Hands and Curses

Got up at 7:30 this morning to catch the Manchester Derby (United v City) live on Setanta — having caved in and finally ordered the channel to increase the dosage of my football addiction.

Getting up at 7:30 on a Sunday should be an indication of the depths of my fervor.

Of course, I don’t think the cats or the dog were quite prepared for the stream of curses that erupted in the second half, when Ronaldo decided that it was a good idea to nearly catch the goddamned ball during a header.

Um…Christiano? Don’t know quite how to break it to ya, but hands aren’t allowed. I’m an American, and even *I* know that.

Thankful

Pretty good, all in all.

One, The Minion has successfully launched into college, and is home to visit. She’ll be home again for Christmas, and we’ll also have a visit from my younger daughter and son, too.

Two, there’s nothing quite like an overwhelmingly positive response to a sale to cheer me up after the Boo-fest that was the discovery of our stuff being pirated. I’m reminded that there are folks out there who enjoy what we do, and are willing to “Love us with money”, as the old White Wolf GenCon booth signs used to read. Thanks, folks.

Three, still cancer-free. Still kicking. Glad for that, and thankful.

Four — after a long, long time: My country is about to be run by grown-ups again. Things are bad — everybody knows that — but I’ve actually got hope for the future. Competent people, who actually care about the same things I care about, are on the job, and it looks like our country will actually move towards being what we’ve always been taught it is.

Hope that all of you have more things in your life that make you thankful than things that don’t.

Gawdblezzus, every one.

Guess That Means We’ve “Made It.”

So, I’ve talked about it in a few places — Adamant’s sales being about 40% down from this time last year. A drastic drop that started in September.

I’m sure some of that is the economy, and some is the fact that our release schedule isn’t as aggressive as it was last year….but now I’ve found another contributing factor to our sales slump — Apparently, someone has created a bittorrent of a bunch of our stuff, uploaded (you guessed it), about 2 months ago.

According to a couple of the torrent sites, the torrent has been downloaded more than 200 times in the past 2 months, which I’m sure has contributed to the downturn in actual sales. I’m sure that most of those folks were never going to be customers — they just like free stuff — but a few of them might have been.

This is the first time in the 5 years that Adamant has been in operation that I’ve found our stuff being pirated. I guess that means that we’ve “made it.”

Tell you what: If you’re reading this, and you’re one of the folks who downloaded the torrent, and you liked the stuff you got, feel free to drop a donation in the tip jar (if you didn’t download, but feel like tipping anyway, that’s cool too):