Podcasts

My daughter loves to watch TV. I don't really blame here; there's plenty of awesome stuff to watch out there, some of it even worth while. Whenever possible, I try to make our TV watching time at least somewhat educational. Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters have been great for this, as both are highly entertaining and engaging, and both offer numerous hooks for me to teach her a variety of things. I try to keep the totally mindless stuff, like Viva Piñata, to a minimum. One of the reasons I don't have cable, truth be told, is so I can limit both of our TV watching without having to be the bad guy saying no all the time. We simply don't have all the channels she has elsewhere, so we don't actually tend to watch too much.

My apologies for taking so long to get this one out. Life keeps happening to me, and I keep feeling the need to spend the evening listening to podcasts and playing on XBox Live Arcade. But I'm finally going to sit down and knock out the rest of my Dragon*Con adventures. If you're just joining me, check out part 1 and part 2 first.

This year, I was finally able to make the trek out to Atlanta, Georgia, to attend Dragon*Con. I've been wanting to go for years, but this is the first time I managed to save up both the money and the vacation time simultaneously. My friends Chad, Lizzi, Jess, and James were all going, and were happy to have me along for the ride. We reserved a room at the Marriot, rented a minivan, and on Wednesday, August 29th, we loaded up after work and hit the highways. The trip itself was long and relatively uneventful; the real fun began once we'd checked into our room Thursday and began roaming around.

I've been getting into listening to podcasts more and more lately, especially as my gaming addiction is taking hold more and more firmly. It's gotten to the point where iCorwin, my pretty little 30GB iPod, actually filled up from the huge number of podcast files I've been putting on there and neglecting to remove after listening. I've mentioned already some of the podiobooks I've listened to, like 7th Son and Earthcore, but I've really dived deeply into a variety of gaming podcasts as well.The big one I've just recently caught up on is Fear the Boot. The episodes I first started with were excellent discussions of a wide variety of RPG subjects, from people who are very interested in the role-playing aspect of role-playing games. For the last several episodes, however, they've been having pretty in-depth conversations about actual game creation, paralleling the design of their own post-apocalyptic RPG, Skies of Glass. While I have no interest at all in ever designing my own game, those episodes have been quite fascinating. They've made me take a look at the established games I do play in a different way, and given me some excellent ideas for the world I'm building for my own D&D campaign. On top of the great information, the synergy between the hosts and their long history gaming together makes for a lot of entertainment as well.