Category: Nerdiness

What the hell happened on my weekend? Let me try to remember. Oh! I had dinner with Marlo’s folks on Friday night and that was very pleasant indeed.

On Saturday night I had my birthday auction and as usual, it was a number of blasts. I got the complete Wallace & Gromit VHS set, some amazing drawing materials that I put to use the very next day, and some miniatures. Other stuff too but I’m tired and my memory, as always, fails. There were some new faces to the auction, and David bought most of my and Chris’ and others’ comics. I made off with a decent cup o’ cash and the food was not bad – even some pineapple!

On Sunday I biked down to Drexoll Games and bought some red dice and another miniature (Reaper did a Cthulhu knock off). Marlo and I had dinner at Greens & Gourmet and then we watched movies. She wrote more about that on her blog so I will direct you to it.

Last night I played BURNING WHEEEEEEEEL!! with some gaming mates and that was pretty fun, though I was distracted all through the night dealing with phone calls from my agent-to-be about being an extra in X-Men 3. You could say I was an X-tra. But you shouldn’t.

I had a long day working on X-Men 3. I can’t really tell you more about it, except that my mutant power was to clean laundry.

I can’t see how the movie could be as good as the cartoon, but I’m interested in seeing how Aeon Flux is adapted to the big screen. There does, in the trailer, seem to be some small hints of what made the original series so unique and stylish. I’ll have to ask John if I can borrow his copy of the original again.

Strangely when I loaded up Firefox today most of my bookmarks were gone. That’s a damn shame because I had a lot of work related bookmarks (links to armor & weapon sites, etc) that took me a long time to put together. Maybe they’re still in my old Internet Explorer files.

Day 2 of the con was pretty good. We raffled off seven lots of books and gaming stuff. Some of them easily had two dozen products or more, including hardcover books and miniatures and dice sets etc etc. It was a success and great fun. I also had a lot of fun playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying today – I played two blocks that Shawn ran, and my character was a dwarf mercenary. The world of Warhammer is quite different from D&D and I like it. It’s grim, grimy, grisly and gritty. Magic makes you go crazy and backfires. Just seeing abominable horrors can make you go run in fear (something that rarely happens in D&D). When you hit someone, you actually know whether you hit them in the head, arm or whatever, and critical hits make a little more sense. I’m looking forward to finally getting my contributor copies of the books. In the adventures we fought some skaven (rat-folk) and this giant mutant skaven, and some skeletons, and a vampire! And a DEMON of Tzeench! And we got sucked into a magic book. It was fun, and there were lots of yucks.

I schedule a Call of Cthulhu the card game demo but nobody showed! So I just gave David an extra booster pack from letting me demo it with him the day before. Not to worry, I’ll demo it again and again until I get some players. It’s not quite as good as Mythos but it does have some merit.

I almost changed my schedule tomorrow so that I could sleep in, but I decided against it. Tomorrow morning I’m playing in a World of Middle Earth game that Brian is running. I heard the Dr Who game went well and also Denzil broke out her Arkham Horror on Saturday, but I didn’t have a chance to look at it.

For my GM swag I grabbed some miniatures, and couple with the tradesies I had lying around previously, I’ve come back with some pretty cool monster minis from trading with other people at the con. I’m sure they’ll come in useful, sooner or later. I also sold some books to Mbeck so financially the weekend wasn’t an entire write off.

Yesterday was pretty good! I ran Spaceship Zero again and the best encounter was when the robots became charmed by the slave girl – but not in the way she wanted. She rolled 00 (horrible blunder) so I made them want to forcibly kiss her to the exclusion of all else. The rest of the encounter was the group trying to neutralize the robot threat while the slave girl simply tried to get away from them.

There was a drunk guy at the con, which I think was a first. Sadly Mbeck was not feeling well so the CoC game in the last block was cancelled. I played the CoC CARD GAME with Dbradley instead.

Today we’re going to have the big raffle, so that should be fun. Plus I’m playing 2 games of Warhammer. I wish the folks at Green Ronin had gotten me my copy of the rulebook before now, so I could have my own for the game, but sadly it doesn’t look good.
I’m also demoing the CoC card game. Good thing I had that run through with David, now I more or less know how to play.

