Limbo's really good. I never finished it - got to around the part when you're walking on the HOTEL sign, maybe. I just haven't fired it up in months, but it was totally worth whatever I paid. (Not $2 bucks but not full price either)

| Yeah, the toy expansion battle never ends

I've resorted to taking matters into my own hands as of late. Neither the kids nor the wife will let go of old toys... on the premise that someday, maybe, they will want to play with them again. Strangely, I think I might have been able to get through to Haylee just before Christmas. I took her down into the spare bedroom and started picking out toys at random from bins, boxes, storage things and asking her... when was the last time you or Bennett played with this? And the answer was never "last week", but more along the lines of "I dunno, last summer? Last year?". That shit is going to be black-bagged in short order. As will about 1/2 of the shit-holding boxes in the garage. If we haven't donated / gifted / whatevered that shit by now, we're done hauling it around for all eternity. Being able to park the cars in the garage is more important to me than holding on to a bag full of onesies or middle-school papers from 25 years ago. RAWR! lol

Limbo rocks! Certainly can't beat $2 either. I see Mark of the Ninja's on sale too (albeit for a whopping $7.50). That's a really solid side-scrolling stealth game (I was ranting about a couple weeks ago). Man, I wish they'd make another Thief game, either a full 1st-person one or a side-scroller like this one. Probably my favorite game series since the world was so good.

We're back in the Bay Area, and looking at all the stuff I just unloaded from the car... 14-MONTH-OLDS DO NOT NEED THIS MANY TOYS! Holy crap. Next year I'm going to be a dick and ask people to contribute college tuition money.

I had a bout of "Merry Christmas to Me" and ordered the Star Wars LCG and Eclipse. Eclipse is a 4x that plays quickly and seems like it should work well for CabinCon.

| Limbo.. very good gaming value!

On sale on Steam for $2. Side scroller in a super gloomy afterlife theme... really great puzzles to solve. Highly recommended!

If I remember correctly, there's multiple scenes of Dylan Mcdermit standing in the nude, crying while he jerks off.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY.

Oh yeah, I got to see Dylan McDermott's ass.  Tee hee.

| Der Horror

Funny you should mention that.  We've been busting our asses (we as in me and two other guys) trying to get the DVD set done by tonight.  Everybody else in the company had a real quiet week (as in go home early cause there's no work).  BooO!

We finished the domestic set this past summer.  This last one was for a couple of European countries.  Needless to say I've seen this show quite a bit.

I actually like it.  Weird, weird stuff.  I don't know how far you've gotten, so I won't say anymore...  Except that there is a Ring moment.

By the way, season 1 is a complete story arc with a definite ending.  Season 2 is an entirely different story.  A few actors from the first season are back, but they play different roles.

Also, the creators made Glee.  Ponder that.  (Alas, I also worked on this show and know more about it than I should).

| undetermined

Me and Silv love American Horror Story! It's total camp but really fun and watchable. Are you watching Season 1 or are you caught up to where it's at with Season 2? We also love True Blood, very much in the same vein.


Secret Santa Jael got me Carcassonne Discovery which my house has played a few times. Interesting variation on regular Carc. We like it!

| For Laffs, Try American Horror Story

Jeez.

It's a twisted collage of creepy, effed up sheet that has a slowly unfolding story that is mostly a skeleton to drape nasty scenes, images, and experience on and call it a TV show.  I'm not saying I don't like it, and I keep watching, and I think I'm enjoying it, but it is sort of unsettling in a forced way, like a cheap BOO scare, but much longer and drawn out.  Like how Alkaline Trio lyrics are sort of dark and twisted and bordering on cliche, yet, still interesting and I like them.

I'm curious to hear what the AT thinks about it.

Looking forward to trying out Star Wars. I scored Netrunner and Le Havre for Xmas, looking forward to playing both. As for Dominant Species, the board game was one of the most unpleasant gaming experiences I've had, so I hope the card game is better or it's getting the Tech Support treatment!

I also got a sweet present from Myke that I suspect will be a hit at the cabin...

Sorry you missed out enr0n. It was a blast, albeit sorely lacking in Action Team support. Was great to shoot the shit with Ryan. We cut the Poop Deck part a bit short because they wouldn't let Matt in with his infant son (go figure, they apparently have one standard and that is it).

Tomorrow we head back north. We stayed a bit longer than we planned because the babysitting was too good to pass up. Bonus sleep! We grabbed some tasty, tasty lomo saltado tonight, and caught Django Unchained. Good stuff!

I got this really dumb but fun game called Life Is Magic. It's a grindy fantasy rpg that uses local map data, so you'll go to some taverny-looking building and it will be The Kettle. The big cities have towers that are really tough to conquer and you need buddies to help.

| Holiday Bits

r00d: I have been a big fan of my Roku. They are small and pretty slick. Much more stable than either the Xbox or PS3 for Netflix streaming and the interface is pretty easy to work. The thing is super small too. If I had to complain about anything, I would say the unit is too light weight. My HDMI cable is a little too rigid and so the Roku "hovers" above the shelf.

eLzar: I too very much enjoyed the Lagunitas Sucks. It is a pretty damn good seasonal beer. One I would like even out of season ;). I bought an array of beers while I was down in LA and enjoyed quite a few, including Pliny (never fails me), but I also hated a couple. Stay away from Rogue's Voodoo Doughnut line. Yuck. Admittedly, I had very low expectations of the Maple Bacon flavored beer, but the missus really wanted to try it. She also wanted to try the Peanut Butter one too, but I drew the line at that abominable idea. The Maple Bacon pretty much tasted like cardboard, carbonation and smokey peat moss. The warmer it got, the worse the smoke flavor. And it lingered for over an hour, over powering the next beer. On the other hand, Unibroue "La Terrible" (Dark Belgian - Toasty, Vanilla, Malty, Chocolatey, Surprisingly high Carbonation, great after flavor) and the Firestone "16th Anniversary" (Strong Ale - Syrupy, Choco-Coffee, almost Coconuty maybe and very smooth overall) were both excellent beers. I highly suggest both, if you like those types. Also had Velvet Merlin, although not for the first time. A nice beer too. Coincidentally, the special lady tried to order a cask version of the "Velvet Merkin" the other day and the cask went dry on her order :(

I am looking forward to some Dreadball at ManJuiceDietCon.

Sorry to hear about the lady friend barfing. The downside? no LA. The upside? no LA. tee hee hee.

I am so bummed I missed the Poo Deck. I started getting a dehydration headache while up in Venice around 1pm. By the time I got fluids in me, it was too late. I was a mess, trying not to vomit, by the time I got home. Bad move on my part. I hope everyone had a good time.

Got me a Kindle Paperwhite for Xmas. I was kind of on the fence for a while after trying the prior models, but I am very happy with this one. It feels right in my hands and is quite convenient on public transit, plus the navigation just seems easier on this version.

D>M>

| Musings

 - We missed the LA Xmas trip due to Leslie barfing, a lot, so that was a bummer.  No lomo saltado (or Disneyland) for us :(

 - Got Star Wars TCG and Dominant Species card game from the Mrs., SWTCG looks like a lot of fun and DSCD is pretty fun.  I think it will hit a sweet spot with more than two players, so look for it at ManCon.

 - Completed my fantasy themed Dreadball pitch and am now in the process of converting my BB minis to Dreadball basing.  It really is a great, great game.  I heard someone make the following comparison:

Blood Bowl is to chess, as Dreadball is to chess without the pawns.

It's true.  The game is just full of the good stuff.

 - Lagunitas Sucks is so, so good.

 - As I was building Wylie's Lego Hoth Battle Set he got for Xmas (from me!), I was thinking about when my dad built my first Lego space set and how as much as things have changed in the past 30 years, somethings stay the same :)

| Ho Ho Ho, no hobo

Merry Christmas you guys! Hope everyone's holiday went well. I scored a sweet Horse Head mask from my wife, so all is right in the world. I also bought us a Roku which turned out to be one of my best buys yet. We can stream netflix from our xboxes and ps3, but the Roku lets us actually watch HBO Go stuff on the tellie which is kind of amazing. Everyone episode of all their shows is on there, so it's paid for itself a billion times over. We watched the 6 hour mini series Angels in America this past week and it was really great. It's about mid 80's NYC and the AIDs epidemic. It straddles the line between humor, really serious stuff, and even a little fantasy. I thought it was fantastic. Homophobes, do not apply. Hobophobes, it should be okay.

Slowly spreading the boardgame virus to my in-laws. The only one that's really stuck is Ticket to Ride, but it was a big hit on Christmas Eve AND X-Mas day. One of my niece-in-laws was hanging with my wife the other day and we were able to get her into a BUNCH of boardgames! So now we've expanded out from 2-players to 3 in a bunch of stuff which was a fun experience. She liked Zooleretto, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. Next time we're gonna bust out Stone Age and see how that sticks.

Man Con 2013 approaches! Hope everyone can still make it!

Saruman also wishes everyone happy holidays!

Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum

| Happy Holidays, fuckers.

The Good:

 - As far as I can tell, no one I know is in the hospital or in jail, so the holidays are indeed happy.
 - Lagunitas Sucks is back!  It's 11:15am and I'm drinking one for breakfast right now!
 - Xmas tree, xmas music.
 - Wylie FINALLY getting excited for xmas.
 - Staying home on at least part of xmas day before hitting the road.
 - The Action Team!
 - Cayucos is just around the corner!
 - Possibly eating some Lomo Saltado with the King of All Haole's, R Dub!

