5/5/14
I am still sick. I am
still coughing, hacking, sore, and exhausted.
However I am better than I had been, it is just the ultimate slow crawl
towards feeling healthy, and it sucks.
It sucks something awful. Couple
that with my stomach giving me all sorts of ‘issues’ and it has been a bit of a
rough run. Pun not intended. The weekend was very relaxing overall, even
though I didn’t get as much sleep as I had hoped, and I wasn’t near as
productive as I desired. Enough about
stuff no one cares about, let’s jump right in with some…
RANDOM CRAP!
- I’m going to have to mow this coming
weekend. That sort of sucks.
- Still no news on the job front. This coming weekend I begin my job hunt in
earnest again. I’d be lying if I said I
wasn’t a bit brokenhearted over the whole thing. I really thought this place was perfect for
me, however not hearing anything for this long really makes me nervous. It they do call the offer on the table will
have to be very good for me to take it.
- Congrats to Mary & Christina and the new
addition to their amazing family!
- Cassandra and I watched Knights Of Badassdom
(*** ½ out of 5) over the weekend for free on X-Box Gold. I am not sure what I expected really. It has a ton of people you know from other
shows like Game Of Thrones, True Blood, Community, Serenity, It’s Always Sunny
In Philadelphia, etc., however none of them, with the exception of Mr.
Dinklage, are really the ‘stars’ of their respective shows. The premise of LARPers accidently summoning a
Demon is equal parts funny, and carried out with an almost ‘slasher’ movie like
efficiency is damn entertaining. You can
tell the movie didn’t have much of a budget, but it NEVER lets you get lost in
that fact. This is just a goofy,
entertaining movie. If you like ‘goofy’
horror movies, or movies that are HYPER self-aware, and are a Role Play or
LARPer of any kind you will most likely dig this very offbeat flick.
- I can’t wait to get my grubby paws on Marvel
Dice Masters and play against Gene-O-Machine-o!
- I was flipping through PWG’s DDT4 ’14 and two
things made me burst with laughter.
First was Kevin Steen talking about making a Michael Elgin t-shirt that
read, “…And God Created All Men Equal…” below that phrase is a picture of
Elgin’s head and a word bubble reading, “NOPE!”
On the back of this imaginary t-shirt is Elgin power-bombing Jesus
through a table. If this really existed,
I would need to own it, I would need to OWN IT SO HARD! The
second was an event, as the RockNES Monsters were going at it with YOUR newest
favorite tag team, The Best Friends; Chuck Taylor and Trent(?). So at the climax of the match ‘Sexy Chucky T’
told Trent(?) to go get the ‘Secret Weapon’.
Trent(?) went under the ring and grabbed a trench coat and proceeded to
put it on. Meanwhile in the ring Taylor
crotched Johnny Goodtime on the top rope, Trent(?) got back in the ring and
Taylor proceeded to put him on his shoulders.
This caused him to disappear beneath the trench coat creating a MEGA-GIANT
WRESTLER! This Trent(?)/Chuck
amalgamation then choke slammed Johnny Goodtime off the top rope, and did the
one foot, muscle flex cover and I lost my ‘S’.
I laughed so hard at the CHIKARA like ridiculousness of it, and the fact
that the crazy PWG crowd embraced the moment with pure maniacal glee. If Taylor is truly done with CHIKARA I will
be crushed, but at least I will have all his amazing work elsewhere, and especially
in PWG. He and Trent(?) are truly Best
Friends, and I hope it is FOREVER!
- I’ve got to get my crap on Ebay this week.
- Sunday Gene-O- Machine-O and I got together and
watched the Wild game, which why enjoyable was still disappointing as they
lost. We then retreated to the outdoors
and grilled up some serious grub.
Cassandra had some burgers she made up that were amazing; we had some
fancy sausages, and last but not least some very special pork. I took a pork loin and trimmed almost all the
fat off of it, then sliced into chops, and finally pounded it paper thin. We topped that pork loin with some cheese and
honey mustard coleslaw, and it was outstanding.
Gene, James and his Magical Beard, Diamond Dave, Samir, Cassandra, and I
then bore witness to the Extreme Rules PPV on the WWE Network. First off, holy crap there was a lot of
buffering, which sucked. Secondly, the
whole little person kick off match was an atrocity, and it was one of those
moments where I sort of felt ‘dirty’ for watching wrestling, thanks Vince. The card wasn’t too bad, but it was a bit
‘squashy’ for the most part. Although we
did get to see the continuing push of Cesaro and Bad News Barrett, which in my
opinion is ALWAYS a good thing. The
overall card though was saved in my opinion by the last ten minutes of the
Evolution Vs. The Shield 6 man war which saw Seth Rollins hit a huge dive out
of the balcony, and Roman Reigns destroying Bootista with a Superman punch and
a spear. Evolution looked old, they
moved old, and in comparison to the big spot, frantic pace that all three
members of The Shield use they looked plodding.
The Cena Vs. Bray Wyatt was an overbooked mess, with the whole Super
Cena beating down three guys scenario that really makes me physically ill. However no one will ever remember that
because they ended the match with a creepy kid singing ‘He’s Got The Whole
World In His Hands’ allowing Bray Wyatt to dispatch Cena and get the win. It was nice surprise, a bit hokey, but
fun. I don’t think this feud is anywhere
near done, and I’m ok with that IF we finally get Wyatt going over Cena
clean. But we won’t. We won’t because ‘Jern SuperCena’ doesn’t
lose clean, and he never puts someone over, with the exception of Daniel Bryan
and even then he had the built in excuse of the elbow surgery. And if you don’t think that little nugget
will come back up later when ‘Jern’ demands his rematch then I’ve got some
swamp land to sell you. Let’s face it,
the ‘E’ doesn’t know what to do with ‘Jern’ anymore, the crowds have clearly
decided that they are done with him, and he’s become worse than stale, he’s
tired. It has been ten years of the same
gimmick, and it is tired. It is a shame
that they won’t mix it up, they won’t have him do a ‘clean job’ to Wyatt, and
that worst of all we’ll still be on the internet bitching about ‘Jern
SuperCena’ burying someone at next year’s Extreme Rules. Sorry, end of rant. Anywho, the other big match was the Kane Vs.
