After lunch Saturday I had planned to go to Gamescape. It's not often that I happen to be in San Francisco and I hadn't been to that marvelous game store in probably at least five years. On the map it doesn't look very far away, and I apparently had forgotten just how far it is from Embarcadero Center to Ninth Street, where West Coast used to be. So I started walking. I really should have taken the BART three exits down and saved half an hour. But at least the walk does me good. So after half an hour I had gone all the way down Market Street to Van Ness, then turned off on Oak Street and started up that street. Another half hour to reach Divisadero, over a bit of a hill and quite tired by then.

Gamescape is much like any big hobby store. In front are the mainstream games, not so much the kind of games you'd find at Toys'R'Us but mainstream for the board game market. Various German games as well as trivia games and weird abstract block games. Off to one side in a sort of alcove is their wall of miniatures. In the middle are all the role-playing games. They have a good selection of games and lots of supplements. I picked up a couple of GURPS items and a couple of Ogre items that my local game store didn't have. Off to one side near the RPGs are the wargames. Not a great selection but a good basic gamut of Avalon Hill and small game company wargames.

But the real beauty of Gamescape is its used game section, which takes up the back section of the store. Alas! It was not to be. I remember three big book- cases on the right wall, two on the back wall, two on the left wall, plus a table in the middle with boxes of modules and games and the stuff of dreams, literally. Just an unimaginable selection of old out-of-print games, modules, and adventures for just about any role-playing game you could imagine. Dave and I would go there and I'd spend a good hour or two poring over the stacks, looking for anything that interested me. I picked up a lot of Champions, some BattleTech, and who knows what else on previous trips.

All that is gone now. Well, it's not that bleak. Now there is a big empty table in the middle and when I went there people were playing some miniature game, probably Warhammer. Lots of used board games in the left and back shelves and in one of the right bookcases. That leaves only two tall bookcases with used RPG books. One of them is full of White Wolf books (Vampire, Werewolf, etc) and AD&D books, the other bookcase has various RPGs plus BattleTech and Star Fleet Battes. Not much of a selection really, and the prices are higher than they used to be (used to be 50% of cover, now it's more like 70%). All in all it was quite disappointing. Another cherished memory obliterated.

Anyways, I walked to the BART and made my way home, getting back after 18:00. A bit too much walking for me, and I'm still a little sore even now. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. The Internet has really changed the used book market since it's much easier to get hard-to-find books from eBay or other sites than from wandering to game stores. Gamescape does have an Internet site with web shopping, although the Interface is not easy to use (too many clicks as you drill down, hard to browse randomly). Sigh, back to eBay for me...

So last night and today I finally set up my old PowerBook as a server and moved everything onto it and turned off the PowerMac that I had used for so long. I don't have time to learn BSD administration and set up Mac OS X as a server, so I just used Mac OS 9 and the applications that I've been using all along. I'll wait until some Mac OS X books are published. Meanwhile the PowerBook is significantly faster then the PowerMac, at least on the local network. Even with basic html queries it's faster and it doesn't slow down as much when I'm doing other things on it. And it has it's own backup power supply.