and, of course, an amazing athlete who seemed to find exuberance in every powerful lunge toward the finish line. And I admit to feeling disappointment and anger over her cheating. I’m not willing yet to give in to cynics who can only say, “I told you so.” I still want to believe in athletes and the amazing things they can do. But I also can see the traces of writing on the wall. This cascade of athlete betrayals is making it increasingly difficult to maintain optimism. Nevertheless, there is a spark of difference in Marion Jones’s cheating story that has rekindled some of my belief in athletics and those who compete.

High Score

As an undergraduate at Appalachian State University, I learned to play video games—or at least one video game--with my friends Robert Huffman and Tim Lesch.  After more than a few pocketfuls of quarters, I became a fairly good Ms. Pacman player, the type of guy who played long enough to annoy you if you were waiting to put a quarter in yourself. While I was not one of those players who wanted to move on to other games (indeed, I was disappointed when Robert and Tim moved on to Donkey Kong and other games), I understood what it was like to become slightly obsessed with a game and to have it slightly alter the way I saw the world. 

As evidence:  one evening, after a full day of Ms. Pacman, I went to see a play—The Prime of Ms. Jean Brodie, it was—performed by ASU’s Theatre.  In the first act, I watched one of the characters exit stage left.  My immediate impulse?  I looked to stage right to watch her reenter, just the way Ms. Pacman would have done had I been controlling her with a joystick.  After the third or fourth time this happened, I remember thinking, “I’m obsessed.  I need to lay off Ms. Pacman.”  The next day, I loved telling that story to whoever was around watching me play another game.

Please vote

Vizu is handy in that it's a free polling app that generates an embed code. It's also buggy, in that it will sometimes refuse to serve up the button at the bottom of the poll that lets you register your choice. I suspect this has to do with the way it reads  information about the beginning and ending dates, but I can't prove it, and careful editing doesn't seem to make a difference.

So here's this week's caption contest, which "began" last night but tallied no votes because of the problem I outlined. This morning's edit of the poll simply put no end date on the voting, and now it "works."

Please help me out today by voting for your favorite reader-submitted caption -- without at least 25 votes I don't really trust the outcome.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Caption contest voting

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Lowcountry summertime bingo

From the Friday 5 Blog: A game you can play in Charleston with your friends.

Additional PDF cards can be downloaded there.

Return of the caption contest

OK, Xark Nation, send me your captions to this cartoon by Monday at 5 p.m., and please put "CAPTION CONTEST" in the subject line.

This week's contest voting...

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Pick the winner in my latest contest

See the original post -- along with all the reader entries -- at my Fun & Games blog.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Caption contest: Test a new voting option

The Fun & Games caption contest rules say that I'll take entries up to Tuesday at 5 p.m., so the results of this poll are non-binding while I test this widget. That said, I'm interested to see how this will work, so please pick one.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Caption contest

This is posted over at my Fun & Games blog. You can enter the official contest by e-mailing your caption to me (make the subject line "CAPTION CONTEST" so I don't mistake you for spam).

Movie pitch contest

Over at my Fun & Games blog: A contest in which I'm asking people to write a one-sentence movie pitch (or "log line") for an as-yet unproduced movie related somehow to Charleston.

You don't HAVE to be FROM Charleston to play, so please help a brother out. It seems that when I do caption contests, dozens of people enter, but when I do other types of reader contests I get very few entries. I don't have a single entry so far for this movie-pitch contest, so I'm beating the bushes looking for funny stuff I can consider for this week's prize (duh -- a T-shirt).

So please: Stop your productive work, think of something riotously funny, and e-mail it to me at my work address. Deadline is Tuesday at 5 p.m.

@ Fun & Games: Caption contest

Just added over at Fun & Games: a caption contest. And yes, I completely stole the idea from The New Yorker. I've played with this idea before, but never with an actual cartoon.

You gotta follow the the link or e-mail me to enter though. I'm just trying to get you guys over there to play, so save your captions for the contest instead of just leaving them here...

Death knell for idiot marketing

I subscribe to WIRED, which means that I find out about cool new geek stuff at the exact moment when it becomes old and uncool (because nothing can be truly leet if a print publication has noticed it). On the other hand, WIRED acts as a bridge between the pioneers (Dewey) and the relatively early adapters (me, Janet, etc).

