Stumpy Kitten

HA! PPG MANGA!

Worth while read up at Fortune.com (linked by Slashdot, of course) regarding the burgeoning anime industry in North America. I'd be worried about it becoming mainstream and losing the delicious goodness that makes it as amazing as it is, but my addiction is kicking my ass and demands more episodes and more series (I started watching Eureka SeveN which is a Nadesico/Eva clone and waiting for the fansubs is KEEEEELING me and a few other longer running shows are on holiday vacation this weekOMGwithdrawl [googles a pic of cute anime girl with blue hair piloting a giant transformable robot] - OK, good for another few minutes).

There's a section that made me "WTF?" out loud when I was reading it at work:

"He's [Don Murphy] producing a live-action movie based on the 1980s anime show Transformers, which featured warring robots, each of which could turn into, say, a truck or a jet (or, in the least intimidating transformation ever, an AM/FM cassette deck)."

Soundwave, I swear, is the scariest transformer of them all - and thus the awesomest. I'll stab anyone that says otherwise. He had a guest appearance on Family Guy, for god's sake!

Its one thing to edit Han Solo to shoot second, but if they don't do Transformers right...my god, the riots.

Ah, extremists. I'm a bit jaded towards anti-nuclear power persepectives. I grew up in the shadow of a plant where my parents work in a nice clean town. I don't glow in the dark or anything, even.

Nukes seem to be the best solution for an island situation like the UK. I was very suprised to find how little it was facilitated. I just kinda assumed they had been using it for a while now.

This is so stupid, especially in light of THIS.

Gonna blame videogames for that one too? Huh? Are ya? Oh, gun control, poor parenting and a violent social situation was at fault? Yeah, I thought so.

Gawd.

13 year old kills self while roleplaying a video game.
I'm too lazy to link it, but you probably don't care if you didn't read it already on /. or the BBC or CNN today. Anyways, there's not much detail on what happened so much as the kid apparently fell to his death and the parents blame World of Warcraft for it.

A buddy linked the story to me at work and I replied to him:

"Yeah, one of the new guys here is a big WoW gamer too. He jumped in front of a car thinking that he'd be okay as long as he was in Defense Stance with Shield Wall activated.

The paramedics said that he still had a few seconds left on his cooldown timer."

I'm such a nerd.

Today was an exciting day for mail!

Bills.
Junkmail.
Preapproved for $10,000 line of credit (legit) and a PS: We raised your CC limit by $1,100.
Info package for hiring a Minister for that wedding next year.

Paid the bills, tossed the junkmail, admired all the money that I could spend but don't actually have, and made an offering* to the higher powers so that our office pool may win the lottery this week and save us all from the bleak existence of 5 day work weeks.

*BBQ chicken. As the higher powers were not present in tangible, chicken consuming form, I took the mantle of responsibilty to consume the sacred flesh on their behalf.

And lo, it was good.

We had a couple lab machines sent in so that we can use them for testing. They were packed with foam chips.

We took our supervisor's chair, inverted it, crammed it in the box full of chips and then inverted the box.

She's still kinda new and we're not sure how well she'll take the joke, but I'm sure we will know tomorrow morning.

Work was senseless today. My desk was moved to a new location in a high traffic, high volume, not near my subordinate, frigid section of the office. I was not asked my opinion of the move, nor was I asked to give feedback.

Naturally, when my phone didn't work, and our intranet tools were broken, thereby preventing me from doing any work at all (and slaughtering my metrics), I was not pleased. I constantly consider a few "sick days" to give me a break and make work a (moreso) living hell for everyone as they shoulder my work, but I like my backup and don't really want to force him into early retirement (suicide).

Did I mention the new seat is fucking cold? I sit between two air ducts...not air conditioning, but outside air. Also, there's a light directly above my desk which lights up my desk to the point of where I can read my badge in the glare of my screen...with a white background on the screen.

We were encouraged to start decorating our cubes and office for the politically correct Holiday Season. I would, since it takes my attention away from the horrors of the above, but my natural distrust of people (which this job has only fortified!) takes over and applies negative encouragement. I refuse to put effort and money into something that will be fun for the three seconds that it takes to get stolen by another employee.

Do I need to reference that the same bullshit happened to me in grade 3? Thus my apparent bitter outlook. I like to call it the Realistic Reality of Real Humans in Real Situations - Really.