The Bad:

 - Driving to LA manana (maybe?) through the probable storm over the grapevine because we've heard that the 1 is closed in various locations due to landslides.
 - Missing the Poopdeck get together, again.  Glad I'm not in LA, however, so it's a mixed bag.
 - Leslie has the stomach flu so it looks like I will be taking Wy to her family xmas eve party by myself.  Supar bummar.
 - Most likely missing Disneyland because of the rain.  They close so much of the park in extended rains, it just wouldn't be a good way to experience it for Wy on his first time. :(

So, I'd like to play Minecraft, but I'm really only interested in screwing around with Redstone and building another lair o' tricks n' traps. Anybody sitting on a stockpile they don't mind me grabbing? If so, which server?

Bantha Poodoo Deck: 3 PM tomorrow. Be there, or be square!

| Day After Tomorrow

I have totally been wrapped up in family stuff the last few days, so didn't get to comment on the end of the world, or the Hobbit.

On 12-21-12, we took the kid snowboarding. We didn't do any snow play ourselves, but we brought a bunch of board games and played in the lodge. It was pretty fun. Only one little kid stared at us playing Rivals of Catan and asked "what is that game?" in a confused voice. No one else seemed to even notice so didn't lose any cool points. As we left that evening, sunset looked CRAZY and for an instant I thought maybe it really was the end of the world. We stopped at Spaghetti Factory on the way home and I seriously wondered if that was gonna be my last meal ever. (It was delicious!)

Haven't seen the Hobbit yet but I kinda do out of morbid curiosity. The movie Thor is usually demoed on those weird frame rate TVs at Best Buys etc, and that shit looks ridiculous. I've seen Thor, so I remember how it looked, but in that weird super high def, it's almost exactly how Enoto described the Hobbit. Soap opera/stage play SUPER fake looking. I don't "like" it in the least, but I find it hard to turn away. So I feel like I have to see The Hobbit that way.

That sounds cool man!  My brothers visiting from NY/ Taiwan from the 27^th and 28^th, so, we can probably host games at my place after the 29^th but I’ll be around to hang out if you want to see the hobbit again or go grab some Mongolian wok (haven't been to that place in a decade)...  So what’s your family plans?    

I laughed at the "cocaine induced frenzy." Yes, that is an important part of the explanation. Ja-el: you in for the Poop Deck? Xmas Eve, 3:00-5:00 bro. And I will take you up on your offer for board gamin'! Could anyone else make it? Which day would work best for you?

We were planning to drive down tomorrow, but we may make that Monday morning depending on how the weather turns out. The Grapevine is not looking so good tomorrow.

| Anal-lysis part 2

And seeing that Jabba used Leiya like a 3.99 Home depot gangnam style gardening hose, locked in a small chest like box, and slapped his slug like slab of meat all over her face, I can also see why she chose to jump on his back and strangle the life out of Jabba in a cocaine induced frenzy, being the most painful way to go rather than just shooting him in the head or something.  That's more of a mature adult theme that was more insinuated and not played out in the movie anywhere, but we all understand what the filmmakers intended.  Like Jron, I'd also be gracious to explain this theme, however I'd say, he'd figure it out by the time he gets to high school and it's one to grow on.

Norcalers, when are you guys going to be in town?  Let me know when you guys get back and maybe we can do some gamin at my place seeing that jron's basement gets a bit drafty during the winter times.   I also haven't seen hobbit or the batman rises, which after all these discussions, i think im gonna go watch them both despite the rotten reviews here.   

| Star Wars anal... ysis

I always enjoy how kids have these very unencumbered views of things. They are still being taught how to think like an adult and integrate into society, as a result they often think very differently than adults. Some of it is nonsense or just impractical, but some of it is very interesting perspectives worth thinking on.

I think jr0n's explanations on the Jabba scenes seem pretty solid. I feel much the same way.

With regards to Anakin/Luke mix up, I can see how he would have a hard time with that. I had a hard time understanding the Luke becoming Vader reference. I really just did not follow the reference and it scared me as a kid. Then again, I was a dolt when it came to deeper meanings in stories and symbolism until I was we'll into HS. Okay I can still be hopelessly naive about these things sometimes.

If you go back to the prequels, I highly suggest you go to the Prequel remixes. Like the No Jar Jar Episode remix. At least that will make it more palatable.

Speaking of remixes, based on the reviews, I have decided to avoid the Hobbit. Sad? yes. but not wholly unexpected. I was Leary when they announced a few years back that it would be a 2 movie pieces, but when they announced it would be 3, I pretty much gave up all hope. Boo. I think I will wait for all three to come out and for someone to remix it as a one 2-hour movie edit. Then it may be worth while. Funny, I preferred the extended version of LotR, but I think a foreshortened version of Hobbit is really going to much better based on what I am hearing.

fArt, I agree about the high refresh rate on LCD and RPTV. The idea is to smooth "motion blur" on the low pixel Grey to Grey (GtG) reaction times of LCD devices, but it just created a weird plasticy video cam quality. I think the TVs that employ this technology now have become much better at making this blending more natural, but it still doesn't jive with purists. I haven't seen the 48fps theater projections yet, but reviews seem mixed. So I'll reserve judgment until I see one. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie studios eventually use it as a new means to add more tiered pricing, like 3D (yuck), to squeeze more money from movie goers :(

D>M>

(Spoilers for some shit we've all read a bunch of times.)

You are not wrong about Hobert, you are exactly right. For example, the introductory scene with old Bilbo talking to Frodo right before the start of LotR, is like 10 minutes long. The party scene with the dwarves at Bilbo's place is extremely long. The fight against the trolls and subsequent hijinx is extremely long and badly staged. The Rivendell scenes are fine but long. The storm giant scene is pointless and long. The goblin-town scenes are pretty good. The Gollum scene is pretty good. The "birds in the trees" scene is long and badly staged. The filler scenes constructed from the Appendices/Peter Jackson's ass are variable, but mostly long. Did you ever know Radagast has half of his head covered in bird shit at all times? Not joking.

What I'm getting at is that the Hobbit is long.

Re: Jabba, Jabba is the powerful leader of a intergalactic crime syndicate one of whose major goals is capturing/killing Han Solo. Han Solo is a major asset to the Rebellion and Leia's space boyfriend to boot. If Jabba survives, he's certainly going to put substantial resources into going right back after Han and probably now the whole gang/Rebellion to boot. As a high-ranking member of the Rebellion Leia needs to make hard choices even when those choices involve killing otherwise innocent droids caught up in the situation. I'd also add that people don't seem to really consider droids to be sentient creatures, at least not universally.

It is debatable whether the attack was necessary or wise, though. A better option may have been to negotiate with Jabba to try and pay off Han's debt to recover him. Of course Jabba does seem to be a vengeful individual and it's possible this was already attempted and is simply not mentioned in the interest of servicing the story. Edit: of course it's also a pretty awesome PR move for the Rebellion's top guys to execute a stunning raid to rescue one of their own.

I can explain all this to Wylie the next time I'm down, there if you like!

Hopefully you enjoy the prequels a little better this time around. They are mostly terrible, but there are moments in each one. If you don't feel like rewatching AotC, maybe you could take Wylie to see Django Unchained since they have a same named character.

| Robes Hobert

 - Alas, I don't think I'll see the Hobbort until it comes out on DVD.  I just have a really had feeling that it will bum me out.  3 hours for 100 pages of book where many of those 100 pages is padding?  Sounds like a poor decision that would be painful to sit through.

I REALLY hope I'm wrong.

- I saw Bartman Rises, or whatever it's called, last night on Amazon streaming and it was meh.

 - I also saw the Bones Brigade documentary on Netflix streaming and it was AWESOME!

 - Wylie asked why Leia killed Jabba because he 'was just sitting there, not even fighting with anyone'.  Good point.  Why couldn't R2 just cut the chain and they take off and let him blow up with the barge?  It's not like he was a real threat, just sitting there like a slab of grade A slug meat.  Leia's kind of bloodthirsty, yikes.

He also asked about all the other droids on the barge when it blew up.  "Some of them might be good like R2D2 and C3PO".  I don't know what to tell you kid, you're not wrong.

Also, the whole Anakin/Luke thing is messing him up.  He thinks Luke IS Anakin so the whole reveal of Anakin becoming Darth is lost on him.  I need to bite the bullet and show him Episodes I - III so he hopefully has some context....  *grumble, grumble*  It's not like I can have him unlearn everything about the Star Wars universe from Lego and various other games and marketing, so I'm sort of stuck.

| IN THE APPLESAUCE

If you haven't already seen the latest Batman movie, DO NOT CLICK THIS UNLESS YOU DON'T MIND A CRAP TON OF SPOILERS. **HILARITY WARNING**

| Yeah.. haven't seen it yet BUT..

When we were co-habitating with the in-laws, he would set his TV to the "ultra crispy" setting and it would turn every movie, TV show or whatever into what I could only describe as a BBC documentary / Soap Opera look. I absolutely hated it.

I think the technical term for it is the "uncanny valley" effect.

Anyone else see Teh Hobert yet? My boss took us to see it in 48 fps, and I was surprised how much I disliked it:

- The movie itself DRAGS. Not exactly a surprise since it is like 100 pages of book stretched to three hours.
- 48 fps looks Godawful. Camera movement as well as regular, in-frame movement looked jerky, and in some cases, normal movement would appear to be in comical, Benny Hill-fast motion. Details are super crisp: too crisp. It is very obvious you're watching actors on a set, the artifice of reality doesn't hold. Things like fake beards on the dwarves really stick out.

