Fuck You, Cold Stone Creamery

1. First of all, your ice cream is not that good. It is too expensive, too bland, and too rich, and I always have to take a gross shit right after eating it.

2. More importantly, fuck your business model of making your goddamn, pathetic employees sing every three minutes. What the fuck. Who wrote your business plan, Tom Bombadil? I do not want to go into a goddamn ice cream shop that appears to be run by gnomes and hobbits, I want it to be run by humans. If I put a buck in the tip jar, I do not want one of the employees to announce "We got a tip!" and then for all of the benighted wage slaves to sing a song at me. I especially do not want to hear this song every couple of minutes. Do you also have a song for when you have to close the store, and for when one of your disgruntled employees ejaculates into the freezer? Do not sing this bullshit at me.

Fuck you. You suck.

Ragnar.

Did you see 'im oppressin' me?


I, for one, welcome our new Hessian overlord.

Hehe.. weee! I'm going FLYING tomorrow. I'm so flippin happy. Vegas-Eric has reserved a nice little ride for the two of us to go galavanting about.. so we're thinking of flying up to Utah for lunch. Why not? SO sweet. Yay!

=)

Nobody Expects the Menite Inquisition!

Myke! I am tickled pink that you have joined the WarMachine gang. And you might even read the rules? Holy frijoles! I'm really stoked. Maybe we can have a multi man-jo-man game at GenCon! Or even play through a short campaign. I have been looking at my old Chainmail stuff for inspiration and it would be very easy to adapt that tournament structure to WM. The prize for winning the tournament is, maybe Denis paints your models or something, I don't know. I'M EXCITED!!!11

I saw Serenity in a big theater full of geeks last night and wouldn't have had it any other way. The movie is really good. The series definitely made the transition to the big screen well. It's kind of like seeing all your friends after a long time, everybody is sort of different at first, but you adjust to it. Anyway, it's the best sci-fi movie to come along in a while and I recommend it (although I highly recommend watching the series first, if you haven't already -- makes the movie a lot more effective). Anyway I'm sort of rambling in ambiguous terms here because I'm itching to talk about some of the stuff that happens in the movie, but I can't, so argh!

War-Love Machine + An fun day with Aeryk

A fun day was had yesterday... Blookburst hobbies, Mini purchasing, Mini construction, Band-o'Bros, and Axis/Allies D-Day. Overall, it's hard to imagine more fun packed into a small time-frame. I'm going to prime them today, and maybe even read the rules (call me crazy). I decided to fill in the War Machine love by getting the one faction that no one has yet, so be ready for some Menite Death! Basically we're the religious right, so watch out, we worship the almighty Dollar, and have scary Rack things and Choirs and shit, so watch out Mo-Fo's! (Sorry, I woudn't be so aggressive, but it says in the rules that I have to be. I think from now on I'm going to call it War Machine: No Fear!

Also: can I say hurrah for getting mini's together and ready for priming? I'd forgotten how much fun that is. Booyah, Band of Brothers - an enjoyable series so far.

That is all.

Myke

Ha ha, bitches!

No more chat window! Ha! Do things my way! I am the King!

Welcome to a new dawn of lengthy, informative, and amusing blogging from the Action Team!

I'm also thinking of chunking this experiment in site design. Without anyone really using any of the "sidebar" features, and me not really updating any of them, I think it might be time to return to a Dark Age of simple blog design....

Im with you...

. Elzar I agree. As much as the additional steps and the more formal posting on blogger may hinder some of my posting, I thing the chat window discourages people from really speaking out. Besides it doesnt get logged does it? How are we supposed to have a sweet archive with the chat going stealing our thoughts into a void.

. Nice job on shutting down the freeloaders out of your network. Fuggers. I also like the attack into their router, a bit of a invasions in to the gray area of open wireless network accees, and the changing of the password is cool. I bet they never find it though. I mean most people never access their router once they have set it up. Too many of those things come with security defaulted to off and no important teachings about how/why it should be used.

