Saturday, June 28, 2014

| The Stuff of Nightmares

WWI. Gasmasks. Lances and pikes.

 - Also, Space Hulk is $6.50 on the Steam summer sale.  I got it and it's pretty good for scratching that itch.  I also picked up Dishonored for $10, and FarCry 3: Blood Dragon for like $4.00, which seemed fun until you needed to also download and instal Uplay, so eff that game.

Oh yeah, burned more of my Kubla earnings/funny PayPal money on Wolfenstein for $29.99....
I read through about 75% of that massive soccer post thinking "Elrick's really playing this satire angle pretty hard" before I scrolled down and saw Ann Coulter, lol. Yikes.

****

We saw 22 Jump Street Friday morning - it was SO funny! Better than the first movie, which was also really good.

****

I think gas masks make anything look scary, but cavalry with lances and gas mask might be the worst.

Friday, June 27, 2014

| It's true - liberals get super angry when you reject the metric system

Other ways to get their goat;

- Turtleneck-wearing libs have been pushing the hexadecimal system since the invention of the "computard". They stiffen up and cry like gay babies when you tell them that ten, not sixteen, is the number of fingers on two hands. The only person who'd want 16 fingers is some kind of faggy retard who wants to play two pianos at once.

- Homo-loving liberals literally froth with rage when you put things in a truck and drive those things around. Lily-livered Dems won't stop whining that all freight should be ported in Priuses after being deatomized by unionized, faggot nanobots.

- Plugging implements into a power outlet will really enrage whatever ObamGAY minion you are unfortunate to be around. They probably want, I don't know. Some kind of gay, magnet, solar, liberal, magnet, gay, immigrant, executive overreach, gay, retarded, gay.

| Ann "Suck my Tea Bag" Coulter

I saw that yesterday. She is such a numbskull, birther nut job. Every time she opens her mouth, shit falls out. 'Nuff said.

D>M>

| Some Exquisite Thoughts

I've held off on writing about soccer for a decade — or about the length of the average soccer game — so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay.

• Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls — all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they're standing alone at the plate. But there's also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks.
In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised. There's a reason perpetually alarmed women are called "soccer moms," not "football moms."
Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That's when we're supposed to go wild. I'm already asleep.

• Liberal moms like soccer because it's a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level.

• No other "sport" ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer. This was an actual marquee sign by the freeway in Long Beach, California, about a World Cup game last week: "2nd period, 11 minutes left, score: 0:0." Two hours later, another World Cup game was on the same screen: "1st period, 8 minutes left, score: 0:0." If Michael Jackson had treated his chronic insomnia with a tape of Argentina vs. Brazil instead of Propofol, he'd still be alive, although bored.
Even in football, by which I mean football, there are very few scoreless ties — and it's a lot harder to score when a half-dozen 300-pound bruisers are trying to crush you.

• The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport. Most sports are sublimated warfare. As Lady Thatcher reportedly said after Germany had beaten England in some major soccer game: Don't worry. After all, twice in this century we beat them at their national game.
Baseball and basketball present a constant threat of personal disgrace. In hockey, there are three or four fights a game — and it's not a stroll on beach to be on ice with a puck flying around at 100 miles per hour. After a football game, ambulances carry off the wounded. After a soccer game, every player gets a ribbon and a juice box.

• You can't use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here's a great idea: Let's create a game where you're not allowed to use them!

• I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's "Girls," light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is "catching on" is exceeded only by the ones pretending women's basketball is fascinating.
I note that we don't have to be endlessly told how exciting football is.

• It's foreign. In fact, that's the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not "catching on" at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.

• Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren't committing mass murder by guillotine.
Despite being subjected to Chinese-style brainwashing in the public schools to use centimeters and Celsius, ask any American for the temperature, and he'll say something like "70 degrees." Ask how far Boston is from New York City, he'll say it's about 200 miles.
Liberals get angry and tell us that the metric system is more "rational" than the measurements everyone understands. This is ridiculous. An inch is the width of a man's thumb, a foot the length of his foot, a yard the length of his belt. That's easy to visualize. How do you visualize 147.2 centimeters?

• Soccer is not "catching on." Headlines this week proclaimed "Record U.S. ratings for World Cup," and we had to hear — again about the "growing popularity of soccer in the United States."
The USA-Portugal game was the blockbuster match, garnering 18.2 million viewers on ESPN. This beat the second-most watched soccer game ever: The 1999 Women's World Cup final (USA vs. China) on ABC. (In soccer, the women's games are as thrilling as the men's.)
Run-of-the-mill, regular-season Sunday Night Football games average more than 20 million viewers; NFL playoff games get 30 to 40 million viewers; and this year's Super Bowl had 111.5 million viewers.
Remember when the media tried to foist British soccer star David Beckham and his permanently camera-ready wife on us a few years ago? Their arrival in America was heralded with 24-7 news coverage. That lasted about two days. Ratings tanked. No one cared.
If more "Americans" are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.

