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Saturday, July 14, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #100: BEST OF THE LAST THIRTY BLOGS

Steve Cole muses: Random Thoughts Blog #70 was a compilation of the 10 blog items I thought were best from all of the previous blogs. People liked it, so I decided to do one every 50 blogs. In order to get back on an even pace, I'm doing that in #100 and will do it again in #150. So, here are my own TOP TEN.

1. Lady Gaga does a song called EDGE OF GLORY which I really like. It's not just a good beat (always a requirement if you want me to like a song) but it could mean anything you wanted, from someone putting their feelings on the line and asking if their love is returned, to the gold mining guys in Alaska, to a soldier wondering if he'll be a hero or a zero in his first battle, to a businessman wondering if his new product is really going to be a hit. We're all waiting for the moment of truth.

2. I continue to enjoy (and be frustrated by) the AMC series WALKING DEAD, which is about apocalyptic zombies. The people continue to show a singular lack of curiosity about how this mess started. Nobody seems to think of finding a ham radio and just broadcasting to see if anybody else (say, a surviving military unit) is alive. They found a zombie in a well and decided to get him out before they killed him so that the water would not be polluted by his smashed brains. So why did they lower Glenn down on a rope and then try to drag the zombie out by a rope around his neck (resulting in half of the rotting corpse dropping back into the well)? Would it have not made more sense to find a ladder and let him climb out? Also, if the zombie reached the bottom of the well by some underground route, does that not mean steps have to be taken to seal off this well from further intrusions? (Not to mention establishing a twice-daily check to see if zombies found underground routes into the other four wells.)

3. Someone asked: Do you have any thoughts to ADB going into a new path? Would you consider doing a Babylon 5 or Star Wars version of SFB? Would you ever consider doing something entirely new?

The answers are: We think about new ideas every day. We probably would not want to do Babylon 5 or Star Wars because the licenses would cost way too much. We do entirely new SFU stuff all the time.

4. In the basement of the Berlin museum, there are many crates of dinosaur fossils collected in Africa before World War I which have never been opened due to a lack of budget. Finding fossils is only half of the problem. The skilled prep techs who painstakingly scratch away the rock surrounding the bones (which are themselves rock of a slightly different kind) are underpaid, overworked, and in very short supply. In many museums, fossils pulled out of the ground wait 10 or 20 years to be dug out of the matrix of rock around them.

5. It amazes me how you can forget things. When you're 25 you think that every fact you ever learned is still there, but when you reach 55 you realize your life has lasted long enough that you have forgotten things that were once well known. (I was fluent in Spanish when in the construction business. Now, I can barely manage a dozen words.)

6. Some of our planets are missing! Turns out, when the Solar System got going four and some fraction billion years ago, there were at least 20 (smaller) planets between the sun and what is now the orbit of Mars. A couple fell into the sun, most merged into the four rocky planets, and others got gravity-flung out of the system entirely to wander forever in the interstellar void. One of those narrowly escaped this fate when it was caught by the gravity of Neptune and became the moon Triton. Mercury got hit by another planet (much like Earth did) with its crust thrown into space (where it fell into the sun) and the cores of the two planets merging into the Mercury we know today. (The fact that Mercury is more or less solid iron resulted in a stupid SyFy channel movie about it getting magnetized and heading for impact with Earth at 1/10 of the speed of light.)

7. We really need to do a better job of marketing. Jean does a lot of really great stuff I don't know about at the trench level, but the important stuff (getting proper release information to wholesalers) is still not happening. Part of that is getting cover art on time (I'm always waiting for a cover that is months late), part of it is getting the design far enough along that we can predict the price and release date. The wholesalers want 90 days notice, not because they need it but because the comic book industry does things that way. (The stores know that anything announced that far out won't happen anyway and they ignore it.)