The fast-motion I got used to (mostly, still caught it from time to time), but I couldn't ever get past the fake look everything had.

Tl;dr take the excesses of the LotR trilogy that you can look past, make a movie out of nothing but them, make it look shitty and there's the Hobbit.

Interested to hear what others think, not everyone I saw the movie with was as bothered by the 48 fps.

Re Star Wars, yup. I think a lot of us are optimistic right now. I picked up the x-wing game too (no expansions tho), probably will get the card game, and picked up the starter box for the new rpg (cheer up Rude!). The rpg looks fun; it's based on the WFRP 3rd Ed rules, and that system was the cat's pyjamas.

| Star Wars

I have to admit I still enjoy the original series of SW quite a bit. I still will sit and watch it if I happen across it on TV. It is especially fun watching it through the eyes of my nephew, who is quite enamored with the whole SW world. So I can totally identify with your feelings eLzar.

Aimey and I would love to make it to Disney with your family on the 26th, but we will be flying out on the 26th.

D>M>

| Star Wars

Ugh.  But in a good way!

Wylie and I watched Empire yesterday, and plan on finishing Return today.  He's into it and asking a lot of questions, and yes, we will eventually watch the first three episodes, just to be completists (will have to borrow from neighbors because I still refuse to own them).  That being said, I have experienced a little of the 'watching it again for the first time' syndrome with him, and combined with the whole Disney sale and a new movie coming out in 2 years, I went ahead and dropped a Benjamin on Star Wars game stuff - the base mini game, y wing expansion, x wing expansion, 2 tie expansions, 1 tie advanced expansion, and the new LCG.

They should all be here on Jan 3, so in PLENTY of time to share my shame at ManCon.

It's like I have made it through some odd SW depression, and realized how good it actually can be (and was for me), so I'm revelling in it right now.  Or maybe it's like I had an abusive father that undermined everything I enjoyed and once he died, I realized that life was good and I could go back to liking things again.

It's 'A New Hope' for the franchise all over again.  See what I did there?

| Game NIght Dec 26...

... at Disneyland!

I went ahead and pulled some strings, talked to some close family friends, and Disneyland has allowed us to host a game day/night on Dec 26th as long as all participants pay full admission price, and instead of playing games, we instead ride on rides.

(Les, Wy, and I are going to Disneyland on Dec 26th - anyone want to come with us and hang out for the day? It's Wy's first time!)

So many Minecraft servers, so little time for me to play Minecraft! Instead, I've been playing Mark of the Ninja, which I picked up in the Thanksgiving Steam sale. This game is both funky and fresh, and I recommend it. It's kinda like a fast-paced, 2d platforming version of Thief, which doesn't sound like it should work, but it totally does. I'm hooked!

There's also a new Humble Bundle as well and it, too, looks super-fresh. I've already got Binding of Isaac (which some people LOVE, although I just thought it was OK); I'll probably pick it up for Legend of Grimrock.

Sounds like iRude can't host a board game get-together post-Xmas due to work complexities. Anyone interested in hosting one on either the 26th or 27th? If not, I can see what my parents think. Maybe we can all cram into my old bedroom and play on the floor?

Looking forward to the Poo Deck!

Also looking forward to having babysitters to look after this kid! I want to get out there and check out The Hobbit and Django Fett Unchained.

| 49284.foldserver.com

Not sure anyone cares, but I created yet ANOTHER server.  This one is a non bukkit server because after the MC update, first The End Again server stopped working until bukkit updated.  So rather than be tied to that crap, I thought I would take an archive of the world, and create a non-bukkit version.

Yes, your spaceship is still in the other world.  Still.

| I ain't done shit!

lol.. I'll check it out. I thought maybe it got shut down when the new one started up. Is there any way to download the world and play it offline?

| Re: Art

As you have probably already figured out by trying to log in to the old server, yes, it is still there in all it's glory.

| Is this mid-life crisis yet?

More like Middle EARTH-life crisis, ya feel me ladies?

I'm excited to take some classes in Feb at the Burbank Adult school. I'm THAT guy now! Fuck it, they sound fun. This is the line up I think I'm gonna shoot for: Beginning Acting, Beginning Photography, and Intro to Screenwriting!

Even though I'm an old photog-pro from my High School days (the dark room bandit...), I cannot for the life of me get a grasp on F-Stop and ISO stuff yet. I have a great book on photography and Enron has given me great advice, but I still fall back on Auto. I gotta get past that.

The acting seems fun because I did a short stint of "background" work when I was jobless a few years ago. It was awesome! I live in  Burbank where they shoot most of these shows, so I might consider trying to get little jobs here and there on my days off for extra money and adventures. You don't need to actually ACT when you do background, but it still sounds exciting and probably helps with public speaking and that kind of shit.

The screenwriting class sounds cool because I had this awful dream the other day that I woke up and frantically wrote down. While I was living through the dream, it was the most interesting story in the world. As I quickly wrote it out, and it so hilariously bad. It would be cool to know the formatting and ins and outs of screenplays so I can sell these gems for BANK.

In the dream, I was back in high school, walking around the track for PE with iJon or some nameless friend. The football team was practicing in the middle of the field. I think a cheerleader picked up the ball and through it the length of the field - everyone was all amazed. And of course, I caught it. So the dream went through the whole story of how we had to train with the team, and they hated us at first, but came around to loving us because we probably won some big dumb game. I woke before the end but it was headed in that direction.

| Whoa... wait a minute

Does that mean our old world is wiped? Is there any way to get a copy of that so I can still play with the rocketship with the kiddos? They may riot and set fire to the house if we lose all that work, lol.

| The End Again

48779.foldserver.com

I THINK I have added everyone to the whitelist so loggin in should not be a problem.

Apparently, if one person ends the game by keeling the EnderDragon, the EnderDragon is dead for everyone - thanks Lou.  I didn't expect that, so, sorry Art :/

I really like starting over in Minecraft and with a definite goal of killing the EnderDragon, I know I get to do it again and again!

The plan:

1) Find Enderpearls on Endermen
2) Find Blaze Rods on Blazes in the Nether
3) Combine Blaze Powder and Enderpearl to create Eye of Ender
4) Use Eyes of Ender to triangulate location of Fortress
5) Find portal in said fortress, and fill slots with 12 Eyes of Ender
6) ...
7) Profit at the End!

PS The server is at the HARD setting; thought I would try something new since we are all wily vets of MC.

PPS Apparently when I cut and paste the link from Minefold, this is the color and background I get!

The shoestrings were novel but the 2player game was a bit dry because it lacked strategic elements.   Like Toody said I'd definitely would try it again with 5 before I deliver the coup the gras on the game box and douse the remaining contents in cleansing fire to ward away the Japanese evil spirits.

Rood and I have made zero progress on our game, sadly.  We submitted our game design to a company who at first were quite interested in our concept.  Then they never called back.  According to the company, they wanted a game to be play tested by at least 100 people or have positive feedback on BGG.  So even though they say prototype, they really meant a completed out-of-box finished game because I can't see a prototype having substantial value to playtesters.

| BING Railway, amirite?

I'm not gonna lie. String Railway is one of those ridiculous impulse buys that didn't really pan out. At least it's a small box and it wasn't expensive. But the idea of a train game using strings sounded super awesome and I prematurely pulled the trigger. Then of course, great moment when I'm bringing it out to show Jael and he's like "it's just a bunch of colored shoelaces!?"

Glad to hear that Deadball turned out to be fun! I'll gladly play it at CayuKhan. Feels like you got that one kinda quick. Everything else I've ever kickstarted has taken like a year to come to me.

That was fun. Like I said to Aeryk, it's good to see the kickstarted games turn out, esp because I've got three big ones incoming!

We will have the biggest game of OGRE ever at Kubla, the event nobody was clamoring for...

In other news, the kid took ZERO naps this weekend (except for snoozing a bit while eating), and slept fitfully at night to boot. We let "cry it out" take its course at last night's 3 AM wakeup and it took her an hour fifteen to stop crying and fall back asleep. It's comparatively a relief to be back at work!

| "Cool prototype, bro!"

... is what I first thought when I saw that last picture.  I thought R00d and Jael had made some progress on their game!  Instead, I found out that is what passes for a professional game these days :)

(I've heard the game is fun, but I thinks what I thinks)

MANCON WALNUT CREEK: PARALLEL EDITION

In a twist of parallelism, jr0n and I also had a mini ManCon on Saturday and got to play Dreadball!

Unfortunately, the acronymn for Dreadball will be the same as Douchebag, but what can you do... Anyway, DB was a really fun game!  It's like Blood Bowl, in so far as it is a sports game where you can hurt people while trying to score goals (or 'strikes' in DB), but boiled down to some pretty simple mechanics.  Much like the 3rd ed BB rules changed the turns so that if you failed, your turn ended to keep the game focused on the interesting parts, DB also keeps the game focused on the interesting parts by reducing the board size, the number of players on the pitch to 6 a side, and giving 5 standard actions per coach, per turn (one player can receive up to two actions, and one more special action from card play, which keeps the potential for dynamic, exciting plays pretty high).

