Bye bye buy the brick

For the last few years, Wizkids has been giving a mail-away incentive to those customers who buy their boosters at actual retail stores instead of over the internet. They pack a case into a ‘brick’ or 12 – 10 boosters and include a coupon. If you mail in the coupon with a receipt you can get a special figure mailed out to you.

I’ve missed a few of these while I wasn’t buying boosters but have gotten the last several (Mandarin, Phantom Stranger, Dark Beast). I’ve been chasing down the ones I missed (Dr Fate and Anthony Stark) but am still missing a few (Krypto and Venom).

I didn’t get a brick yet for the new Heroclix set that came out at the beginning of March – Crisis but Wizkids just posted that all 5000 figures have already been redeemed. So the Superman / Batman World’s Finest figure on a bigger base will need to go on my missing list – that I’ll have to try and chase down on ebay when they drop – as they are already going for over $40 a pop.

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words, 30 days – November 2008

www.nanowrimo.org

I didn’t come across this until into November 2007 – too late to really join in that year. Since then, I have looked into it a bit and read his book, No Plot? No Problem! It does seem to speak to me as something worth trying.
Now to convince some other people to join in my madness. So far, Amalia has remained resistant to my prodding, but we still have almost half a year to go so we will see.

Jeanne's cake

Like most Winnipegers, there is only one picture that comes to your mind when you hear the words ‘birthday cake’. You think of that rectangular log with the shaved chocolate curls on the sides and the cookie on the bottom. I’m talking about a Jeanne’s cake.

http://www.jeannesbakery.com/Home.page

I’ve always been partial to a marble but some prefer the banana. I’ve tried the round ones that you can get at other grocery stores but lately I often go direct to the source. Some people don’t like the cookie bottom or find the cakes dry but, for me, it’s the definition of a birthday cake. For a lot of the former Winnipegers who visit, it’s often one of the things they want.

HSX - Hollywood Stock Exchange

I’ve been playing for about three years now. It’s a site where you can ‘buy’ stocks in movies that are in production and bonds in the stars. The movies cash out at their value in box office millions and the stars adjust based on their last five movies. You start with 2 million and, at present, I’m up over 150 million. I’m in the top 2% and closing in on the top 1% and am in the top 10,000 players.

I go in mostly every day to dabble in the daily stocks. Since I learned how to short bonds, I’ve done much better. Most of my main goals have been passed – 100 million, top 2%, in top 10,000, 150 million. My next big goals are $200 million and top 1%. After that, it will be a while before I crack $500 million or top 5,000.

This gives me no illusions about my ability with real stocks. This is a select environment with strict rules on how it works. The real world doesn’t adjust nearly as cleanly. Besides, the real world won’t give you $50,000 every week to dabble with just for answering a simple survey about what movie you’re going to see.

If you want to join, you can go under here - I still have a few referals left.
http://movies.hsx.com/servlet/Register?referrer=dkwd

LARP

We’re too young for any of the steam-tunnel live-action D&D craze. We did play a few of the Murder Mystery diner games – but they aren’t quite the same. By the next time live action role playing came around in a big way, Vampire the Masquerade was the one making headlines. I didn’t play that either but many who have seem to be the ones to think it’s the only game out there.

Many others systems have come out with LARP versions. I have the Star Wars, and Cthulhu Live ones. I even played a Highlander LARP back in the day at Gencon.

Some of the local players seem to think the only LARP that could be is Vampire. They were once putting together a LARP con. When I expressed interest and asked what games they would be playing, Cthulhu Live or Star Wars, they look askew at me and said that they would just be playing Vampire the Masquerade.
They didn’t appreciate my suggestion that they should rename their convention to be a VAMPIREcon instead of a LARPcon so as to not confuse people. I’m not even sure if they actually ran the convention or not – it had dropped off my radar after I found out it didn’t have anything that interested me.

Presently, I'm reading the Cthulhu Live books. They look great - I'm just not sure I have enough of a crowd with which to play though.

Car - rust repair - 3rd time the charm?

Shan has been dealing with arbitration about the Windstar for the last two months. It’s not been easy – mostly due to the fact that the lady she was dealing with wasn’t really listening to her. The end result is that the Windstar is back in at Birchwood to have the rust fixed to “industry standards”. We were a bit leery about they defined that but they basically mean “cut out the rust, weld in a new metal piece, grind down, and repaint.”

Since this was what we had wanted originally, we were happy to learn that they could do this after all. The arbiter thought we were being unreasonable about wanting it fixed “like new” and wouldn’t listen to us tell her that Birchwood was the one who brought up replacing the panels in the first place.

We did get them to provide a courtesy car again – but it took us hammering away at the arbiter that this wasn’t later repair work but rather work that was supposed to have been done before we bought the car. I think when we started bandying around the word “fraud” she finally understood.

I dropped it off on Monday morning. They had said that it should be fixed by Thursday so we shall see.

Hercules / Heracles

I’m just reading the kids the Greek and Roman mythologies – in graphic novel form. It’s a nice version that gives a good overview for them. It mainly uses the Greek names for the gods but does give charts and tables with the Roman versions. The one problem is with Heracles, or as they call him, Hercules.

With Greek myths you have – Aphrodite, Ares, Poseidon, Hades, and Heracles as Zeus’ son but not with Hera.
In Roman myths, you get – Venus, Mars, Neptune, Pluto, and Hercules as Jupiter’s son but not with Juno.

I’ve noticed that most shows seem to want to use the Greek gods but usually break down and use Hercules to not confuse the masses. Both Hercules the TV series and Hercules the animated movie have done this and it always annoys me when it happens. Of course, I would rather that they use the Roman names anyways but if they are going to use the Greek names, at least be consistent.