If you were following along last year (or are paying attention otherwise) you might know that the fabulous SXSW Interactive/Film/Music conference happens right about now here in lovely Austin. Since I’m (a) a music fan, (b) a geeky web nerd, and (c) looking for a job, I’ll probably be blogging less and screaming at tourists to get out of my town more for the next week or so. I might just sneak a few posts in here and there – quite possibly something interesting relating to the conversation I had at that fancy restaurant a few weeks ago – but don’t hold yer breath, amigos.

Meanwhile, here’s some Barbarians for you:

Just a quick note that even though I’ve been quiet for a couple of days I haven’t abandoned you, my faithful audience. I’m heads down on some demonic goodness I’ve been fighting to wrap up and you can expect to partake of the delight shortly.

In other news…

I want the axe.

Just got back from dining at one of the very bestest places in Austin – The Emerald. If you live here, or just happen to visit, you really ought to make a point of getting out to this (pardon the pun) gem of a restaurant. I hadn’t been there in far, far too long and had the opportunity to go again. Chateaubriand never tastes as good as it does with a fresh pint of Guinness to compliment the flavors!

While dining, my wife and I ended up chatting with a delightful couple at a nearby table who just happened to know a thing or two about RPGs and some upcoming interesting developments for the iPhone. I can say no more, but keep your eyes open for a very cool announcement during Austin’s own SXSWi festival, which is just a couple of weeks away.

In the meantime, I’m far too fat and happy to write about RPGs any more tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow or so with something or another to tickle your geek bones.

Holy schniekes! If you haven’t seen today’s Google Doodle, go now before it’s tomorrow. Be sure to play with the joystick thingie on the right side, too!

In honor of the short-lived snow day here in Austin, I humbly link to Snowdecahedrons! by Dan Sternof Beyer. These were definitely not made in Austin, today or any other day 🙂

Snowdecahedron, by Dan Sternof Beyer

And the Frost Giant takes… <rolls> 8 points of damage from my Longsword! Eat that, Frostie!

Through the magic of WordPress and its ability to schedule posts “in the future” I am able to set this particular note to publish at precisely the same time and date as the very first post on Strange Stones. Crazy, no? Actually, it’s not as crazy as the fact that I made it through a full year of this with only minimal annoying gaps in my geekful posting. Yay me!

Anyway, I’ll spare y’all any deep introspection on this momentous occasion (especially since I went into that sort of thing earlier). I’ll just take a moment to say that, amazingly enough, I don’t think I’m going to just give up and walk away from all this fame and fortune to go live on an island somewhere 🙂

Game on, my internet brothers and sisters. Game on!

Odds are you’ve heard of Noble Knight Games by now. But if not, you owe it to yourself to give ’em a look. They’re pretty much the absolute best online RPG shop, and they have a strong focus on out of print games.

Part of how they fuel that side of their business is by taking trade-ins from nerdly folks like me. I just did a big deal with them and was treated quite fairly. Heck, they even paid for shipping on that big box o’ games I was never gonna play again.

So if there’s something you’re looking for that you can’t find anywhere else (or if you just want to order online) I highly recommend giving the folks at Noble Knight a bit of business. They’re good people who do right by their customers. Heck, you might even wind up with something I used to own.

In the unlikely even that you’ve missed it, I figured I’d point out the Deal (-eal-eal) of the Century (-y-y-y): A $20 Amazon gift card for only $10 at LivingSocial.com. Yep, you give Living Social $10 and they give you $20 to spend at Amazon. For reals.

Sure, you have to sign up, and they’ll undoubtedly pester you in the future, but hey, $20 at Amazon will buy a nice edition of Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E. Howard, don’tchaknow?

Anyway, it never hurts to share these things. I think 🙂

Hey folks. If any of you aren’t already using Dropbox to store files online and are looking for a better solution to sharing stuff than any of the really annoying pop-up heavy Media Fire type sites, please consider signing up for Dropbox using my buddy link. If you do, we both get an extra 250 MB of storage space, which is a nice thing. You get 2GB for free, and can opt to buy more should you need it. But for general purpose usage, the 2GB plan seems quite solid.

I’ve been very pleased with Dropbox and find it a good place to back stuff up (like the PDFs some of you other blogheads so generously share with the world). And you can easily share or not share stuff you store there on a case-by-case basis. And, as I referenced above, if you are sharing something from there your sharees don’t have to deal with the annoyances that come with places like Media Fire. I’m not really using it for sharing since I can host stuff freely here at strangestones.com, but one never knows when one might need such a thing.

You can also easily access stuff you store at Dropbox from an iphone or ipad (and maybe other smartphones, I’m not sure), which makes it a nice way to get to PDFs of rulebooks and stuff, too.

Ok, begging and spieling over. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled geek blogging 🙂