Miss Ill Aynie Us

• So we stopped by ConQuest SF Friday night and Saturday, enjoying some good times playing a few games and making some nice scores in the flea markets/dealer room. The highlight was a lengthy game of Arkham Horror which is so good that it probaby cracked my top five board games after only one play, so that was cool. I also scored some cool Blood Bowl blisters on the cheap and picked up a card-based fantasy wargame (very similar in mechanics and theme to Warmaster only without the pricey models) that looks pretty cool as far as that goes. The weirdest experience was a demo I got for a skirmish-level SF miniatures game called Rezolution. Put it this way: I played a quick couple of rounds against another guy getting the demo and I literally wiped him out without getting hit once. I could blame it on the dice rolling but it wasn’t like I was making spectacular rolls so instead I chalked it up to poor game balance which, in a game like that, means one thing: It’s broken. Sorry guys, try me again with Second Edition. While you’re at it, maybe think about offering something that isn’t already done (and better) in games like Necromunda.
• We had lunch with Nik’s Dad and Grandma when we got back and then stopped to see Grandma’s new digs in the retirement community she moved into recently. It’s a nice place (Nik and I actually lived across the street from there in our first apartment right after we got married and I used to go there before the management changed to recycle newspapers for Boy Scouts way back in the day), although it is currently in the process of being rennovated so it looks kind of in-progress. Despite the general pleasantness of the surroundings, there can’t help but be a sort of sad, morbid atmosphere around a place like that. I couldn’t tell if Grandma was happy, unhappy or indifferent to the whole thing, which made it somewhat awkward on top of everything.
• HB and Gin spent their weekend shopping for a new TV, eventually settling on a JVC 40″ HD LCD set. Of course they also needed new speakers and immediately had their old receiver give up the ghost on them (of course) so had to replace that as well. The bottom line was that they pretty much upgraded their whole entertainment setup and as a result had a leftover 36″ Sony Trinitron. They offered to let us have it for the price of taking them out to dinner (a mighty fair deal in my estimation) so we hit Ikea after we left Grandma’s place and grabbed a new TV stand (the old entertainment center wouldn’t accomodate the new TV… at least I don’t think it would; and even if it did, it worked out better this way) which marked the innagural use of the truck for hauling purposes. With Nik’s expert help we slapped the stand together in less than 30 minutes and then HB and I muscled the behemoth of a TV out to my truck, then up the stairs into our apartment. Of course we needed a bit of help from the next door neighbor once I lost my balance and ended up sitting on one of the steps with the 750 pound beast pinning me down and making my leverage such that I could not stand back up. Eventually we managed to grunt and strain to get it set on the stand and there it will stay until I pay some burly men an obscene hourly rate to move it for us because I am never picking that thing up again as long as I live. Still, it was mostly worth it once I turned it on and saw SportsCenter with Lee Corso’s head staring at me some two feet across. I did say it was mostly worth it.
• One thing I only peripherally noticed about our old TV (now in the bedroom, replacing the sad TV/VCR combo 19″ set on which the VCR no longer worked and had a bad greenish burn-in mark in the lower left corner) is that it wasn’t aligned right so about two inches of the picture was cropped on the right side. Mostly this didn’t affect viewing except when title screens were right-aligned and you’d lose a few letters on the end of words and names. But it turns out there’s a whole little world going on over on the right side of TV screens like little faded overlays of network logos and stuff. Not that I’m super-thrilled about seeing all that now but it makes me wonder what else I missed watching the other TV.
• Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died yesterday in an accident involving a lethal but very uncommon stingray attack. On one hand, we all knew this was coming. I mean, the dude was constantly picking up stuff like the Venusian Death Beetle and saying, “This lil’ bugger’s got 40cc’s of the world’s most toxic poision stashed in each of seventeen different stingers! Let’s shake him up and bit and see what happens, right?” But going out on the barb of a normally docile stingray? On that hand, it’s kind of… anticlimactic? I can’t decide if him being taken out by a typically non-dangerous critter is fitting or sadly ironic. At least he wasn’t like hit by a bus or something. That would have been really weak.
• Worst Price is Right Player Ever. Stay til the end because Bob Barker’s reaction is splendid. I kept waiting for him to say, “I need a nap.”

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