You roll dice against stats and compare successes against either a target number of required success for the action, or against an opposed roll.  Doubling required successes proc additional effects.

Like to play it at ManCon: Proper Edition, so I'm working on priming, and painting the 4 teams and then ultimately building a custom board...  We'll see what actually is accomplished by the end of Jan....

| man on man

Jael and I had a mini game day this morning, playing String Railway and then a couple of games of Zooleretto Dice. String Railway with 2 isn't very exciting, but it plays up to 5 and I imagine it would be a lot more dynamic and fun with more. Zooleretto Dice went over better and is surprisingly fun for such a simple game. It is essentially full on regular Zooleretto but with animal dice and nice scorepads instead of tiles and boards.

| on a lighter note

scored these sweet action figures at the 99cents store

Yeah, that was pretty horrible. What's scary about the mall shooting that had just happened before in Portland is that my sister and her kids shop there all the time!

| School shooting. :(

I just can't even imagine what would bring someone to the level of being okay with harming children. Gah, so freaking terrible. =(

well, i met MY end in Game of Thrones, played on Vassal.  Awesome game, awesome java engine, and best of all it's free.  Reminds me a bit of fumbble, with a bit better graphics.   Will definitely pay another quarter to play.

| Jerk face!

I wanted to do it with you. /nohomo

| By The End I Meant

...for Minecraft.

I know the REAL End doesn't happen until later this month....

The Mayan calendar is the 22nd.   12/22/2012.   We're not there yet.  Still a chance the prophecy may yet to be foretold

| The End

Was it supposed to be the 12th or the 21st? I don't remember. After the fake Rapture, all the other end-of-the-world events just seem soft.

Semi-related... anyone ever seen that movie Melancholia? The first half is kind of hard to get through. But it's worth it. Very interesting, if off-speed, movie.

| This is the End

The End, my friends, The End.

Interesting, not sure what it will mean for everyone else in the world, but I have experienced The End and it was fun :)

Who's up for starting at the beginning again?

| USS Cayucos, powered by iOS Artemis

Seems VERY apropos that this is released just before CabinCon!

$2.99 and works on both iPhone and iPad.  Seems like we should try it again without all the crappy networking shenanigans from last time!

DO EET!

| Minefold... teh?

I dunno.. it's just saved in my multiplayer servers menu within Minecraft? Do you connect by using a feature on the Minefold page directly or something?

I've started building an archery range and challenge course. It's kinda fun. Needs a little work still. If anyone wants to take a look, you can find it by either going due-west of the rocket, or by going down through the flower garden building (ladder going down to entrance passage) and following that into the underground castle thing.. but that might be hard to find, as there are a couple of semi-hidden passage-ways and whatnot.

The Rocketship project was a lot of fun. I sometimes wish there wasn't a constant cloud layer (makes it hard to see from the ground. But I've found that when I first log in, the clouds haven't fully invaded yet, so I did get one clean screenie from the ground nearby:

| p00p, p00p, p00p of Earl

p00p deck yo. I am in. As jr0n said, this may be the last year. Booo... Minor update: the Mermaid is open again, but only on weekends for a few hours in the evening, so that is out as jr0n mentioned before.

r00d, you can also call Peter by his other name, Panzer-Faust. Also, I third the motion that Space Team is pretty sweet.

I am in town the 19th-26th, so any post Xmas gaming is out for me.

fArt, the End looks like fun, but I am not sure when us punks will gather enough interest to get a large enough group to assault the End. Also, Minefold has totally changed their servers and the payment structure. I cannot find our server anymore on the world maps anymore. I don't think I like the direction they are going with this new model.

D>M>

Peter = Blackheart, yo.

We'll be down in LA around Xmas and I think we'd both LOVE to get together for some board games while we let the grandparents babysit! Could we do it either Wednesday or Thursday?

Oh yeah, and the Poop Deck is definitely on this year, probably for the last time! The Poop itself may or may not still be open, the Mermaid is definitely closed, so we may just end up drinking brown bagged Bud Lights out on the beach. Bring your own mural.

I picked up Baldur's Gate! I'm still in the tutorial, but so far it seems like they've translated the controls reasonably well to the tablet, although it's a bit clunky because let's face it, this is kind of an old and clunky game. Further update when I'm a little further in.

Edit: oh, and Spaceteam is awesome. enr0n and I went down to Aptos a week ago and we got in a couple of good, chaotic 3-player games. Definitely one to bring to the cabin.

| USP

We threw an Ugly Sweater Party at our place last night that went off pretty well! Jael and PETER (don't know an appropriate fake name for him) were there to attend for the Action Team, and it seemed like everyone had a fun time. :) My house would be PERFECT for gaming, maybe closer to x-mas if any norcal peeps visit for the holidays we can get a mini game day in.

Some epic titles for iOS lately. For Elrick and any other Zombie fans, the free endless runner "Into the Dead" is pretty awesome. It's first person in that realistic Mirror's Edge style, but you're running through hordes of zombies trying to last as long as you can. It's free. It'll give you at least a few minutes of fun.

SpaceTeam! This is a pretty amazing free app. It's for 2-4 players, also with iOS devices all in the same room. Your phones basically become control panels on a starship (sorta like Artemis) and there's these super quick timers that slide down. You have to give commands to the other players while hearing and following THEIR commands to you. All the buttons and switches on your console are random technobabble that changes, so it's just people yelling out all this crazy shit to each other, trying to keep your ship from blowing up. It plays great with just 2, so play it with your significant others!

Another free iOS game I've put a ridiculous amount of time into (around 6 hours so far) is called Undercroft. It's an old school turn based dungeon crawler, but why I'm so hooked on it is that you can set the difficulty level to EASY! So I can actually survive and jam through content. I love the exploration of these styles of games, but they always seem so hard. I might bump up the difficulty to see if I can hang.

Not free is that enhanced edition of Baldur's Gate. Never played the original, so might pick it up for $10 bucks. But since I'm having a fun time with Undercroft, might hold off for a bit to see if it goes on sale or something.

| lulz... that looks like fun!

You guys have HL2, TF2 or Portal2 installed, you should be able to play this free mod. Looks silly and lots of fun to play on teamspeak with each other, screaming like little girls haha.

| Let's Play - The Hidden

| MOAR MINECRUD

So I followed Elzar's road, wondering whose house it would wind up at... only to find out it winds up in the BAD GUY'S PLACE, lol. That place is a crazy labrynth! And I'm pretty sure I haven't explored more than 5% of it. Madness! I had to run for my life, getting chased by a pair of creepers.

Has anyone ever made it all the way to the dragon at The End?

| MOAR BREAD PORN (and chikn pot pie porn)

Poor man's chicken pot pie!

Made a cheater sauce for poor man's chicken pot pie. Started with a quick Roux (1/2 cup butter, 3/4 cup flour, whisk together... then whisked in milk until it was a very thick paste but not dough-like)... then, cracked open a can of roasted chicken & wild rice soup and whisked it all together, needed some salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder.

Baked a fresh loaf of french bread to pour the sauce over.

Fucking noms, and only about 300-350 calories a serving.

Fresh baked bread, sauce

Slice of fresh bread, sauce ladled on top. Weeeee!

Yeah, you gotta watch the Witness:Libya episode because they talk about Tim Herington getting killed there and have some footage of him with the guy they're following around. Tim was the co-director/photographer from Restrepo.

| Minecraft related:

So I read up on The End and it sounds like there's no chance in hell of anyone surviving against the dragon alone... maybe we can all agree on a time to get in the server together (even the part-timers / done with it crowd?) so we can beat that sumbitch!?

What say you!? :D

| Interesting, will check those out

You ever catch that documentary-style film on Afghanistan? Restrepo. Not an easy watch. But really, really good.

| bonus cup (of death)

Also been into these really good HBO short documentaries on war photographers called Witness: and then some place's name like Libya, Rio, Juarez, etc. REALLY good and pretty fucking heavy.

| Chimney Sweep

I've had to force myself to stay awake this morning because I had to wait through those long time frames for a refrigerator repair man and a chimney sweep to show up. Caught some cool Netflix movies that were pretty interesting. First I saw "Six Days to Air" which is a documentary on South Park. They create each episode from idea to it coming out on tv in six days! It's crazy to see it go down even though I never really watch the show. I'm definitely going to watch this week though to see if it feels like something that gets popped out so fast.

The other doc I just got finished watching is "Indie Game The Movie" which just talks about the current indie video game scene. Well, it's probably like a year or two old, but its current to the last time I was playing a lot of games on Steam and xbla. Neat to see the people behind a lot of games. Talk about all walks of life.

| Screenies

Here's the Rocket Ship.. the island on the bottom will need to be removed before everything is all said and done. The column going up the middle is where the ladder resides. The ladder is fully enclosed in falling lava, which kind of adds to the illusion. You can see what's left of the lava stream still sloooowly receding at the bottom, lol.

This was the view of the first platform I built at the top of the sky, lol.