I am on another media consumption binge. I just finished watching Advent Children and will shortly be watching 4 more episodes of Mythbusters, The Princess Bride, and a couple other movies that shall remain nameless as I don't think they are out on DVD yet.

Blogging my illegal activities seems silly unless I thinly veil it.

One day I will have slaves to take the bus down to Blockbuster and obtain my movies for me. Its also possible by the time I'm that rich they will have realized that they can be making so much money off people like me by offering online rentals.

I've come to the conclusion that one of the guys I play D&D with can't read.

I was doing some research regarding the feats he had, and also regarding how he got so many. Turns out that he's using stuff from Unearthed Arcana, reading the entries incredibly wrong, and getting his choices approved by someone that isn't even gaming with us...

I'm bringing my god-damned red pen to the next gaming session.

I turn to WoW to calm me down in situations like the above...at least in a MMO its really hard for people to abusively interpret clear rules. However, it brings out some other entertaining (I lie, I mean "fucking annoying") qualities in humans, which I find equally aggravating.

Lets watch that CSI episode for this week to take my mind off uncoordinated game-tards. Cliffhanger episode. Argh.

Picture, if you will, an airborne harpy luring sailors and platemail clad heroes off their ship and out into the middle of the ocean...

Envisage the face of the iron-clad dwarf as he manages to pass the first swim check, only to swim further out to the calling harpy...

Imagine a 15 foot fiendish tigershark popping into mid-air just above the harpy, biting the fug-o, and pulling her down the rest of the drop and under the waves...

Harpies, which I have never actually fought before in D&D, are a pain. Turns out they don't sing so well with a hold person and they can't really fly or swim either. The shark took care of the other one, and a fireball had us singing we "feel like chicken tonight".

Between the Kraken and the charbroiled bird, we had enough rations to last a long sail.

The Mysterious Tower of Annoyance kept us busy the rest of the session. The courtyard wall is a permanent blade barrier but doesn't actually activate until you touch it. The interior tower had me thinking of something Gord once said regarding "1000 peices, each guarded by a god of war": There are four doors leading into the tower. The East door was almost blocked by bones of a small army that had attempted to force its way in, so we decided to leave that one for last. We tried the West door, only to get jumped by a small army of undead and constructs.

Now, were I a full level 11 cleric, the undead would have been no problem. However, due to my dragon devotions, I'm actually a feeble level 6 cleric when it comes to turning (but I'm real good against things with willpower to crush!). Fortunately a mage cast a wall of fire and the undead were scorched mightily.

Most of the damage the party took resulted from the massive golem (apparently had fast healing TWENTY and jackhammers for fists) or the two construct-like mages raining fireballs from the top of the tower. With three mages and a war cleric in the party, we managed to disintegrate the turret that they were standing on. Fortunately they did enough damage to cause our Ranger/Weretiger to involuntarily change shape, and he went almost toe-to-toe with the golem. I say "almost" as the golem mostly ignored the tiger, and beat on the dwarf (whom had spent most of this session prone or mindcontrolled...). A desperate deeper darkness by everyone's favorite dragon cultist managed to give the dwarf the miss chance that he needed to crawl away in retreat. It was quite amusing as the golem would have crit, hit 3 more times, and easily killed the tripped dwarf, but the 50/50 miss chance from the darkness saved him each time.

Oh, and did you know that weretigers have Blind-Fighting? Boy did that work out as a bonus!

One poor skeleton was also trapped in the darkness sphere, and once we were pretty sure the golem was dead, I cancelled the darkness spell, revealing that the skeleton was being stalked in the dark by the kitty. If only the poor guy still had muscles and lips to frown with instead of just a stupid grin.

It was here that we realized several of us almost died as we were completely unprepared for a battle like that. We also found out that this door was just an illusion.

Two down, only two more directions to go!

We're going to be adopting a scorched earth policy on the next door we attack. Most of the building will be coming down before the freaking constructs and undead get to annoy us again. There better be some nice l00t inside for this much trouble...

Ian always finds the most entertaining tests.

Francois Duvalier You scored 0 Ego and 0 Ideology!

