I went to the Tri-Cities this weekend (left Thursday morning). It was a lot of fun. Got to see my parents and Jones, Paige, and Beefy. I stayed in the indoor arena apartment this time… It’s weird, but for some reason I always sleep really well on the futon up there, even though the cushion seems way too firm.

General summary of events: GMed a lot of d20 Modern, helped my dad with some stuff (hung a gate, took stuff to the dump), played some new card games, got comics and RPG stuff at Infinite Frontiers, guest hosted on Beefy’s podcast, made our own Apples to Apples decks, read a lot of The Mote in God’s Eye (about two-thirds through now), and got a messenger bag.

The new card games we tried were Mag Blast, King’s Blood, and Guillotine. Mag Blast was okay, but too much of the game depends on luck — victory is like 15% strategy, 85% chance. King’s Blood was fun, though the rules are a little cryptic — on the first read-through it seems overly complex. But it’s really just a dressed up version of Uno. And I don’t have much to say about Guillotine… it’s good in small doses, or as a warm-up game since it’s so simple.

I drove back to Fed Way around noon to attend Chris’s Monday D&D game. Major events unfolded tonight. So much happened that I’ll have to do another post later just to explain it all. The big news is that the current campaign came to an end. Our characters are being retired and will likely appear in the next campaign (same setting, about 10-20 years later) as NPCs. It’s no fluke that this coincides with Chris’s game moving to Friday nights (meaning we’ll lose a couple players). But after spending the last several months waking avatars and fighting the hollow-men, I’m ready for a change of pace. I’ll have to post Kreft’s character sheet here to commemorate his awesome archery abilities.

On the trip here, I listened to the Zombie Survival Guide audiobook. It’s surprisingly serious about the subject matter. I expected some jokes, maybe some short stories. Nope. But it still manages to be interesting, provided you’re a zombie nut (like me).

Here’s something I was working on in SketchUp earlier this evening. It’s a section of a zero-gee structure meant to spin for artificial gravity. I was thinking about some of the issues with O’Neill cylinder (internal) architecture and decided to do a 3D mockup to clarify some things for myself. Isn’t it strange how the doors on the spin-plane have to be wedge-shaped while the perpendicular ones are normal? And then the walls are the opposite — spin-plane walls are of the same thickness throughout, but when rotated 90 degrees their bases have to widen to appear “vertical” from the perspective of the cylinder’s inhabitants.

Some good news on the whole car-break-in thing: I got my Pontiac back from Jim’s Auto Refinishing today. (They’re really awesome, BTW — super helpful. They even cleaned, vacuumed, and washed my car for me!) Also, the manager at Steel Lake Plaza, an apartment complex over on 312th St., called me and said she had some of my books. Turns out she had the entire contents of my briefcase — my clipboard, character sheet, all four of my D&D books, the little plastic tub containing all my favorite dice, my notebook (with the party treasury and Bag of Holding inventory), and all my papers. I was pretty glad to see that stuff again.

Last Saturday, Brett and I had lunch at Bangkok Garden (over by the Barnes & Noble). We both had the pad thai. It was really good, though a little spicier than I was expecting. I think it was slightly better than the pad thai we had at Noodle Ranch in Seattle, though theirs was also very tasty.

Since my car was in the shop for the past five days and Brett works the graveyard shift, I decided to try eating at one of the restaurants in the Korean strip mall next door. (I’d been slightly reticent about such adventures before because very few of these places have English menus or signs. It seemed probable that I could end up accidentally ordering raw duck or something.) I ended up wandering into the one simply named “Chinese Deli.” Turns out they have amazing, dirt cheap teriyaki. Here’s what I brought home for only $4.25:

There was so much of it, I was barely able to finish it myself.

I’m 170 pages into The Mote in God’s Eye now. The first few chapters were really slow, but it started getting much more interesting after the crew of the MacArthur encountered the first alien from the Mote. The book’s much longer than I’d expected; about 560 pages. At first glance, I’d assumed it was only 300 or so. After this, I plan to read Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, which just arrived in the mail last Thursday.