V-Con, where I can put my artwork up on display for all to see and buy, and the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, are the same weekend.

Can’t decide! Can’t decide! Brain aneurysm!

“The last full planet to be discovered – in 1930 by US astronomer Clyde Tombaugh – was Pluto. But recently some astronomers have campaigned to have Pluto downgraded to ‘minor planet’ status. It is so small – its diameter is a mere 2,200 kilometres – that it is unworthy of the status of full planet, it was argued. This bid was finally rejected after heated scientific debate.

But now the discovery of Xena, which is only slightly bigger than Pluto, will re-ignite that row. Both Pluto and Xena are components of the Kuiper Belt, which is made up of thousands of small asteroid-like objects, many mere lumps of rock, that sweep the outermost depths of the solar system. As members of the Kuiper Belt, neither Pluto nor Xena should be rated full-fledged planets, it is argued.

The trouble for astronomers is that they do not have an exact definition of a planet. Many say that, if Pluto had been discovered today, it would not have been called a proper planet. “

On Friday I went with Marlo and Stewie to Kidsbooks in Kits for the midnight sale of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The secret of the half blood prince is that the other half is rum raisin ice cream, not blood. Anyway there were tons of kids there and hippies banging drums and twits on stilts, but also free Happy Planet juice and stick-on tattoos. It was interesting. After that we went to the Naam and I had my first truly satisfying meal there in a while.

On Saturday I went to Kate’s birthday party (which I actually didn’t know was a birthday party – I thought it was just a summer BBQ) and was entertained by stories from various people I had never seen before and old friends who I haven’t seen for a while. Marlo and I learned that there is a karaoke place near her house, and that the horse track is a fun date idea, which I always imagined but never thought I’d find anyone to go with me. Too bad my schedule is all drawing this week or I could see those rapscallions (Ranger, Demers, et al) a couple more times this week.

Speaking (or, writing) of schedules, I didn’t go into work again this week. This is the third week in a row, and I’m worried that one day I’ll go back in and they’ll say “hey, you don’t work here” and then I’ll have to go find a better job.

I have been buying pineapples left and right, which is good, because fresh pineapples make me very happy, but they ferment quickly in my garbage in my hot hot apartment. I’m eating pineapples like goddamn corn on the cob, and it’s awesome.

Marlo and I went to some garage sales on Sunday morning and at the first three I didn’t find anything, but Marlo found a $2 copy of Chinatown (the movie). Marlo usually barely tolerates my garage saling expeditions but this time she was particularly impatient. I stopped to pick blackberries and she kept on walking until she was a block ahead of me. I was so mad at her that I bought her presents at this amazing garage sale that I found just moments after we parted. I long to disclose the glory of it all but it will have to wait because I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Remind me later.

In the meantime, I’d like to say how much I enjoy the cartoon Home Movies. It’s on weeknights at 1am (two episodes in a row) on Teletoon. It took me a bit of warming up to the series (I saw the Hallowe’en episode 3 times by chance before I decided it was good) but now I love it. It’s true that I only really guffaw a few times during the show. It’s not like the old 5th season Simpsons or anything, but then – what is? There really isn’t anything else entertaining on TV these days. My schedule at drawing is this:

noon: People’s Court
1pm: Star Trek original
2pm: People’s Court or ST:TNG
3pm: ST Voyager
4pm: Judge Judy

People’s Court is by far the best reality show on TV. Judge Millian is a fantastic judge. Judge Judy is my second favourite but even for a judge, she’s really judgmental. I mean I appreciate she’s been doing it for something like 50 years but a lot of the time she doesn’t give everyone their fair chance to speak and give their evidence. I can’t watch Judge Joe Brown or Divorce Court – those two are so trashy. They just let the parties bark at each other and it’s like watching Jerry Springer. Quack.

I got distracted from my Home Movies spiel: it’s good. Stewie says I need to watch Dr Katz, from the same creative team. Does anyone remember Science Court? Same deal. It was on Saturday mornings for a very short time and there were only a handful of episodes, but it was fun-tastic.