. Myke you can not be busy any more. What are you cataloging your pubic hairs and carbon dating that shit? Ill do you a little favor and cut you in on a little secret: unless you are vampyre, your coprolite you have been saving is no older than about 31 years. Get off your Duff bear and speak the word of Khorne.

. I have not seen Make before. I will have to check it out. I still think the George Forman Grill webserver was awesome. I still want to make something like that. Band o Brothers is still mega-zor sweet.

. Jorn: That sounds like a fantastic convention. I especially like the awkward boob conversation. Sign me up for wierd creepy perverted guys talking about the merits of optically fucking a woman's boobs with a total stranger.

D>M>

Ah, the internet.

"THIS IS AMERICA oohhh glory be to god we love AMERICA now lets get onto religion cos you can really have some fun with that. like i recon its really funny how Americans all claim to be god fearing citizen just before they go out and rape and murder and avoid taxes ." - Some Yahoo by the name of WTF

Also, 1) you click the link to blave, if your cookies are on, you 2) click new post, then you 3) type your post, then 4) hit publish post. It's not TOO hard, is it?

Isane Ramblings

Yee-haw, Serenity! I'm fired up. I have tickets all bought and ready to go for tomorrow night. I am even looking forward to seeing the movie with terrifying, raving Whedonites. My only regret is that I wanted to make sure I had tickets and so I had to buy them online through that goddamn, fucking Fandango site with their stupid fucking paper bag puppets that waste hours of my time before every movie. But I think I've been down this road many times before so I'll skip it this time. Except to say, fuck you, puppets.

But yeah, movie, yay!

I worked at a wireless technology/entertainment trade show yesterday for my company. I was demoing a game but most people were more interested in coming up to me and asking questions that I had no idea how to answer. In a typical exchange I would say, "Would you like to demo this game? We're giving away prizes?" Then the guy I was talking to would say: "No! I would like some information on the wireless space you inhabit and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah." To which I would respond, "If you get a high score in my game, you can win an American Express Gift Certificate!" At which point they would sort of walk away. Keep in mind that my day to day job duties involve the guy who's doing everything to get the game put together coming up to me and saying, "How is my game coming along?" to which I reply "Your game is a fucking piece of shit, and is full of big fucking bugs, be ashamed." So the barrage of alien questions was sort of overwhelming, but also somewhat inspirational in that I realized how little idea I have what actually goes on behind the scenes with cell phone games. I am desirous of learning more!

Some other things I noticed were, there were more jugs (as in: the kind in Juggs magazine) around. I think this is because unlike E3 where everything is flashy flashy and the games sell themselves, here you are walking around looking at your ten millionth booth that sells some God damn phone faceplates, or that perhaps offers some arbitary software solution that kinda sucks actually, and by God you need to occasionally need to look at some tits to get by. At least that's what the guy interested in leveraging IP and ad content for GM told me. "You know how sometimes you're at a bar and the breasts are popping out at you? You say, 'If they had eyes, I'd wink at 'em!' You know what I'm talking about? I've been married twenty years!" That encounter ended awkwardly, abruptly, and unsatisfyingly, as actually did most of my encounters at the show and, in fact, just like this post!

Ramblings

- Found some fuckers using my bandwith via wireless connections tonight. Aced those pricks out with my trusty MAC filtering option on the ole wireless box. I think it was probably the guys next door. Bastards park in front of our house when they know that we have two cars and we park the same place every night. Asshats.

- Then, I found an unsecured wireless network that had a very strong signal, which leads me to believe it is next doors as well. I hopped on, and found that the default passwords were set to the router. I logged in, and changed the SSID of the network to "changeyourpasswords". Nothing malicious, just wanted to let em know L33tFa990tz0rz pwns THEM!!!

