| Bread

Yeah, pretty much old school. Just putting it on a baking sheet and shoving that shit in the oven for 20-25 minutes. Comes out nice and crisp on the crust but not hard as rocks like some of the stuff from the store. Also, it's hard to explain what the texture is like on the fresh baked bread but it's awesome. Warm and moist. It's almost like cake in that regard but savory instead of sweet.

Gaming sounds like good fun. I've jumped into the Minecraft server some and have begun construction on my first stupidly big project. After which, Elrock Von Hobbington is going to teach me something about Ender Pearls or Anal Beads, or something along those lines, I'm not 100% sure.

Yeah, I had no good follow up and didn't want to be the first shmuck after so much epicness. I totally remember that arcade! I loved to play Offroad there (that was the 4 player game with steering wheels and monster trucks, right?) - It was on the left side of the arcade when you entered. And that dumb holographic time traveling game was on the right side - right when you entered. They also had Star Wars (the wire frame one) and I think Tron. The good olde days!

That same theater, I remember sneaking in a large soda from Carls Jr I think and how much I was FREAKING OUT! I wore some stupid over sized letter-mans jacket and I had the drink under one of the sleeves. I'm sure I was sweating bullets.

Awesome post man, I am pretty sure the radio silence is because there is no worthy follow-up. I rarely have dreams at all (that I remember) so to have such an all-inclusive one is pretty bitchin'. Also, big props for the Dreammaster II reference (or whatever it was we called it).

And I'm stoked you will be able to make it! This should be fun. I have no idea when the last time we played an RPG together was. Did we ever???

I will be there for the game. It will be 11:00 am here (3 hours difference). I'll bring by D2s. I'm looking forward to it!

On another note, I had an AT dream. Was it a dream? Or a butt-ream?

We were in a glass room that was at the Long Beach Harbor around the time we were all in high school, during the middle of the day. The glass room had about 15 video games in it that were all FREE! We were all merrily playing games in the room, which pretty much consisted of all the games that were in the arcade that used to be under the AMC theaters in Hermosa (Street Fighter II, the weird hologram game, the Simpsons game, that sort of thing)

At one point, Elroq turned to me and said, "All of these games are a recruiting tool for the Mormon Church, you know. In about 20 minutes, they are going to come and take us to a service and try to indoctrinate us."

"Can't we just leave now?" I asked.

"No. It's too late," R00d said.

"Man, I don't want to be Mormon," I sighed.

"None of us do," said Enr0n. With that, a group of guys in religious cassocks and other vestments came and ushered us all to a Mormon Church (Temple?).

Keep in mind, I have no idea what the inside of an LDS Temple looks like, but in my mind, there were pews, so we all had to sit in pews.  Jr0n had this advice for me, "Just hang out and play along. If they knew we were just doing this so we could play video games for free, they would be really pissed!" 

What's so weird is that we were ALL THERE. fArt, Jael, Mmmmike, Denish, and the others I said before! Pretty soon the place started getting PACKED! And with every new group that was coming in, we kept getting pushed further and further to the front of the church. Pretty soon, I was like, "Shit. I don't want to be at the front, because the priest or whatever is going to see me and expect me to be at the service every fucking time!"

Then R00d said, "Let's get the fuck out of here!" So we all scattered. I went to the balcony where I hid under some pews that some Indian (not Native American) family was sitting. They weren't prisoners though. They wanted to be there! That is where I was cowering when I woke up to my alarm.

This dream wasn't scary at all. I wasn't rattled at all when I woke up. I felt more like I was on an adventure, like the adventure that will happen online on Sept. 15!

What the fuck does this dream mean???

Count me in, I'll bring my d1. Jael and Aarte better make appearances! As well as JP and Mister Fish!

Art: Are you making bread via bread machine or just in the oven, olde fashion stylee? I was on a bread machine kick a few years ago and it was fun. Bread is the best food ever.

