Well, to salvage the pretzels, you could always cook them up, cover them with peanut butter and roll them in cracked black oil sunflower seeds, and hang them up outside for the birds and squirrels. Birds and squirrels gotta eat too, man... ;-)

From the website they claim to be Tweeting on behalf of: Copyright © 2010 ECA. All rights reserved. Game Politics and Game Politics logo are trademarks of the ECA. It really doesn't seem like a far stretch to expect that they are a part of the ECA, given that, you know, it says so.

But the thing is, Danny, because of who Wil is, he reaches people who don't go to PAX or Gencon. I'm really not a gamer, it's not a culture I play in, and it's not something I'd go to cons over. And while I of course knew of Wil from his acting in the 80s, I originally bought his books because I was working on a project for how to convert an organization's blog to a book, and Wil was a great example of 'how to'. The books introduced me to the things that Wil (hi! sorry to talk about you in third person) does advocate for, led to me reading the blog more frequently, following on Twitter, watching PAX speeches, supporting groups he recommends, educating myself on policies and media that does affect gamers (because ultimately it will affect us all), and actually becoming involved in advocacy myself (even if it is just lobbying my representatives). So yes, although he speaks to the gamers at these cons, it's not like it stays there - what Wil says gets out in the wild, where other fans who are less gamer and more geek see it and go from there.

My bf-at-the-time Magic came out was the assistant manager of a comic book shop, and I worked there during events as security when I needed extra money. ...needless to say, with employee discount, and the "we opened 30 packs to find the Black Lotus to sell under the glass at the counter, and the rest of these cards aren't worth reselling, have them", deck-building we all did, it was really easy to build awesome decks quickly. So I learned pretty fast that what mattered was who you were playing with, and crazy-fun side rules on what kind of decks could be played. I stopped playing around Ice Age, too, mostly for the same reason - power gamers and decks just became boring. I've noticed that the surest way to get me to fall out of interest in something is for rabid fans to take over (see: comic collecting in the early 90s, thanks to Image).