Gentlethings, start your engines
While browsing through the list of announced GenCom games, I hit Cthulhu 500, the game that combines Lovecraft with NASCAR.
“Mythos Motor Sports Madness: The Cthulhu 500 card game puts you in the driver’s seat for a frenzied race that mixes the madness of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and the insanity of motor sports. Rev up your Satanic Pushcart’s Engine Of The Damned, mount your Radials From Beyond Space And Time, and take a Dreamlands Shortcut to win the race for The Sponsor That Must Not Be Named. The driver in the lead when the Checkered Flag card is drawn celebrates victory by devouring his opponents! 3 to 8 players – Ages 8 and up – 30 to 60 minutes”
Why does this sound like it was target-marketed right at some of the people I game with?
If game materials are dangerous, what does that make me?
NYC Ferry guard tries to confiscate role-playing book as “inappropriate”.
I’m not even going to be sarcastic about this. This just makes me angry, and sad. Are we really going to have to give up all our freedoms one at a time in the interest of “public safety”?
Edit: According to Greg Costikyan’s weblog, the New York Waterway folks are very red-faced about this and are attempting to get more details in order to take corrective action. Urge to kill falling… falling…
Movies! Music! Games! Parties!
For the first time since moving here, my weekend return to Salem was marred by traffic delays in both directions, both at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. Neither time did I see an evidence of an accident – it was instead as if a claustrophobe had realized too late, “oh, I’m going through a tunnel!” and slowed to 15 mph, causing everyone for 6 miles back to have to slam on their brakes.
However, the Game Day / raininva‘s Party / Con Meeting / .Hack Session was lots of fun. Rain proved once again why she’s nearly indispensable to Rising Star, I demoed MegaMan, and Nick P. showed me a .Hack//Enemy deck which is no fun to play against :p I also got to say hi to a bunch of Blacksburgites who I don’t see as often as I did before the move – I might not be in B-burg again before Rising Star.
Despite reviewers’ best efforts, I have figured out the plot twist in The Village from reading reviews, just as I did in The Sixth Sense. The difference is that the deduction made me more interested in watching Willis and Osment, but I know I’m going to give this new movie a pass. Instead, rattrap nearly talked me into seeing Thunderbirds after all – at the very least, I can sit back and enjoy the CGI rescue vehicles.
Moving to Virginia Beach has certainly improved my concert situation. I saw a Chicago / Earth, Wind, & Fire doubleheader last month, and this month Blondie is playing a show less than 2 blocks from where I work. Yes, I am still all about the 80’s – if I can catch Duran Duran on their 2004 tour, I can check off two more bands that I always wanted to see.
Time to go fix another laptop…
RPG Team Meme (Weem!)
Now all I need is a catchy soundtrack and a hyperactive title sequence and I’m ready for cable TV:
Hacking, pretend and real
Played the new MegaMan card game today (yesterday was official release). Guess who won? If you guessed the other player, you’re right 🙂 Of course, he’d played it many times during development, and this was my first. Decent game – I don’t follow the MegaMan console games or cartoon, but the play of the game was fast-paced, and slightly less complex than ./Hack. Another quick time-killer. Interestingly, your draw deck = your hit points, so every time you take a hit, your combat possibilities diminish. Conversely, you lose a trickle of hit points every turn whether you attack or not.
The staff at LiveJournal has posted in the lj_maintenance community that the terrible recent slowdown has two causes: LJ overgrowing its network, and a Denial of Service attack. Firstly, I’ve never understood the psychology of trying to take down a journal site. The Pentagon, or Bank of America, maybe. But LiveJournal? You gain that much hacker cred from preventing people from commenting about their day?
Secondly, they mention that a significant chunk of the attacks come from innocent people with infected Windows machines. Aside from a wry suggestion of changing OSes, they suggest firewall, anti-spyware, and anti-virus software, or at least changing web browsers to one that doesn’t have a direct pipeline into your OS. The response? “I don’t have time to bother with that!” “I’m not computer-savvy enough to install a new browser!” Or, in other words, “Yes, officer, I realize that my brakes are failing and my steering doesn’t work right, but it’s a real inconvenience to fix it. Perhaps you could make the other drivers just stay out of my way.”
Argh. People.
Somebody invent the frelling transporter!
Phew. Still a little tired from the accumulated 12 hours of driving this weekend. I had a great time in Riner, it was good to catch up with folks. Ironically, I had to drive back to the B-burg area to see some people who live here on the Virginia coast :p By the end of the evening, I was on the floor of the guest house with a bunch of buzzed people working out the “King James ending” of Space Rogues. Turns out that the cat is more important than you can imagine!
rattrap and rubinpdf helped me with my HeroClix issues, and that was much appreciated. Told several people about the portfolio review – hope they get in and get to draw a card or two!
Thanks again to calandra for a great afternoon and evening!
Game text: “Sacrifice personal pride to play this card”
Re: my earlier whine about collectible games…
Just played two games of ./Hack//Enemy with one of my co-workers over lunch. I lost them both, but I didn’t humiliate myself. Even he admitted that I just got some bad card draws. So now I feel better.
I need to see if we have some spare Marvel Hero Clix, he wants to play some games of that. If not, I’ll buy some next week.
