Titansgrave is now on YouTube

Our release schedule for Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana is

We’re doing this for a bunch of business reasons that aren’t interesting enough to go into, and because we’re working on making Geek and Sundry dot Com a destination for videos, sort of the way a TV channel works. Like, you go to ESPN for sports, you go to literally any other cable channel for bullshit reality TV, you go to MTV when you never, ever, ever want to see a music video, or you go to Comedy Central to see comedy.

Based on the feedback I’m reading all over the Internets, the video player Geek and Sundry is using sucks for a lot of you (and I hate it). I just wanted all of you who have expressed frustration with the player to know that I hear you, and I’ve conveyed your feelings and concerns to the business people at the Mothership who can hopefully do something to address it, and make it better for everyone.

I’m not sure that I can do anything about it, but I want you all to know that I’m doing my best.

And now, here’s episode zero and episode one of Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana on YouTube, for your embedding and TV streaming and sharing needs.

Also, we’re partnering with DFTBA Records to make some cool Titansgrave merchandise, if you wanted to get in on that action.

 

#SaveTheBeer!

For weeks, I’ve been a wreck. The stress dreams were relentless, my appetite was unpredictable, and I got massively sick for the first time in years.

My depression and anxiety have been as bad as they’ve been in months, and it’s been a challenge to get to the end of every day.

This is pretty normal for me when I care deeply about something, and I know that all of this has been anticipation about the release of Titansgrave, which is something I’ve been actively working on for about a year, and something I’ve wanted to produce since Tabletop first began.

I feel a responsibility to the cast and crew, to the editors, to the director, to our partners at Green Ronin, and to the thousands of backers who made it possible for us to create the show.

I’ve been making creative decisions every day, watching edits and rewatching edits and giving notes on edits and watching the edits with those notes applies so much, I started to lose perspective on the story. When I’m spending all of my energy focusing on what I can cut and what I need to change, that’s all I can see, and it’s easy for me to forget that there’s all this stuff there that’s genuinely cool.

My deepest fear has been that we wouldn’t be able to share with the audience how we felt while we played, that we couldn’t be able to communicate the fun, the tension, the camaraderie, the anticipation and excitement. I was worried that everything I thought was awesome, because I was there, wouldn’t translate.

By the way, I felt exactly this way before Tabletop was released, so this is nothing new for me.

As I told Ivan yesterday on Twitch: all I could hear was Carrie’s mom in my head, hysterically screaming that they were all going to laugh at me.

Well, it’s about 24 hours later, and contrary to everything I’ve been taught, I’ve been reading the comments. It looks like the hard work of our team from the first few ideas I wrote down in a notebook to the first few steps our party took together to the final edit I signed off on last week was worth it.

So far, everyone seems to love the characters, the players, and the story as much as I do … and that makes me so incredibly excited because I know what the future holds for all of us, and now I wish it was next week as much as you do.

Thanks for watching, everyone, and thank you for your feedback. A very, very special thank you to our backers, and to everyone involved in the creation and production.

Oh, and whoever decided that #SaveTheBeer was going to be a thing? You get +3 to awesome today.

 

Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana is here

Titansgrave Wallpaper
This could be a neat wallpaper, if you were interested in that sort of thing…

We’ve been working on it for a very long time, and it’s finally here.

I hope you like Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana as much as I do. I hope we communicate to you, the audience, what we experienced as we played the game.

Here is our prologue, episode zero.

And here it is … Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana – Episode One.

New episodes will premiere every Tuesday on Geek and Sundry, and then they will be released on our YouTube channel on Friday.

i’d love to change the world but i don’t know what to do

…so i leave it up to you…

I’ve been talking with some friends about the increasing belligerence, toxicity, and general shittiness of the Internet lately. It seems like it’s just exploded in a logarithmic curve in the last week or so, and websites I generally enjoy browsing, like Reddit and Fark, and social networks I’ve always liked, like Tumblr and Twitter, seem to be overrun with real dickwagons.

“It’s like somone pushed a button, and unleashed a horde of … angry … children …” I said, the reality dawning on my as the words came out of my mouth.

“Oh god. It’s summer vacation and the children are online, unsupervised, all day.”

I’m going to sound like an old man now, but fuck it: I’m genuinely concerned by the lack of basic empathy and kindness I’m seeing online from the damn kids today. Maybe they’re not like that face to face, and maybe they don’t think that being online is “real”, but the cruelty and bigotry and misogyny that I see blithely spouted all over the place online worries me. Are we letting an entire generation grow up believing that behaving like the whole world is [whatever]chan? Is that healthy? The Internet has always had awful people on it, but the farther away I get from my 20s, the worse and worse it seems.

Maybe it’s because I’m a parent, and I know how hard I worked to help my own children develop empathy and kindness, so I have an observational and confirmation bias … but I’m genuinely starting to feel, for the first time in my entire life, like I don’t want to interact with people online. I don’t mean that in a flouncy, goodbye cruel world I’m leaving this forum forEVAR way, either. I mean it in a “man, what happened to this neighborhood? It used to be so great,” kind of way.

I’m looking at websites and networks and communities that I’ve been part of for close to a decade or more, and I hardly recognize them. Is that because I was just less touchy about people being shits back then? Or is it a real and meaningful change in the culture? For the sake of the damn kids today, I really hope that this is just me feeling touchy and overly-sensitive. Because I’m trying really hard to make the world a better place for this generation, and if the behavior I see online from them is indicative of their norm, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.