Meanwhile, underground... this was a fun water feature to build. It's rather portal-like, yes? (Shhh, don't tell anyone, it's the secret entrance to the great hall, bat-cave and mines) ;)

A view from one of the recessed-seating areas in the great hall:

Seemed appropriate to add a throne fixture, lol:

| Minecraft Update

Been working on stuff with my two little helpers. Haylee loves to organize flowers and do agriculture stuff, Bennett is definitely the "LET'S GET TO THE BAT CAVE AND KILL ALL THE BAD GUYS!" ...guy. lol

So the Rocket Ship is more or less structurally finished. There are some aesthetic changes I'd like to make but overall it's complete. The top of the ship is 1 block short of the absolute build-limit (top of the sky). I'm not even quite sure how many blocks it took.. but it was a lot. The interesting phenomena I ran into with the cloud layers bisecting the project was that it made it nearly impossible to check my progress from the ground unless I traveled across the valley to my neighbor's house (whoever has that nifty house with the giant spiral on top of it). From THAT vantage point, I could see the entirety of the rocket because the topmost portion of his spiral stairs poked above the cloud layer.

Anyhow. The Rocket has an engine room, engineering control, two boosters, a huge storage bay (or whatever it might be turned into), a middle section good for observation, and then the topmost portion which is split into several decks. I started with the topmost portion, then realized it wasn't visible from the ground and then made plans to extend the whole body of the thing down A LOT.

The engineering control is setup such that you place lava "cores" into their assigned places and they go through the engine room and spit out of the bottom of the rocket, looking like, well, flames or something. lol.

The problem I ran into was that my previous gravity-drop to the surface was no longer effective because the water wasn't wide / deep enough at the point of impact. I tried to turn off the lava flow at that point to allow myself room to fix it... not realizing that it would take FOREVER for the lava to disappear. Tried to stomp it out by building "down" with blocks... but man.. that's a RISKY proposition, lol. Nearly flooded my underground complex more than once. So I've kind of resigned myself to just hanging out in-game and paying attention to the glacial-rate of recession.

At least all this waiting has given me some free time to work on the underground complex / castle. Even has a secret Bat Cave! lol

Now that it's more or less done, I guess I can go google "The End" and see what we need to do. Maybe Elzar or Aaaaaaaron can tell me what the objectives are (and what we've already accomplished?)

| Rivals

Random stuffs:

Haven't played Minecraft in forever! Still like hearing about it and remembering the thrill of the first night in the game, rushing to build shelter and hiding out till the sun came back out.

Rivals of Catan! What an awesome 2 player game. Picked it up the other week and we've played it a ton already. You guys have probably played it already in some form, but basically it's the reprint/remix of Catan the Card game which came out in 96. Each player has their little principality set up in front of them with the different reasons having a d6 number on it, and whenever that number comes up you get that resource. You use the resources to upgrade your town and the first person to X points is the winner. It's that perfect light-euro mix that I really enjoy.

I've been back on my desktop a little to play some Steam games. Working my way through The Walking Dead adventure game, loving it. They really knocked it out of the park. Can't wait to see how it plays out. Each episode they make you make agonizing decisions, it's bananas.

Also picked up some shooters n stuff that were on sale or from those Humble Bundles. I'll put in 20-30 mins every few days - nothing hardcore, but it's nice to have these casual distractions.

Been making a lot of music lately too! Super fun!

| I'm just gonna go ahead and blog the shit out of this place

So the kiddos decide they wanted to lobby for a 'camping out on the couch' night with the fireplace on, movies and popcorn, all that jazz... ok, sure, let's do it.

Everything was going awesome until this morning, when we discover that Bennett has had his first night-time accident in months... on the fucking couch. And even though he was wearing a night-time pull up as insurance, he decided to sleep on his stomach, which had the unfortunate effect of aiming his wang straight up and out of it... ugh.

So now the couch smells like piss, despite several attempts to take it out with resolve pet-odor foam, febreeze, etc.

Sigh.

| GOOD NEWS

(It's a suppository!)

The Lavapocaplyse is actually starting to recede... just REALLY REALLY SLOWLY. So it looks like I'll get a chance at a do-over on the design. That's awesome because I'd really hate to give up the "teleporter" (free fall from the top of the world to underground).

Is anyone else still logging on? lol. This has been, by far, the biggest project I've ever undertaken (makes the castle thing look really small). Really, was probably more than I should have attempted. But, it's almost done! Yay! Would love to show you jerks around :)

Maybe some of you jerks with experience in wiring / redstone could help me out on a part of the project I'm not real sure on how to move forward. It's not a necessity, but would be kinda cool.

Elzar, you still doing The End quest? How do I get in on that to help out?

| CAY-EWE-COAST

Or however the hell you pronounce that. I was totally in for December, but now that we've waited, some murky finance shiz is coming down the pike. I won't rule myself out but I'm now going to be a game time decision (should know for sure around the 1st of the year).

Unrelated: Playing Minecraft on our multiplayer world with the kiddos a bunch. The Mothership is almost done! I, eh... had a slight mishap when firing up the engine cores. It appears that I miscalculated on the ability for the lava-drive to power down with the cores removed. So, while the first test-firing of the engines went well and there were otherwise no mishaps... I realized a slight engineering defect that negated my "teleporter" and turned it into a one-way express into Death Town... but being unable to turn off the lava-drive, resorted to extreme engineering to try and fix it... which managed to make things a lot worse. Anyway. lol

That being said.. can't log in! Whassap with that? Anyone else having issues getting into the game world?

| Cayucos and Beyond!

After much confusion with the rental agency, I have finally received the rental agreement in the (e)mail!  Next step: pay the nice people for the right to live in their house for the weekend!  Step before that step: Pay Elzar some money upfront so the hit doesn't come to the old bank account at once!  The total cost out of pocket is $1,976.30 with $500 of that coming back at the end (security deposit), so how about it fellas - scrilla for the Thrilla from Aptosilla?  IIRC those to attend:

Elzar
Enron
jr0n
R00d
Pumpkin
Dave Defeat
Blackheart
Motorbyke
and possibly Oriental Rugs and Lost Wages.  So that puts us at either ~ $184 or $147ish a head.

 - For those of you with kids and an iPad and a desire to give the kid something to do that may or may not help them learn algebra concepts from like age 4 and up to 12th grade (I think), check out Dragonbox+.  Wylie is hooked for better or worse and I have fun with it too.  It basically turns the concepts of algebra into a non-numeric valued puzzle using monster icons.  It's very interesting and at a certain point I hit this 'a-ha' moment where "I see what you're doing there".

 - No brewing for me yet.  Haven't had the time, materials, energy, or equipment to do a batch - maybe you should come down for inspiration and we can have a brew day?

- For what it's worth, I'm a CISSP now.

| The Walking Dead

Only game I bought from the Steam sale was the complete season of The Walking Dead for $12.50. Still in the first episode but I'm really enjoying it. Haven't payed attention to much else on it. Microsoft Store was selling friggen Skyrim for $10 bucks but it sold out right away (the dvd version). I'll get that game if it comes out that cheap.

| Draft master

When I post from my office PC, I get the dozens of draft posts, due to the pain-in-the-ass content filters HQ has in place. It actually is a pain to post from work, but there are work arounds, with caveats, as you can see.

D>M>

| lol

Just saw the million drafts. lulz

| Steam Sale

Yeah, I picked up Portal 2 for $4.99 (never played either of them), and also got the Game Of The Year Edition for Civ5 at $12. Should be fun to play through with the kiddos.

Oven bags are a great festive way to prep your crack rocks.

Enr0n, there are like 20 drafts of that post. I mean it was funny, but you might be taking it too seriously.

Anyone buy any Steam junk? I picked up the new Deus Ex and Mark of the Ninja.

| Oven Bag Rocks?

fArt, I have never tried cooking rocks in my oven bag?! Do they tender up nicely? Do you saute them in mud for a little bit prior to putting them in the bag for a little favor enhancement?

eLzar, are you in the realm of the living still, or did you slip into another plane? Any brewing lately. I need to live vicariously through your brewing since I don't have the space in my apartment.

D>M>

| Oven Bag rocks

I also throw in some carrots, celery and apple slices into the bottom of the bag for added moisture. Can't do the 500 degrees thing from Alton's recipe though, the bag can't take that high of heat. 100% recommend the bag, though. It's awesome.

Thanks for the info about the bags. I used Alton Brown's method of starting the bird off at 500° for about 30 minutes and then lowering the temperature to 350 and putting an aluminum foil breastplate over the breast. So when my Thermometer told me the breast was at 161 I pulled the bird out. At that point the dark meat was in the mid 180s. Didn't do any basting because I was afraid of letting too much heat out.

| Oven Bags

Oven bags are for cooking a faster, more even roast. The biggest plus, it keeps the moisture in. So instead of basting every so often, and thus reducing the temp of the oven each time, you just keep the oven door closed the whole time. This keeps the oven temp up and the oven bag keeps the temp within the bag more consistent. This results in less chance of uneven temperatures around the bird. In a way, it averages out convection current hot spots in your oven.

Of course this doesn't solve the age old question of, "Do I cook for optimal dark meat or white meat temp": dark meat is best when cooked to 180 (most tender, otherwise under 180 it can be a little chewy), breast to 165 (above it tends to get drier).

Bags are relatively cheap (~$3-4 for two bags) and easily found in your grocery store. You just put a table spoon of flour in, shake it up and then throw the turkey in the bag before putting the whole thing in the oven.

D>M>

I'm going to have to try your brine recipes around Christmas this year. My 2nd turkey came out damn near perfect, but I know there's room to improve. Enoto - you gotta make your little family a turkey! It was honestly pretty damn easy. It also makes you feel manly as F. I don't really get how or why you'd use the turkey bag. Someone please 'splain.