That sounds cool too me jr0n. Plus it is another excuse for me to play around with my D3, D5, D7, D14, D16, D24 & D30. I think I will try to pick up a web cam proper instead of using The missuz's computer.

eLzar, that would make you the best Dad. And the blurst. Send him to school with that shirt on. That would be hilarious. On second thought, he might end up like Chris Cather...

D>M>

| The Official Getting Back Together of the Band, Including Bands I Was Never In and Ones Which Technically Never Existed Until Now

We are playing Dungeon Crawl Classics, via Google Hangout, on Saturday, September 15th, at 2 PM PST. All Action Team members are required to attend. Individuals with children, with night-shift jobs, and/or living in different time zones not exempted.

Preparation: None required. We will roll up 2-3 0-level characters each and it will take 5 minutes.
Required materials: Headphones, because bouncing audio into your mic is obnoxious. A mic. A webcam. Internet access. A mouse. Some pencil and paper. As many types of polyhedral dice as you have, if you have any.
(heart) to fart: optional, but recommended

GM: jr0n
Backup GM: Aeryk
Understudy to the backup GM: Ja-el

He'll have to settle for writing FART on the wall when you visit friends.

| Worse Dad

If I was a worse dad than I already am, I would TOTALLY buy this shirt for Wylie.  He really does love to fart, and he does it a fair amount.

I saw this shirt. I thought it was funny. It is a funny shirt (to me). Shirt.

| Also

Been experimenting with baking bread this week. Crazy easy to do and a hell of a lot cheaper than buying at the store. I'm hooked and sold and all that jazz. Yay bread!

Oh. My. God.

The Elzar masks are holy-shit amazing. INVOLUNTARY GUFFAWS GALORE.

Brilliant, whoever came up with that. MAN I wanna go to one of these something fierce. Now that the wifey has a full time gig and things are picking up with my business, it looks like we may have a little extra spending money for trips and other frivolity. Yay!

All right, I had to jump in to the Reaper kickstarter. It's fricking insane, you get like 200 miniatures the last time I checked.

I brought an "Elzar disguise kit" (a wig and stage beard hair/glue, in addition to the plaid flannel and Splunk T-shirt I'm wearing in several pictures) but the masks were so damn funny that I never used them. Some other day...

I like how enr0n signs on with my security premise but then keeps using the non-encrypted version of my name, lol. Because the encrypted version is totally uncrackable!

That has to be the funniest Gif i've seen in a while...  Watched it at least 4-5 times evertime i come to the AT site.  The great thing was Jr0qn0la seemed pretty Happy and unsuspecting and Zing!  he gets turned into an Elz00par clone!   I was turned into Newt, but i got bettah'

Talk about evil.

Man, i gotta learn how to do these masks.  Ruzzidahr, think you could do something like that for the Kickstarter vid I was asking you to make?  The prototypes will be ready in about 2 weeks, so anyway...  I thought this would be great.

Edit:  All names in the future will be encrypted in 32bit WPA

r00d, for sure Facebook is a big problem that way, which is why I stopped using it about two years ago. I just don't like the lack of transparency in what is private and what is public. You never really know what is viewable to others or the Internet and the damn privacy settings change all the time without notice. At least with [AT] and Google+, it is pretty straight forward. Although, you can not really control when people tag you :(

I am glad people seem to like the images and the story line. The mask idea was jr0n's brainchild. I ran with it and pulled some photos from the wedding, past Kublas and ManCons. The script was a last minute whim. As I walked through the photos on the site, the story just seemed to write itself. I will try and do this on future ones.

Pictures of older [AT] members/pre-members gets to be dicey at a certain point. eLzar, you and I may need to rip through the old 35mm negative archives for viable images. What was surprising, although it shouldn't be, is that I don't commonly have pictures close enough that a blow-up looks okay. Even less common are compositions oriented as a frontal portrait and not a profile. Even with all the hundreds of photos of eLzar in my archives, not many were up to snuff. In fact two were pulled from the wedding images. That all being said, I am totally game for some more photo shenanigans. It was really fun shooting these and putting together stories.

I tell you, watching each other walk around with those masks was pretty damn creepy. And yes the images are totally sized right for "I'm having a big head day. Big Head, Big Head, Big Fat Head" eLzar. Just sayin'... Olive Head!

