Comicon and San Diego

Tomorrow night I will begin my journey across 1/2 of the United States, to gather with my fellow geeks and geekettes for comicon. If anyone is planning on being there, let me know, we’ll hook up. Not like… hook up in a sexy way or meat hook way, but in a coffee or food way. I guess if you are the right kind of person, the first two might be options as well.

I have found out my phone can actually log into the site and use the full functionality of the dashboard we use for posting, I was unsure if I could actually do that, I can. What this means is that after a long day of fun in San Diego, I can attempt to make a post. The chances of me being successful will be low though. I may just be tired and pass out immediately in my bed. If I don’t get around to doing that, you can always follow my adventures via twitter. I assure you, things will be going on twitter. a lot.

Once I return, then I’ll actually start the posting schedule I planned. At first I was going to toss one or two out before now, but it turns out that getting ready for vacation takes some planning… and I hate planning. Which means my brain has smoked and seized up numerous times. I was able to fully pack last night. Everything is in my luggage. By doing this, I have learned a few things I have almost zero casual clothes, and I have to buy underwear to make it through my trip.

It seems about 80% of my clothing is work clothing, and I don’t have a lot of clothing in general. Seems I will be making one last purchase on my way out of state. But hey, brand new undies for vacation isn’t so bad, right?

We’re alive!

Yeah, okay, so this is a super quick post to let everyone know we’re alive. Seriously, we didn’t just pay server fees for nothing here just a few weeks ago.

Life has been busy. I’ve been doing some re-arranging in life, in about every way someone can, and Matt is figuring out how to be a dad. Hopefully we’ve both got this figured out for the most part, if not, then there is a child in danger and I might start eating nothing but eggs or something. I officially plan on starting to do 2 posts every week starting around the 6th of July. These posts will more than likely go up on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Sadly, I will almost immediately be taking a week and a half long break from these posts for comicon. Meaning the 2nd half of July will have little to no posts, unless I can find an easy way to do them, that isn’t my phone.

As far as the audio podcasts go, I am hoping to have more info on that sometime after the holidays when things slow down for myself and I would assume Matt as well.

The main reason of this post, besides pointing out that we aren’t dead? To point out that we have one very dedicated and awesome fan, you’ll see him in the comments, goes by Benensky.  A little while ago Keith Baker was looking for some input on his site about what people would like to see. Benensky being a dear soul name dropped us to Keith in the comments of that post.

Firstly, Matt and myself are huge Eberron nerds. It is easily our favorite campaign settings, and I know that I myself would be honored if Keith took up Benensky’s idea about coming onto the show and pumping something out with us. Whether this be something small, or he be a full fledged co/guest host for entire podcasts, or even maybe a side podcast. I won’t speak for Matt, but I’m sure he’d like it too.

Sooooooo Keith, or anyone really, you can e-mail me here or find me on twitter if you have any thoughts or ideas on this topic… or any topic.

Seriously, if you guys want something steady in the posts I’ll be doing let me know. That way it’ll be better than “last Monday I tripped on a stick and hit my head on an emu”.

Have fun kids! (and Keith)

I’m bad at titles

I’m also bad at a large list of other things as well! I’m a multi-faceted item of failure for sure. Now now, before you all get “don’t be so hard on yourself”, look at it this way, I have facets, I’m a friggin gem. I kid though, except for the part where I tell you I suck at writing titles.

I’ve decided to scrap the next podcast due to audio quality, and with things right now, i am not 100% sure when I’ll be able to get together with Matt in order to work out the issues we had with recording last time. For every issue I seem to clean off my plate, I seem to get at least one more added on. Thankfully that hasn’t been holding us back, yet, just life in general has. I promise you, I’ll try to work in some here in the next week or so for us to get together and work it out.

In the meantime, if there is anything you’d like to hear on a quick bonus episode, let me know, or if you would like to see me try to team up with another podcaster for a quickie, I’ll do my best.

But, I’d rather not leave you all with nothing, so I’ll say this.

Today, there will be a man in my mouth. Not just any man mind you, but a man who makes art, and has skillful hands. Yes ladies and gentleman, I am going to the dentist, the first time in a long time. I have decided that since I have dental insurance, I shall use it. If any of you follow me on twitter, I’m sure you’ll see something about the trip. I will say I got worked into their schedule in a stupid fast way. I was expecting at least a week wait, nope, less than 24 hours. I called at 3:10pm and got told to be there at 10:30am the next day.

