Category: Nerdiness

I went back for more shooting of X3 on Thursday, and the chances of my mug showing up on film increased tenfold. Of course there’s no guarantees, but I hope so. I met some nice people, and some not-so-nice people on set. Tomoko and Lance were the nice ones. Well Hugh Jackman was nice too, but I didn’t have QUITE as many conversations with him as I did with T&L. And I saw Norm there too (on Tuesday – did I mention that already?). It was really fun being a mutant (more so than usual) and it would have been way suckier if Taja and Shane hadn’t provided rides for me out to the woods. That was a poorly structured sentence but I’m prepared to live with it.

After I got home last night I actually put in the first X-Men film, I was so in the spirit of things. The schedule of shooting had me so mixed up, however, that I set my alarm for 6:20 instead of 7:20 this morning (for work at the warehouse), and after it went off I couldn’t get back to sleep.

Thanks to Tony Marsh for the half dozen boxes of Jaffa Cakes I got in the mail today! And…uh…Twinkers or whatever they’re called. They are strange. Stewie will be pleased.

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. “