Lily threw up over the weekend. I felt so bad for her, because she did it overnight and we didn't find it until the morning. We usually keep the doors between our rooms open, but we happened to have them closed that night.
So I wake up, and I see Lily sleeping on top of her blanket in front of the gate we have in the door jam to her room. I figured that she must have woken up during the night and fallen asleep there when she couldn't get out. She woke up a short while later, in a very good mood. She asked for her Baby Bear, so I picked her up and carried her over to the bed, where I saw that she had thrown up. She got her sheets, her blankie, her whale and Baby Bear.
"Oh," I said, "You threw up" and she answered in the smallest little voice, "I'm so sorry" and I felt terrible because she thought this was all her fault. I tried to explain that it was okay and it was an accident, but she just kept saying "I'm so sorry."
We did wind up washing Baby Bear, so that was a good thing. She takes Baby Bear everywhere and the thing was getting more than a little scurfy.
At work, a friend asked which holiday movie I'd be watching with Lily on Christmas Eve. I said it would probably be Dora saves the Mermaids.
Two months ago, Lily had two favorite videos. One was the Little Mermaid and the other was Dora the Explorer. Jen was out one Saturday morning, and we had watched Dora three or four times. I really couldn't stomach another viewing just then, so when Lily started begging for Dora during the closing credits. I said "Hey, let's try this other Dora video" and I unwrapped the plastic and popped it in the DVD player.
In a way, I feel sorry for Lily, having found her ideal movie so young. It's got Dora and it's got mermaids. It has Dora turning into a mermaid. Her joy is complete.
Speaking of peaking, I was thinking about two things I like that has seen their peak and aren't really suited to the world in which they now find themselves. I'm talking about comic books and role-playing games. For a while, they were both pretty mainstream. My old boss at Dreamscape said that if you had the money to open a comic book store in the early 90s, then you would make a profit. . Everyone thought that their Death of Superman was going to fund their retirement, so they bought ten copies at time. But it had an initial print run of 4,000,000 copies and something like that is never going to be collectible. When people caught on to that fact, the speculator boom started to die and as the industry had adapted to serve that segment, a good percentage of comic shops took heavy hits as well.
Role-playing: Odds are that if you went to college in the late 70s/early 80s you probably played at least one game of Dungeons & Dragons. People on a message board I frequent point out that Barack Obama went to school during that time frame, and it's possibly, even likely, that he was exposed to it. But the niche it occupied has been replaced by video games to a very large extent. You can slaughter orcs at your kitchen table with twenty-sided dice or you can do it in front of your 50 inch TV in surround sound. I'm as enthusiastic an RPG partisan as you're likely to find, and I know which one I'd prefer. There are fewer people being introduced to RPGs every year. The hobby has fallen below that critical mass where people recruit their friends into the game. There are some things tabletop RPGs do better than video games, but you'll never know that if you're never exposed to them in the first place.
Both of them are slowly dying. As the current customer base ages out, they'll shrink down even more. I don't think they'll die entirely, at least not within my lifetime. They'll be kept alive if for no other reason than that they serve as a source of intellectual proprieties. Which comic book can fuel the next summer blockbuster? How can we package D&D as a new video game?
Maybe this is just bleak and my natural pessimism is showing. What do my fellow geeks think?
So I wake up, and I see Lily sleeping on top of her blanket in front of the gate we have in the door jam to her room. I figured that she must have woken up during the night and fallen asleep there when she couldn't get out. She woke up a short while later, in a very good mood. She asked for her Baby Bear, so I picked her up and carried her over to the bed, where I saw that she had thrown up. She got her sheets, her blankie, her whale and Baby Bear.
"Oh," I said, "You threw up" and she answered in the smallest little voice, "I'm so sorry" and I felt terrible because she thought this was all her fault. I tried to explain that it was okay and it was an accident, but she just kept saying "I'm so sorry."
