In which we find a home for our next offspring

In one of those great Duh kind of moments, last night at about 4:15 I realized that the place for the Tournament Toolkit is the NDCA site. They have a lot of resources covering other things, but nothing really on the mechanics of tournament management. My search has ended. (Of course, I’ll cross post it to my own site as well. It will want to remember where it was born.)

I did some counting. Let’s say I’ve been tabbing steadily for 15 years now, and I tab 20 tournaments a year. (I’ll save you the agony of my doing the math, since no doubt CP would claim I was doing it wrong, in any case.) That’s a lot of tabbing, and with the possible exception of Kaz, probably more than just about anyone else I can think of. Week after week after week, with nary a break. If you were to seriously ask why, I would seriously answer that I enjoy it, and better still, I think it’s the place where I’ve been able to make the biggest contribution to the activity. Considering that most people don’t enjoy it, I’ve been able to fill a vacuum. This is, to some extent, to the detriment of my team, in that I’m not in the trenches week after week, learning the ins and outs of topics and the ebb and blow of tactics, but now that we’re doing mostly PF I think the harm is minimalized. In any case, that’s a lot of experience to share, and now is as good a time as any. Considering that a number of those tournaments I not just tab but direct, either out front or behind the scenes, I do have a lot to say that may be helpful for others. I’ll create the material I wish I had had when I was first starting out, but I will try to keep in mind the epigram that CP inevitably directs at me during any of our work together: “Are you sure you’ve done this before?”

The brouhaha seems to be simmering down over the ombudsman/abuse suggestion. I think I have pulled out a general sense of what is needed, which honestly is the commitment to provide a good environment for all without necessarily a solid idea of how to do it. Keeping people’s feet to the fire is a good start. I will, of course, bloviate on this in great detail shortly.

I really have all of a sudden overwhelmed myself with writing obligations. Last night a little musical keyboard I ordered arrived at the chez, and I connected it to my Mac and flipped on Garageband… What I should really be writing is a guide to self-distraction. You think my writing here is full of parentheses and digressions? You should see my life.

(But I digress.)

On the positive side, vis-a-vis getting anything done, the newly released Theme Park Studio is a PC program, and I do not intend to allow my new Mac to soil itself with a Windows ability. Then again, I could just by a dedicated Steam/TPS machine.