8. Jean wanted us to create two pages of advertising for the two main RPG systems. (These were to be included in that RPG intro pack she did to explain the universe to new customers.) I basically blew a fit, since I am overloaded with things to do, hate doing marketing, and I get stuck with writing all of the advertising because nobody else seems to know how. Jean understood my situation, and decided to sneak one by using the old Rock Soup system. She told Joel to create "rough draft" advertising pages using the copy from the shopping cart. She cleverly thought that once it was shown to me, I'd start marking all over it, take charge of it, and it would get finished. Well, it worked, but perhaps not the way she expected. Joel did what he could, and brought it to me. Rather than taking over the project as Jean assumed I would, I explained to Joel that I was going to teach him how to do ad copy. (That way, I'll have someone to delegate this stuff to.) It took Joel five trips back and forth to my office with updated drafts, but we made it work. I would show him a problem and discuss how to fix it, he'd go take his best shot (he's actually pretty smart), and then I'd discuss with him ways to do it better. I guess I'm just getting too old, but I was calm and tutorial during the process. I figured out that it was easier to give Joel inadequate instructions and then show him how to fix the result than to lay out the instructions so fully that I had basically done all of the work. I had him write some new copy to fill in one item, and told him to "go find some art" to fill some blank spots. He found some art, but the four pieces of art came from three different places, and didn't look good together. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that since Xander Fulton keeps bombarding us with all kinds of art, that maybe he could find four Xander graphics that would work and would actually look like a matched set. That is just what happened! In the end, the process took two hours, but only about 15 minutes of my time. I could have done it by myself in an hour, but after we worked our way through the first of the two pages Jean wanted done, Joel was able to whip up the second page by himself in only 10 minutes. So, I learned something. (If there is no one to delegate things to, invest the time in training someone.) Joel learned how to do ad copy, and learned a few tricks, tactics, and principles for building a creative ad. He stretched his skills and in the end did a better job than I could have, since he knew better than I did where to find all of the art pieces in his computer. Jean honed her skills at manipulating me (and others in the office) to get her goals accomplished.

9. Over the years of running ADB, no end of people have suggested that I delegate more. The theory seemed to be that more products would come out and more other things could get done if I just let others do some of it for me. I resisted this for a very long time, not because I am a power-mad dictator but because of the lack of qualified people who could actually get the jobs done. Time and again, I delegated jobs to people who either did not do them, did them wrong, or abused their position to do things that were bad for the games and bad for the universe. The hard part to learn was that potential helpers don't show up by accident; they have to be trained and taught. You cannot just give them the drawing; you have to give them crayons, show them how to use them, and teach them that the lines mean STOP HERE. Over the years, more than a few people have volunteered to become "the delegated" but have demanded total control over whatever it was they wanted me to delegate to them (i.e., they could change anything they wanted without my approval, even if the result did not match stuff other people -- or I -- were doing). The fact that the SFU has survived this long is not just a testament to one-brain leadership, but to multi-brain creativity. In all fairness (to me) I have delegated a lot of stuff now that I have qualified people. We've had Q&A guys for all of the game systems for a decade, Steven Petrick runs SFB (except when he wants me to make some decision for him), Jean Sexton runs the RPGs and Marketing and FaceBook (except when she asks me to decide something), Daniel Kast runs Starmada (which he created), Paul Franz runs SFBOL and Warlord, John Berg runs Galactic Conquest (which he created), Frank Brooks runs PBEM, and Matthew Sprange runs ACTASF (which he created). More than that, the department heads (Chuck Strong at F&E, Mike West at FC) are very nearly as independent as Steven Petrick is. So I have done plenty of delegating, and as fast as I can train people, I am doing more.

10. Once we began uploading the old JagdPanther magazines (that I did during the 1970s), we started getting questions. Here are some of the answers. We'll do every issue of JagdPanther, in order. We'll do them at least one per month if not faster, just depending on what else we need to upload or what else we need to do. They'll sell better one at a time then uploading them all at once. I am scanning what was in the archive box and am not updating them. The issues of Bushwhacker, ICW Newsletter, and the non-magazine games will be uploaded as we find them. I know we have all of the JagdPanthers and think we have all of the games, but I doubt we have all of the Bushwhackers and newsletters.