Anyway, I point out this video thanks to this item in the March issue's package on Snack Culture:

Sony's two-hour press conference on May 8, 2006, was a slo-mo car crash. Intended to rally geeks around the PlayStation 3, the event instead left them cranky about the feckless sales pitch, weak games, and high price tag. Over the next few days, bloggers tried to capture Sony's cluelessness, but none were so eloquent as YouTube user Macaw45, who posted a video titled "Sony E3 2006 Press Conference in 1 Minute." Editing footage from the event, Macaw45's clip distilled the meltdown with DJ-like dexterity, looping key moments for maximum effect. The defining shot in Macaw45's montage showed a game developer explaining how to defeat giant enemy crabs: "Attack its weak point for massive damage!" A meme was born: The phrase became the "All your base are belong to us" of 2006, and it was used as shorthand for Sony's lameness. The inevitable T-shirts, dance remixes, and homages followed. Marketing execs beware: Geeks with iFilm can pare you down to your essence - you'd better hope you like what they find.
- Daniel Dumas

I don't think this is a small thing culturally. How much of what we deal with in life is crappy because of slickly marketed shoddiness? And I'm not just saying this as a consumer. Shoddiness is a disease of the soul -- punished in individuals, but often rewarded by institutions and corporations. This is why we've come to hate flacks, mouthpieces and pitchmen. This is why advertising -- as we know it -- is in a state of flux.

Name that entrance

OK, this one is for all you pluff-mudders out there. I'm working on a new idea, so here's a test:

Can you name the business to which this distinctive tile arrangement serves as an entrance?

The reality of Geekdom

I'm at least on a roll, possibly in a rut, but I am feeling rather inspired this week, possibly because I just spent four days doing what I love more than anything in the world - gaming.

My husband has always been very secretive about his gaming hobbies.  Almost no one at his place of business knows where he goes when he takes a week of vacation in August.  I, on the other hand, generally live by the principle of "If you've got a problem with it, that's your issue, not mine."  When someone at work asks me where I'm going, I tell them.  When they ask me what GenCon is, I tell them.  And at my current place of business, the response is mostly confused looks, followed by repeated questions of "so..is this like something you do competitively?"

Honestly, "competitive gaming" is such a scary thought that I don't like to even dwell on it.  Certainly there are players who see it that way, and they annoy the piss out of the rest of us.

But then the question becomes 'What's the point?"  Why do I play games in which there is no winner?  It really is the joy of playing, but I understand why people think that's a cop-out answer. 

Is it that I don't like reality?  Well, occasionally.  Honestly, don't we all at least occasionally wish we were somewhere else, or we were someWHERE else?  And for the majority of role-players, that's what the hobby is about: being someone we're not in an acceptable setting for such behavior, so we can go back to our mundane lives without causing a stir. 

Are we unhappy with our real lives?  Not particularly.  But reality, honestly, is pretty boring in comparison with what it could be.  Granted, boring has its benefits.  In the real world no one is trying to kill me or depose me or otherwise destroy me.  Is my fantasy life something I wish I was living?  Not a chance in hell, in most cases!  Fighting crime is hard and dangerous work, and in some games, I'm not even the good guy.  On occasion, I can be a really rotten bastard in-game.  It's a joy to cut loose and do that on occasion, but it's not something I'd actually want to submit real people to.  Really horrible things happen to us in-game too.  The Star Wars game that has been referenced several times in my post is a great example.  Best scene I was ever in involved the death of five other characters, including my in-game boyfriend.  I had real tears in my eyes as it played out. Oh, and did I mention I was the one who killed them?  The BF informed us that they were doomed anyway, and there was a big baddie on their ship, and I gave the order to blow it into little bitty pieces.

And people ask me if I would prefer my imaginary lives.  Are you kidding me?  It made a great scene in a game, but I would never, ever, want to live through that or anything close to it.  That's the difference between fantasy and reality, folks.  And, yes, most gamers are very, very aware of the difference between the two.  It's been an interesting journey the last two years, playing a character responsible for the death of a loved one.  The character is a mess now, as one might expect.  But it's only fun BECAUSE it is fantasy, because no one actually died, because my character's devil-may-care attitude and drinking problem are things that I have chosen to play, not things that have actually been forced upon me by circumstance.  (suggestion to other gamers: alcohol and blasters really don't work well together,  just trust me on this one.  They are, however, occasionally hysterical together.)

And for this character in particular, we've ended up with a certain personality within a personality, which I find amusing, to say the least.  Very early on the character got nicknamed "Crash & Burn," due to her creative piloting maneuvers.  Almost ten years later, most people don't even know Crash has a real name, and she occasionally gets pissy about it, and I just laugh at it.  One of the judges actually double-checked that I was playing Crash at GenCon because he overheard me being called by a different name - the name I originally made for the character.  My character has a character.  There's me, and there's the character I created, and then there's "Crash," the character that other characters see, regardless whether that was my original plan for her.  And they are three sometimes separate people.

Are there connections?  Of course.  As much as I try to actually roleplay, to play someone I'm not, my own personality sneaks in.  Most of my characters display snarkiness and sarcasm.  I just can't help myself.  That's me.  Many of my characters have some sort of serious flaw, generally physical, and I can only guess that that stems from my physical limitations.  There's something about overcoming personal adversity that I enjoy playing.  A number of characters also have particularly dynamic with their fathers, although I haven't been able to logic that one out yet, as me and my own father are neither notably close nor estranged.

