Ben Affleck was the Bomb in Phantoms, Yo

A Flurry (ha ha) of Updates

Unfortunately I have been somewhat tardy in my blogging. My router is being a pain in the ass. It's decided not to broadcast anymore. All of the cable connections work fine, but our laptops don't see any signal. I've done some fiddling and now they can see the signal, but can't connect.

This happened once before. I fucked around with the settings until it worked. I didn't change anything of consequence, it mostly just decided to start working. I'm going to have to try the same approach again.

I hate technology.

The Tree

We put up our spanking new xmas tree on Sunday night.

I can't describe how awesome it is.

It comes in three sections. In each section, the branches are on hinges and quietly drop into place. The lower branches have sub-branches that can be moved into the right place. Each branch has reasonably realistic looking pine nettle branches that are on wires so they can be posed as well. The outermost eight inches or so of each branch replaces the normal pine nettle pieces with soft cast rubber pine nettles (brown in the middle, green at the tips).

It looks real. It's amazing.

You really have to see it in person. Wow.

Game Night

Unfortunately /dev/null is overseas again, so he missed out on game night.

On the ride over, W., who lives in the same building complex as Serdic and consequently gets rides with him alot, mentioned Axis and Allies. He's a fan and he proposed we try it at game night. I thought that sounded like a pretty good idea.

While we waited for Prime to show up, I surfed the weeb a bit and Serdic worked on dinner. We decided to give Eve CCG a try, and just as we were about to start Prime arrived, so we made it a three player game. It seems to have a very straightforward ruleset which never the less produces some interesting decisions. I'm looking forward to giving it a try with more people.

Mr. T arrived shortly before we broke up the Eve game and expressed an interest in picking some up himself. Then we broke for dinner, which was up to Serdic's usual standards of excellence.

I mentioned W.'s suggestion of Axis and Allies and Prime and Mr. T both responded with vocal enthusiasm. Apparently we're definitely going to have to give that a go. Mr. T also mentioned that he has a metric fuck-ton of Star Wars cards, so I promised to look up the rules so we could give that a try as well.

After dinner we played Vampire; Prime -> Nail -> Serdic -> Mr. T. Serdic played his stealth-bleed !Malk deck, I played my Lasombra, I gave my Tzimisce to Mr. T and Prime played his cobbled together mostly-!Brujah deck. Prime went out first, then Mr. T, and then I burned myself out immediately thereafter with Smiling Jack (not that I would have survived Serdic, Captain of Stealth-Bleed for long). Fun game.

Meditations on Card Games

I've been going through some reading on Vampire, and the making of decks thereof. I think I'm going to keep my Tzimisce deck, but try to build up the card base a little bit to improve its ability to intercept minions and mess them up some. My Lasombra deck is probably going to come apart. I'm going to try to put together a few decks based more on groups of disciplines with specific game-plans attached rather than build a crypt of a specific clan and then building a deck around that.

I've also been looking at the Call of Cthulhu CCG. It looks like a lot of fun and the art is amazing. Might have to give that a go.

Last Night

Yesterday was Kung Fu. For weapons, we did 3-count and 5-count patterns, sitting in chairs facing our opponent. This is actually a very cool exercise as you have to be more precise with your motions (so as not to whack anybody's knees) and because you're fixed in your seat the correct distance from your partner, you immediately see if your strikes are too close to your body or too far away.

In class we did reverse chi sao and eye gouges, including a fun exercise where we put our partners into various holds and locks and experimented with interesting ways of using eye gouges to get out of those difficult situations. Our stations were done with partners of different ranks, with an admonition from Sifu that the higher ranked partner should be able to outdo the lower ranked one, while the lower ranked should do his best to keep up, to make the higher rank work harder.

Unfortunately my partner, while a blue and thus lower ranked than me, is also an assistant instructor, which changes the map a little. I was able to edge him out in many of the exercises though, and was at least competitive in the ones that he beat me out on. The one that surprised me was push-ups; I got in 40 in 1 minute and left him in the dust. Since he has quite a bit more upper body strength than I do I can only assume that he had some hard assistant-instructor classes before the regular classes.

Chapters, Why Can't I Quit You

Before class started I was talking to a fellow student who said she'd finished her xmas shopping that day at Chapters. When I asked when she'd started shopping, she clarified that she'd started today. All of her xmas shopping at Chapters in one day? Not too shabby!

She then told me that Chapters was having a huge sale on its bargain books. Sigh.

So my lovely wife and I stopped by after class. Presents were acquired for a number of people, some of whom read this blog! I also found a huge book of historical maps (maps from historical periods, not maps of historical places) which my lovely wife agreed to give me for xmas at a future date.

For myself, I picked up a fantasy novel by someone I'd never heard of, a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, and a book by Richard Dawkins, the Ancestor's Tale. I started it last night and had a hard time putting it down. It starts with modern humanity and proceeds backwards in time, marking our descent through the annals of evolution and describing what earlier forms our ancestors took, when and where we branched off of other life forms, all the way back to the ultimate common ancestor of all life.

Very cool.

Collar Stays

RJA asked us if we had any collar stays at work, admitting it was probably a silly question. I explained that I had none here, nor anywhere else, physically as well as temporally. I had to clarify, though, that I think I had recieved one with a shirt once, but discarded it, thinking it was part of the packaging.

He thought that was quite funny.

It wasn't as funny as when he made a sarcastic comment and I asked if he was being sarcastic, and he replied that he wasn't programmed to be sarcastic.

Now that's funny.