I could have played tennis today. I would have played tennis today. I should have played tennis today. I’m declaring tennis officially playable. Who wants to be on my tennis spam list for arranging impromptu games?

Today I went down to Radical Entertainment (video games) for a voiceover audition. I think it went well. Wish me the luck. The good kind of the luck. While I was there Dennis made sure that I got to show off my artwork to the art director there, Yayoi. They have cool super secret projects going on there that I can’t talk about. I mean that in both senses of the word “can’t” – I am not allowed and I’m not able. My bus transfer ran out while I was there so I went to the McDonald’s in the bus depot there on Terminal Ave. I bought a chicken fajita. It wasn’t even worth $2.13, but it gave me change for another bus ticket. I decided to try my old transfer on the bus just in case (I wasn’t sure what time it was, and also I wanted to see what he would do if I tried to get on with an expired transfer). To my delight and surprise he said “don’t worry about it” without even looking at the transfer, which he didn’t take. Sometimes, if you get on with an expired transfer, the driver will look at it to see “how expired” it is, and may let you on. I wonder if that is something the drivers do personally – break the “rules” – or if they’ve been instructed officially that they are allowed to do that.

There’s no D&D tonight because we don’t have quorum. It would be a good chance for me to catch up on my work, but for some reason I just don’t feel like it tonight. Or at least, not right now. Maybe it’s because I just got off my feet.

I’m getting a little disheartened by “contests” in which your entry consists of submitting creative work. This happens a lot in the gaming industry. For example, a contest to design an entry or create a writeup for a book. The prize? A copy of the book (sometimes more). This is a cheap way to get content for a book. This is also going on with a “Necronomicon” contest at http://www.cthulhulives.org/necronomicontest/contest.html You “submit your spell, drawing,
chapter, or passage of mad Mythos rambling. Your entry could be included in the
finished volume, and you could win a complete, handmade, leather-bound, super
authentic copy of the finished work, done up in full 17th-century style at the
insane level of detail the HPLHS is known for! There are lots of other prizes
too, so submit several entries and increase your chances.”
Now this particular example is not bad, and in fact it is kind of in the spirit of Lovecraft’s contemporaries (Lovecraft had writing buddies who used one another’s ideas for a collective “mythos”). Furthermore, submitting one drawing or passage may not be a lot of work to some. But there are other similar contests in which entrants must submit, for example, a fully statted monster entry for an upcoming D&D book. This is a good idea if you’re a publisher, because instead of paying a professional (usually freelance) author three cents a word for one piece of work, you can instead receive scores or hundreds of submissions and pick your favourite, and reward the contest entrant with a complimentary copy of the finished book (of which an author would normally get at least one in a standard contract) and whatever else you happen to have laying around the office. It’s clever, and it’s cheap.