The next meetup is coming up soon, the details below are pretty similar to the North one: ITINERARY: Date: August 4th Location: Carowinds – Charlotte, NC / SC 9:00am - 10:45 Meet at Shoney’s restaurant, which is very close to Carowinds Link to Google Maps I’ll be inside having breakfast or outside in the parking lot. T-shirts and prints will be available for sale outside (though they’ll be for sale all day). We should have higher quality ones this time, including Civil Protection ones. If you don’t want to pay for the cost of the amusement park, you can stop by during this time for free. 11:00 - 11:30 Arrive at Carowinds, Meet outside the south gate (not the north one). Here’s a picture from google maps:

 

WARNING: There is a $15 parking fee inside Carowinds because they’re jackals. You might want to try to park somewhere else and carpool with people.

11:30 – 2:00 Enter Carowinds, go on rides. If you still need a ticket, here’s the info to get a discount on it if you buy one online: Price: $41 for August 4th if you use this link to purchase tickets. ($36 + $5 BS “processing” fee.)

2:00 - 2:30
Meet at the Carolina Skytower structure (should be the tallest structure in sight) in case more latercomers arrive or people get lost. We’ll probably eat after this.

5:00 - 5:30
Meet again at the Carolina Skytower structure.

~10:15pm (as park closes)
Meet outside south gate again.

- - -

Like the last meet, things will be pretty informal. I’ll answer questions, sign things, you can stick with me while I go on rides, split off and do your own thing, whatever you want. If you hang around, be prepared to have an answer for what you would do with an island if you were rich enough to buy your own. HOW TO FIND ME: I’ll be wearing a bright lime green t-shirt to remain as visible as I can. If you come late, you’re welcome to track me down “Where’s Waldo?” style.

Here’s a picture of me from the last meetup:

Once again, if you’re colorblind, you should probably arrive on time. If you don’t see me, look for a large man wearing a Freeman’s Mind t-shirt, he’ll know what to do. Hope to see more people at the meet!

*** ONE MORE MEETUP ON AUGUST 4TH! *** 

Well the first meetup is over and went well. I got to meet several fans and have some intense fun at the park. I learned some things about myself too, specifically that I can mostly stay in control when it appears that I’m falling to my death. The people that came were all great; I feel like if there was a zombie apocalypse, then the group we had would be very functional and survive. All in all it was a lot of fun and I’m glad I had the meet. Really my only complaint about the meetup is that the numbers were a little short of what was projected in the earlier poll:

Now the second meetup hasn’t happened yet, so the results of this are still inconclusive. It could be that 1300 of you are coming to the south meetup, that would be great. If that happens, then I won’t understand why the Confederate states lost the Civil War. If the second meetup turns out like the first however, we can make some interesting conclusions:

-If internet people say they are interested in attending something, over 99% of them will not actually attend.

-If an internet person says “maybe” they will attend something, there is a 100% chance they will not attend it.

I don’t want to pass judgment too quickly about internet people however, maybe some people got scared after seeing my picture, or some of you weren’t able to make parole afterall. In light of this, I’m launching a new poll to see what we can expect:
 

[poll id=”7”]

Hey everyone, this is just a quick post for the people attending the Accursed Farms North meetup. The nice way of saying this is things have gone less than optimal with the t-shirts and the final quality is what you would expect more of a rushed Chinese counterfeit copy.

There will only be the Freeman’s Mind logo of shirts for sale, I vetoed producing the Civil Protection logo after seeing how the FM ones came out. Anyway, I felt like I had to make a quick announcement about this, otherwise I would feel like a con man. My apologies ot

The good news is we’ll have nice high quality prints for sale that I can sign!

This meetup is coming up soon and I finally have all the information finalized. Here’s the itinerary:

Date: July 22nd
Location: King’s Dominion - Doswell, Virginia (near Richmond)

9:00am - 10:45am
Meet at Denny’s Restaurant which is right next to King’s Dominion.

Link to google maps.

