Justin Achilli

Work all day, go out at night,
Next: international flight.

Off to Italy for the Lucca fair.

R.I.P. John Peel, without whom we’d have had an unconscionable dearth of interesting music.

It’s been a long process. I’ve been working on Vampire since 1998, and writing for it since before then. If you want to get specific, I’ve been developing Vampire in the form of Dark Ages since even before that.

That’s a long time. Six years. A fifth of my life. I revised a world, blew it to hell, and then built a new one using the experience I gained in working on the old one.

Regular readers will remember how nervous I was as the relaunch approached. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Even after putting the first copy sold at the show in the hands of the first dude in line to receive it, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the culmination of everything I had learned and done was occuring in real time right before me.

I had talked about the situation somewhat with friends at GenCon and afterward. Universally, they asked, “What next?” That question lingered with me for a while. I didn’t really have an answer for it. I mean, my professional life began and peaked with Vampire. Answering the question might yield a scary answer. It might have made me look beyond my comfortable niche. It might mean moving into something that would challenge me and force me to learn something new.

These aren’t bad things, I realized.

I’m done with Vampire. It’s time for me to move on. I’ll be staying with White Wolf, but it’ll be in a much less developmental capacity. In fact, I’ll be managing the developers’ department. My boss has made a few personal decisions of his own, and vacating his position was one of them, so that’s where I’m going.

It’s been a fun trip, strange at times, brutal at times, frequently drunk, frequently painful, but always something that I found to be very rewarding in the end. I share that with everyone who’s been with me along the way: professional colleagues, the players who buy the game and enjoy it, and friends who aren’t part of the game at all.

As my first sort of executive decision, I’m placing Vampire in some very able hands. After that, let’s see what I can do with regard to giving some creative guidance to the company on a greater scale than I did before. It’s scary. It’s a challenge. It forces me out of my comfortable position. It kind of feels like leaving a relationship — not a bad one, but one that just wasn’t any longer where I was.

Good.

Somebody was acting all froggy Tuesday night and threatened to put out a cigarette on my hand. Dauntless, I told him that I wasn’t intimidated and took the opportunity to put out a cigarette on my own hand, thereby proving my not-intimidation.

Man, that was dumb.

Three days later and this thing’s a weepy mess. It’s about a half-inch in diameter and it has that egregiously painful new-skin stretching-hurt. Like, it hurts when I move my hand, which is pretty crappy for a guy who uses a keyboard all day. It’s all slathered with antibiotic ointment and stuff, but, man, it looks like a gross stigmata.

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Tuesday night people came over for roof drinks to celebrate the birthday of me, Andrew and Eric. We had delicious cakes, delicious beer and naturally, some delicious liquor made it onto the scene eventually. One of my gifts was a bottle of rye whiskey. Awesome.

I’m not sure why, but the party was Mexican themed. As in, we had quesadillas, taquitos, Mexican beer and margaritas. Oh, and the birthday boys wore sombreros.

Speaking of sombreros, they’re absurd. You know what else is absurd? Ponchos. Why the fuck are women wearing ponchos? Here’s a little joke to that effect.

Knock, Knock.

Who’s there?

No woman looks good in a poncho. Ponchos are stupid. Why not just cut a hole in a towel and pull it over your head?

Anyway, sombreros. Here they are.

After roof drinks, we went over to the bar where we were soundly mocked for our sombreros. That’s where the cigarette-hand thing happened. As well, I entered into some kind of absurd fighting competition wherein I have to fight three guys of increasing size. It is legal to break arms and clavicles in this fight, but no gouging is allowed.

It is for this reason I hate to be getting older. Thank you.

I really like this picture, even though it has me getting my ass kicked in it. This is me being hurled through the air by a guy five inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than me. It’s raining, which is all that neat stuff zipping through the flash flares.

I still have that blue shirt. It has permanent mud stains on it. The fight took place in a muddy yard. That’s the origin of the mud stains. Stands to reason.

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Yesterday was my birthday. I should have some pictures and details up… soon. Maybe tomorrow. Today I’m hungover and worthless.

Things have changed.