STUFF & THINGS 7

By Richard Early

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I went to use your phone but figured out it was the pop machine.”

VACATION: ALL I EVER WANTED

I know that I have broken the streak. I know some of you will point that out rather mercilessly. But sometimes you just gotta do it. I went on vacation last Thursday and was gone until Monday. I originally intended to post a blog on Monday but that plan never came to fruition. So here we are.

I went to Sioux Falls SD for the weekend. My grandparents live in a retirement home there. My grandmother is a young 93, and my grandfather is 99. His big century mark is coming up in October. He currently holds the undesirable title of oldest living resident.

I went with my two younger brothers. Many of you know them. Alex works here and is distinguishable by the distinct hair. My middle brother Nick is, well, he just is. That’s not a topic for one blog. It would be like a year long series. Anyway, we also met one of our cousins, Adam Mills. Adam and Nick are the same age, 25, and our other cousin, Adam’s sister Katie, is the same age as Alex, 20. They were all very close as kids in part because of their ages. I’m the old guy, 39, with no such matching relative.

4 days is our longest trip to Sioux Falls in at least a decade. Most trips it’s in and out in 2 or a Christmas trip of 3. But we’ve had limited time with everybody so this was a great change of pace. We saw our grandparents every day, which was great. I especially enjoyed my Saturday night where I spent about 3 hours alone with them. They of course want all the dirt on the other brothers. We also saw Adam every day, which was by far the most time we’ve possibly spent with him in forever.

We screwed up one major thing. We tried to go to the zoo on Saturday. Sioux Falls has a great zoo so it’s fun to visit. But the place was packed Saturday. There was not one single parking spot in their fairly large lot. So we gave up and did something else. Well, I found out after getting back to Fargo that there were 3 tiger cubs born there on Saturday. How awesome would that have been? And it explains why the place was packed.

Sioux Falls is pretty much like Fargo only a little larger. The city is laid out kind of poorly with the old part of the city now surrounded by modern expansion. The population is about 150,000, so pretty close to Fargo, Moorhead, and West Fargo combined. But the best feature is the Falls Park area. Sioux Falls was founded in 1883 on the Sioux River and there was an old mill there that has since burned down. But the whole area has been turned into a wonderful park with observation points overlooking the falls themselves. Recently, they’ve added a five story observation tower that overlooks the whole city. You can see the falls on one side and the old stockyard and Morrell’s on the other. It’s pretty cool.

Well, while we were there Friday afternoon, the air show was just starting up. So the Blue Angels were performing. That was pretty cool. They put on quite a show over the whole down, but buzzed the park quite a bit so we got some pretty close up action. The show must have lasted at least an hour.

OK, this is probably really boring. The point is I got out of the store for 4 days which is a pretty major accomplishment for me. I’m a big routine guy. Too big. I like my own bed and my own stuff and get a lot of anxiety about going on trips. As many of you know and have pointed out, I spend way too much time at the shop. Which is true.

BRETT FAVRE

Now that it’s over, I hope I never utter that name again. Don’t get me wrong, I was driving the bandwagon to get him here. But I think you have to realize that it was never about Brett Favre. It was about how awful our current quarterbacks are. I know plenty of people, 2 in particular, who were threatening to boycott the team for the season if Favre was the quarterback. First of all, I don’t believe them, and secondly, that’s just stupid. I don’t believe for one second that given the option to win football games or lose football games, you would choose to lose them. Give me a break.

It is true that Favre’s stats have declined the last quarter of every season for 3-4 years. I was hoping that AP would help with that problem and envisioned Favre throwing 20-25 passes rather than 35-40.

It would have been one of the great sports stories of all time. Probably the biggest here in Minnesota. Even nationally, though, I don’t think any rival teams have had such a swap occur outside of Clemens to the Yankees. And this of course was what had some fans riled up. If Favre had had the exact same career but played for the Kansas City Chiefs or the Houston Texans, Vikings fans would have been unanimous. I understand the Packer hate, I share it, but the Packers rejected Favre. They traded him to the Jets. They had him for 16 years and only won 1 title. Given all that, had he come to the Vikings and had we won a title, it would have been the ultimate in your face to the Pack. Now, unfortunately, Packers fans can mercilessly mock us because we tried so hard to get him and don’t even have the wins to support it. We’re so screwed.

Last thing on the Vikings. My cousin Adam lives in Mankato and took a ton of pictures from last year’s training camp. His favorite moment was when a Viking defensive back fell down and was lying flat on his back when T-Jack threw the ball to him. That’s right, Jackson through an interception to a guy lying on his back. This is your guy, Brad Childress.

We would have beaten the Eagles in the home playoff game last year if our QB didn’t suck so badly. To the day, I have no idea why Gus wasn’t put in that game. Jackson came in against Detroit late in the season and looked good against the worst team in NFL history. The following week, our whole team walked all over the Falcons who couldn’t have cared less because they had the division sewn up. So people were getting on the T-Jack bandwagon. But here’s the truth. He looked absolutely awful the next week against Atlanta, terrible against New York the last week of the season and only managed to win because the Giants pulled their starters at half time (and we still had a last second 50 yard field goal to win a home game against an opponent who didn’t even want to play), and then capped it off by being utterly terrible against the Eagles.

