WarMachine!

This is the first half of the Warmachine battle report my brother put together last month. I'm pretty impressed... it's the distilled action of what happens in a Warmachine game, without the dice-rolling, the animated argument, and the tedious waiting for a player to make a decision. It establishes a good narrative, the background music is excellent, and it moves along at a good clip. Enjoy.




Two points I'd like to make. One, this wouldn't have looked half as good if the models weren't painted.

Two, I suggested the Adventures of Baron Munchausen reference.

Sometimes Good Customer Service is Shutting Up

A discussion is being had in front of the counter. One of the two is discussing how his wife was once dissed, and that she has never let him forget it.

He turns to me.

"Are you married?"

"Yes," I say.

"Then you know what I'm talking about."

And I do not open my mouth and say, "No I don't, because I married a sane and rational person."

Because sometimes, good customer service is not telling the customer that he's being an asshat.

The Big Four Oh!

April 7, 2009. The weather is cold, the rain is interspersed with snow and sleet. I am officially forty.

And it's awesome.

I've recently learned that I am not the only child of the eighties who thought I would never be this old. Reagan's hawk posturing (later softened) led me to believe that there was going to be at least a 'limited nuclear exchange' at some point in the near future, and I would be dead before I was thirty-five. If you didn't live through the eighties, read Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, watch Quiet Earth or read the rulebook for Gamma World. In school, we read Benet's By the Waters of Babylon, and The Planet of the Apes was a regular on television. So according to my inner seventeen year-old, every day after thirty-five has been a bonus.

But that's not the best reason to celebrate today. This morning I received a miscellany of comments from friends, organized by the Queen of Science. If an individual's wealth is measured by the friends he has and the company he keeps, then I am rich beyond Gordon Gecko's wildest dreams of avarice. I have the best friends and family in the world, and I married an incredibly wonderful woman. I am both humbled and moved by this gift of love. Thank you, my friends.

Finally Figured Out My Current Job

For those gentle readers who are not aware, my current job is a cashier/counter person at the local game store. And I'm coming to realize that part of my job is being a bartender to geeks.

When there's no one else to talk to, there's always the bartender. If you want to talk about Naruto, your Magic: The Gathering deck, Warmachine, Warhammer, or your D&D character, the bartender is always there. He'll listen, and on occasion give encouragement, because there are few enough places to talk about these things with people who understand, or at least sympathize.

There will be the occasional story told here, generally with the names changed, which will be placed under the "Bartender to geeks" label.

Wargods of Egypt: Rise and Fall, Civilizations at War

Well, the Egypt thing just isn't going away. Over the last couple of months, I've picked up a couple of computer games that allow you to command the forces of Ancient Egypt.

Rise and Fall, Civilizations at War is a colorful game about raising armies and then throwing them at your opponent. It is also a firm believer in the heroic leader concept: your general is the stompiest badass on the field. In addition to the usual resources of gold and wood, Rise and Fall also uses the concept of glory. Glory can be used to increase to upgrade your hero's level, or to level up units. In Egyptian fashion, the more prestigious your units are, the more clothing they tend to wear. And the more graphically pretty they are.

Gameplay is otherwise bog-standard real-time strategy. Build structures that allow you to recruit forces. Some troops work better against other sorts of troops (spear-carriers do well against cavalry, for example). As an archery fan, I am sad that I can't get the sun covered by arrows effect of massive arrows in the air, but the Egyptian chariot archers that use fire-arrows satisfy me well enough. I tend to avoid the camel-mounted units, since the Egyptians did not use domesticated camels.

Rise and Fall is a good game to play I want to spend an hour beating down Romans or Persians. Once the rather short campaigns are done, all that's left is to play skirmishes against the computer on the various provided maps. Which is too bad, because the on-line community hasn't created a lot of them.

Still, the gameplay is engaging, the graphics are solid. Here's a pic of the Egyptian Ramses among his elite khepesh-wielding troopers:

Unbound Unleashed

I have copies of the first volume of Cthulhu Unbound in my hands. It should be available at your local bookstore on March 30^th, but if you want copies early, there's a book party tomorrow, Saturday the 21^st at Bennington's South Street Cafe, 5-7PM.



Contents are as follows:
"Noir-Lathotep" by Linda Donahue
"The Invasion Out of Time" by Trent Roman
"James and the Dark Grimoire" by Kevin Lauderdale
"Hellstone and Brimfire" by Doug Goodman
"Star-Crossed" by Bennet Reilly
"The Convenant" by Kim Paffenroth
"The Hindenburg Manifesto" by Lee Clarke Zumpe
"In Our Darkest Hour" by Steven Michael Graham
"Blood Bags and Tentacles" by D.L. Snell
"Bubba Cthulhu's Last Stand" by Lisa Hilton
"Turf" by Rick Moore
"The Menagerie" by Ben Thomas
"The Patriot" by John Goodrich
"The Shadow over Las Vegas" by John Claude Smith
"Locked Room" by CJ Henderson

"The Patriot" is about a man who gets a macabre history lesson while dying in the muddy No Man's Land of World War One. I think it's got the best ending of anything I've written.

For a quick preview, I present you with another Wordle of the story. I like this the composition and atmosphere of this one better. Click on it to see a larger version.



My next project is to make up some "Signed by local author" tags to stick in the books I put on the counter of the Gamers Grotto.

What did You Do This Weekend?

I was incredibly geeky. My brother came up, and recorded a battle report for a Warmachine fight against the Master Painter and his mercs. Here's the first part of the battle report, which look to be more interesting that the battle itself.



Thanks, Iren Bear. This looks awesome.

Most Eldritch

This awesome lady and her sign were seen at a Chicago counter-protest of the Westboro Baptist Church:



Today is full of win.

The Problems with Pundits

I try not to blog my politics. There's a hundred better-informed political blogs out there. However, the pundit problem is starting to piss me off. I see a lot of people blindly accepting their conclusions, then repeating those views on message boards and in conversations.

There are several problems with this.

1) First and foremost, no one should take what anyone says without thinking about it. This is so basic that it should be obvious.

2) No pundit has ever had to compromise with another lawmaking body. Democratic laws are made by compromise. A pundit never has to worry about what the members of other branches of the government have to say about it. The majority of their proclamations are unusable for this reason.

3) Hypothetical enactments never run into unintended consequences. When Idi Amin Dada (yes, I'm comparing the average ego-bloated pundit with a mass-murdering dictator with a massively overinflated ego. Often, I feel the difference between the two is opportunity) threw all the Asians out of Uganda, it seemed like a great idea to him. However, he didn't realize he'd gotten rid of his country's middle class, which was disastrous for the economy. Ooops. Since pundit proclamations never have to deal with reality, their hypothetical solutions never have unforeseen consequences.

Free Fiction

So I've been updating my website, a nip here a tuck there, changing the title of the anthology that was renamed six months ago. And while checking for webrot, I discovered that the 2007 Horror World gross-out contest I placed in has gone away.

So I now offer you the chance to read my gross-out story "Champagne" free on my website. And yes, it really is pretty gross.