Work's just been insane and I haven't felt like getting into it much lately, but I'll try and jump back in soon. That was fun.

Amazon's running a board game sale, there's some good stuff in there: thanks Jeff Bezos

| Heisty Heistersons

U Y NO HEISTING?

I ran a heist with guys WAY out of my league last night and hauled in 2M in one run. lol.. completely ridiculous. On the plus side of the ledger, I unlocked the 300% damage upgrade on the sentry guns. They're like meatgrinders now on almost anything that comes at them (bro). Weeeee

Going to do a quick errand here in a bit then will be home. Let's knock some foos off!

When my internet gets slow, I usually bust out my tac-knife and cut some wires in the infocable- that usually frees up any gigaclogs or megalumps that have formed.

Looks like the Advanced Edition of FTL is out. Supposed to be a free update but I can't figure out if my steam ver updated on it's own.

Me and Silvia are going to this taping of an Orphan Black special monday. It's hosted by Wil Wheaton and will have the cast and other celebrities and fans, etc. Should be fun. I assume it will be like The Talking Dead, but hopefully better. Maybe they'll give us free shit like a car or cassette tape.

A little friday treat to slow your intewebs browsing even more.

Your kids will thank you by learning from their mistakes

Is it just me, or is surfing the internet getting jankier and slower, especially on mobile platforms? Discuss.

I've always been looking for an excuse to call you "Knivez".

| Coup Twoup

For you guys who were interested in picking up that game Coup, looks like they've got a new Kickstarter up for an expansion. One of the options is to get the original game as well. I think it was hard to get for awhile, so this is probably a good way to grab yourself a copy if you're interested:
kicksharter
Not going to grab the expansion myself, because the once-a-year ManCon is the only time I ever get to play, but maybe you NorCal dudes with your abundance of gaming groups will want to get it.

| gimmie the loot

THWACK
Payday 2 is like Arrow minus being good, oh sick burn. Just kidding, I like BOTH things, because I am highfalutin. I can't get on board with your hate, Elrick. It's just not that bad.

BRAAAINS
ABC has their own "The Returned" kind of show called Resurrection, and it's SO weird to watch. It was supposedly developed with no relation to the The Returned, but it's so hard to not be like "whatup with this fake shit?". There's big similarities to how the dead who've come back act on both shows, but the American show feels less mysterious and cerebral. More like "regular tv show, also these people have come back from the dead." Still gonna watch it for a little while longer, because I GOTTA know what the fuck is up with these people, but there's almost none of the tension / creep-factor that the French show has.

CUTTER
I got us crazy murder knives from Amazon. After the bunch of earthquakes we've had recently, my wife asked me to put together some emergency kits for the house. So I ordered all this bullshit from Amazon that they suggest for your emergency kits like zip ties, rope, water tablets, weird food rations, bandages, etc. Then when you order shit like that on Amazon, they suggest "people who bought that, also bought this" which led me down the road to scary knives. So I got her a pink one and me a black one. I was such a pussy trying to even OPEN the thing this morning. I dunno guys, I guess I'm not a big "weapons" kinda dude. Eventually I was able to flip open the knife like a true greaser (after watching a YouTube video on how to CLOSE IT - no shit, I couldn't figure it out). If the shit goes down Walking Dead/The Road style, I'm prepared to zip tie prisoners and torture them for their canned goods and/or bottle caps (or whatever  a post 5.0-earthquake Los Angeles uses for currency).

| lol Payday 2 dreams

Man. I too have succumb to the dreams as of last night, lol.

In other news, started my new jorb today. Was pretty stoked about the bennies. They're stupid awesome! $50 to cover the entire family, for everything, including 150k in extra life insurance. That's a win. Only bummer is, I found out that from this point forward through my training I'll be required to show up at 7am (but I'm out at 3pm, so that's kinda rad). The people at the lab who want my blood every morning are gonna have to suck it. They'll get their blood at 330pm and like it.

In other Payday 2 news, I unlocked my dual sentry guns. TWICE THE MAYHEM. Pretty awesome, actually. Can lay one down during the heist to cover and throw one down to cover the escape! Huzzah!

| Pointz, Ccounterpointz

I too, remember playing Dark Castle at the Toth's house, right around the time Eric turned all of the stuff in his room to be like Pee Wee's Playhouse (basically paper cut out eyes and mouths taped to everything).  I also played a grip at JPs house.  We SUCKED at that game and I wonder if it's because a) it was hard, and b) it made you use and master the left hand keyboard, right hand mouse control scheme which was way ahead of it's time.  Dunno, I really, really liked it too and have downloaded countless mac emulators and ROMs over the years to play, but never really got into it again.  The remake looks promising!