Hey Pumpkin, you know that money you've got burning a hole in your pocket? Here, throw it at the Kingdom Death kickstarter. No Wet Nurse in there, sadly(?).

| Brineage

It absolutely rocked. But in all seriousness I think one of the biggest flavor-enhancers was swapping out a gallon of water for apple juice. I do another gallon of brine using vegetable stock, allspice, rosemary, thyme, garlic, peppercorns, ginger, and bay leaf. I let that boil / reduce down for about 15-20 mins on a low boil.

This year's bird was unbelievable. Best I've ever done. Even when I was seemingly past the point of eating another bite for fear of barfing, I kept going back to pick at it some more. lol

I don't even bother using the drippings. I just make my own stock now using the turkey giblets. Throw that in a stock pot with a gang of chopped up carrots, onion, celery. I also put in some mushrooms for flavor and a few quarters of an apple. I start it off with 2 quarts of broth, 1 quarts of stock. I add in another quart or so of water. As I take stock out for mashed potatoes, dressing, gravy, I replace with more broth or water. It simmers for like 8 hours all day long and at the end of the night I usually have about 4 quarts of LIQUID GOLD to save for use in the next week or so.

| Brine & Bag

Ry, awesome. That is great to hear you are now engaged. Ignore jr0n, you totally need to have your destination wedding in Stockton. A completely rad place for a wedding/meth cook-off.

fArt, Brine and Bag is the way to go. I have been using a brine that seems to really work nice: 2-2.5 gallons water, 1.5 cups brown sugar, 1.5 cups salt, fresh thyme (1/2 bunch), fresh rosemary (1/2 bunch), fresh sage (1/2 bunch), crushed juniper berries (20), (2) oranges quartered and (1) lemon quartered. The oven bag makes it real easy too, just need to make sure you pop in the thermometer prior to tying up the bag. How did the wine brine work out?

The drippings are a little tough to work with because of the salt. I keep meaning to try cooking the drippings with potatoes to try and pull some of the salt out, but I haven't made it there yet.

I'm still suffering a bit of a post T-Day drag-ass. Too much Butta'

D>M>

We had a great time over at enr0n's place. Pretty sure I'm still sweating butter. enr0n makes a great bird and a green bean casserole that will slay your ventricles outright. I'm a little scared to make turkeys, but I do make a pretty damn good pumpkin pie, even if I had an epic brain fail this time around. (Whole cloves instead of ground? WTF??? Fortunately the taste wasn't affected.) I also made my Grandma's Jell-O casserole, which in and of itself uses 3 sticks of butter for the recipe, along with substantial amounts of Cool Whip and cream cheese.

Got today off and am STAYING THE HELL HOME.

Hope everyone had a great one!

| Turkeh Brine!

Rood:

I got home from Thanksgiving at Michelle's aunt and uncle's place a little while ago and did up my brine. I probably should have made it earlier today before we left so I didn't have to wait for it to cool down so long, lol. I put ice packs in ziploc bags and floated those around in my brine to cool it down.

Like you, I started off with the Alton Brown standard and then went from there over the last few years. I now use apple juice instead of water in the brine. Gives it a nice flavr. Also put in about 1/3 to 1/2 a bottle of white wine. Garlic, Rosemary, Thyme, Onion Powder. Comes out so much better than regular ole bird.

Something else to consider using if you don't already is an oven bag. That shit is EASY MODE. Cooks a lot faster and really very evenly.

Only bummer about brining is you can't really use the turkey drippings (too salty). But I remedy that by cooking up a batch of stock while the bird cooks in the oven, using the giblets and neck. That home made stock is GOLD for making mashed potatoes and dressing.

We're doing our surplus Turkey Day tomorrow and inviting some friends and family over. Should be a good time. :D

Ryan: You. Dumb. Bastard. lolol, I keed. I keed. Getting married was the best decision I ever made :D Hard to believe I'm creeping up on 17 years with Michelle. That doesn't even seem like a real number. Crazy.

| Gobble

Happy Thanksgiving!

I made my first turkey ever this week. I'm doing one Friday for my parents who are coming over, but I also did one on Tuesday as a test run. Came out surprisingly well! I did Alton Brown's brine for the turkey. I was worried it was gonna be super salty or bland, but it came out right in the middle and had a pretty good flavor. Not PERFECT but really good. It only took about 3 hours in the oven and nothing was particularly complicated. The brine was simple to whip up and the most nerve wracking part was waiting to see how it would taste after soaking in a brine for a day. Put my 2nd turkey in another brine tonight and this time added a few more items to the mix, so looking forward to tomorrow's turkey. It's been turkey all week (had Turkey at my ladies families house too)!

PS Watched all of Sex House the other night and it was hilarious! What a great webseries. Really funny and they nailed the Real World style reality show perfectly. Alan Moore of creepy comic book writing fame is writing a web series now. I watched the first "short" and it was good. Looked amazing. The colors and style were really awesome. Act of Faith
It's kinda "sexy" so maybe don't watch it with your parents or kids. Also, it's Alan Moore who seems like a deviant, so whatever you're expecting, that's pretty much what's there.

Congrats Ryan!    Happy T-day, you Turkeys

They'll have a destination wedding. Destination: Oxnard.

The problem is once you live in paradise, where do you go for your honeymoon? Fucking, Torrance?

| yay

Congratulations Ry! You guys are already in the most awesome place to get married, so you're all set. :)

All this talk about the bike shop got you in the mood, eh?

Congrats bro!!!!!!! You'll need to fly us over to Hawaii for a very special episode of Man-Con.

| I'm Engaged.

| RROD(udley)

Sorry for the Studly Dudley rant!

But back on the RROD discussion from earlier, I'm in the SAME boat if mine happens to RROD anytime soon. I lost my original one within the first 3 years of ownership, so they sent me this replacement for free. But I just never use it anymore for anything. My stepkid has a 360 with Live and Netflix from another family member, so mine is basically a dvd player, if that. Once I got an iPad, my video gaming has switched almost 100% to that. I love Steam to death, but I barely even fire up my desktop these days because what internetting I don't do on my iPad I've done for 9 hours at work each night.

You think Google-Glasses type things will be common place before we make our final saving throw?

| Dudley's Bike *wink*

LOL, I guess if I am going to weasel my out of one thing I may have participated in, I might as well be blamed for something I didn't have a hand in. Oh well, there goes my political aspirations. Oh wait, I think those went out the door years ago. Never mind. Carry on.

D>M>

Other searches:

Dudley bike
Dudley bikey bike
+bike +shop +Dudley
Dudley do-right
Dudley do-nasty

The world's most thorough disclaimer still won't erase your YouTube search history.

Dudley bike shop
Shop Dudley bike
Bike shop Dudley
Tarzan

| Chest, the only game a man needs to learn

Okay, here is what is rad about that: Your kid is fucked. r00d is right. I mean, both Mike and I learned to play Chess 6 and 5 respectively. We even played against each other competitively at the MB school with the Grandest of Views. And we both turned out great. Oh wait. A weirdo who digs up dead bodies and ashes or a numb nut who thrusts his apparently red, sexy, swollen Georgia O'Keeffe inspired lower lips at other men while inviting them to go to the lobby with him. Plus Bobby Fischer will scare you more. Actually best not to read that. You might just cry. Bummer dude.

In all seriousness though, that is actually quite promising. He is into cool activities that are gateway drugs to nerd life. You may still have a proper gamer on your hands yet.

Disclaimer: By no means is any of the above statements an admission in anyway, shape or form of involvement in any crotch thrusting activity of any sort with relation to stuffed lipped shaped pillows or any other phallic or an otherwise symbolic genital proxy or likeness. Guilt by past activities is by no means proof of the previously mentioned activity occurring other than in the perceptions of the accusers. It could have been anyone of you jArks. What was stated above was only for illustrative purposes and only exists as perceived digressions of myself or others as a result of the theoretical matter regarding Chess and what the game will do to pervert participants, both real and perceived by others.

D>M>

| Chess!? YIKES!

Be careful with Chess! I think it modifies how your brain works and makes people NUTS. I dunno, if you google it there's some yahoo answers about it. Some people say yes some say no, so best to play it safe and teach the kid Battle Chess.

| Stuffed Lipps (,INC.)

I believe the offending novelty item was a set of stuffed lips.  While my memory is somewhat, er, MOSTLY cloudy, I think that was the item that doubled as a 'lets all go to the lobby' phallus and a video camera stabilizer when we stuck the camera on the dashboard.

So, I have no evidence to PROVE Enron did it, I think all we have to do is look at his past behavior to convict him on this one.

Yes, I'm an asshole for not wanting you to honk, and it wasn't so much honking at the dude with the sign, it was more because we were sitting at a traffic light, stopped, surrounded by cars - I didn't want to be the assholes honking for no apparent reason stopped in traffic.

Chess and Wylie

So, sort of out of the blue, Wylie wanted to start playing chess.  For a six year old, he doesn't suck - he can remember, mostly, what all the pieces do, although he still tries to move his pawns backwards or diagonal, but mostly he get it.  The thing is, we sort of actually play real games because I am so bad and unfamiliar with chess in general.

I will usually let him know if he is moving a piece that is clearly going to get taken on the next turn and ask him if he's sure, then he usually looks at the board and says "AAAARGH!" and points to my piece that will take his the following turn, and then redoes his move.  However, it's not like I can go for the throat or anything because I just don't really know how a game of chess is supposed to flow!

