Commercial Time!

Seeing to my self that I was somewhat bored, Over the weekend I made a game. Only 1 rule to the game was important. Drink tequila till I was not bored anymore.
"Phenomenal, best idea ever" I mentally dialogued to myself in a British aristocrat accent. This shouldn't be hard a hard plan to enact at all.

After all, I was claimed once to be an accomplished drinker. I even have a shade of most alcohols on stock for just such whimsies. I don't wear that descriptive notion with pride though, I can't help to acknowledge that I've come a long way from getting tipsy after a few sips of a wine cooler. I was at one time about as stable as a sea sick passenger looking for relief while "drunk". These days it takes quite a bit more to phase me. Even when thoroughly plastered I'm lucid and in control.
Though there was even a period that so much as smelling a beer tended to make me nauseous and hung over the next day, but that is past me as well by virtue of experience. A smarter man might of just stopped drinking, but I digress.

I consumed the first shot. Onward I was, prize state of mind in site, to consuming the delicious Azul brand tequila- straight as it were, from the shot glass with but a afterthought of lime. To make it more of a challenge I set to taking a shot during commercial breaks. However my wife and I sat down to watch Battlestar Galactica on DVD. This made judging the "commercial break" period of consumption nebulous at times. I drank in spite of it to be sure.

Somewhere into the second 4 hour DVD I mentioned ruefully how I was described as being an accomplished drinker to my wife. Though at this time the deafening sloshing sounds of what was quite near an entire fresh bottle of tequila the size of a large wine bottle pooling, plus some, around in my brain was obscuring what was about to become very clear, God saw some irony.

A good drunk would have recognized the effects of sitting down has on one's inebriated state. I was not being a good drunk... or I was too drunk to come to my attention... the point is lost now; What was a cool controlled but obviously drunk state soon spiraled into a state of chaos the moment that I stood up. It was as if all the alcohol, patiently waiting to be absorbed by my liver in a calm orderly prossession suddenly jumped the railings and crashed right into the cognitive faculties.

• My speech functions were hit first. Not that I slur. Rather, I start talking about what I'm thinking about without filter. I insisted to my wife that the laundry was being overloaded.
• Motor functions went next in a gentle slope of degradation not unlike how a rock glides to the earth. Though I wouldn't realize it.
• Because critical thinking went immediately afterward. I acted with poise and definition comprehended and fueled by Azul tequila. To my mind I was a glorious bastion of everything right and awesome.
  
• I was falling over trying fold and hang my errant laundry - I have to carry out my nightly duties.
• "I should stand up." This made sense then. And that I tried like a blind man tangos.
  
• At one point drink more tequila, like adding fuel to a fire, sounded eloquently cognoscente and brilliant. -thankfully I did not make it back to the bottle.
• Dancing entered the equation at one point but, by God, that wasn't happening considering standing in one place resembled dueling with Jackie Chan.
• And with all great inebriations, dizzyness began to set in like the wailing bell of the porcelain throne. I was going to vomit. This was going to happen.

And it did. For what I think what was the first time in my personal history, I didn't even get to sleep before I began to return what I took. This would continue more or less till the next day.

... the taste of tequlia haunted the aftertaste of everything till almost 3 days later.

"Accomplished Drinker" my ass.

Star Trek: MMO Atleast it looks pretty

The Phantom Menance Dissected

The off color bits were unnecessary. But otherwise it's a good break down of all the reasons Phantom Menace is bad.

Muse: One last one for the road

Muse: High production values

Only if all music videos were this good.

Muse: Uprising

Nifty. Scary looking bears though.

Space Travel: Not Like in the Movies

For those wondering about the toilets - From the book called A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts:

But one aspect of weightlessness was so unpleasant was so unpleasant that even the thrill of exploration didn't make up for it. If this marvel of engineering called Apollo had one major design flaw, it was the 'Waste Management System,' perhaps the most euphemistic use of English ever recorded. For urine collection there was a hose with a condom-like fitting at one end which led, by way of a valve, to a vent on the side of the spacecraft. On paper at least, it seemed like a reasonable, if low-tech, way to handle urinating in zero g, assuming you got over your anxiety about connecting yor private parts to the vacuum of space. You roll on the condom, open the valve, and it all goes into the void where it freezes into droplets of ice that are iridescent in the sunlight. One astronaut answered the question "What's the most beautiful sight you ever saw in space?" with "Urine dump at sunset."

In reality, using the urine collector didn't work so well. For one thing, it could be painful. If you opened the valve too soon, some part of the mechanism was liable to poke into the end of your penis, which prevented you from urinating. And at that point, as if to confirm your worst fears, the suction began to pull you in. Now you were being jabbed and pulled at the same time, so you shut the valve, and as the mechanism resealed itself it caught a little piece of you in it. It took only one episode like that to convince you to never let it happen again. Next time you had a strategy: start flowing a split-second before you turn on the valve. But once you began to urinate the condom popped off and out came a flurry of little golden droplets at play in the wonderland, floating around and making your misfortune everybody's misfortune! And in no time at all the whole device reeked; it was an affront to the senses just sitting there.

The astronauts got used to the urine collector, though, and they got used to mopping up afterwards. But there was no getting used to the other part of the Waste Management System. Tucked away in a strange locker was a supply of special plastic bags, each of which resembled a top hat with an adhesive coating on the brim. Each bag had a finger-shaped pocket built into the side of it. When the call came you had to flypaper this thing to your rear end, and then you were supposed to reach in there through the pocket with your finger---after all, nothing falls in zero gravity---and suddenly you were wishing you had never left home. And after you had it in the bag, so to speak, you had one last delightful task: break open a capsule of blue germicide, seal it up in the bag, and knead the contents to make sure they were fully mixed! At best, the operation was an ordeal. In the confined space of the Apollo command module, your crewmates suffered, too. One of the Apollo 7 astronauts said the smell was so bad it woke him out of a deep sleep. When the crew came back they wrote a memo about it: "Get naked, allow an hour, have plenty of tissues handy."

