Today, I Accomplished Absolutely Nothing

Except for mailing a form and a check to the guy who owns the apartment I'm hopefully going to live in next year, I accomplished absolutely freaking nothing at all today. What a shame. But I had set aside today to be burned up without accomplishing anything useful. Tomorrow I'll do my project for my political science class, and over the weekend, among other things, I'll finish the paper. Shouldn't be too too difficult.

We played Dungeons & Dragons on Tuesday, with Chuck. Astonishingly enough, none of us died. We encountered many fearsome villains, but we were just all the more fearsome. Actually, most of it was a logic puzzle, us trying to maneuver our way around inside a set of underwater tunnels inside an undersea mountain. We managed on several occasions to take literally the most complex route possible back to our original position, taking precisely the turns in our path that would lead us most astray. I can't claim anything but sheer luck and the perversity of the universe here.

We did fight a few good villains. Undersea trolls, for one thing. Hard to deal with, especially when they hit with two claws and a bite, and automatically do even more damage when they hit with both claws. The ranger nearly died, but my cleric was able to resuscitate her. My warmage was stymied, since the trolls immediately closed to melee range and he was unable to use his flashy area-of-effect spells to defeat them. He compromised by using his heat vision (some call it scorching ray, I call it heat vision, because heat vision is awesome) to pick them off one by one.

Oh, and the fighter. Ah, the fighter. Since Robert couldn't make it, we had Chuck's roommate, Darius, fill in for him instead. He made a fighter who specialized in throwing light hammers. I mean, he had magical bags of holding with hundreds of hammers in each of them. I joked that all he needed was a turtle shell and a bike helmet and he could be an Amazin' Swimmin' Hammer Brother. This went over well.

For some reason, I could not stop laughing at this next bit. Before we submerged, we were on a boat, and had nothing to do for a few days. To pass the time, the fighter decided that he would practice his hammer-juggling. This is somewhat amusing but nothing LOL-worthy. The great bit came when the captain was getting on our nerves for some reason or another. My cleric could not threaten him, for he's extremely lawful good and doesn't go for that sort of thing, but Darius leaned over the table and said "I stare at him and start menacingly juggling hammers." Just the thought of his dwarf fighter, with a look of intense concentration and anger, hammers whirling like dervishes, sent me into a fit of laughter that I could not contain, despite my best efforts. I was disabled for the better part of five minutes.

One of the other foes we fought was a giant psychic fish-thing called an aboleth. It went, attacked the ranger, infected her with a terrible disease that would turn her into a fish-like drone thing, the fighter threw his hammers, the cleric prayed, then the warmage's turn finally rolled around.

"I cast disintegrate."

Vaporized in one shot. Ooh, I like playing a warmage. I think I'm going to change the name of the spell to "EXTERMINATE" and say it like a Dalek whenever I use it. It's basically a death-ray anyway.

"Sorry for ruining your boss fight," I said to Chuck.

"Don't worry about it, I got two more. I know how PCs can be," he said. Or something like that.

Aggravatingly, we gained no treasure or experience from this side-quest, as Robert was not with us to share in the spoils. I maintain that we should have gotten something, but hey, Chuck's the DM, and he's fairly brimming with magic items elsewise anyway.

One other thing that was cool: Tonight, as I was bringing my laundry out to wash, I felt - but did not hear - an enormous bird whooshing over my head. It perched on a lamppost. I went over and had a look, and lo and behold, it was an owl. I didn't even know we had owls up here. It was very neat. As it flew, it made absolutely no noise. None. Silence. Kind of creepy. Especially, when I walked up to get a better look, it started staring at me with its predatorial eyes. I felt like it was thinking "Mmm...nah, too big." Birds of prey are like that. So, I thought that was kind of cool.

Today's Luke-Approved YouTube Link of the Day is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA0ffVBw584 Possibly the Crowning Moment of Awesome (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrowningMomentOfAwesome the TVtropes website, go here at your peril as it'll drain your life away) of Samwise Gamgee as a character comes here, when Shelob (the big spider) has just stabbed Frodo and is webbing him up.

"Let him go, you filth."

When my mother and I went to see this movie at its midnight release, at that line, the audience stood up and cheered and applauded wildly. I mean, how can you not?

REPLIES.

Mike: Hush.

Jake: Yeah, I have. I can't wait for Meet the Sniper, Meet the Medic, Meet the Pyro, even. I was waiting on Meet the Spy, but someone pointed out - I could have already seen the Spy's video and not known it.

Dad: It amazed me, even as I wrote, how interesting a story about a completely boring character can truly be. Oh, and that really stinks about your arm. Best to take it philosophically, I suppose. Nothing really to be done there.

Steve: Uneventfulness, no. Laziness, certainly. That story got me an A in the class, I'm darn sure proud of it. Link?!? Link sucks in this new game. Charge-up spin attack my fanny, I tell you. Boxing, still. Sigh. I still think Dan can beat you up. Summer term? Deep sigh. Well, at least you'll be around for a few weeks.

Later.