So yeah, this will be interesting, especially since I don’t get up till 1-1:30pm on a standard day, let alone being somewhere at 10:30am.

Have fun kids!

Episode 31 – Player’s Handbook 3

Welcome everyone to the in the works on being new with our audio Episode! In episode 31 we discuss and talk about some of the new things you’ll find in the PHB3. Is this episode late? Most definitely! Would I warn you that with our new setup, that we aren’t use to, we occasionally get robot voices? YES! So please, don’t write us about it. I know about it, which means Matt will know about it, which means we’re going to fix it. Mostly because I friggin refuse to edit that much again for another podcast. Plus I don’t want the voice over robot voice stuff we had this time around. We will get it fixed, I just don’t know when.

Which means we may or may not be on a slight break, I am not sure. If the audio on the next podcast isn’t too bad as far as being able to match them up and etc, I will edit it and put it out. If not, then I’m going to scrap it and we’ll work out the kinds sooner rather than later in our recording process. What that means is I’ll do my best to post entertaining blog posts until then, and maybe do the occasional skype bonus episode with other podcasters. I don’t know, but I will try to keep you all entertained.

Anyway, enjoy our overview of the PHB3!

Questions? Comments? You can e-mail the show here. If you want to speak to one of us directly both myself (Jason) and Matt have e-mails as well, how handy. We are both also on twitter: Matt & Jason.

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Episode tomorrow

Yeah, I might have it sitting on my hard drive starring at me, but I figure I might as well torture you all and make you wait till a standard issue release day for the podcast to go live. I’m a jerk like that. It also didn’t help that a storm rolled through here the other night and I was unable to work on the podcast due to the lights flickering a lot and scaring me. I’d rather not lose all that work due to one stray lightning bolt.

Episode 31 within a few days

Okay, I am close to having Episode 31 – PHB3 ready for all of you. And in fact, I’m only 1/3 of the way done with it but the reason I say I am close is because I started with Matt’s audio first. He talks softly, I talk like an angry dinosaur, so I sometimes carried over better on his microphone than he did somehow. I have no idea. My own audio stream is much more obvious on the who is talking part. With a little tweaking to the sensitivity of our microphones, I will be able to edit faster, and things will sound even better on the podcast itself.

I am going to strive to get the next podcast out on time, meaning 2 weeks from today.

I would expect Episode 31 here Wednesday morning, because right now, I don’t exactly have a lot of things lined up to do on Tuesday. That means editing time.

I have also been asked a few times if Matt and myself will be at Gencon. While I will not answer that here, yet, I can say there is at least one gigantic convention I am going to. I will be attending Comicon in San Diego this year. I will be in the San Diego area for an entire week, so feel free to contact me if you are going to comicon as well or just live in the area.

Have fun kids!

Podcast incoming in the year 2099

Alright kids, remember how I said we got new equipment and how awesome it would be? Yeah, apparently it will be awesome for everyone but me. With the 2 podcasts we have in the can for all of you, the amount of time it’ll take me to edit will easily be about 4 times what it normally is. Once we get use to things and are able to tweak it a bit more, it’ll remain a huge pain, hooray! Which means I am going to have to learn how to tweak a few things, and fast.

While there is no podcast for you today, there should be one by the end of the week. I spent the last 2 dedicated editing nights to trying to find a technique to make it so I could edit like normal, failing both times. I thought I was close, but then 5 minutes in Matt started sounding like a robot, which I was honestly tempted to keep.

Podcast Next Monday

Hey everyone!

Okay, cheerfulness done. Matt and myself had planned on recording in time to have a podcast up yesterday but well, guess who forgot the microphone. If you guessed Matt, you’re wrong, it was me. There is a downside and an upside to this. The obvious downside was there wasn’t a podcast for you all yesterday, the upside? I was able to order us another microphone so now we can get back to the old school way of each of us having a microphone each.