D>M>

| Pure Brilliance

Dude, you guys are super-duper awesome, that was hilarious (and touching, in a totally no-homo sort of way).  And it MAY have just bought me a ticket to GenCon next year according to the Mrs., we shall see!

A few points:

 - I TOTALLY don't recognize some of those faces I made.

 - I am a little uncomfortable there are giant pictures of my giant head/face floating out there. They were so big!  "But they were life-sized!"  Ha, ha Enron - prick.

 - If only we had hi-res photos of all the Pre-Action Teamers to take with us.  Maybe a choice photo of Jopa when he used to work the chicken fryer?

 - Kudos to our old man eyes for spotting that 'guy' in the background and having the visual fortitude to recognize that blob looked like me!

Really, really funny stuff.  And I was SOOOO confused by the GIF before I had seen the big smugmug reveal!  Weird-ass morning!

| Masks

Haha, great pictures!

When/if we go again we'll take the mask thing to the limit. Ideas:

* Masks of every current and former Action Teamer. Rude, JP, Myke's friends Kevin and Phillip, etc.
* Masks depicting us wearing masks. Ie Pump wearing a mask of enr0n wearing a mask of me wearing a mask of Pump
* And who says masks have to be of faces? "Hey that left pectoral appears to belong to ja-el, crazy!"

And those are just three "brilliant" ideas I came up with real quick.

Maybe you took one of those photos?

I'm cool with no real names on the blog, but you guys all got facebooks still and I think that's even more intrusive and scandalous with your full names out there. We can put all the security settings on max but then I'm sure we all got some friend or family member whos on our list with a wide open facebook that's compromising our shit. BE VIGILANT!

-Judge Dredd

PS - Can't wait to see the con pics - loving that gif

PPS: Ok, the running story you've got with the captions is amazing - that has to happen in every photo set from here on out

Also, this is rad, although a bit of an error...

This is the item that comes up when you search my name using google image search Look at the photo caption. I guess if I am going to get credit for something I didn't do, this would be a pretty awesome one to have.

D>M>

Okay, the images are up. And damn, I knew there was the one creepy image of the doppelganger eLzar, but it looks like that guy made it into few other random shots. Ack!

Anyway, go ahead and check the posted GenCon images. The usual password.

ja-El, I agree with jr0n, we should avoid all first or last name references here. As it is, any mobile phone images we post are probably an issue we should be aware of. The EXIF and Geotagging info persistence is a problem.

D>M>

| Naw

This lady was a bit more tan.

And please, it's jr0n on the blog!

Jon's talking about this 'ere gamescience laday

| Seems elementary...

...that Space Hulk and Blood Bowl (more like Fumbbl, less like Cyanide) should follow.  It's an outstanding platform for those games where you have a solid game and then want to gussy it up with sounds and effects, giving it the spiky-bit GW treatment.  Even those old PlayStation Warhammer Fantasy Battle games seems like a port wouldn't be too much of an issue.  Warmaster, anyone?  Dark Future?  Adeptus Titanicus?

Some company is making Warhammer Quest for iOS! Hope it's cool. And better than Blood Bowl! (which was alright but could have been SO much better)

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/8/21/3257412/warhammer-quest-coming-to-ios-next-year

I will go to any Mancon, any Manplace, and any Mantime!

Yes sir, Happy B-Day. One more notch on the post of life.

What to pick-up. DCC. That game is pretty damn fun. Iron Kingdoms and The One Ring RPGs were both fun, although I would love to play with a more [AT] style GM to really see how these systems work for us. Certainly DCC is the most G+ friendly.

We didn't try out Netrunner. I liked the theme of the old school version, I still have my cards, but was never drawn in. Something about the mechanics never worked for me. Maybe FF has this one dialed in a little better.

Not that this is super new, but the two player Agricola is apparently great for the mono y mono action. I will probably pick it up for game with the missuz.

I will try and post-process the pictures tonight and Tuesday. I will post a link once they are up.