Been playing a lot of Magic Online lately. I’ve really fine-tuned my mono-blue thief deck. The Dissension set introduced a fantastic sorcery that’s been a great addition — Govern the Guildless. Here’s the current “Supersteal” decklist if anyone wants to check it out. Oh, and MTGO’s new “Momir Basic” format is amazingly fun. Essentially, you make up a deck of basic lands, then get to summon a random creature with a converted mana cost equal to whatever you could generate. All you need to play is 60 lands and the Momir Vig avatar (which only costs about 4 or 5 tickets). And the random creatures are drawn from pool of every magic card ever printed — even stuff from Alliances, Revised, etc. that isn’t normally available on MTGO.

D&D news: At Monday’s game we spent three months looting gigantic gold coins from Boccob’s burial chamber. Our individual shares came to about 40,000 gold pieces. Ian and I were smart enough to launder or convert ours before waking his avatar (who made all original profits disappear). I bought Greater Bracers of Archery, bringing my peak attack bonus to an impressive +19 (while using my enchanted composite longbow). It looks like we’re going to have to move the game to Friday nights instead of Mondays due to Chris’s new work schedule. Also, Pat will probably be dropping out soon (though he might rejoin us after December). Since Keith can’t play on Fridays, he’s going to be starting his own Monday night game; right now, it looks like it’s either going to be D&D (homebrew setting), d20 Modern, or Spycraft. (I’m lobbying for one of the latter two.)

Some piece of human garbage broke into my car last night. They punched out the rear partition of the driver’s side backseat window and stole a bunch of stuff. They took my D&D books and dice (and the briefcase I kept them in — a Christmas present from my grandma), my backpack with my GURPS books in it, my Settlers of Catan game, all my Magic decks, a checkbook, and my CD case (which had a bunch of comedy and audiobook discs in it).

They also keyed this little doodle next to the gascap:

Anyway, I filled out a police report and made arrangements with the insurance company. Also had to close out my checking account with the bank and open a new one (and order new checks). Dropped the car off at Jim’s Auto Refinishing this afternoon… looks like it’s going to cost about $770 to fix. At least my deductible on that is only $100.

A girl called me earlier — she’d found some of my GURPS books lying in the street near the Best Western. (Glad I wrote my name and number in the front of them.) I picked them up from the jewelry shop next to Game-A-Lot, where she was kind enough to leave them for me. They’re really beat up — looks like they got run over a couple times. I got back Characters, Campaigns, and Alternate Earths… looks like my Infinite Worlds sourcebook didn’t make it.

Needless to say, I’m pretty steamed over the whole ordeal. The loss of all my Magic decks probably hurts the most; many of the cards in those were from when I first started collecting, back when Revised was the latest set. Underground Sea, Coat of Arms, Lord of the Undead — there were a lot of great rares in there.

I’ll begin this post with a couple recent items that were a source of bountiful delight to me. Number A: On Sunday night it was revealed to me that Paige (Paige!) is a b-tard. For those of you not in-the-know, that might sound like an insult. But quite the contrary: It simply means she frequents 4chan’s “random” imageboard. In fact, over the past week I’d actually seen some posts that made me think, “OMG, that looks like something Paige would write!” And lo and behold, I asked Jones (who asked Paige) and it was confirmed that she was the true author. A funny coincidence, for sure.

Secondly, I made some new friends at Game-A-Lot. Our Monday D&D game was canceled yesterday, but I didn’t learn this until I’d arrived. Jay and his dad were there playing video games, so I dug out Munchkin and we (and Anthony) played a couple games. Then they had to leave, so I played Dead Rising on one of Anthony’s Xbox 360s for an hour. (Great game, BTW. The only problem with it is that the message text is way too small on a normal sized TV with RCA jacks — it’s blurred just enough that about 75% of the words are unreadable. It’d probably be legible on a big screen or with a high-def connection.)

