[  Mood: Happy ]
In my computer, being rocked out to right now.

I love The Thickets and will happilly buy anything they put out until they stop making music, which had better be some time after I have died.

I get confirmed fairly often that I am a nerd not cut from the normal nerd cloth.

Various examples:

-I could give a crap about Harry Potter

-The Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, while I think are ok are nothing that did much for me.

-I really tend not to like anime.

Anyway, I could go on.

My nerd obsessions went elsewhere. Obviously I am a horror genre guy with HP Lovecraft in particular. I love harder scifi, but have a grudge against Larry Niven from a con ten years ago.

Weird things like that.

The things I obsess on and love though… I love whole heartedly with gushing fanboy love. I was at the first ScaperCon fan-ran Farscape convention in Saint Louis if that says anything. I will embrace fan obsession, it just takes me a bit to get there.

I am the strange scifi fan, the niche fan among a niche market. But hey, I still feel comfortable and at home. Just don’t ask me to like Highlander the TV show.

I really liked the Silent version of Call of Cthulhu. They did a great job of capturing the feel of the origonal story I thought. So recently I bought one of the nifty movie posters for the film and had it framed. I just hung it.

I think it looks rather snazzy.

I’ve been fighting a battle the last few weeks that made me in turns annoyed, full of self doubt and filled with near rage at inanimate objects. It was, kind of, won today.

I was trying to wire up the offices of my friend’s sheet metal company. I tried wiring scheme after wiring scheme all to no frakkin’ avail. I could NOT get point A to talk to point B. I started to doubt if I even had the skill to put together a simple RJ-45 plug.

Anyone in computers knows that that is genital removing self doubt right there.

So this morning, away from the warehouse over at Two Fat Guys Lab I put together a cable, tested it and it worked. Yes, yes, I still knew how to make those. I relaxed in that comfort. I took it to the site and..nothing..something…nothing.

Then I remembered they were on a funky ISP/DSL provider that required hardcoded DNS/GATEWAY/IPs and bingo! The magic worked!

I swear this job was making me lose it though for a bit. Still don’t know why the previous cabling schema didn’t work though. I need to take a closer look at that building. I think I was getting EF interference from an arc welder or something.

Sorry…just had to vent.

[  Mood: Happy ]
Viva La Game Night!!!!!!

The fridge was stocked, the cards were shuffled, the bags of snacks in place and it was time once again for Game Night! (insert sound of thunder and flash of lightning here)

New member of Team Cthulhu but old school Delta Green gamer Jason (aka Snackmaster J) brought down Munchkin Impossible and Munchkin Bites for us to try. MI was first on the plate and after some brief discussion about the unique aspects of this version of Munchkin vs. other versions we were off.

MI is a quick playing game much like Munchkin Fantasy. The mix of loyalties and classes is fun and the cards are halarious as always. One nice touch, the color of the face of the treasure cards is slightly different then the door cards so they don’t get mixed up with each other; a constant problem with some of the other Munchkin incarnations. The game did a good job of capturing a lot of the spy genre tropes.

I took the first round of it and Corey got the second in two back to back rapid fire games. After that we decided to check out Munchkin Bites.

MB is obviously aimed straight at the White Wolf World of Darkness games. Full of angsty monsters and goth cliche. A ripe field for amusement and mockery. MB is a slower paced game then its’ Munchkin bretheren, it reminded me of Munchkin Cthulhu in that regard. After much, much scrapping and back and forth I managed to snag the game and the coveted 10th level. I would like to note that Craig, the host was still at first level (the starting level) when I did it. Good times, good times…

A brief interlude to consume dead animals, bread and cheese occured. Including some observations about the blob like movement of the host’s above ground pool as it makes its’ slow and merciless march towards his back porch.

Obviously after a big meal nothing tops it off like a massive,massive game of Zombies!!! including the sewer and subway Zombies!!! 6 expansion. We do a few things differently to make the Zombies experience less painful. For one we substitute the heart and bullet tokens for red and black glass beads (pente style). They are easier to pick up, spot on the map and help hold the tiles down. We also play on a big honking table which allowed us to use the entire stack of tiles.

The center and a large portion of the west side of town got cleared out. This left a large void area with a huge horde of zombies to the east, the helipad and more zombies to the North and a largely buildingless but zombie filled area to the South. Nobody tried their luck in the sewers and the subway only got used once which I thought was a bit disappointing. I think once people get used to the expansion we’ll see a lot more people going underground to get around.

Once the helipad dropped that became everyone’s favorite vacation destination. Unfortunately, Corey had found his NRA membership card somewhere, raided a couple of well stocked buildings and went on a high rolling spree against the undead horde. By the time the rest of us were making a run for the helicopter Corey was three out from getting his Zombie Master merit badge and winning the game.
A few more zombie fights and he walked away with the game while the rest of us were still looking for tokens for the subway.

At this point it was getting late and we decided to have one quick round of MI before the KC crew set sail back to their home port. It was a fast and furious game that ended with me winning (I was on fire playing Munchkin that night for some reason). As a coup de grace I used the sex change card and donned a kevlar bikini even though I didn’t have to. Hey, all I can say is it was late and I’d been drinking.

Our KC brothers of Team Cthulhu departed into the night and three of us decided to have a cutthroat 300 point game of HorrorClix. The armies were weird and broke down thusly:

Craig: Elder Predator, Field Agent (yellow), Templar

Sherman: Gyrus, Imp (yellow), Vampire Hunter (blue), Field Agent (red)

Me: Hellboy (hell, yeah!), Mi-Go, Hook (red)

Obviously we had some seriously strange teams. Also, two possessors (Mi-Go and Gyrus)and 1 flyer, rules some of us didn’t have experience with. I picked a bad map that left me pinned between Sherman and Craig after the first round. (It was the camp map from the Predator box set…NEVER AGAIN for more then 2 players) My boy Hook ran up and engaged the Templar and the Elder Predator while Hellboy went and did his victim rescuing thing. The Mi-Go flew around like a retarded butterfly.

I hadn’t looked at the flight rules very closely, the Mi-Go payed the price and was shot out of the sky by Sherman’s Imp, Vampire Slayer and Gyrus. Hellboy ran up on the Imp and quickly dispatched him, but then was possessed by Gyrus and ran all over the map.

Hook eventually fell to the Predator/Templar team (he did some damage to the Templar, who proved to be suprisingly tough) meanwhile Craig’s field agent did…nothing. Sherman took his team after Craig’s crew while Hellboy tried to figure out where he was and creep up behind the fray. The vampire slayer got dropped in a big battle with field agents jumping all over the place and the suprisingly weak predator being dropped before he could use his end game nuke power. Gyrus was running around possessing Hellboy and then finally gunning him down. After another round it was down to Templar and Gyrus in a large open area. It was then that something strange happened.

The Templar ran up on the brain on a robot that is Gyruss and took him down.

A quiet settled on the house as something became clear… Craig had actually won a game.

I know, I was shocked as well.

With that the gang split up and headed home. I need to work on my HorrorClix skills, I always get thumped. Maybe next game night…

New game night report INCOMING!!!!!

[  Mood: Amused ]
This kind of stuff makes me glad to be of Scots descent.

Got rid of the shoutbox. I fought the spam dilligently but it just really wasn’t worth the effort. So…shoutbox gone.