Wednesday Night is Game Night

Game Night! That glorious night of fun and people who might, incredibly, be slightly nerdier than I am!! The smell in the air tells me that the night has finally arrived. No, wait...the smell in the air tells me that I just walked past a skunk that's been dead and decaying since the Truman adminitration. But I can feel it. And it's great.

My test went fine on Monday, which I neglected to mention. It was real easy, considering I had studied heavily the morning of it. Also considering that the professor told us exactly what to study for. It was a bunch of questions based off of the heavily detailed notes he had us take, and five questions off All the President's Men, the book Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward wrote about the Watergate story. You know. The one that unseated President Nixon and forever changed the shape of journalism.

...Please tell me that those last two sentences were unnecessary. Please. I'll lose all faith in humanity if people don't know what the friggin' Watergate story was. I mean, they made jokes about it in Futurama, that alone should qualify its knowledge in even the basest of our youth.

Oh well. I suppose I'll find out later. Right now I'm waiting on people to arrive for my weekly game club. Even though people are invariably late, I still wait for them to be punctual. This suggests that perhaps I have the IQ of a Ritz cracker. I say it's my optimism at work, but you can only stretch that excuse so far. Unfettered optimism closely resembles delusions and madness, I've found. Still, it's always worked for me, and the giant pink iguanas ballet-dancing around me agree.

So what else happened...I gave a speech today in speech class. It was about the history of Nintendo. Piece of piss - I banged it out in two hours before class started. I wanted to make a speech about something I already knew, and something I was actually interested in speaking about, so that seemed to fit the bill. I went two minutes over time, but I didn't manage to make myself look like a total idiot. It's safe to say that I maintained my image as a partial idiot, like I always do.

The new Magic: the Gathering set, Lorwyn, looks completely and utterly ridiculous. Broken beyond belief, overpowered to a degree we haven't seen since the bemoaned Urza's sets long years ago. Sounds like a blast, I can't wait. It'll fundamentally change the shape of the game, I know it will. If the 5/5 first strike vigilant creatures that can block any number of creatures and that cost 3W don't, the planeswalker cards that can deal damage, untap lands, create creatures, and in extreme circumstances animate all creature cards in all graveyards without spending a mote of mana will. That sentence was a bit runon. I don't care.

A note I've wondered for a while: Someone named 'Steve' is posting in my comments section. (Speaking of which, post comments, people. I live and die by feedback to my work.) I know no less than three Steves. Which one are you? I just can't wait to find out.

It occurs to me that I was setting the bar a bit high with my initial blog posts. You can't expect every single one to be that long. I do have SOME limits on my time, after all. I have a test to study for on Friday, and I really should get around to buying the textbook for that class. One of these days. You know how it is, a person just doesn't have all the time in the world. My character in WoW won't get himself to 70, that much is certain.

I'm still debating on what costume I will wear when I go to Megacon (a great big anime/sci-fi/gaming/comic book/other convention) in February. I had originally planned to go as Bobobo, the titular character from the anime Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, but the fact that everyone else in the world seems to hate that show but me drove me off. Now I want to go as Scar from Fullmetal Alchemist, but there are a certain few problems with that as well. I'll have to paint my entire body to match his dark skin tone, I'll have to somehow acquire short white hair, I'll have to draw the complex tattoo he has on his right arm...and let's not forget that in the 50-odd anime episodes and 70+ manga chapters existing of FMA, he has never once smiled. He seems to have a permanent glare. I tried that, and after ten minutes it felt like my eyebrows were going to burst into flames.

I originally ended it here, with a simple "That's about it", but bugger that for a lark. I may be making shorter posts, but I can take a little extra effort and tack on a few paragraphs. Even if they're about nothing in particular, I can do it. It's an insult to my skill (or lack thereof) as a writer to write such a pitifully truncated post.

My current thought is about my future career. I do want to work for a video game magazine, like Game Informer or Electronic Gaming Monthly (or any one of the dozen or so others I know about, honestly, magazine fields are extremely highly specialized these days). But it would also be interesting to take a page from my girlfriend's book and spend a stint as a foreign correspondent. I read some of P.J. O'Rourke's books on the subject, and he MAKES it sound like a rollicking good time, but I know he's lying. He really doesn't sugarcoat what he goes through, he just somehow manages to convey the impression that while being pepper-gassed in Korea and shot at in Beirut, he was enjoying himself. I believe this firmly falls under the category of "I went through hell to bring you this amusing anecdote, so gosh darn it, enjoy it or else." I really have no illusions, but it does make for an interesting expense report when all is said and done ("Did he really claim $5,621 for 'fermented socially-lubricating interview-inducers'?") and it sounds like a hoot. Plus, if I get arrested (which I probably will, for one reason or another), I'll be able to run a front-page story in the New York Times on how horrible I've been treated. So it's win-win.

Game Night was an absolute blast. We played "Token Effort", a game that I suspect the guy who told it to us made up on the spot, which is really too complicated to explain but caused the sentence "You didn't spend enough tokens. Now you all have a sex change," to be spoken. Anything that begets that, while all the participants are sober, certainly merits some thought. Even if that thought is "If I ever see anyone doing this, I'll shoot them right then out of sheer mercy." In between games of that, we played Pirate's Cove, which is an entertaining pirate simulator. The most interesting part of that was when one of the players attempted to take on the Flying Dutchman by himself. The resulting slaughter caused much merriment in all but him.

A high point of the evening was when we all gathered around to watch videos of a certain Super Mario World hack, in which all the levels were changed to be fiendishly difficult. I might even say some of them were archdemonically difficult. For example, a given task would be to jump from platform to platform as they fell from the sky, with no real ground to support oneself and the margin of error being a tenth of a second, at best. This sort of task would then be repeated approximately forty to sixty times in a given level. Not all at once, mind, but enough to cause the most ardent gamer to hurl his controller away like it was personally responsible and stomp off, cursing the names of all who invented such tripe. It gave the player unlimited lives, and just as well. Dying upwards of 100 times to complete a level, even for the extremely skilled person playing in the videos, was not uncommon. The name of the hack is a bit crude to mention here, to an open audience, and even a line of asterisks would allow the inquisitive to guess. So let's call it "Crude-nickname-for-an-annoying-and-disreputable-person Mario". That should be vague enough for the parents of impressionable children.

THAT'S about it.