- Then, was wondering what I could do with the log feature of my router (and really their router too!) and found that I could see all the outgoing sites my router touches as I surf the web. So far, I have actively been to the actionteam site, mail.google.com, and blogger.com. All the traffic looks normal, and then www.pepsi.com shows up. Weird. So I continue to go about the same sites, then nokia.com. Then walmart.com. That doesn't sound good. Must be time to check the ole spy/tickware killers out.

- I'm going to get rid of the shoutbox feature. There needs to be more blogging and less shouting round these parts.

- Band of Brothers has garnered more bang for the DVD buck than anything else I own, except for maybe Real Genius and North Shore.

- Enron: Have you checked out "Make" magazine yet? If not, do it! O'Reilly mag about CRAZY SMART PEOPLE DIY stuff. Neat.

- Dr. Mike is still here, people. Though you would never know, would you....

Elzar

This may be of interest for you. Appearently someone has come up with a PSP firmware downgrader. Check it out.

Skype huh. I will have to get that setup.

Jorn: My lord, that was an epic review. We got maybe 1/2 to 2/3 the way through. Jeezuz was that painful too.

D>M>

"If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of that program and smash it."
- George Lucas

There's a pretty funny review of the Star Wars Holiday Special right here. Reading it, my stomach literally churned as I remembered watching it at my place. And we didn't even get to see Bea Arthur singing. My God.

Those were Vallejo paints Aeryk and Denis were singing the praises of. I'm not sure whether they have them at Gamescape or whether we'd have to truck out to Games of Berkeley or Endgame. I remember that one has them but not the other.

ActionCast

Seriously. Let's do it. If I understand correctly, using Skype, there can be up to 5 people connected at once through Skype. Also, for those not using Skype, there is a phone number to call that will then connect to the Skypies. So, that means there is no excuse for anyone not to connect and participate. We should try it out some night and iron some kinks out.

I can host the .mp3's on my machine for download, and use the no-ip address as the link for connections. At least until Adelphia gets pissed about the bandwidth, then I'll switch and host them on some server somewhere. Then we need another website to post notes, links, images, and the like.

I think I feel the need for some celebrity, or rather, it will be interesting to see what kind of celebrity we potentially gain by doing a podcast. My guess will be none, but man, who knows! Our own booth at GenCon! Autographs! Groupie hookers! Free dice!

I have some software that can record Skype calls, I just need some cheapie/free suggestions from Rudy as to some editing software. I have Acid, which is what I did the wedding mixes with, but without checking, I'm not sure that it is so great for this kind of editing. I'm sure it is, but who knows.

So lets do it!

We can do it in like 1.5 hours or less some night of the week. Just a phone call away!

GenCorn: I would be thrilled out of my skull if we got in some serious RPG'n. D&D, WFRP, CoC. All good. These days I take all the RPG I can get. As far as Pre-Registering, I guess we really need to start thinking about that. GenCon is eraly this early and keeps faking me out. That and I can not believe it is almost October.

ELzoR: What were those paints you were talking about being awesome. Most of my paints in LA are probably shit by now and I am getting the itch to paint again. Might as well start it off right. How is the DMG II?

fARt: You lay out ass scorpions out for me in my chairs and I am going to lay clear gamer caltrops wall to wall in my creame-colored, carpeted apartment on my way out in the morn while you sleep. Good luck. Oh, and I will use Jewel edge D4s. None of those pansy rounded pointed D4s. Eek...

D>M>

Fun weekend with Aerychk!

It was short but sweet. Enjoyed a monster sushi dinner pre-game, game, then crash for the night to wake up the next morning and watch my beloved Raiders find a way to lose a game they should have won.. for the third time in three weeks. Yay.

As for teh Hock-ay.. The Kings wound up losing in sudden death OT (despite my frowned upon hope for a shootout), but the game itself was really enjoyable, with the highlight being Roenick dancing to the disco music pumped through the PA while the engineering crew was attempting to fix a broken glass panel. Can't wait for that to surface on the internet somewhere.. heh.. too funny.

So, it was good to see the big E man, even in a short weekend-hopper.

Weeeeeeeee!