Friday, July 28, 2006

Vacation, over

Good times! Aeryk/Bryan thanks for the bodysurfing, it was awesome, Denis thanks for the beef hearts, Rudy thanks for going to Burbank (I kid, I kid :) ). It was a great vacation.

I'm back and I'm tired. I went out with my friend Scott last night in El Segundo. That place seems to be slowly changing to more of a Hermosa Beach vibe. It's still got a small feel, but there were definitely a lot of booby shirts at the bar we were at, and it seemed strange. We ended up closing the bar out and then playing Xbox at his place until 4:00 AM. Which brings me back to tired.

(Aeryk -- do you have the downloadable Xbox game Geometry Wars? If you don't get it, it is the shit. It's like this simple $5 game but it almost makes the 360 worth it... plus it is completely mesmerizing and your boy may even enjoy it!)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to busting out either Epic or Warmaster once in a while! So far what I am getting is that with Epic you have a crazier, more random game with buckets o' dice (the rulebook used that phrase too) and lots of variety. With Warmaster you get a more balanced system and lots of unpainted, hard to kill dwarves. An intriguing choice! Too bad I am seemingly incapable of getting through the Warmaster rules. I've crashed upon the rocky shore of that rulebook many times.
Jopa the Rumpus rider

Playing against JP was either agony or excitment. The Orcs were the only ones that could crack his shell so badly he would quit in one game and yet the next game get handed their ass without so much as damaging a single key unit. Every couple weeks I had to come up with some new hair-brained scheme to defeat him as he adapted to my new weapons and strategies. He was very good at identifying my weaknesses and limitations

The Pulsa rockets were the first in a long line of improbable, highly volatile units designed to either crack one of his elite fortresses or smatter my own troops in a blaze of glory. Pulsas, Wierdboys with squig cannons, Wierdboy Towers, Sheildcar raids, suicidal Goffs, Liftas... That was some crzay fun.

The pulsa rockets were challenging. I was pretty darn good at it until JP figured out how to circumvent their precision. Rolling up to 30d6 was just great. Which brings me to the point.

The awesome part of Epic was dice and the fast/loose nature of the game. Warmaster rules were much tighter for I think a couple reasons. First, they were able to take the epic 40k core rules and strip it down to a more refined set. Second, with epic 40k, almost all of the Orc units and usually a about half in each other factions units broke the rules with special rules. Not unlike Warmachine. Just imagine warmachine with 20 unique units on the field like Alexia rules card. I mean the rules were not necessarily complex, but there were a lot of exceptions.

Plus in a much more magnified fashion than Warmaster, you had modifierss on top of modifiers for die rolls. A lot of armor, save, and shooting mods. And that brings me to... Warmaster is really a hand to hand combat game with a bit of ranged fire. Epic 40k is really a Ranged attack game with a bit of close combat. Even with an army like the Orcs, which is really designed for overwhelming your enemy with waves of stands of Orcs, close combat was usually only a small part of the game and often they were decimated by the time they were in hand-to-hand.

D>M>

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Re: Levia-un-fun

That reminds me of one of my most favorite gaming moments of all time.. when Aaron "hot dice" Killen bullseyed JP's Leviaturd on the opening luck-of-all-luck rolls with those orc rockets (pulsa rockets?) ... the look on JP's face as we measured out the random distance and scatter dice was priceless. KABOOOOOM! That had to be a one in a million hit at that distance.

Hehe.. good times.

Right up there with Rich's Pinhead Level 5 Wizwar and the Maagiic brrrrrrridge attribute roll.

LOL

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Musings, vol. XI

- Rooday: I enjoy the body surfing right now for a few reasons, some of which you pointed out. 1)I can throw some fins in my bike basket, hit the beach, and head home with no hassle of parking, or lugging around equipment. 2) I like my sexy body in the water with no board under me. 3) You can catch and ride waves that are impossible with a board, like massive closeout barrels (which is going on right now). I think that body surfing is the most fun I have in the ocean, ever. So good. Do it!

- jR0n: The difference between Epic and WM are many, yet strangely, essentially they are the same insofar as they are both about maneuvering and killing you opponent with lots of dice. Epic used to be about firepower and jerky tricks using special rules for the units to defeat your foes. Now there is a little more subtlety, more maneuver (crossfires, pinning, etc.), and less special rules, I think. Warmaster was great because right from the start, there was very little rule manipulation due to special rules and magic items and such.

I suppose it is which floats your boat more: swords and sorcery or tanks and guns? Either way, they make me feel like I am playing everything I like/liked about the GW universe, without the mega expense and without the broken, abused rules and special item/character bullshit.

As has been stated MANY times before, JP was the master of rules exploitation in both Epic and Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I will only utter the words, "Imperial Guard Leviathan" and "Knights Panther", but say no more...

- No takers on the podcast?