If he asked me to teach him Blood Bowl, or Combat Commander, or Memoir '44 or something, I would know certain things to do, not to do, what to look for, etc. and I would know how to take advantage of a weak opponent (usually!), but with chess it's just not the case.

I usually don't praise Wy to other people because I am mostly annoyed by parents that constantly talk their kids up to anyone who will listen, but in this case I am absolutely, genuinely, impressed. :)  Next up he says he wants to learn piano!  WTF?

| Haha!!

Oh man, I had totally forgotten about that. I think the sheer volume of brain cells we were killing each night might have played a role in our memory (or lack thereof) of said events.

I remember that place now, it had some kind of view of the river going on or something. To be fair, it was essentially the Taj Mahal compared to the Garden of Eat'n motel haha.

| Garden of Eat'n

Oh boy was that place ever a gem. In the middle of fucking nowhere Utah, connected to some unassuming motel. Anyway, after Art asked, "OK, what is at least "safe" to eat?", her response was "I don't know, the French Fries are probably safe." Pregnant silence followed... After she left the table the three of us were mulling over how bad we were going to have the shits the next day or something to that effect. If this same exchange had happened in a wooded area in the south, I am pretty sure one of the three of us would have been forced to squeal like a pig. Wow. Just wow.

Now with regards to "Let's all go to the lobby." I am not fessing up to it. Video or it didn't happen. LOL. Also, that "rat trap we stopped in outside of Portland" was the Best Western Plus Columbia River at the "Bridge of the Gods". This is also the Hotel where you destroyed our room toilet with your once a month football sized turd, just as we were checking out. eLzar and I tried to convince you to cut the turd up with the plunger but you were having nothing of it. Then You refused us to call the front desk and stated, "Trust me it isn't going down easy, now leave a big tip and lets get out of here."

And yes there is evidence of eLzar telling you not to honk the goddamn horn. I still watch that one about once a year to laugh it up a bit.

D>M>

| Another classic moment from that trip..

Had to have been when we were driving past the mattress store and they had that dancing sheep guy out on the curb and iErrrric was all bent about DO NOT HONK THE HORN, ART.. JESUS CHRIST YOU HAD TO HONK THE HORN? haha. I think that rant was on film as I recall.

The Garden of Eat'n out in the middle of ass-end nowhere was probably the most hilarious stop I think.

Us (To the waitress): So, what's good to eat here? Anything you'd recommend?

Her: Nothing. I won't even eat here.

Us: "..."

Us: No seriously?

Her: Yeah, I'm serious.

Us: OK, what is at least "safe" to eat? (lol)

Well, I dunno... that doesn't SOUND like enr0n...

OH WAIT IT TOTALLY DOES

Haha, I can picture it so clearly.

| LET'S ALL GO TO THE LOOOOBBBBBBYYY

iEric, can you back me up on this one? lol I think it was at whatever rat trap we stopped in outside of Portland on the way down, but I think it was continued later on too.

Yeah, I appear in the beginning segment briefly.  I didn't want to be on at all, but somehow I was dragged in.  So I cleverly suggested that we use a narrator / Storybook format, where instead of a bunch of talking heads, we do narration through a bunch of cool shots, kinda like a flipbook.   That way, we had minimal exposure to face the camera in terms of acting.    We just recorded the script with a mike.   I'm waiting now for the rough edits of the video.   Was a fun experience.  How's everything Rood?  I'm excited about your House warming party Dec 8th man!  Let me know if you want me to bring anything.

Awesome to hear the video shoot went well, Jael! You had mentioned a resource you used to get in touch with different film crews - what was it again? I can't wait to see the finished product. Do you appear on camera at all, or are you more a behind the scenes dude?

| Wait a minute...

Wait a minute? I don't remember this:

It's right up there with the non-stop drunk-ass sexy-dance he did on our road trip while singing "Let's all go to the lobbbbbyyyyy" with a long couch pillow sticking out of his crotch... for hours.

Did I just block this memory out? Could be...

D>M>

| What's awesome about Enron's recollection of the BoB ace pilot death

Is that he remembers it so vividly. LOL. And it really did take a good 15-20 seconds between me saying, hey, you're all shot to shit, jump out... to the final impact. Aaron completely froze into brain lock. It was horrifying at the time because, you know... I like PLAYED THAT CHARACTER FOR HOURS MAN, but now it makes me giggle-snort every time I think of it.

It's right up there with the non-stop drunk-ass sexy-dance he did on our road trip while singing "Let's all go to the lobbbbbyyyyy" with a long couch pillow sticking out of his crotch... for hours.

What's the difference between WWF and Porn?  Nothing.  Hulk Hogans in both!

Ha ha wokka!  o comon, don't die!  btw what game is that, I don't remember that on apple.

So if you guys are really interested in some good humor like mine, watch key and peele, which i'm sure some of you if not all already know.  It's like the chappelle show but not as ghetto blast.

On the weekends I've been really busy working on the Kickstarter video.  We just finished the shoot last weekend!  Prior to that, the weather channel had forecasted about 30% chance of rain, which is pretty bad, considering if it rains it would ruin the entire shoot.  Come saturday morning, it was pouring in Redondo.   I was sure we would have to pay for some kind of rescheduling fee since we had booked the cameras, stage lighting, locations, director, camera crew etc.   But it ended up being awesome weather in Santa Ana and no rain at all!   It turned out great.  Just as sweet as killing the Fucking Kilrathi.  I remember that shit.  That was one badass mo fo game.  I thought there was already a MMO based on Wing Commander. I did a search like 6 months ago thinking that would be a great game to make into an MMO like Eve.  Also note, that the was the first space porn game.  Cuz you get these hot wing women chicks and there was a bunch of storylined script, kinda like Rikker was always hitting on D.Troy funbags.

enr0n has told me that Battle of Britain story before, but damn it makes me laugh.

| Brown Star

LOL about Wil. The, "Just one more block" mentality got me into a lot of late nights. Dangerous game that.

Sooo, I ran across this article on Arstechnica about Goatse.cx being converted to a mail service. I swear to all that is good and righteous in the world, this is not a trick link. Yet, I bet you are sitting there, looking at the link for a minute mulling, "I'm not touching that shit. It's just some sick ploy to get me to look. A BS redirect site link or a mirror site." LOL. The article is kind of interesting, but the comments in the comment section are golden and spot on.

D>M>

| Wil Wheaton had a funny post regarding Minecrack

Three days ago:

So I thought I'd try out Minecraft Pocket Edition, just for fun because all the kids are talking about it. Just, you know, a little bit of goofing around to see what the big deal is. I even bought a cool little guide on iBooks, figuring that I'd just skim it, and then play around with it on my iPad for a few minutes on the airplane.

The next thing I know, we're landing and I've built a fucking fortress that sticks out of a mountain. I'm looking at the front of it and trying to figure out where I can go get clay to make bricks because a brick walkway would be really nice. At one point, while digging around, I actually said, out loud, "Hey! Coal!"

Seven hours later:

Annnnnnnd I liked Minecraft Pocket Edition so much, I bought the full version for my Mac. I built my first house on the shore of a lake in a snow biome and faced my bedroom windows to the west because the sunset is pretty beautiful to watch.

I'm fucked.

Five or so hours later:

Yep. Completely addicted to Minecraft. I was up until 1:30 in the morning playing pocket edition on my iPad in bed two nights in a row because I wanted to build a wall around my house (two stories! With a staircase! And beautiful wooden floors!) ... and then I decided that the newly-created "yard" should have some dirt instead of sand in it, and probably a tree would be nice, and then I'll just go into the mine I dug out of the mountain behind my house and look for some iron ore because it sure would be nice to have an iron pickaxe and then OH MY GOD WHY IS IT ONE THIRTY IN THE MORNING.

This morning:

I can see the potential for this to take over someone's life with "one more block" the way Civilization takes over your life with "just one more turn", and that's a thing I'll have to monitor closely and objectively. I also realized that Minecraft satisfies the same part of my brain that painting miniatures did back when I played 40K: I can keep my conscious mind occupied while my subconscious mind works on story ideas, or just needs to recharge. It's fun and soothing to design and build simple things like a house on the Mac or a full-on castle on my iPad, and the exploration aspects of the full desktop version are really, really fun.

I haven't even tried it on a server or with another player, yet... and I think I'll have to stay away from that for the time being, because that could lead to me wearing Kleenex boxes on my feet.

| Hahaha! I totally remember that historic Battle of Britain moment haha

We even had that sexy flight yoke thing. It was like I saw the whole thing happening in slow motion... NOOOOOooooooo HIT THE J KEYYYYYY AAAAAAAARON!!! NOOOOOOO!!!

lol.

Yeah, I lost many a nights' sleep to that game. This one looks so effing amazing. I pledged for an upgraded ship to get the lifetime free insurance on it. Will use it to make money to earn / own other ships. The Kickstarter campaign (combind with the fundraising on their home site) ended at over 6.2 or 6.3 MILLION dollars.. holy shit that's amazing.

That basically unlocked a full orchestral score, playable capital ships! Cruisers and even the Bengal Carrier will be player controllable in-game at launch. 100 star systems at launch and for me, the most important part, 70-80 campaign missions to play offline (and get more cash to bring online towards upgrades, ships, etc).

