I’d settled into a good routine. Get off work at 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., go to the gym, and then get home by 6:00 to 6:30 in time for dinner with the family. Take care of the kids – giving them baths and cleaning up the house – and help herd them into bed by 8:30. Then my wife and I would have the evening to ourselves. That was the theory, and it was also the practice for a good long while.

And then Luke became a toddler.

Radio Active returns to its somewhat regular schedule as I talk about family visits, getting more sleep, hacking Moodle and trying out Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

In Netheads, I talk about getting a sneak peak at D&D 4th Edition through already-released products like the Book of Nine Swords, discover a new Secret Lair for masterminds and minions to hang out in, and experiment with Google Code. Finally I have a review of the new print magazine Kobold Quarterly, which just may be the Dragon replacement that gamers are looking for.

Geek musician/singer Jonathan Coulton (Skullcrusher Mountain, Re: Your Brains) lives in Brooklyn, New York, which isn't all that far from the Lehigh Valley. Yet to the best of my knowledge, he's never played here, which is something I'd like to change.

There's a Lehigh Valley "demand" for him in Eventful:

http://eventful.com/demand/D0-001-000000412-0

This is basically a webified way of asking someone to come play in your area; by accumulating votes we can show that there's enough folks in the Lehigh Valley to make it worth his while.

Click the link and vote if you'd like to see him perform in the area.

So it seems like the federal government's going to go ahead and cut everyone in America a check, which is nice and all except for a) it will likely do little to stop a recession, seeing as how it's a tiny sliver of GNP and b) we'll have to pay for it later since there aren't any spending cuts elsewhere to balance the expenditure. We're basically borrowing (stealing if you're of a more cynical mind) from our future selves to pay our present selves.

If you really want to help the economy and benefit Americans in both the short term and long term, then you'd deal with the very real, very expensive issue of Social Security and Medicare entitlements.

But why solve a problem today that you can panic about tomorrow?

GoodReads is a social networking site for readers, allowing users to add their book collections to online bookshelves and then share those collections with friends. Books can be stored on different book shelves, rated, and reviewed. You can compare your collection to that of a friends, with the site giving you a side-by-side comparison of ratings for the books you have in common as well as a percentage indicating how much alike you are. It also supports a cool group feature that allows you to have a group reading list, and then talk about that list in a discussion forum.

My brand-new, yellow-painted, Chaosium-sanctioned Call of Cthulhu dice by Q Workshop arrived today from Poland:

I've got to say -- these things are easily the most beautiful, well-crafted dice in my collection, and I'd put them up against any of those meteorite dice in a geek cred show down. I mean, sure, dice made from space rocks are cool, but when are you going to use them?

These dice are something you can use every week, and hell, they've got Elder Signs on them ("it's a tree ... it's a star!").

Visit Flickr for a full-size photo of the new dice. You can order a set yourself by visiting Q-Workshop's CoC web page.

Last week was a light one for Marvel (or at least the Marvel titles I read) so I let Tony at Phantom of the Attic talk me into trying out a couple of other titles. In addition to my X-Universe standby – this week it was “New X-Men”, Part 12 of the Messiah Complex – I picked up Penance: Relentless #5 and Dark Horse Comics' The End League.

Finally there’s Marvel's The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, one of the four graphic novels I got for Christmas.

I look like death warmed over. There are deep bags under my eyes, my neck muscles are vise-tight despite a massage on Saturday, and my face has that hang-dog, puffy look that comes from one too many nights spent sleeping far too little.

This is actually an improvement.

Things were worse in December and January, which were hell on sleep in the Newquist household as the kids forgot how to sleep through the night, family emergencies smashed our piece of mind, and a nasty stomach virus had my wife and the baby fighting to keep food down. And while it feels like we’ve been under siege for the last three days fighting this virus. Not all of my sleep deprivation is family induced though. There was a marathon session of Civilization IV of Saturday night, and more than a few late night DVD forays to watch the two Resident Evil sequels, the first two discs of Doctor Who, Season 3, and the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Heist.

Some days, I’m my own worst enemy.

The northeastern game convention MepaCon will be held April 11-13, 2008 at the Holiday Inn at 200 Tigue Street, Dunmore, PA 18512. You can learn more by joining the con's convention information group at Yahoo, contacting the convention organizers, or visiting the web site.

I'd like to attend, but I've got a lot going on in April, so we'll have to see. If nothing else it'd be great to go up on Saturday and run some Savage Worlds games, but that may have to wait for the fall.

The Savage Worlds: Explorer Edition game book is a slim, seductive little tome that promises to deliver “fast, fun, and furious” action for any genre and in hundreds less pages than Dungeons & Dragons takes to recreate just the fantasy genre.  It’s a promise it makes good on … up to a point.

This is the third printing of Savage Worlds, and perhaps the best one yet. The book is printed in folio format (6.5 inches wide by 9 inches high) and numbers 160 pages. It’s a slender book, but it manages to pack its entire game mechanic into those pages; this isn’t a “lite” edition; this is the whole game.