Now that school is in, some of the younger people who work at the warehouse are gone. The panoply of temps have more or less been ‘promoted’ to fill the ranks. This is trouble. They don’t know or don’t care about the finer points of book-picking protocols, and it’s making everyones job more difficult. The shelves are a mess with stacks of titles hiding behind other stacks of titles, titles being put on the wrong shelf, shelves being overstacked, books being left in their boxes, and just general chaos. Each staff member was given an aisle to take care of some months ago. My aisle is Aisle 28. My job is to take 5 minutes of every day and make sure my aisle is neat: the spines should be facing out; the books shouldn’t be pushed far back into the shelf; and suchlike. That’s probably my favourite part of the job. Maybe I can convince the bosses that it’s the only thing I should be responsible for.
Cruise Ship of Damned
I had a dream this morning that a comet passed near to Earth and turned everyone into zombies – not the undead brain-eating zombies, but just imbeciles who would try to rip apart anyone who wasn’t wandering around in circles going “googa bugga urgga.” Some people weren’t affected, and it was very difficult for me to find others like me. I couldn’t just yell out “hello! Any non-zombies around?” because the zombies wouldn’t like that, and they were everywhere! In fact I think the bulk of the dream took place on a cruise ship.
Wow
I don’t usually have blog entries that are just links to other sites/files/pictures/movies on the internet, but this is amazing:
http://media.putfile.com/OlbermannSwings
I hope this is the beginning of a trend in the media to take some responsibility for the welfare and education of their audience.
Aeon Flux
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.
One Year of Torlo!
Yesterday was the one year anniversary for Marlo and me. We didn’t do anything special, and we didn’t even see each other, but we did talk on the teliophone, and Marlo sang me a little song on my answering machine. I knew it was an anniversary but I didn’t know if it was 11 months or what! So isn’t that exciting!
My birthday auction is going to be on the 17th of this month. I took a poll and the most amount of people were available on that day. Sorry everyone who can’t make it!
I went out to Chilliwack tonight for band practice. It was at 6pm but I thought it was at 7. Even so, I didn’t get there until 7:23 because of the traffic. Now I know there is no way to get to Chilliwack before 7pm on a weekday even if I do get off work 40 minutes early.
But we arranged another song, more or less finalized. This one’s called The Makening. We also tried out a new bass player. He’s very talkative and he’s an old acquaintance from Chilliwack named Carry. He didn’t get there until about 8 which left us with about 20 minutes for Jordan so that was a little disappointing but not too much, since we did spend the time before that writing.
We, the Thickets, officially have a show at the ANZA club on the 5th of October. Tell your friends! Tell EVERYONE!
HPLBDP Day 2.
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.
HPL's Birthday Party, Day One
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.
I think the newspaper headlines should be the same thing every day
PEOPLE STILL STUPID INCOMPETENT PRICKS
ps – it would suck to be named Katrina right now.
Anyone need anything from the UK?
A friend is mailing me some Jaffa Cakes. Anybody else need anything small from the UK? I can’t think of a damn thing.
Weekend Update
Last Sunday Torlo went out to Chilliwack again to visit the Woodses and to eat pie. Also we had a band practice and we worked out the final arrangement for one of the five songs we’ve been working on. We decided that, if we can’t find a suitable/reliable bass player, that Merrick will have a set of songs memorized that we can fall back on.
Stewie came back from PAX and reported. I’m obviously annoyed that we didn’t go, but with cross-border gigs there’s just so many things that can go wrong, it didn’t surprise me. We had a long chat (Stewie & I) and we decided that the Thickets needs a manager who can make all the arrangements that I myself am not very good at, despite my efforts. Things like getting t-shirts, stickers & CDs made and shipped down prior to the engagement; things like negotiating payment, lodging, food, etc. We need a Winston from Broken Roses to print out our damn maps. So the next step is a band meeting on Wednesday and an inquiry to the management side of Divine Industries.
By this time next year I hope we have a new CD out.
I’ve got a blister on my toe from my day job! It’s poopy.