(ok, I've completely lost my train of thought, so I'm going to end things here, as my husband just came in bragging that he ran over two mice with the lawnmower.  Blah!  Not something to brag about, at least in real life.  Now there are mice bits all over my yard.  Yuck.)

And God said, "Let there be Geek."

Now you've whetted my appetite. Is it mostly networking? Or socializing? Or gaming? Is the emphasis on existing games or previewing new games? Are there lots of panels, like with the sci-fi fan conventions, or are there lots of vendors there with lots of gamer schwag?

Xarker's question really deserved it's own post, so here it is.

The short answer is no, sometimes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

GenCon was started about 30 years ago by TSR, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons.  (It has since been bought out by Wizards of the Coast, or WOTC for short.)  As I understand it, D&D was the main draw, and it was small.  As the convention got bigger, people continued to bring in their wider idea of "gaming."  When I started attending in the mid-90s, role-playing was still the main event, and D&D and was a large segment of that, but there were also people who attended solely for board games or miniature gaming. 

They also had guests - lots of them.  Writers held seminars about publishing, story creation, game development, character development, and other applicable subjects.  Up until the last few years, there was always a major sci-fi star in attendance, plus a swarm of more minor stars.  Recently the selection has been a little more hit and miss.  Originally the stars were largely from Star Trek, but as science fiction TV broadened, so did the actor pool.  My husband and I's combined autograph collection includes not only most of the Star Trek actors, but cast members of Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (new), and Buck Rogers.  David Caradine was in attendance last year.  James Marsters from Buffy and Angel was the year before that.

In 1993, a card game called  Magic: the Gathering came out.  It had a fantasy setting, so it appealed to gamers.  (This is the game that started the craze that led to Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and so on.)  The effect on GenCon was staggering.  Every horizontal surface not being used for gaming was taken over by a Magic game.  This frequently included the floor.  You literally could not traverse the convention without tripping over a Magic player.  By the end of the convention, anonymous signs had started showing up for "Magic Anonymous" and "Friends don't let friends play Magic."  TSR tried to curtail the game, but it was just too popular, and the next year there were Magic tournaments, followed in the following years by tournaments in newer card games.

Computer games now also take up one corner of GenCon.  So does Anime, which technically doesn't have any connection with gaming at all, but is popular among gamers.  There are people who now attend just for the Anime screenings.  It's also a popular place for gamers to dump non-gamer girlfriends so they don't get bored.

If it's out there, you can probably find it at GenCon.  Exhibitors run free demos of new games, while attendees register ahead of time to run games in established systems, which other attendees like myself sign up for. D&D is still prominent, but no longer the clear leader, in large part to the huge number of new games that have come out in the last decade.  Most games are run by individuals, but there are also a growing numbers of clubs that run games.  GameBase7 is one of those groups.  They've been running a Star Wars campaign for ten years now, and that's where most of my friends are to be found (the ones I didn't count in my previous post, because I knew I would be seeing them at the SW games.)

For a lot of people, there is no socializing.  This is a convention of 30,000 geeks, after all.  29,000 don't know how to socialize.  (seriously, thousands of them don't appear to know how to bathe.  A few particularly snarky people have handed out soap in gift bags as either a joke or a not-so-subtle hint, take your pick)  GameBase7 is an exception.  We've been playing together for years.  We know certain friends are going to be there, and we look forward to it, and sometimes we even take time out from gaming to, you know, actually chat (usually about gaming) or have a drink.

I can't easily scan a photo from my wedding album, but there's a picture there that is telling of the social dynamics.  We have one picture that is only GameBase7 members, as Jerry and I are both members (which is weird in and of itself...we were members of the same club and never really crossed paths until three years ago, even those both of us counted our best man as a friend for most of our years with GB7).  There's about twenty people in the picture.  That's way more people than non-family who came from Green Bay or Milwaukee, which were our respective homes at the time.  It's more people than even came from Michigan, where I spent most my life.  I see these people a couple times a year (at various conventions) at most, and here they all are at my wedding.  I would trust any of these guys with my life, even though by-the-numbers I barely know them. (4 to 10 days a year for up to 10 years.)

GenCon continues to grow and expand.  Many more artists are becoming involved, partly because GenCon made it more economical for them to display works, but also because the industry has had an influx of artists, at least partly because the card games demand huge amounts of artwork to be produced.  A Christian Gamers group has shown up for at least the last two years to hold a worship service Sunday morning.  A monstrosity called True Dungeon has run for 3 years now, which is a 3-D dungeon that players walk through as they play.  The LARPs have spilled out into the mainstream time slots, when previously they were run almost exclusively at night (when everyone was playing Vampires, go figure). 

And people are bringing their kids.  It's not just that my personal friends are growing up and ha