About Fred
Fred Hicks does layout and art direction for role-playing games. He also publishes and plays them. He likes his television and he likes his cooking. He loves his wife and daughter. Life is good.
Author Archives: Fred Hicks
Holy Crap Friday
So, it’s Friday, and I don’t have a food post for you. Once I do, it’ll be about The Banana Bread I Grew Up On. Promise.
Today, I’ve taken some painkillers, so I have very little to say that doesn’t dissolve into a suffusion of yellow.
I’ve got some interesting things to say about how a distributor [...]
Phat Tuesday
Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, so naturally we dove into a pancake dinner. Good times. We aren’t much for plain pancakes around here — I’m all about the chocolate chip, my wife’s into the banana and/or chocolate chip variety.
Naturally we are right-thinking people and build this around Alton Brown’s Buttermilk Pancake recipe, found over yonder at [...]
Chicken Lazone
I’m going to try to talk food three times this week. It’s going to be light on words, unless there’s a recipe for me to offer in-post, but hey, you’ve got some eating to do.
First up is my new favorite dinner. It is not healthy, but it is good: Chicken Lazone.
It’s Game Theory
What it all comes down to is what Russell Crowe as John Nash was on about in A Beautiful Mind. Watch this clip — it’ll only take a few minutes — then come back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk
This Time It’s Personal
This is nominally the next part in my rambling about the elements of community building. This time I’d like to talk about the value of the personal connection.
The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member [...]
Critical Mass
I’ve seen a few people ask me how I build communities. Most of what I do relative to communities that I’ve been in a nominal leadership role with just seems to proceed from natural instinct. I’ve tried to deconstruct this in the more distant past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting, even if I’m not [...]
No More Posts This Week
No more posts this week — Dresden Files RPG grows large in my schedule, along with some other things — but you may content yourself with running over to Blue Collar Space to watch me harrass Brad about our friendly philosophical divide.
http://www.vsca.ca/halfjack/?p=388
Everyone Is Talking About It
… so maybe I will, too.
Yes, Amazon screwed up the public relations — you really should read John Scalzi’s excellent analysis of why, but as usual, skip the freakin’ comments.
I don’t really think that’s arguable. Everything outside of that is where things turn into a sort of wiggly, wobbly munge.
What A Difference A Day Makes
In the last 24 hours, my wife — formerly an employee of Sun Microsystems, now acquired by Oracle — got laid off, and Evil Hat started getting courted by a distributor now that our press release about the Dresden Files RPG is getting more circulation. Both bear talking about.
The Shelf Is A Gamble
I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.
This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden [...]
Bunt
Today, I bunt. I’ve got layout on my mind, in the sense that I need to get back to doing that, rather than blogging.
But it occurs to me that by this point, if you’re following this blog you know why you’re coming here.
Why is that? And what should I be writing about to keep your [...]
Evil Hat Sales: Finishing 2009
IPR numbers are in!
Here’s the skinny.
Invincible
My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing. I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit. (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. [...]
Midnight Post: Help Haiti, Get $1400 free
So, over at DriveThruRPG, they’ve set up a “donate $20 to Haiti” thing. That’s cool in and of itself. But that’s not where it stops. Because publishers have donated products which you get when you donate. Their total value? $1,481.31.
So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.
You should perhaps take all [...]
Blogging Is Vulnerability
So, my birthday was this past week, on Wednesday, the first day since I’ve rebooted my blogging that I’ve missed out on the Monday/Wednesday/Friday regularishly scheduled posting thing (to be followed by a Friday absence as well, but that’s almost beside the point).
It wasn’t, though, because I wanted to give myself a day or two [...]
Direction and Detail
Quick Blog Note
So my updates are likely to get more sporadic over the next few weeks. I started layout on the Dresden Files RPG right at the beginning of the year, and all my previously queued blog posts have been run through, so the myth of regularity I’ve been operating under is shortly to evaporate. [...]
To (Sell|Talk|Play)
Short post today.
I was looking at Chad Underkoffler talking about whether or not to go to Dreamation this year, and it reminded me of my perspective on conventions in general. Since I’m both a publisher and a hobbyist, conventions are always composed of some mix of selling (and buying), talking (networking), and playing. The question, [...]
Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Observations
On Monday I posted the missing 8 months of sales data I’d been too busy most of this year to post. So, that’s done, bringing us up to the end of the year (save for a big chunk of sales reckoning from IPR — I don’t get confirmed, official reporting on that until the 15th [...]
Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Catch-Up
So, once upon a time I regularly updated my livejournal with Evil Hat’s sales numbers. I fell off that horse a goodly time back — evidence points to May 1st as the last time I did this — so it’s time to play catch-up. I don’t have the end of year numbers from IPR yet, [...]
Sales and Origins Gaming