Taken from a slashdot post.

A One Way Ticket To Awesome

Seriously this has to be one of the best "Christmas Episodes" of any series by far.

Battletech 3rd Edition

I recently scored a near mint copy of BTech 3rd edition from a game shop just like the one I purchased many moons ago from a model train hobby shop in North Carolina when I was 14.

Looking at the box then, nestled neatly between some obscure wargames in a corner, I thought "holy cow look at that mech, it's stepping out of fire being all bad as shit. It's friggin awesome". Followed shortly by, "Wait, this is battle tech... like the computer games (Crescent Hawks Inception/Revenge)? I wonder if it's like Advanced Squad Leader... but with mechs. I would so dominate ('pwn' not being part of my lexicon then) the Germans if I had a warhammer like that".

Now mind you, I had at one time created a pen and paper version of 'battletech' based entirely on what I understood from the video games. And my experience with wargames was principally of ASL against my father... and of losing.

After a few moments of befuddlement, excitement, and sheer curiosity, I tallied the cash in my wallet and asked my father to spot the difference from my allowance. Not long later I had the box in my possession and once home, I opened the seal to the box and peered within.

Inside was plastic miniatures of what previously was something held only in my imagination. After breaking him from the sprue I exclaimed over a paper chit medieval war game with my father, "Warhammer! Awesome!" I posed him a bit as much as 2 socketed arms can and made some wooshing sounds. He still doesn't look anything like the art work on the box... not that I cared.

And not just that, a simple rule system also laid within, nestled with imaginative art work, that created a running dialogue of broken machines and desperate gambits. I was captivated completely and wholly with just the miniatures alone. But an engaging game system that had no imaginable limit of capturing star systems and carving empires with carefully used elite pilots sold it far beyond that to me.
And it didn't have morale checks like ASL (stupid conscripts...)... or a rule book that makes dictionaries look tame.

Many games were played with my father, family, and friends. Campaigns were won and lost on a stray critical at a pivotal moment. I learned of the clans later on and became a bit munchkin-y, though I stuck with the Warhawk-Prime for the most part. Cheese was cried on the level 3 vehicle rules.

We stopped playing for a while and my father passed on. I miss him very much.

Upon reopening the 3rd edition Battletech box I just scored this weekend, and seeing all the miniatures I fell in love with so many years ago- just like how I had them originally, fresh in their gray plastic- I felt like I was 14 again with so much potential and wonder from such a small box.
I can't bare to paint them.

Jerrail

I posted this on 4chan about the Jerrail.
At the time I couldn't remember their name... still, I would like to introduce them in a campaign sometime beyond the evidence of their tampering.

For Traveller, I came up with a race of omni-vorous cannibals based on arrow crabs.

They had a penchant for cannibalizing other ships for parts and generally retrofitting them into their own crafts- wether it helped the ship or not. The end result was often a ship or colony that resembled a hash of mismatched parts that functioned fairly reliably in the long run despite being somewhat ungainly massive and crude.

This trait was developed partly because solar conditions on their home world caused the surface to be inhospitable to the point of forcing the survivors into underground shelters for an almost indeterminately long length of time. Everything became valuable to their culture, from other peoples possessions to oil stains.
It eventually led to them being uplifted into stellar society, or face what was commonly thought as being eventual extinction.

Shortly after being introduced to space, their perceptively greedy hoarding attitudes tended to get them shunned in the rest of civilized universe which led them to live in most of the backwater sections of the universe - collecting from passerbys what they "need" to survive.

A quickly adapted vessel or colony might just have junk strapped around it.

More long term, or heritage craft constructed and retrofitted at some of the few mother craft, are almost completely modular and are little more than rigging and a primitive workshop when it is launched.

The passage ways are unique in that they are triangular with ceiling flat and hand holds along the bottom. (Which would make a certain sort of sense to something shaped like a arrow crab.)

It got some kudos there. In retrospect it's not a horrible synopsis... and most of the notes for the old campaign that the Jerrail were set in are long gone.

A changeling campaign if I ever saw one.

I loved this. I also think it's funny that if something is imaginative and hard to categorize it by system it automatically becomes a "changeling campaign".

Though, the need to organize all thoughts by RPG type is kinda depressing. Doubly so for categorizing something as being "changeling" of which is ironic.

Forever Lost

My flavor in the coffee cup I drink from has been washed out. The combined experience of flavors for the past couple years have been stricken from the morning weary containment vessel.
In some ways it's like losing a friend. It had grown to become, on the inside, a color other than its natural white. It's was an off beige even after casual scrubbing here at work. But more typically the interior of my mug was a darker mixed hue stained thoroughly over the paths the coffee my take to get to my mouth.

But alas my better half saw it and probably likened it to an open sewer pit, whose colorings were admittedly not too dissimilar. It was dirty and probably accrued some sort of health hazard over its long career. As such it was scrubbed vigorously with the tools designed to do so and washed properly at home. For this I am thankful and do not really miss it.

But now the mug looks new again and in a sense it is completely alien having lost all its familiar markings and stains. Indeed, the taste of the coffee itself has changed somewhat too. That last part being something of a myth to me before and only held in to me in the sense of being vaguely aware that it is a psychosomatic response.

Fair well 'old coffee cup'.

War of the Worlds: Goliath

Woah, wait, what? (trailer)

Though it seems needlessly campy and cliche, it probably will be really fun regardless.