I’ll either be having breakfast or else be outside in the parking lot. T-shirts will be sold outside. If you don’t want to pay for the amusement park ticket, here’s your chance to meet up for free.

11:00 - 11:30
Arrive at King’s Dominion, meet at the plaza area (near a flagpole?) in front of the gates. Here’s a picture from google maps:

If traffic is really bad, this time might get pushed back some.

WARNING: There is a 2 parking fee inside King’s Dominion. You might want to try to park somewhere else and carpool with people.

11:30am - 2:00
Enter King’s Dominion, go on rides. If you still need a ticket, here’s the info to get a discount on it if you buy one online:

Price: 9 for July 22nd if you click on this link and follow these instructions:
Username: KDVAFUN04
Password: KDVAFUN04
Then buy the “multi-day” ticket (not what you think) for 3.99. They’ll still add a BS “processing” fee.

2:00 - 2:30
Meet at the Eiffel Tower structure in case more latercomers arrive or people get lost

5:00 - 5:30
Meet again at the Eiffel Tower structure.

- - -

I don’t really have much in the way of plans aside from going to the amusement park, this whole thing will be pretty informal. I figure I’ll just talk to people, you can ask questions, meet Craig Mengel and Fred Meixell in addition to myself. I can sign stuff if you want, if nobody has any ideas what to do I’ll just make up stuff to talk about. I’m really not sure what to expect at this meetup. My guess is it will be something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4keTxDO6hk

- - -

HOW TO FIND ME

Arriving late? No problem! I’ll be wearing a bright lime green t-shirt like this:

Also I should say to the dismay of many of you, I no longer look like Gordon Freeman. Unlike earlier photos, nowadays I look more like a backup Musketeer or something, judge for yourself:

If I look like I’ve only had 4 hours of sleep in this picture, that’s because I have. And yes, the people with chainsaws behind me were doing their work the same time I was trying to record a lot of the dialogue for the last episode.

Anyway, if you arrive late, you’ll just have to hunt me down at the park, like a real-world “Where’s Waldo” book. I’ll try and remain pretty visible and plan to be at the park all day. If you’re colorblind, you should probably arrive on time.

Hope this works out!

Youtube

Downloadable copy will be up after a revision is done to the audio.

Here’s the next episode. This episode was brutal on me. My old microphone died on me a small ways into the video (you’ll probably be able to hear where it changes), so I had to take my best guess as to what kind of microphone to get as a substitute. I’m relatively ignorant about mics though, and one problem the new mic had was that for some reason it makes my shouting seem much less intense than it is in reality. So if my voice performance seems lackluster, blame the mic, I was screaming my head off to try and make it sound believable. On top of that, I wanted to make sure this episode got on this Friday before the meetup so there would be an annotation blurb at the end about it. That put some time pressure on me and due to some miscommunication, all the volume balancing for this was done in about half an hour by me in a desperate attempt to get the video submitted in time. I made the deadline but the audio quality likely suffered a bit. There will be a remix of the audio for the downloadable copy when it goes up later that will sound better. Also I’m going to take a break from Freeman’s Mind until I get a more appropriate microphone. I’ll be working on a surprise video you can expect in the next month or two however.

MICROPHONE ADVICE NEEDED (AGAIN)

I’ve received a lot of promising suggestions about what microphones to get in the past and I feel like now I have a LITTLE more knowledge about what I need, so I thought maybe people could give me recommendations based on what the problems I’m having with my current mic are. My biggest issue with this new mic by far is that it makes my shouting seem a lot less intense than it really is. Before you recommend a mic to me, I would like someone to explain exactly what properties of a mic would cause that to happen. I get very, very loud when doing the shouting for Freeman’s Mind. I consider this video to be a fair representation of how loud I can shout. I’d like whatever microphone I use to capture that intensity when doing lines, it will help me a lot. Anyway, I’ve made a small chart illustrating my experiences with microphones so far:

Just because a microphone is good, doesn’t mean it may be good for what I do necessarily. I thank knowledgeable people in advance for advice they can give me.