Had a crisis moment right at the end there, almost switched my pledge from the Firefly-ish Constellation over to the newly unlocked Retaliator Heavy Bomber. Would have meant a loss of the little snub fighter tucked into the Constellation's bay, loss of some maneuverability but a gain of a shitload of missiles / torpedoes and bristling with turrets for defense. But the donation page was going up and down so much on the RSI website that my credit card remained safe, lol. Looks like I'll be sticking with my base pledge. The pre-alpha stuff they're showing off already is CRAZY impressive. It already looks AAA quality to me. I can't imagine it will be much more than 6-9 months until they have the alpha released.

Until then, gonna have to go download a copy of Wing Commander III / IV to scratch that itch I think, lol.

| Flight Sims and rRods

iFart: I still remember the night we got a copy of Wing Commander. It came on some 10 disks I think and was compressed. It took something like 2 hours to decompress on our then high end rig, a 386sx running a chipper 16mhz. I remember waking up a couple of times in the middle of the night to the soft glow of the DOS installer screen washing over your sleepy, hunched silhouette. No surprise Star Citizen has your full upright attention. I always liked the idea of these games, they just never hold up to the expectations. Probably because I suck at flight/space sims. Case in point: eNron flying your super ace in The Battle of Brittan...

fArt: "Crap you got shot to shit, eject."
eNron: "Which key is it again."
fArt: "Which key is what?"
eNron: "Which key to eject?"
fArt: "Dude, it's 'J'"
eNron (staring blankly at the keyboard): "Uhhhh..."
fArt: "Dude, not funny, eject before you crash"
eNron (Panicing): "Where is the 'J' key"
fArt: "Dude, fucking eject, it's not funny"
eNron (more panic): "I can't find the key"
fArt: "What?! Dude hit the goddamn key. It's on the right"
eNron: "Where on the right?"
fArt (Stunned silence)
eNron: "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!"

Plane splashes down. fArt is slack jawed in disbelief...

eNron: "Shit, I couldn't find the key"
fArt: "Asshole! What the fuck was that? You better hope my Ace doesn't die. He has 50 plus confirmed kills. Ugggg, well the chances of dying are pretty slim, you will probably get picked up by a British surface ship."
eNron (more stunned): "Ummm, it says... Your ace died."
fArt: "FUUUUCCCCCK!"

fArt stormed out of the room.

Yeah, that.

But I did really enjoy X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, although I sucked at that too.

RROD? That is no good. If mine were to RROD, I probably would not replace it either. I just don't use it very often at all. I used to use my Xbox for Netflix, but I got a Roku and stopped paying the Xbox live Gold fee. Plus, the Roku streams much smother, cleaner than the Xbox ever did. For gaming purposes, I tend to almost exclusively use my PC, sprinkled with the occasional Xbox game.

My PC is getting pretty damn old. The rig is about 4.5 years old and holding up, but it certainly could use an upgrade. Yet, I continue to drag my feet on the expenses. I know it will need almost all new components, aside from the drives, the case and the PSU. Uggg, so much to do, so little money to do it with. My Vid card is particularly long in the tooth (Radeon 4850). 54 months is ancient by those standards. At least I solved the overheating issues (dust), the card would cut out when it hit 120 degrees... Celsius. Toasty. I can not believe any part in my computer would even operate at 250 degrees Fahrenheit before conking out.

Rude: I like that ja -El "Tells a really good joke." Too bad about eLzar dying.

Made some brosmary bread this past weekend. Damn that was good. I used 1-1/2 Tbs of fresh chopped rosemary. It was awesome with Olive Oil and Balsamic. Damn!

D>M>

| Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie

First of all, wow on that Kickstarter! I would never have imagined that game doing so well, but there really must be a market for it! Are they gonna have space-furries like the Kilrathi again?

Secondly, holy shit I laughed my ass off at Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie. It's showing on Showtime right now. I always resisted checking out the Tim and Eric show on Adult Swim because it just looked like weird anti-humor I wouldn't like, but now that I've seen it, it's BRILLIANT. The funniest 11 minute show you'll ever see. The movie was really good, but fair warning, it's pretty extreme in parts. Nothing the Action Team can't handle, but talk about NSFW/NSFAnywhere. But if you have an open mind, I think you guys might like it. It got a half-star review from Ebert which is pretty hilarious. He sounded so letdown.

| Wow, the Kickstarter on Star Citizen is going nuts

They're about to pass up $5.5MM (I didn't think they'd likely get above 4.5!) and the devs are unlocking all kinds of shit. Playable capital ships! That makes me wanna throw in for a heavy bomber. Man this looks seriously awesome. I haven't been this excited about a game in so long. 10 hours to go on the fundraising effort. It looks like they might just hit the $6MM tier. Already broke the all-time Kickstarter record yesterday or the day before. Amazing.

Weird!

I'd upgrade your computer! You can always use more horsepower to throw at WoW and fancy Minecraft textures, right?

| RROD

No. Freaking. Way.

Mine RROD'd yesterday, too!  Seriously!

Seeing as a refurbished model is like $129, I figured I'd just crack that bad boy open and try to fix it myself. I did the do-it-yourself penny heat sink trick, the replace the 'x brackets' with bolts trick, and the re-seal the thermal paste trick - all to no avail.  I took it apart and put it back together like 3 times just to make sure, and it is toast.

I use my xbox for about nothing these days, with the exception of Skate 3 (which I really like!), so I am even less motivated to fix it.  However, I also need to upgrade my regular PC since I'm still running XP and my hardware is like 4 years old.  But when I compare the cost of the PC upgrade, vs. the need, as well as the cost of the xbox vs. the need, it still seems likely that I will get the xbox because it's cheaper out of pocket.  Isn't that sad?

For being someone that has chosen technology as his career, I certainly have the shittiest tech in my house (I upgraded my CRT monitor LAST YEAR).

I slept until 9:40 AM today. Holy shit that was awesome. I haven't slept past 6:30 in many moons.

In other news, my 360 RROD'd. "Mother-cracker!" I loudly exclaimed. It'll be $100 to fix it. I'm weighing letting it stay broken. It's really of value for two things: a) HBO Go b) my tremendous repository of Rock Band DLC. We'd kinda tapered off on a), and I don't get the chance to break out b) often, but I dunno... I don't like the idea of just leaving some broken piece of shit in my otherwise dynamite command center.

Rude, do you use PS+ at all? It seems like a pretty good deal for $40/year since you get a bunch of pretty decent "free" games. They are also expanding it to Vita, and since I'm one of the fools that owns one, it'd be useful for me there as well.

Picked up a 2-player card game today called Mr. Jack - Pocket that's pretty fun and was pretty cheap ($15 or so). Mr. Jack had been on my watch list before, and then it got a recommendation through an unexpected vector. The premise of the game is that one person is Holmes, Watson, and their creepy-looking dog, the other person is Jack the Ripper, or "Mr. Jack Pocket" as the wife dubbed him. The investigators try to get line of sight to Jack while Jack tries to evade them. It's fun and really quick, so if you like the theme at all it's worth checking out. I might pick up the full version someday, supposed to be quite good.

In other news I am looking forward to Thanksgiving, Xmas break, Man-Con, Kubla Con etc.

Yeah, it's a good app! I think they patched in the ability to switch between the USA/EU versions within the same app as well, so it should be a pretty smooth experience. I'm always down for a game.

Bargain alert! Ticket to Ride Europe for iOS is free today.

| everyone EXCEPT eric!

Organ Trail, the zombie version of Oregon Trail, was on sale around Halloween and is a great time waster. I wish I would have screen capped when Eric got killed but I think he got pulled from the vehicle and turned into a zombie. I had to put him down.

| I am completely high on the koolaid

And went ahead and pledged for an RSI Constellation. WOOOOO! :) It was a hard choice but I figure for the price of a cup of coffee or two a month I get to support a game I REALLY want to be made, and once it's out, I get a really sweet ride. The bonus is, any pledge ships have free "insurance" on them, so if they get blown up for any reason, they are replaced in perpetuity. I think the 'Stella will be a great rig to make money with so I can afford to buy smaller ships. It's being billed as in the same vein/class as the Millenium Falcon, so a high end cargo ship with some wiggle. Plus, it has so many configurable bays that you can really kit it out to do anything... exploration / mining, some trade runs/smuggling, and it wouldn't be hard to set it up as a gunship.

Constellation

Builder: Roberts Space Industries Crew (max): 4 Mass (empty): 75,000 kg Focus: Long-Range Mercantile / Space Superiority

When you think handsome bounty hunter making his own way in a galaxy of enemies, you think the Constellation. The Constellation, a multi-person freighter, is the most popular ship in RSI’s current production array. Constellations are beloved by smugglers and merchants alike because they are modular, high powered… and just downright iconic-looking. The Constellation includes a manned turret, a large cargo area and a small flight deck capable of launching a snub fighter in its own defense.

Upgrade Capacity: 14 Cargo Capacity: 35 tonnes

Engine- Modifiers: 4 Max. Class: Anti-Matter Thruster Class: 4 x TR6, 8 x TR3

Hardpoints- 2 x Class 1: Equipped 2 x Behring M3A Laser Cannon 4 x Class 2: Equipped 2 x A&R Pike IV Neutron Gun 6 x Class 3: Equipped 2 x Behring Judge missiles (Friend or Foe) 2 x Class 4: Equipped 1x Behring M5A Laser Cannon (turret)

Tender - Short Range P52 Space Fighter

Similar to… Paradigm, Salvia, Armored Transport, Millennium Falcon

Only 9-12 months until alpha! lol

I haven't been this excited about a game for probably a decade.