Anyway, after that I saw some guys setting up The Game of Life. I’d seen them at the store before; they often played Magic in the evenings while Chris’ D&D game was going. I aksed if they wanted a fourth player and, thus, I was introduced to Josh, Leah, and white-Anthony (a designation I’ll use here to distinguish him from Korean-Anthony, who runs Game-A-Lot). I think Josh won with about 2.1 million dollars; I came in second with 1.6 million. (How sick is it that Hasbro measures your success in life by the amount money you accrue?) After that we played a couple games of Settlers of Catan, then some Magic. During this time, I met Steve-O (a mechanic, not the celebrity) and Logan.

Then today I got a call from Josh and a bunch of us met up at Game-A-Lot for Settlers of Catan and Magic. This time, I also met Charlie and Doug. They’re all awesome people — the sort who quote Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, get excited by clever Magic card combos, and play every game with cutthroat win-at-all-costs tactics.

I was having some problems with my site in Opera — apparently a change in the 9.01 version of the browser made it handle certain CSS properties differently, such that the “Previous Entries” link at the bottom of each of my blog pages became unclickable. The talented Filosofo and HandySolo helped me fix it in this thread, over at the WordPress.org support forum.

This site, “The Joint,” is a virtual building filled with rooms designed (and sometimes animated) by different users in a isometric/pixel-art style. Apparently you can submit your own rooms.

I made some “stripy wallpapers” for my desktop and organized my favorite ones on this page, along with a tutorial for people who’d like to make their own. It’s also linked off the sidebar under the “Stuff” section.

Here, enjoy these Golden Gate Bridge suicide statistics.

Boy, the Regal 17 in Auburn is an awesome theater… huge screens, lots of parking, impressive entrance. It surprised me since I’d always thought of Auburn as rather podunk relative to Federal Way. After all, they have less than half the population Fed Way does (40K to our 83K). I got lost on the way home from the movie and ended up in Milton. What a depressing dogpatch that place is… it made me think of the little town in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4, but with more trees.

Anyway, The Illusionist (what I saw in Auburn) was a thoroughly average movie IMO. I don’t have any complaints, and I don’t regret going, but in the end I found it difficult to muster any real enthusiasm for the film. Giamatti (as Inspector Uhl) and Sewell (as Prince Leopold) played their parts very aptly. On a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’d give this, like, a 5.2.

Okay, here’s a big image dump. Some of these are really cool. Mouse-over for a tool-tip description.

Aside from Nerdcore Night at the Shark Club in Kirkland, not a whole lot happened this week. GURPS was called off on account of a player schedule conflict (shouldn’t be a problem in the future if we can recruit some more). And there was no D&D, as our GM was off in London (enjoying the vacation he won in a radio contest). But Ian and I met up at Game-A-Lot and played a rousing game of Settlers of Catan with Anthony.

Nerdcore Night was fun. Beefy’s performance went over really well. Some guy even bought me a drink just because I knew him! We talked about it a lot on Beefy’s podcast, so I won’t rehash the various anecdotes from that evening here.

My grandparents sent me a Barnes & Noble gift card as a belated birthday present this week (thanks!), so this morning I made use of it. I got some 1970s sci fi classics (The Mote in God’s Eye, Crashlander, and The Gods Themselves), Lords and Ladies (a discworld book), and Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings (the second Penny Arcade collection).

I discovered Shin-Chan on Adult Swim last week. Definitely the funniest Japanese animation I’ve ever seen. Much funnier than Azumanga Daioh. And the ending theme song is really good — here’s a YouTube video of it. It’s a little ohrwurm-y, like the “Doncha Wanta Fanta” jingle.

I’m going to try to see The Illusionist in Auburn tonight. It’s got a really good rating on Rotten Tomatoes (75% ATM, 96% amongst users only).