- I D/L'd The Dunwich Horror and Call of Cthulhu from Audible a few weeks back. I listed to the DH, and it is really good! The reader is perfect for the role. Good stuff, I will report back when I hea CoC!
Myke, you rule

Dunno if you're reading this now (where the hell are you? aren't you moving soon?) but: today I recovered my Elven Warmaster army from Aeryk's collection o' old goodness. White, pink, and blue with a Barbie-pink dragon. That shit is hilarious! And well-painted! I still can't believe you did that! One of the best birthday presents ever man.

While I was there we also looked through the old Epic stuff. Pretty cool. Enron your Great Gargant is there, it's pretty hot, looks like a Mexican pinata! :) I never played too much Epic beyond the Space Marines box set (millions of basic Space Marines, Whirlwinds, and Land Raiders, and nothing else) so I don't know a lot about it.

Edumacate me... Epic vs. Warmaster -- discuss.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Have fun on the ferris wheel! LOL
This is TRULY frightening:

What Have You Got To Hide?

Really. These people are psycho.
by the time they were "CIV" they looked and already seemed hella old. Still, think it would be a kick to see GB if its REALLY GB. I remember that "screamo" band Rival Schools was the OG guitarist/songwriter from GB. Who knows - it was prolly the original lineup.

im fucking drunk. AS FUCK. ugh, too much

Monday, July 24, 2006

I have not been body surfing since I lived in El Segundo. Man I miss that. Not having a proper beach here kinda sucks. Boo.. eLzar, remember that time at 'Squeekers' that barney kid cut in front of you while he was aimlessly riding a sponge. You almost broke your neck on a shore pounder. I thought you were going to tear that kid in two.

It has been awesome weather in SF. Every SF weenie that has whined about temps in the 80s is an idiot. Man it does not get any better than that. Ahhh.. my temperature vagina hurts. Dorks. Now anywhere elese in the bay... Well I feel for them. 107 in Napa. 103 in SJ. 106 in Oaktown. Boo hot. Today we had to turn off a lot of excess energy consumption in our buildings to cut back on usage. Kinda wierd working with the lights almost all out.

Elzar: I like the Koo-Ta-Loo mini. Well Mini is a relative term. I gotta say I really enjoyed the build up during the eary stages of In the Mountains of Madness. That was fun and shapping up to be a good campaign. Too bad things conspired to bring the adventures to a halt. I gotta say I am jonesin' for some RPG action. I have not busted out since Boobla Khan last year. SAD! I have RPG'd just once since early 2002. Ass. 4.5 years and only one RPG game. Das Burnt.

That is a bummer about 3rd planet. However, that place has been in a slow rot for a very long time. Personally I hate buying from the online store, but sometimes I just can not help it. The last order I placed with Gamescape took them 3 months to fill! FTW? I got fed up after 2 months and ordered from the war store. Got a call a month later and felt bad when they told me the product was in. What the hell. Why should I feel bad? They way exceeded a reasonable amount of time to fill the order. Stupid guilt of not supporting the local gaming the community. Boo ingrained catholic guilt. Boo urns

Speaking of seeing OG music. I saw an ad for GB in concert. I missed the date. I donno if that would be any good. Half the fun of GB was the fact that those guys sounded like they were 14 and were full of nutty teenage energy.

D>M>
i know bodysurfing is SUPER fun (havent done it in a many many years) but do you still regular surf at all? If not, why? Is it just too easy to get yer sexy body in the water and not worry about all the surf board details maybe? Teach me your secrets.
This is teh coolest

IA! IA! Cthulhu phtagn!!!! Such a pisser it is an incentive for store owners to buy more Horror Clix, and can't be bought by the general gaming fanboys. Cause if you could, I would be all over it.

- And we should do a podcast. Seriously this time. Maybe Jon and I can do episode #0 while he is here?

- It is hot as a mother effer in my house. Not Las Vegas hot, but hot like in a house with no insulation, no central air, and no air movement because there is none outside cause it is too hot. Fans just sort of blow the hot air around. It is seriously like a sauna in my house at 10pm.

- Body surfing is the best.

- I miss D&D.

- I miss playing meaty games. Which is why if we did a podcast, at least I could TALK about some meaty games!

- Ryan and I are going to see Anthrax on the 6th of August. The cool thing about it is of course Joey Belladonna is back in the band singing, AND they are playing Among the Living from start to finish! So amped to go!

- Picked up a pair of the Descendents shoes at my FLVS (Friendly Local Vans Store). I like them!

- I guess it doesn't really matter now, but Third Planet is no longer pwned by Chris, he sold it to one of his underlings and plans on moving to Santa Barbara. I was in the running, rather I was in discussion with Chris for over a year about buying it, and then we sort of stopped talking for a while. More recently, he contacted me about selling it, and was about 66% LESS than what he was asking a year ago. When I went over the books, it just didn't look good. Not to say that it couldn't be turned around, but the existence of the FLGS's in Southern California is a precarious existence indeed. It's sad in a way, but now that Chris is gone, I really don't care if 3P goes under or not. It has been going downhill abit in more recent times, and seems like there needs to be dramatic changes to save it. Time will tell, in the meantime, I will be a part of the problem (in a way) and buy games online from retailers that not only offer a discout, but also have all the games, and more, that I could ever want. So sue me.
Kudos on our festival of beer Ja-el. You know, I don't think mosquitoes really like alcohol or garlic, so if you are consuming lots of those things, that may partially explain your new immunity... the 1d4 poison damage cracked me up by the way.