We did wind up washing Baby Bear, so that was a good thing. She takes Baby Bear everywhere and the thing was getting more than a little scurfy.
At work, a friend asked which holiday movie I'd be watching with Lily on Christmas Eve. I said it would probably be Dora saves the Mermaids.
Two months ago, Lily had two favorite videos. One was the Little Mermaid and the other was Dora the Explorer. Jen was out one Saturday morning, and we had watched Dora three or four times. I really couldn't stomach another viewing just then, so when Lily started begging for Dora during the closing credits. I said "Hey, let's try this other Dora video" and I unwrapped the plastic and popped it in the DVD player.
In a way, I feel sorry for Lily, having found her ideal movie so young. It's got Dora and it's got mermaids. It has Dora turning into a mermaid. Her joy is complete.
Speaking of peaking, I was thinking about two things I like that has seen their peak and aren't really suited to the world in which they now find themselves. I'm talking about comic books and role-playing games. For a while, they were both pretty mainstream. My old boss at Dreamscape said that if you had the money to open a comic book store in the early 90s, then you would make a profit. . Everyone thought that their Death of Superman was going to fund their retirement, so they bought ten copies at time. But it had an initial print run of 4,000,000 copies and something like that is never going to be collectible. When people caught on to that fact, the speculator boom started to die and as the industry had adapted to serve that segment, a good percentage of comic shops took heavy hits as well.
Role-playing: Odds are that if you went to college in the late 70s/early 80s you probably played at least one game of Dungeons & Dragons. People on a message board I frequent point out that Barack Obama went to school during that time frame, and it's possibly, even likely, that he was exposed to it. But the niche it occupied has been replaced by video games to a very large extent. You can slaughter orcs at your kitchen table with twenty-sided dice or you can do it in front of your 50 inch TV in surround sound. I'm as enthusiastic an RPG partisan as you're likely to find, and I know which one I'd prefer. There are fewer people being introduced to RPGs every year. The hobby has fallen below that critical mass where people recruit their friends into the game. There are some things tabletop RPGs do better than video games, but you'll never know that if you're never exposed to them in the first place.
Both of them are slowly dying. As the current customer base ages out, they'll shrink down even more. I don't think they'll die entirely, at least not within my lifetime. They'll be kept alive if for no other reason than that they serve as a source of intellectual proprieties. Which comic book can fuel the next summer blockbuster? How can we package D&D as a new video game?
Maybe this is just bleak and my natural pessimism is showing. What do my fellow geeks think?
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RPG was ALWAYS a small niche of super-hardcore-geeks. I might be a geek, but I was never into D&D. My love of sports prohibited me from joining the D&D clubs. And the people diving head-first into the video game market don't fit the RPG/D&D bill. They are mainstreamers. People who would beat up/make fun of RPGers in high school. I know of 2 new recruits to their local comic book shop for Saturday morning D&D sessions.
With comics...Things are cyclical. In the 70s/80s, there were few stores that catered to people who loved the genre. Then, in the 90s, those damn mainstreamers looked at comics as an investment. Comic shops sprung up all over and non-fans bought up all the #1s they could get their hands on. Well, it's not big enough to be an investment property. And that market collapsed. All the fly-by-night shops closed, leaving the small, indy stores from the 80s still left. And they mainstreamers moved onto their video games, leaving only comic fanboys left.
These genres aren't dying, they're just back to the normal levels that they were, before the influx of semi-fans.
-Tom G
Thanks Tom! (We still on for that Doctor Who marathon on New Years Eve?)
TT sez: With comics...Things are cyclical. These genres aren't dying, they're just back to the normal levels that they were, before the influx of semi-fans.
I'll agree with that, and perhaps I lost sight of my original point over the course of the post, namely that they've peaked and they're never going to be as popular as they once were. They're back at their ground state, but since they've failed to adapt to compete with other forms of entertainment, I really don't see them having another big resurgence.