The problem with sleeping at work on a weeknight is that the cleaning people are running around until 04:00 or so doing things. They don't make that much noise, other than the occassionally singing and vacuum cleaning. But just after you've gone to sleep for a bit someone comes tromping along. Oh well, I guess I should have used the rest area.

So I'm back to working a lot, and not getting enough of my other things done in a timely manner, like this journal. At least the work is interesting and I feel that I'm accomplishing something. Unlike that last project which I've talked about too much.

In any case I'm really thinking about stopping my campaign at the end of season 3. But I'd feel bad since people seem to like it. Alternatively maybe I should try to get someone to run another game half the time, then fill one week with boardgames and I only have to run once a month. That would really prolong my campaign in the short term, but once I'm more used to my work load I'll probably get back into the swing of things.

I really regret not writing people, as I have these emails I haven't replied to in a month or two. It's kind of embarrassing, and yet not something I look forward to. I'm just not very communicative and I keep putting it off and doing other things. I do seem to get a lot of things done when I'm procrastinating, although they're not important things, mostly reading and other mindless activities.

Writing of which, I'm missing quite a few books. At work I have all these technical books that people keep borrowing. That part I don't mind, but I never seem to get the books back. I probably have about a half-dozen books floating around, out of a couple of dozen. At least I get to read them first before they disappear. But then I can't use them as reference books.

Barnes and Noble is a pretty nice bookstore. Good selection in a wide variety of subjects, chairs to read in, coffee shop, events and a friendly staff. Sometimes you hear people bemoan the big chain store, since they drive out small specialized bookstores and you lose a certain amount of choice because B&N can't possibly stock every book. But the Internet has helped that. I'm not as worried about not being able to find some esoteric books since I can probably find them on the Internet. There is the argument that without the bookstores some books won't be printed due to lack of preorders. Print on demand technologies may solve that.

Right now though, print on demand technologies are not that great. I bought a book that way and it was nice, considering how it was made. Spiral bound and nicely laser printed, a really nice amateur job but a far cry from a "real" book. I told Eric a few weeks ago that I don't like ebooks and online mags as a source of gaming material. That was a bit too blanket of a statement although substantially true. If it's not professionally printed it's not really a valid source for my RPG campaign. It's an easy first criterion to distinguish the amateur stuff from the professional stuff. It's those extra things: editing and layout and art and playtesting, that distinguish the quality work from the hash some groupie puts out. Not that professional work is necessarily good, but the odds are better. That I've been forced to rely on the Internet for adventures points to the fact that LUG is not printing anything anymore.

On that subject, some people at Last Unicorn Games are planning on releasing their unfinished products as freely downloadable PDFs. With the permission of Wizards of the Coast, who bought LUG a few months ago and then immediately lost the Star Trek license to Decipher Games, Spacedock has already been released and a handful of other supplements will follow. For the most part though, they are not quite finished works. Some have been playtested (like Spacedock) but from looking at Spacedock, editing will be subpar and there will be lots of little things wrong. But it is a nice gesture from LUG and WoTC.