Ann Coulter is a syndicated columnist. Contact her through her website at www.anncoulter.com.

| Cayucos, Bites

eLzar: Yes, Suarez is a nightmare and should be banned from play for life. The man is obviously very disturbed. He just is an awful person on the field, I don't care what people say about him being a family man and great as a friend. While we are on the topic, it still bums me out that FIFA is still not clamping down on diving. It is just so rampant and I see it as cheating. It reminds me of the bad old days of 90s hockey when all the european players came over to the NHL with their bad diving habits. F that, get some stones and play like you gotta pair. I guess FIFA is just too broken to fix the problem, among other issues... *cough* corruption *cough*

On a less douchey note, I would love to add another Cayucos event a year. Not sure if anyone else can get on board, but I'd be game.

r00d, I think eLzar is on to something: once they started using chlorine gas, they figured the metal helmets would oxidize too fast, better stick with cloth. TOTALLY safer that way.

Caverna and the Doom Town remix sounds like a lot of fun. Looking forward to getting to play those some day.

D>M>

Thursday, June 26, 2014

| Oh, right, Caverna!

It's good! It's pricey, but it's a LOT of game, and it includes the fancy tokens that I ended up paying extra for Agricola: comes with sheeples, grainples, woodpileples, etc. instead of cubes and discs.

The game does a good job of having similar enough rules to Agricola that you can pick it up pretty easily, while also feeling totally different in the types of actions available and play that it feel fresh. The theme is fun too. Being Dwarves, digging out your mountain, and getting weapons and going on unspecified "expeditions" from which you return with things like dogs, new sheep, and furniture for your cave is fun and a different feel.

(Yes, I bought a new board game in 2014 despite my resolution. I figured clearing out all that closet space via auction deserved an exception or two. :) )

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

| Tits & Robots

I'm pretty happy with Relic Knights! The plastic is the same that Privateer uses. I'd say it's a grade above Mantic, but definitely nowhere near the hard plastic used in the GW kits. (Or the new Malifaux kits, or the frankly insane-looking KD:M kits.) It's pretty soft. The quality is pretty good except when you get into really fine, intricate detailing or very small parts. Then you miss metal or better quality plastic. I think this is mainly true with the Relic Knights themselves (the giant-robot-riding chicks and dudes). Wish they'd stuck with the resin/metal for those ones.

I'm getting in a game against enr0n on Friday. Fly up! Cayucos II 2014! We are playing in his office building after work so please wear a suit and tie. If housekeeping comes by you may have to wake up and pretend you're working.

Pretty pumped for Doomtown. I'm looking forward to reliving the glory days of '98 when we were all playing it, less so to reliving the inevitable decline of '00-'01 when nobody was around who'd play and in desperation I played it at the home of a Baptist preacher who told me it was a little bit evil to play the Whateleys.

There are a variety of articles on the tweaks to the game -- they're trying to discourage some of the broken/annoying strategies like stacking your deck with just one or two values of cards and heavy turtling. Shootouts are slightly less deadly and seemingly more frequent, and out-of-town deeds (ie strikes) have been generally nerfed to keep the action more in-town. Also, the fiddly bullshit that was card memory is gone (basically, buffs/debuffs on dudes and deeds being permanent even when those cards left and later returned to play). However, the Whateleys have been replaced by evil circus clowns and this makes me slightly sad. I hereby dub this faction the Juggalos. Now, I am happy again!

BTW, the rules are out and the full set of cards can be downloaded in pdf format (links not provided).

I am slightly pissy about the seeming impossibility of getting a deluxe set because I would buy one in an instant.

Also thanks for the well wishes, my dad's doing lots better. Mainly eager to get the tubes and crap out and get out of the hospital at this point.

| Gooooooooooooollllll...ooooh my god noooooooo...

It's the zombie apocalypse!  All those futbol fans from all over in one place.  This is how it spreads to the rest of the world people!  The ref should have have given him the red card and shot him in the brains.

Hmmm...  Tell me more about this Doomtown.  Are there saucy elf saloon girls in leather chaps?

Also for Cayucos Con, I was getting an itch to paint up a new team for Blood Bowl.  Maybe Chaos?  Good excuse to buy more minis.  I like this one for the minotaur:

Raowr

Blood Bowl anyone?