Based on Blackheart, Pump and jr0n, it sounds like another ManCon won't be in the cards until early 2013. Maybe late winter con?

D>M>

Well, that was fun! Too bad the rest of you didn't go. HA! :)

I didn't make too many purchases this year, just a bunch of little stuff:

- Two new SW factions and their reinforcement pack (Mercs and the Filth)

- Funky dice for DCC - d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, d24, d30. You don't really NEED all those but it's kinda fun to buy dice once in a while. Ja-el would have liked the gamescience booth because one of their employees was a nice-looking lady with a huge rack who was inking dice the whole con.

- Couple new Savage Worlds books (the new cheap version of the updated core, and the new "Post-apocalyptic Deadlands" Hell on Earth)

- New warjack

DCC was fun to run. The adventure was a hilarious clusterfuck with the adventurers getting terrified by a flame-shooting statue in the central chamber, and scattering off in all directions to face the myriad threats of the dungeon in small groups. Seven PCs and a beloved sheep died, generally in horrible ways. There were a couple moments of impressive heroism (mainly Enron's characters fighting and defeating a pretty tough snake-demon and only suffering one casualty, I was sure they were all going to bite it). Aeryk, even if we never play it (but I hope it will!) it is totally fun to look through, so I say go for it. Really hope we can swing a G+ session for it soon because it's just perfect for it. Fairly lite rules, and not much need for a battle map. I bought another zero-level adventure, so we're ready to roll anytime...

(Also the guys at Purple Sorceror games have a cool set of online DCC tools. They're working on iOS versions as well.)

Enr0n and I played a couple of tabletop events and they were a good time -- it was nice to go to the mecca of RPGing and actually, y'know, do some.

Iron Kingdoms RPG (which Pump also played) -- this was only 2 hours, so more of a demo than anything, but seemed solid. Everything is closely tied to the wargame rules (but different where it needs to be), so it's pretty easy to pick up and resolves very quickly. From other previews I know it has pretty cool rules for things like building your own steampunk magic/mechanical devices, and the magic system was fun in play, so it was promising. Because of its combat system it seems like more of a tabletop game than something that would be good on G+ though. Now selling for a mere $300 on eBay!

The One Ring -- this is a really neat Middle Earth game that really embraces what people do in the books in terms of having pretty interesting rules for travelling, bolstering your side's morale through speech and song, etc. Kinda sounds dumb but cool in play. Also had a fun dice mechanic with a d12 where good things happen on a 12 (a Gandalf!) and bad things happen on an 11 (a Sauron!). Neat endurance rules where the amount of encumbrance you have is a factor in your fatigue/HP. Absolutely terrible GM, but the system was fun and the players were a decent bunch so we had a good time.

Got in a lot of other random games, all fun. (Magic, Infiltration, Dungeon Lords, drunken Space Alert, Summoner Wars, Quarriors). Our Magic tourney was inconclusive so we will have to resume it at a later time.

Not as fun: Peter being sick all Thursday and most of Friday, me way overdoing it on food and beer on Friday night and having horrible upset stomach/poopz until 4:30 AM, the guy at the PP seminar who asked a lengthy set of questions about how ridiculous it was that there was both a spell AND a weapon named lightning strike, and how it had confused his friends one time, and how could they let that happen?

Ratio of good stuff to bad stuff: approximately 15:1. Great time! Missed you guys that didn't go! Can't wait for the pics!

(PS Blackheart asked a couple times when the next ManCon is, so I'd say someone needs to get on planning one.)

| Thanks!

For the mortality reminders, er, birthday wishes!  We have officially passed into the 'life is a ticking timebomb' phase where any one of us could drop dead and people will say 'awww, he was so young'.  Good times.

GENCON:  Thanks for the updates!  Always nice to vicariously live through others at the grandaddy of all nerd events!

I have about 70 spacebucks in credit to coolstuffinc from my last magic card sale just burning a hole in my pocket - any must-haves from the con I should consider?  I already have the DCC rulebook in my cart, anything else a hit of the con?