Category: Nerdiness

If you go to Popcap.com and start playing Astro Pop (“galactic puzzlement!”) and enjoy it, do yourself a favour and resist the urge to download the “deluxe” version, because you will find that just when you’re getting your highest score ever on your highest level ever, and things are really starting to heat up, the program will close and tell you that your 60 minutes of trial time is over and that you need to register for $20 to play more, and you will want to put something large and brick-tasting through your computer monitor.

These grapes are shaped like pears and I find that disturbing. Maybe they were genetically modified to include genes from my oil painting instructor in college, who was also pear-shaped. They certainly do taste a little like paint thinner.

D&D tonight was fun, if hot. I blame Stewie for stealing one of the fans (I’m not really concerned whether or not it is his fan, thanks for asking) and keeping it in his room. And by that I mean I blame him for the heat, not for the fun. I blame the fun on Kelly, who brought home made blueberry ice cream. And by home made I mean it’s made in her home. I’m wary of restaurants who declare that I’ll love their “home made” meals. I choose to believe in that case that somebody is living in the restaurant, therefor it is his/her/their home, therefor the meals are ‘home made.’ I guess there could be rats who call the restaurant home too, so okay – yeah, by that logic, no matter where you go the meals are home made. Swanson tv dinners are home made because gypsies and spiders live in the factory. “It’s gypsy-licious!” their new ad campaign begins. No? I digress.

In D&D the kids are finally putting together pieces of the information I’ve been feeding them to come to various conclusions. These conclusions may be right or they may be wrong, I’ll never blog, but it’s nice to see them putting their heads together as a group. Most of the time NPCs will tell them what to do and they’ll just assume it’s what they’re supposed to do seeing as how it came from the DM. Not necessarily, my pretties, not necessarily. They parleyed, and in the words of Paul Simon, time it was oh what a time it was. Now they may make choices that I haven’t planned for and even though it means more improv for me, I think they’ll enjoy the campaign more that way, knowing I’m not railroading them.

Tonight at Anghold’s we (Yvonne, Ursula, John Crawford, and…Greg?) watched Tron and Logan’s Run. Many among the group had not seen either. There was a goodly amount of MST3King, mostly about the homoerotic nature of some of the Tron scenes. It had been a long time since I had seen Logan’s Run – it get’s really slow in the last third of the film. It becomes Logan’s Stroll.

Today in the astounding campaign of the World Wildlife Federation of Justice the heroes Metalligator, Invisible Fink, Go-Rilla, Otter Destruct and Drako duked it out with the villainous Dark Horse, Tarmadillo, Hypnopotamus and Rhinosferatu in a construction site. They captured everyone except Dark Horse. Lots of fun and Theo & Kate brought me a delicious bubble tea.

The San Diego Comic-Con was this weekend. I knew a couple people who went. I’ve never been. Stewie has been often. The next Star Wars movie got the title that in my brain I knew it would get: Revenge of the Sith

One article I read said “It was a risky move – some of the notoriously fickle Star Wars admirers initially bristled at previous prequel titles The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. ” – so how is yet another campy title along the lines of the precedent set ‘risky’? I actually think it is a much better – simpler title than PM or AotC.

In addition to the title, Lucasfilm also sent concept artist Ryan Church to show off drawings of a Wookie tree civilization from Episode III and played footage of Christensen’s climactic light-sabre duel – minus all the special effects – with co-star Ewan McGregor, who plays Obi-Wan Kenobi. Return of the Jedi was originally to be titled Revenge of the Jedi. Some advance promotional material even featured that title, but Lucas changed it later in production. “This time, George tells us he’s going to keep ‘Revenge’ in the title,”

This is a tough question for me, so I’ll let you work it out:

Which do you prefer, the Spider-Man movies or the X-Men movies?
And if you prefer one to the other, do you prefer the first or the second?

I got my pound of candy (licorice of course) in the mail while I was away. I got it in trade for a gmail account.

While I was away I did a lot of writing. I worked on the girly D&D campaign a lot. For a recap, the storyline is basically thus:

-PC’s (Player Character’s) wizard mentor has a prophetic dream of the apocalypse.
-Mentor sends PCs into woods to find old oracle/ranger friend to see confirm omen reliability
-While on quest group is underground in grimlock caves (grimlocks are the D&D version of morlocks)
-PCs come above ground to find the land has been afflicted by an aurora that causes blindness. During this aurora invaders from another dimension have taken over major cities and the cleric’s god has been killed.
-Home town has been evacuated, mentor and townsfolk migrated to bigger city through mountains, PCs follow trail.
-In mountains PCs meet old wizard who scries (scrying is looking through a crystal ball, basically) to find out much of what’s going on. He explains how Demon Lord of Undead (Orcus) and his new bride (Queen from alien dimension) are working on conquering the realm. This info ties in with mentor’s omen.
-Wizard (“The Hyrkanian”) sends them on mission to safeguard evil Queen’s little sister so she can return to her home dimension and possibly undo some damage.

That’s pretty much where we are now. Over the week I’ve been working on backstory and come up with some pretty interesting things for the near and far future. I would say that we’re about 2/5 of the way through the campaign, and that the group is slightly higher level than I anticipated they would be, even though I’ve been pretty stingy with the XP to hold them back to be in line with the advancement of the scenarios. Considering I’ve never DM’d a really long campaign where I had to plot out at what level the group would have to be to coincide with a given “module’s” recommended level several adventures ahead (this campaign is mostly a group of pre-published adventures that I’m stringing together with one common thread), it’s working out not too badly. No major hiccups.

I have also been working on a script for a tangentially Lovecraftian short film. I’m not ready to divulge any more info on that at this time though.

I got an email from a fellow at CBC radio who wanted to ask me some questions about D&D for a feature they may run on the 30th anniversary of the game. I may be out of town when and if they do an interview so they may just get David from Imperial Hobbies instead. Too bad, that could be fun. But we had a good long conversation on the phone about the game. We decided it’s really hard to try to explain it to someone who knew nothing about it, but we settled on a blend between a board game and a play. At least I pointed him to the Deadale Wives humourous mp3’s.

Ladies: “if you have any suggestions about female players (not necessarily the ones who play with you) I’d be interested in finding one as a possible balance for a male guest (don’t know the format yet).” Marlo? Tamara? Kate? Michelle? Kelly? Now’s your chance to be famous(ly linked to nerds).