I'm off to sunny LA. Hooray! I am so excited to be on vacation that I could pee myself. That is pending the airplane exploding or something. "Bon jour!" (Explosion.)

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Maybe my most favorite Asian Game Show clip of all time:

LINKY
The best thing about Japan.. the crazy game shows. Make sure you stay tuned until about the five minute mark where the best "variation" on the prank shows up.. SO FUNNY. Hehe..

LINKY
Yeah.

One cool thing about the UNLV online testing center is that once you've completed your test, you can compare your results against all the other students that have completed the test as well.. standard deviations and all that. You can even see, question by question, how many people got what right and what wrong. It's interesting to note certain test questions that you thought were total bullshit and then to go back and confirm that everyone bombed it. Especially of note on this particular test was how dramatically everyone's scoring dropped off towards the end of the exam as people surely were in the "fuck this bullshit" mode of test taking. LOL. It was brutal. Perhaps even more so because it was an open-book test, so you kind of feel obligated to go hunting for the correct answers to all the ambiguous, horseshit I-want-to-punch-whoever-it-was-that-wrote-this-fucking-test-in-the-nutsack queries.

As it was, I scored an 86% compared to the class average of 71%. At least the guy curves.. so that'll be nice I guess.. but I'm sure he's going to get a huge load of angst come next class for fucking that up. LOL.
The off lotion didn't work?

That must have been a resistant batch of mosquitos. I'm virtually impervious to mosquitos now. Somethings happened lately. I no longer get bitten by mosquitos, or not many are willing to bite me. I think over the course of the year and a half, I have accumulated so much mosquito venom, that I'm just a huge venom poison sac. There's probably a trillion different viral bacterial swimming in my blood stream. If dipped in daggers, my opponents would feel a 1d4 per round of poison damage.

EDIT: English Proper: "If dipped in daggers, my blood would cause my opponents..."

That was the funniest camping story I've heard in a while. Sad, but funny. My only story to share was I went to a friends kids Baptism party on Sunday. Many kids, many kids. Kids scare me more than night monsters. What's the difference? Boozed it up all day. Malaysians can fucking drink, let me tell you. If you need an bloody excuse to drink, just befriend a Malaysian. He'll find any fucking reason to drink. We started at around 1 pm and ended drinking at about 7pm, finishing off 3 container cases, not 24 packs, probably 48 packs of beer.

To Note: Friday we drank lots.
that is an INSANE amount of questions! well, i'm sure you rocked it, but STILL!
Midterm O' Death

Gah. My prof told the class last Thursday that the online midterm would be 50 questions randomized out of a pool of 150. Lucky us that he muffed the setup and the test was ALL 150 frigging questions. It took me two and a half hours. Fuckers.
is tomorrow the monday yer in town Enoto? Let's go to the beach! Teach me how to surf! or I can watch you surf and masturbate into the sand. Whatever's clever!
R. Oeterson, Extreme Camper

Lady Ragnar and I haven't been camping in a while so we decided to go down to Big Basin State Park (just north of Santa Cruz). Big mistake. It was hot enough in our normally cold part of town -- around 80 -- but as we went south down the Peninsula it just got hotter and hotter. And of course the air conditioner in the minivan is broken. Even with the windows rolled down going 75 on the freeway, it was boiling hot in the car.

The fun really began when we got to Los Gatos (near S.C.) and traffic was slowed to a standstill. We sat there in the broiling heat. How was it? Let's just say I saw one guy get out of his car on the side of the road to pee, then fall down screaming as nothing but scalding steam shot from his penis. Anyway eventually we got off Hell's highway and onto the slightly cooler, foresty roads leading to the park.

When we got to the campground it was touch and go, but we managed to grab the second-to-last space. Sweet! We got to our site which was 85 degrees in the shade and about 10' from the bathroom. Not a stinky bathroom, but still. Bathroom. Bees and flies descended upon us as we sat at the sticky, warm to the touch picnic table. We rued the fact that we'd only brought two beers. Over in the next campsite, children screeched. Motorbikes roared.

We sat there. The sun started to go down but the heat stayed steady. We were sticky and gross. The Off, it did nothing. We both imagined a sleepless night in the boiling hot tent.

Finally we ate our macaroni n' cheese, pounded our beers, and got the fuck out of there. Yeah that's right. We totally pussed out and went home after paying for a site. I feel so rugged!

Lessons for next time:
1. Beer. We were short on beer supplies by at least 400%. The extra beers would have rendered us insensible to some of the downsides of the site.
2. Camping. In the summer? You idiot.
Misc Debris

You know you own the 'ghetto' version of a DVD movie when one of the special features listed is "100 minutes". Weak sauce.

D>M>