Neighbour John and a .44

Computer Woes

I'm having no end of grief with my lovely wife's laptop. The god damn thing just doesn't want to play. She's installed her stuff on my desktop windows box in the meanwhile, so I can go ahead and whack the laptop with a clean install. Here's hoping that squares it away.

Fuck HP.

Ebay Madness

I've been interested in the Conan CCG, so I went looking on Ebay and found someone selling starters for $5 and boosters for $1 each. So I'm all tooled up for at least 2 players' worth of decks, expandable to 3 pretty easily if I see another good opportunity to snag some cards.

Speaking of Conan

There's been a bit of Conan-philia going on around here lately. Mr. T and Serdic are completely on board, but Prime and Null aren't quite as enthusiastic. I want to do a Conan movie night sometime soon.

All this has led me to reflect on why Conan, the movie I mean, is so awesome. There's a lot about it that is obviously awesome; I mean, he fights an eighty foot long snake. There's so, so much blood. And boobies. The boobies are plentiful.

But I think the big reason is that it's not a movie that anybody could/would make nowadays, because of the introduction of computer-graphics special effects.

Consider the giant mill-wheel that Conan is chained to in the beginning, as a slave. Nowadays they'd just do a matte painting and CGI in something ornate, and you wouldn't get a good look at it because the special effects guys would be doing lens flares and all that bullshit, and it wouldn't really look real, as much as like a computer game cut-scene. For the Conan movie, though, they flew some poor fuck into the middle of the Crimea and had him build one. It really helps with the versimilitude when the thing in question actually exists.

And the snake. If they made Conan now, the snake would all be CG. Conan would be doing acrobatic bullshit that would look completely fake. It would be Anaconda meets the Matrix, and it would suck. Instead, they actually made a giant rubber snake and filled it with fake blood, and had Arnie hack it to pieces with a real sword. You get a tremendous sense of physicality and weight that just wouldn't exist with CGI. It's not fake-Neo beating up fake-Agent Smiths, it's a butcher going to work on a hunk of meat. It's fucking awesome.

There are a few people in Hollywood who know how to use special effects conservatively, so that they don't become a spectacle in and of themselves, but there aren't many. Which is why we don't get movies like Conan anymore, filmed on the steppe with actual swords on sets that were actually built and peopled with actual camels. Instead, we have twenty guys in front of a bluescreen and smothered under lens flares and fake backgrounds and the horrible overuse of the sepia filter. What we get is 300, and it sucks.

Give me Conan and a giant snake any day of the week.

Game Night

Game night was, as usual, a blast.

Serdic prepared a very tasty chicken parmesan. Mmm!

We only got in two games, due to their lengths. The first was magic, Null vs Prime vs Mr. T vs myself, with Serdic observing due to his efforts in the kitchen. I played a blue/green deck which was a little slapped-together; Null played a U/G zombie deck (with no mazes of Ith, oddly enough); Mr. T played a R/B full-hand-dependent deck; and Prime played R/G elves.

I got put out first, which didn't surprise me much. Prime hurricaned himself out of the game, and in so doing put Mr. T down to 1 life, so Null was able to oust him for the win.

In Vampire, the table setup was me (!Ventrue vote/bleed) -> Null (old skool vote) -> Mr. T (!gangrel bruise/bleed) -> Serdic (!brujah vote/fight) -> Prime (!brujah/!tremere).

My deck was mostly !Ventrue with a few !Tremere; Dominate for Governs and bleed, Auspex for intercept and bleed bounce, and lots of votes, backed by vote denial like Demonstration and Quentin's special. I spent the first part of the game putting Null out by way of a large number of bitterly contested close votes, and a bit of bleeding. Mr. T brought out Enkidu and started ripping the arms off other people's vampires. Prime got shut down hard; he influenced out a 2-cap and then got a big !brujah vamp out, only to have him contested by Serdic and taken out of play for most of the game. That sucks.

I got into a pretty good condition early on; a 2-cap Pander for early bleeding (she has basic Dom) who later got tooled up with a title, Quentin for voting goodness, and Neighbour John with a .44, who is just hell on wheels. You can get a lot more with +1 permacept and a gun than you can with just +1 permacept.

I managed to oust Null, which made me happy -- call that a first. Null pointed out that he's not accustomed to being the first one ousted. I'd say he's not accustomed to being ousted at all, but we'll see if we can't fix that.

Serdic managed to oust Prime, thanks to lots of bleeds that Prime couldn't stop with his one small-cap and the occasional backsplash from KRC votes I was pushing Prime's way.

As soon as Null was out, I ran out of votes and started getting nothing but bleed and bleed bounce, so I bled through Mr. T as quick as I could. Once I'd ousted him Serdic conceded.

I'm going to see if I can't tweak the crypt of this deck; since it's basically all Dom and Aus I can also go to !Tremere or Giovanni pretty easily, although I want it to still be mostly !Ventrue so I can use the fun vote-denial specials they get. I had a bit of For defence but I didn't use it; I think I'm going to remove them in favour of a few more votes.

Brown Eyed Girl

Talking with Brown Eyed Girl in Korea via instant messenger via my lovely wife. Good to talk with her, although some of her reports about local customs are not doing much to help my appetite. Seems things are going well for her.