An update on what went down with my job.

So, as I’m sure many of you are aware, last Friday I turned in notice at my job. This was precipitated by a crisis that has, or so it has become apparent in the last week, turned out to be much more Head Office’s fault than mine. Still, the crisis made me sit down and face facts about my job. Things are not getting better – as evidenced by me having to sic HR on my boss for trying to make me work unpaid overtime, or by such managerial “genius” as banning the word “busy”.

That’s right. I’m not allowed to say that I’m busy. Not even to head office.

(Amusing parenthetical anecdote:
So, on Friday of my play - when I have the day off - the regional manager sends out a memo. We're not allowed to use the word "busy" anymore. So Monday comes. I'm sick as a dog, and we get EIGHTEEN SETUPS in. Our previous record is 11, and anything over 6 is a heavy, heavy day. We get a request to do something that can wait until Wednesday, and I tell the customer care person relaying the request that there's no way we can do it today.

My boss overhears me, and the following conversation happens:
"By the way, we're not supposed to say we're busy anymore. [Regional Manager] wrote a memo, I'll show it to you later."
"Okay, then how am I supposed to deal with --"
"Just use your best judgement"
"Can I see the memo? If I'm supposed to be restricting --"
"No. Later. Not right now. It's too busy."
(HA!)
"Okay, but then how am I supposed to --"
"If you want, you can call [Human Resources] and ask if you can say the word "busy".")

So when the crisis initially sprung, I was very much in a mode of “my options are quit or get fired”. This week, as regional middle management started to intervene, it became clear that that probably wasn’t the case. But the initial spur of panic had given me the impetus to review our finances and discover that thanks to Kit’s raise, our gap in expenses would be relatively small and that we could afford to have me quit.

It took some hard thinking – was this really something I wanted to do? But when I looked at the effects that my job has been having on my home life, on my health, on my stress levels, there was no question. Especially when I considered the fact that due to understaffing, the stress was only going to get worse – not better!

There wasn’t any recrimination, which I was half-expecting, and there’s been no attempt at negotiation – which is a relief.

It’s been scary, though, quitting with no position lined up. I’m trying to use nepotism, but I haven’t heard anything yet and the economy is always a factor. I just wrapped up a freelance job, which along with some evening hours I’ll be picking up at a theater box office will cover the bills for March and mean that I can stay home to concentrate on job searching, at least for a month, who knows if I will have found something by April?

It’s hard to remember that I’m doing the right thing. Giving up a secure job is a scary, scary thing. But I have hope that this time I’ll be able to find a job that doesn’t slowly suck the life out of me.

Survey for the Women of the Redemption Woodstock LARP

Hello, LARP ladies!

This summer, as part of a general effort to get more women involved in gaming, I’m going to be part of a booth of female game designers selling independently designed and produced roleplaying games. As part of this endeavor, we’re going to publish and sell a ‘zine called RPG = Role Playing Girl with a collection of articles about women in roleplaying.

It’s been pointed out to me that our LARP group is a bit unusual in the number of active and involved female players that we have – as the gaming population at large tends to be largely male. I’ve been asked to write about my experiences as a woman with LARP, but I thought it would be much more interesting if I asked the women of LARP to speak for themselves.

So! Here’s the deal. I have a short survey comprised of a few open-ended questions. I’d really appreciate it if you took the time to fill it out. Feel free to write as much or as little as you care to. For that matter, answer the questions that appeal to you; feel free to ignore questions you don’t feel are relevant to you.

Some caveats, I may not use all of what you send me, but by sending me answers I am taking that as permission to publish your comments. Anything you say will be properly attributed, but may be edited for spelling and/or grammar.

I’m hoping that you’ll take the time to answer these questions. I’m excited about trying to get more women involved in gaming. And I’m excited to hear what you might say in answer to these questions.

RPG = Role Playing Girl Survey

1. NAME (as you would like it to appear)
2. How long have you been at LARP?
3. How did you get involved with LARP?
4. Do you think that women are discriminated against in roleplaying? If yes, why? If no, why not?
5. Is LARP more female-friendly than tabletop roleplaying? If yes, why do you feel that way?
6. Have you ever experienced discrimination by male roleplayers because of your gender? If yes, would you be willing to provide examples/anecdotes?
7. (For people who roleplay outside of LARPs) Have you ever played cross-gender characters? If so, have you encountered resistance from other players about playing male characters?
8. Have you ever felt that certain plots were expected of your character because they were female? (i.e. rape, pregnancy, etc)
9. Is there anything else you’d like to say about being a female roleplayer?

My deadline to submit the article is the beginning of April, so I need responses by the end of February so that I have time to compile answers into a finished article. Please send responses to my gmail address: anna (dot) kreider (at) gmail (dot) com.

(Also - a bonus question. We're trying to come up with a name for our booth at GenCon. If you had to come up with a name for a group of female game designers, what would YOU call it?)

Thank you!

Showdown cover sketches

So my current illustration project is Showdown - a game in development by Seth Ben-Ezra that started out as a silly thread game on a forum and turned into a full-fledged game. Currently, interior layout is still being figured out, so I've just been doing sketches for potential cover illustrations, which are to be as genre-bendy as possible.

So this was my first attempt. The poses are definitely kind of 'meh', I was more wrestling with the idea of having characters from two obviously different genres of fiction face off against each other. (Seth's initial request was for space marine, but I had too much difficulty with that so I turned him into a retro-future space man.)