So I recently just found out the guy who made Agricola made a new game, Caverna.  It plays like Agriocola, with dwarves, farming and mines!  I completely missed it.  I think I also saw it at Kubla; which kills me because it's hard to get now.  It's pretty pricey (almost 90$) and the sellers at Amazon are price gouging right now.  Anyone play it yet?  I'm super obsessed with it right now.

Jron - Sorry to hear about your dad.  Here's to a speedy recovery.
I slept in your minecraft bed.  You might want to change the sheets.
Have you played around with the Relic Knights minis?  How good are the sculpts and the plastic?  Is it hard plastic or is it bendy like the Mantic stuff?  I was thinking of picking up a few once they are in the stores. 
He also says racist stuff about opponents and cheats in other ways. All around fuck-nut. Yay sports.

| Cayucos Dreamin'

 - Totally a dream, I know, but man - how awesome would that be? :)

 - I think the cloth caps were there to absorb more mustard gas.  I mean, how good do you think metal helmets would be?  Not really great at all.

 - Also, did you know there is a guy in the World Cup that apparently regularly bites opponents and has been suspended a grip of times in prior years yet is still allowed to play?  Oh yeah, he bit someone else a few days ago during the tournament.

How can that be?  I seriously don't get it.

SPORTZZ!
I would do Cayukos every other weekend if I could! Twice a year sounds great, but I don't know if the gang will be able to be wrangled that often- seems hard enough for once a year. But if you guys wanna make it happen, I'd def try to be in on it!

Soldiers didn't wear helmets during the first years of WWI. They wore CAPS. CLOTH CAPS. What the fuck.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

| Fartz

 - Its an unfortunate truth, like global warming, that farts are just funny (like global warming).

 - That history podcast sounds rad!

 - Can we do Cayucos twice a year now AND Kubla?  Please?!?!

 - I'm getting pretty hot to trot to play Doomtown only because I know that many ATers will also be excited to play and we can FINALLY play an LCG like it was meant to be played!  I mean we get some play outta LotR whenever we bust that out, but it will be fun to watch the story unfold with Doomtown and it will be fun to visit some old mechanics and haunts for me.  I haven't played that since, what, the late 90's at UCLA?  Is that right?

The Premiere edition looks sexy as hell but I understand it will be impossible to purchase unless you luck into it at GenCon.

Anyway, Cayucos already has Doomtown and XenoShyft taking up the schedule of games - let's doo eet!

| stuffs

The Leftovers
Just finished reading the book "The Leftovers" by Tom Perrotta (also wrote Election and some other shit). It was a good read. Quick and interesting. It's being turned into an HBO show that starts next week, and the trailers for it looked intriguing. The premise is that a "Rapture-like" event takes place and 2% of the world's population vanishes. Rapture-like because it's not just Christians that disappear. It's also Jews, Muslims, atheists, gays - it appears to be random. So the story follows a family in a small town that's been torn-apart by the event and gives glimpses of how the world reacts after something like that happens. Lots of weird cults, suicides, disassociative behavior. It sometimes feels like The Stand-lite, minus supernatural stuff other than the main event that sets the whole thing off. I would love to read Stephen King's take on this world, because he would probably be way crazier with everything, but it was still a really good story.

History Buffs
I started listening to this history podcast called Hardcore History with Dan Carlin. The show I'm on right now is SO GOOD. It's called Blueprint for Armageddon I, and it's about the beginnings of WWI:
"The planet hadn't seen a major war between all the Great Powers since the downfall of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. But 99 years later the dam breaks and a Pandora's Box of violence engulfs the planet."
The host is really easy to listen to and he's got a unique presentation that's addictive. The shows are apparently super long - like 3-4 hours each, but it doesn't matter because it's all this awesome shit I've never heard about, and I'm loving every second of it. They seem to come out every few months, so I guess the long run-time makes up for it. Haven't listened to any of the other episodes yet, but start with the same one I'm on and see if it hooks you. I found it through iTunes.
(He also does a current events show that I haven't checked out yet. I'm not sure what his angle on today's politics are, so I'm avoiding it till I burn through these history episodes .)

Monday, June 23, 2014

Holy shit, that was way funnier than I expected. My favorite had to be the bird that was picking at him from a Conan I think. So good.

I missed RPG Day because I didn't see your post till that night. Make us play the free games you picked up over internet.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

| And now, for some intellectual stimulation

It's a bunch of Schwarzenegger clips with farting sounds cut into them. Bravo! Bravo!