The benefit to that is we’ll sound much better, obviously. While we didn’t have pop filters for the upcoming episode, we have created some and we’ll be using them for the following one, which would be Episode 32. For the upcoming episode where we didn’t have pop filters we just stayed far enough back that it wasn’t an audio issue, but it did mean we had to speak up a bit more than usual, not a big thing. I plan on having Episode 31 out Monday the 21st. I could wait for Tuesday though, that way you have something to go along with your Avatar DVD. Also, a warning, once I edit down Episode 31, I expect it to be very close to an hour and a half long. In that episode we cover the Player’s Handbook 3.

While I don’t want to tell you what our verdict on the book as a whole is, nor whether or not we suggest you go buy it or not. It would almost be a breach of protocol if I said whether you should buy it or not buy it.I mean, if you like things like races and classes, such as githzerai and psionics, you’ll be biased. Me? I’m not a fan of the githzerai, but I might be fond of humans with bull heads.

We talk a lot between ourselves, not on the show so much, about our insatiable love for Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books. Well, they are making a pen and paper rpg based around this little set of books and guess what, if you go to their site and pre-order, you get an almost complete copy of the book in pdf form right friggin now. You will also get a PDF of the books when they are 100% done as well on top of your meaty paper based copies as well.

I know what you’re saying, “but they are so expensive”. You’re right, they are, and especially so when you consider the fact they are built off of a free game system. In the end, I look at it this way, I am paying for both real physical copies and the pdf copies along with supporting an author and the guys who spent god knows how long creating those books. Plus, you know, early access to the books, which means you could start playing whenever you want.

Anyway, I’ve talked enough as it is.

Have fun kids!

I know I know

I know, there is suppose to be a podcast up today right? Right? Well… too bad! We were looking to be on schedule and everything here, but that just isn’t looking like it’ll be happening for a bit. A little over a week ago the family issues I’ve been having, finalized themselves, in the way a wobbly house finalizes by collapsing. To continue the metaphor, I’ve been spending time pulling people from the rubble and making sure everyone is as sound as they can be. Thankfully, all of the other houses seem to be stable and sturdy for now. I will try very hard to begin blogging more for you all.

With that out of the way, everything should be in the all clear right? Buzz, sorry sucka (aka beloved listener/reader), or at least from what I expect. Matt’s wife is heavy with child and is due in a few days shy of 2 weeks, which could very well interrupt recording for a bit. I’m going to talk with him soon and see if we can schedule a few recording sessions between now and then, to make sure we have a pile of stuff for you while we are on infant hiatus. This isn’t a positive though, it really depends on Matt. I honestly have no idea how long it will take for the baby rush to settle down and for him to stop hugging it.

While we don’t have a topic or time picked out, I am guessing we will discuss the Player’s Handbook 3 next, on Tuesday, meaning a podcast next Monday. This was a wild guess, and what I just e-mailed Matt as a suggestion.

I really need to do some of this stuff sooner so I can make posts that are more informative… nah. That just isn’t my style.

Have fun kids!

Episode 30 – DDI stuff: Rituals, Valenar, and Kalashtar

Welcome to Episode 30! In this episode we explore some of the DDI articles that have come out recently for all of you paying people to read. Don’t have a DDI subscription? Well then tough, you won’t be able to get on the “in” of our talks. What you can do though is listen and see if there are articles that are interesting enough to have you possibly start into DDI.

Specifically in this episode we talk about: the current Ritually Speaking article, which deals with item focus rituals, which I think are pretty darn cool; as well as the Winning Races article entitled “The Fighting Styles of the Valenar”, which will give you both fluff and crunch to your favorite elves from Eberron; and we wrap it up with the Power of the Mind article focusing on the Kalashtar, which has a great deal of fluff and is by the main man himself, Keith Baker, so you know it’ll be good.

Here soon Matt and myself will already stray from our new episode formula for a very deep talk about how Wizards has released their campaign books, what some of the changes they are looking to do, and how we as human beings percieve the past, present, and possible future of campaign setting releases. Will it be our next podcast? Can’t tell ya, cause I don’t know. If anything, the PHB3 landed, so I’d expect one of those two if I was you. You don’t have to take my word for it but well, I am in the know on this one… kinda.

Questions? Comments? You can e-mail the show here. If you want to speak to one of us directly both myself (Jason) and Matt have e-mails as well, how handy. We are both also on twitter: Matt & Jason.

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