I hated Arrow.  Like, wanted to turn it off Men in Tights stylee, kind of hate.  It was tooooo beef/cheesecake-y, and toooo influenced by the whole OC/CW/Barbi and Ken lookin' style, any redeeming qualities were lost for me.  So far, Rude has hit them out of the park in his recent recommendations (Orphan Black, the Returned), but this one was TERRIBLE.

Like, worse than season one of Buffy, terrible (which I actually re-watched and didn't think it was as bad as I remember).  Which means I'm usually okay with giving a shitty show a second chance, but I don't know about Arrow... it was just so bad.

PAYDAY UPDATE:  Well, I've officially started having PayDay dreams.  No, they are not as fun as playing the game, they are sort of like the Doom 2 dreams I had after putting in a solid weekend of that game at ORug's place in LV.  I had to get up and walk around at 2:45am this morning to sort of reset my brain because no matter how much rolling, or pillow flipping I did, when I closed my eyes I only saw the bank heist over, and over, and over...

PAYDAY UPDATE II:  It's totally fun!

| Arrowz

Arrow can be totally cheesy, especially in it's earlier episodes, but it gets progressively better with time as it moves away from the typical CW-format. Also, he totally murders dudes! That's rad. Season 2, which is coming up on it's last few episodes has been really good. They setup a "The Flash" spinoff which will come out next year I think, and that should rock as well.

The weird city background they use is a composite of like Toronto, Tokyo, New York, and something else. Yeah, it looks INSANE. Like a BILLION skyscrapers and freeways all MC Escher'n it all over the place.

Have you guys tried watching Spartacus yet? That's still such an amazingly underrated action show. Starts off REALLY rough because they were going for this 300/Sin City graphic-novel style that was already super dated, but they move away from that after like the 3rd episode. SO GODDAMN GOOD. Ultra-titties and violence, but once you get past that/used to it, it's a blast of a show. It's from some of the Buffy/Angel writers, so there's this stealth-quality that starts to shine through.

Have you guys seen any of the new Comedy Central shows? They're all really hilarious. Kroll Show, Broad City, and Review. Oh my god, so so funny.

DARK CASTLE - I used to LOVE that game. And yeah, I remember it being fucking impossible as a kid. There were so many great/weird Mac games back in the day.

| Nostalgia-Based Commerce

Made two recent purchases that, while satisfying, can only be described as nostalgia-driven:

1. Return to Dark Castle

Motherfuckers!

Started reminiscing on how awesome this game was when I spent hours playing it on E. Toth's Mac in 5th grade. It was hard as fuck and I don't think we ever got anywhere! Then I saw this updated version which kinda rolls together parts 1, 2 and has some new shit for $10. It's fun so far, and still incredibly difficult, although I wish there was an option to play it in grayscale. In 1986.

2. Night's Dark Terror

Flee on your steed, Tandy Compusa!

This is kinda the one that got away, and I can only blame myself, for a) trying to run it at a convention b) trying to convince people that they like Basic D&D. But I can ALSO blame all of you guys, for being assholes*. :) This was the one with the HP Hatecraft/Tandy Compusa/etc. characters. Fight on a riverboat followed by a big siege. Went down in flames. Then I somewhat sneakily tried to run it again like five years later, only to have someone say, "Hey! We've already played this!" At which point everyone refused to play any more. Crash and burn #2.

But the thing is this module is like renowned as the high-water mark for D&D modules! Although I wouldn't say it's as good as Enemy Within, it's kind of in the same category of being an epic, map-spanning, somewhat sandboxy campaign.

Anyway I'll be running this at KublaCon 2016 so forget I ever mentioned anything.

The sad part about me buying the PDF of this is that I think I already own two hard copies.

* I have never been an asshole during someone else's game, so I totally have a leg to stand on here.

Probably of interest to Rude only: we've started watching Arrow in our (copious) free time. I really enjoy it, not despite but because of how ridiculous it often is. For example, whenever they pan over the city, that's a model, right? There's this particular establishing shot they use once per episode or so that just cracks me up because SOMETHING about it looks totally wrong but I can't figure out why. (Well part of it is nothing ever seems to be moving in the shots.)

I also like (genuinely) how the scenes are sometimes soap opera level but sometimes more like the filler "plot" scenes in a porno. The actress who plays the lawyer love interest in particular has this kind of porny look to her and her subplots are always really cheesy.

It's got pretty good action scenes and lots of beefcake for the ladies.

I think what I'm saying is that it's actually a really good recreation of a comic book!