The verdict: the character design is good, but the poses not so much. It needed to be more action-y! They need to be actually fighting, not just facing off. So I took another stab last night at rehearsal and came up with this:

Better, although there's definitely some pose weirdness. I'm not thrilled about the idea that it looks kind of static, despite that she's hauled off and slugged him. Also, her face was ugly. But whatever - just a sketch. Easy to fix.

Tonight I had another stab at it. I actually did two different drawings. I did one where I liked him but not her, and vice versa. So I scanned them and pieced the two good halves together - which is why the placement seems a bit odd.

So that's proceeding nicely.

Currently, in addition to working on Showdown, I'm also in a play as well as doing some freelance web design while continuing to look for a new job. It's making life very... interesting. So who knows how frequently I'll update here?

Last Session of Hero's Banner

So, we played the final session of Hero's Banner tonight - at long last! Man. There was some hardcore awesome-itude that happened tonight.

Amusingly, all of our characters went with their Hero influences - which resulted in some pretty personally bleak endings. In terms of mechanics, this meant that:

Magdalena managed to secure the right of women to inherit and rule their own property. In order to do this, she had to give up the possibility of a future with her lover, Carmina. (In fact, Magdalena saw her lover beheaded by Octavian as a traitor. (She was innocent)) She also gave up on continuing her family's line, as she never married or had children. Ultimately, she became a ferocious warrior and one of Octavian's chief generals and died in battle.

Octavian claimed the throne for himself and created peace between the four kingdoms - although a peace brought about by force. In order to do this, he disbanded his House and murdered his family - including his beloved Roxana. Though completely insane and corrupt, history will remember his reign as a good one. He was ultimately murdered by the son Vasilica had by the Queen (before Octavian murdered her)

Casimir followed his heart and became a priest after succeeding in his campaign to convert the barbarous folks from over the mountain. Gavril, swayed by Casimir's sermon, converted as well as became a priest - entering a life of holy solitude. Casimir never saw him again. His lands were absorbed into the Principality of Carol - formerly known as Ryic.

Vasilica decided to pursue expansion at the cost of his people, and when his loyal servant Oana tried to persuade him to be content with the crown of Tucaescu, he killed her. He died a lonely bitter old man, and no one remembered him as a hero.

Here are the drawings from the final session:

Magdalena killed a soldier to save her lover, and she was ingrateful enough to repudiate her because of it. Stupid woman.

To his credit, Octavian did try to reconcile with Roxana before boarding her up with the rest of the family in his family's manor and burning it to the ground.

Awesome SAUCE. Conclusion: Hero's Banner rocks my world.

Christmas doodle

I've got quite a bit of sketching that I'm obligated to do over the next few days, and I might post things here depending on how rough the sketches are. In the mean time, here is a marker sketch for a present to my brother and sister-in-law. We're donating to a local nature trail in their area.

I only spent about half an hour with pencil and marker, but I thought it came out cutely.

My parents aren't leaving until tomorrow. But after that I have some sketching to do for Seth Ben-Ezra's Showdown as well as logo sketches for a play. Hopefully I'll be able to get them all done on Monday, but we'll see.

More photography from Florida: wildlife and seascapes

So here's the other half of my Florida photography favorites. It's a bit saddening to be going through them now as we had 15cm of snow on Friday and will be getting 15 more today.

The resort that we stayed at in Key Largo had a small beach. We sat out there one evening and watched the sunset.

Sadly, we discovered that they don't really clean the sea-grass off the beaches during the off season.

This was part of an old bridge, now only open to foot and bike traffic, that goes out to a mostly abandoned island called Pigeon Key that used to be a railroad building settlement. Kit and I walked out to the island and had a spin around. It was quite entertaining.

This fellow was lurking in the bird gardens at Busch Gardens. I have no idea what he is, but those legs sure were funny-looking.

When we went on the boat tour in the 10,000 Islands part of the Everglades, there was an island simply covered with white pelicans. What you can't get from this picture is the sense of scale - pelicans are *huge*. These were at least four feet tall.

Another picture from Busch Gardens. Meerkats are just adorable!

The islands in the 10,000 Islands section of the Everglades are all mangrove islands. Amusingly, it only takes 1 mangrove to constitute an island. As we were headed out to the Gulf of Mexico, we spotted a flock of birds perched on a tiny mangrove island.

More Busch Gardens. Macaws are pretty.

Photography from Florida: wildlife!

So here is some of the promised photography from Florida. There was an awful lot of wildlife to be photographed, and I went pretty hog-wild.

There are white-tailed deer in the Florida keys, only they're about the size of large dogs. We were very lucky to have spotted some while at the Key Deer Refuge. It's sad that you can't really get the sense of scale in this photo.

There are some very large iguanas in Florida. This fellow was hanging out near the visitor's center in one of the parks, but there was a very large specimen that hung out at our hotel as well.

We startled this heron at the beach and I was lucky enough to get a good shot of him flying away.

We stopped at Gator Hole State Park to watch alligators. It amused me to watch the gators pretending to be logs. The reflections did turn out really well.

I'm just a log. Yep. Juuuust a log. Nothing dangerous here.

There were some HUGE alligators in the Everglades. This guy was seven or eight feet long!

It was too bright to tell what this fellow was, but he was probably a turkey vulture. There were more turkey vultures than you could shake a stick at in Florida.

Kit and I were amused by the fact that this flamingo was letting his leg flop down like that.

This picture was taken at Busch Gardens, so I'm not really sure what kind of bird this is, other than some kind of buzzard (honestly).

The COOLEST thing we saw the entire vacation was in the Everglades. We went on a boat tour and saw a pod of dolphins swimming in the wild with a baby. What you see there are two females holding it up, since apparently baby dolphins don't swim so well. SO. UNBELIEVABLY. CUTE.