Daniel Bryan match which was entertaining but unfortunately didn’t end their
feud. The reality is I just don’t care
about ‘The Demon Kane’ thing they have going on as it bores me, which in turn
is making me bored by Bryan as a result, which isn’t good. The ‘E’ has booked itself into a corner by
having a complete lack of credible heels at the top tier. I surmise that this is the John Cena
Effect. When you build an antagonist and
then feed them to your ‘Face of the Franchise’ and he goes all Super Cena on
them they lose credibility. I don’t
think he buries guys purposefully, but with either his or management’s
inability to put over anyone clean they have an upper echelon that is devoid of
credible antagonists and that is a damn shame.
In the end thank you to Cassandra, The Geneius, James & his Magical
Beard, Diamond Dave, and the visiting Samir for taking what was a mediocre PPV
and making it a joy.
- 5/14/14 the return of the Antagonist Relations
Podcast!
- Team TrollStrong met last night and started
Burnt Offerings with an additional mega-spell card that Gene-O and Sassie
Cassie picked up at PAX East. We also
found out we’d been doing a few things incorrectly which made things even more
challenging. It was one of those rare
nights where I was hitting on all cylinders and was a kill crazy Warrior of
unstoppable proportions, while the rest of the group was equally as
efficient. I had a massive headache so I
was a tad detached as I felt like I was playing the game down a long tunnel
from everyone else, however once the end game was set in motion my focus got
VERY sharp. Sassie Cassie made a small
tactical error which was going leave her dead, ‘PERMA-Dead’ in fact. The Geneius wracked his brain to figure out
what to do, and in the end it was a total party effort to finish off
Ripnugget! THE Karl sacrificed a
Blessing permanently to shut down the last remaining location that the Villain
could have fled to, Cassandra, James & his Magical Beard dropped Blessings
on Cassie to ensure her first victory and El Gene-O-Machine-O and dropped the
F’Ning HAMMER to finish off the Goblin Chieftain. By doing this we prevented the ‘PERMA-Death’
that was hanging over Sassie Cassie’s head.
I can’t state enough how much I love this game, and I think it is mainly
due to the 5 people I sit around a table with a few times a month and have a
blast with. Thank you Team TrollStrong!
- My stomach is a bottomless pit right now; I just
can’t get enough to fill it.
- I plowed through James Sutter’s ‘The Redemption
Engine’ (**** ½ out of 5) last week. This is the sequel to Sutter’s previous
Pathfinder Tales novel ‘Death’s Heretic’ following Salim in his duties to the
Goddess of Death. The rub is Salim was
an atheist from a country in the Golarion setting that actively pursued a war
on religion. In a moment of desperation
he reached out to the Goddess of Death and now is ‘forced’ to serve her as
‘problem solver’. The premise is great,
and overall the surly protagonist is smart and dangerous. This tale revolves around someone taking
souls of rapists, murders, and slavers and using magic to force their souls
away from judgment and subsequent damnation and forcibly ‘saving’ them. This causes the tenuous balance between
Heaven, Hell, and the Goddess of Death and Judgment to be skewed heavily. Salim’s job becomes to track down the
responsible parties across the Prime Material Plan, Heaven, and even Hell in
order to dispense justice. Mr. Sutter
does a FANTASTIC job of giving you all the nuances and differences that makes
Golarion its own fully fleshed out fantasy multiverse. The hierarchies of Heaven and Hell and their
strict adherence to ‘Law’ as a concept, and the idea that those concrete ideals
can be manipulated interpretation. There
is a great underlying theme of choice versus fate as a thread throughout the
book, and it brings Salim’s complex and complicated relationship with the true
believers of the Goddess he is ‘forced’ to serve all the more interesting. There a great deal of fun and interesting
secondary characters that keep things moving and allow us some perspective both
into Salim and his investigation. I was
also VERY happy to see the Caulborn, a Pathfinder-centric monster that I find
to be VERY cool, get some serious spotlight time. In the process the idea of them was so
perfectly expounded on that I NEED to find a way to move them back into my
D&D campaigns. I’ll be interested to
see if Mr. Sutter has another tale of his heretical investigator up his
sleeve.
- Congrats Kedrin, last semester midterm mark
ACHIEVED! Just a month or so left of
Grad School and then you’ll be graduating at the top of your class! That is an amazing feat.
- You know it is funny I went through two weeks of
just miserable illness, roaring high fever, and I’ve coughed so hard that my
sides actually hurt, BUT no seizures.
Apparently I had an Aura last night, but I don’t really recall it, I do
recall get blasted by an epic migraine for a while during the Pathfinder game,
but not the Aura at the onset. That means
for the first time in like ten years I ran a fever, a SIGNIFICANT fever, and
had no seizures. I can’t tell you what
that means to me. To even have the
inkling that what I’m doing might be making a difference makes me feel like
there might be a light at the end of this tunnel, and that I might finally be
reaching it.
Hrm, that was far more than I thought it would be…
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