Trained as a doctor, Francois Duvalier (1907?-1971), a.k.a. "Papa Doc," became president of Haiti in 1957. Papa Doc claimed to be a powerful houngan who modeled himself on the mythical Baron Samedi, and many Haitians believed him: after all, anyone who spoke out against him died mysteriously. (More skeptical observers put the blame on the fearsome "Tonton Macoute" militia, who were paid only what they stole from victims.) What little money changed hands in his country tended to go into his. After his death in 1971, he was succeeded by his 19-year-old son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"), who rode Daddy's coattails until his overthrow in 1986. ("Baby Doc" proceeded to lose all his ill-gotten gains through gambling and divorce.) No one can do that voodoo that you and Duvalier do. You may not be the richest or the most charismatic person on the block, but when you speak, people listen. Is it your pragmatic nature that commands respect, or is it the fear of finding severed goat heads on their lawns? You know the dark side of human nature well, and you use it to your advantage. Just remember to keep an eye on your kids. You don't want some wastrel to dilute your legacy of terror.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 40% on Ego You scored higher than 31% on Ideology

Link: The Which Evil Dictator Are You? Test written by echopapa on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

POLYSYLLABIC!! Read the newspost and additional comments from yesterday. I have no idea what card system they are using, but it looks freaking complicated. It also looks awesome.

I guess I'll add that CCG to my massive list of Stuff I Might Want For XMas. It is now up there with a STFU Hoodie from Thinkgeek, some D&D Mins, and a big Bag O' Money.

Might be doing D&D on Sunday again this week (GLEE!) since we're trying to align things for the holiday season.

Which reminds me, I forgot to mention what happened at the last session. We started off finding out that the corpses of our friends that were killed by the green dragon (and also happened to be afflicted with were-tiger lycanthropy) were corpses, but still animated by the curse even in death. The reanimated and ran off to spawn an army of undead were-tigers. I doubt we'll ever run into them again. That would be too obvious.

Later on, we were ambushed by a gank squad sent by the big villain we're after. It includes frost giants, Rakshasa, and a golem. We ran like little girls. I managed to save us with a well timed wall of stone. During the quick encounter, we picked up the replacement for the brawler: a new mage. He has a shadow for a familiar and can apparently innately cast spells...but I'll get to that in a bit. His back story isn't know to the rest of us yet, but he gated in from his previously location which included a horrific scene and a burning wizard's tower.

While fleeing, we rescued the arcane monk's replacement character. He's a Shugenja (think cleric that can cast arcane and divine spells) with prestige levels in Arcane Archer. This character is the bastard son of one of the original characters that was retired a few months ago. He heard great stories of our party and has come seeking us so that he can record our epic stories. He's extemely nieve and my character likes that. I intend on using him to spread the word of dragon worship.

We eventually booked passage on a boat (re: instigated a war and are going along for the ride) to a prison island that we're sure contains information regarding the big-bad-evil that is molesting the region. Along the way, we got jumped by a hag riding a KRAKEN.

Fortunately, the DM didn't read the full monster specs and didn't sink our boat and drown all of us in 1 round like he should have. Instead, he closed in for melee and the overpowered mage (casting 2 direct damage spells each round...) nuked it to death. There was yet another arguement about rules at this point. The mage was grappled by a tentacle and taking damage each round. He has the ability (I'm assuming through feats since he wouldn't let me see his char sheet...) to prepare and cast an energy substituted fireball as a free action withou any verbal, somatic, or material components. This free spell can be cast 3 times per day. He disputes that since its cast by speed of thought that a giant squid tentacle crushing the life out of him wouldn't force him to make a concentration check to cast it. I did something totally unexpected and used the rule book and found 3 seperate references in the PHB and the DMG that indicated it was subject to concentration checks. Dispute resolved, but the player was still angry. Apparently an automatic 30d6 damage per day at will isn't worth it if he has to make a concentration check 1% of the time.

He rolled a 1 on his check and botch the spell. I laughed in his face, which was extremely rude, but he had also just wasted 30 minutes of game time by arguing for the second session in a row.

We accidently killed the hag with AOE incidental damage, but she hissed our party name before she died, indicating that she was sent by someone specifically to harrass us. Its sooo nice to be reknowned.

So, we killed a hag and a kraken in 3 rounds and had to end the session due to time. A swarm of harpies was just beggining to descend on us. 7K exp until I can use my dragon...yess....

Actually interesting information from CNN regarding Calvin and Hobbes. Read it before it gets crushed by the normal trash.

I was thinking the author would be a good answer for one of those "If you could have a conversation with one person, dead or alive...", but I'm not sure there'd be anything new that he could tell me. The comics had so much heart and perspective in it that I kinda feel like I already know the guy.

It would be neat if he came back and did a different comic series, but I can't blame him for vanishing. I know I'd do the same.