Jackson is one of the 3-4 worst QBs in my Viking watching history, which started around 1980. There was Steve Dills in 1982. There was Rich Gannon’s rookie year in 1992 or 3, whichever year Dennis Green took over. But Gannon went on to be good, something that Jackson will never do. And then there was that joke Spurgen Wynn, whose name I can’t remember how to spell. But that guy was never going to be a starter and was forced into action due to injury at the end of a bad season anyway.

I could go on forever on Viking football so I better stop. My whole point here is that Favre would have been exhilarating for the fans, the team, and the franchise. I have to wonder right now where Childress will be in a year. I have to wonder whether the team will get a stadium with the terrible ticket sales they will probably now endure. And I have to wonder if that long-standing talk of moving the franchise out of here might not be more real than ever. The Wilfes have spent money on players and tried to bring Favre here as the centerpiece of a veteran team. Their stadium efforts have been rebuffed time and time again from their original development plans north of the Twin Cities to refurbishing the Metrodome. Obviously, the economics in Minnesota are awful for this sort of thing right now, despite the Twins and Gophers getting stadiums. In the end, you cannot understate the potential damage to the franchise that this decision to stay retired by Favre has done.

NEXT

We’re back in action and I’ll keep you up to date.

STUFF & THINGS 7

By Richard Early

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Do you have Agmablam comics?”

NOTE: this one’s really obscure, despite being a personal favorite. The customer is looking for the DC/Marvel Amalgam books and manages to blurt out ‘Agmablam’. I love it.

2010 BOX SEALED

So I’ve had this crackpot idea forever to run a sealed box tourney. Each player supplies a booster box, there’s an entry fee, and builds a deck out of what they open. 2010 seemed like the perfect time to go for it for many reasons. It’s a core set, after all. Before you say it, no, we’re not simply trying to sell more boxes. Most players who played were already buying one.

I took part. We needed a guy to make 8 and it looked like a lot of fun. It’s like the ultimate launch party sort of deal. I think there were also about 20 players at FNM (Standard here), so we had a pretty good turnout for the night.

Oh, yeah, the rules (thanks for calling Scott). You open 36 packs, you build 60 card minimum deck, and we’re imposing the 4 copy per card limit.

Anyway, my box. My box was good. Highlights were Ajani and Garruk. Ajani was very tempting. I had the requisite amount of dudes, and Ajani plus dudes is good. I had triple Elite Vanguard, a boat of the soldier +1/+0 and +0/+1 dudes. There was a Planar Cleansing, a Harm’s Way, a Divine Verdict, and 2 Pacifisms. The problem in the end was that without Ajani, the package seems kind of boring. Keep in mind, your normal sealed deck pool has 6 packs. So we’re dealing with six times that much. It becomes quickly apparent that a lot of cards that are good in a normal sealed don’t even come into consideration here. Cards like Divine Verdict or Righteousness, for instance. Basically combat tricky things like Glorious Charge or even Giant Growth.

Then there was my Blue. OK, done with that. Then there was my black. 4 Doom Blades. Yum. It was immediately pointed out by Brian (who gets primary credit for this deck design) that Doom Blade is about the world’s easiest splash, especially when paired with green ramp cards such as Rampant Growth and Borderland Ranger. Not a lot else in the black. Obviously Tendrils of Corruption is powerful, but you really have to commit and this box didn’t have it. When 2 of my black rares were Haunting Echoes, there just weren’t any high end bombs for the color. Rise from the Grave was about it.

OK, red. Oh, red. Let’s see, where should I start? Commons/uncommons? Sure. 3 Lightning Bolt, 2 Fireball. Rares: 1 Earthquake, 1 foil Earthquake, Siege-Gang Commander, Shivan Dragon, and Capricious Efreet. I realized in deck design that even the Efreet, a clear limited powerhouse, just wasn’t good enough. We’re bordering on constructed, and when you can pile in all these higher quality cards the consistency of your deck dictates which cards you can play. Meaning that things with marginal effects become les relevant than in a more limited pool.

So to tie it all together was green. I already loved the green cards. There were 4 Rampant Growth, 2 Borderland Ranger, and 3 Llanowar Elves. There was Garruk, as mentioned, Protean Hydra, and Great Sable Stag. There were some Cudgel Trolls to fill in the blanks, and a couple of Centaur Coursers, too. The big decision at this point though involved our two Overruns. They were in the deck all the way to the final build. It’s a choice between control and aggro. My feeling on keeping them in was that they are just too ‘bomby’. That even though the deck was at 21 creatures, they were still just too good. But in the end, the Rampant Growth style of the deck made it look and act like big mana from standard more than anything else. You want to accelerate early and then just go bomb, bomb, bomb. So Overrun hit the skids as a cut from 38 to 36 cards to accommodate what might have been the right amount of land.

So here’s the decklist:
CREATURES3 LLANOWAR ELVES

4 ELVISH VISIONARY

2 BORDERLAND RANGER

2 CENTAUR COURSER

2 CUDGEL TROLL

1 ELVISH PIPER

2 ACIDIC SLIME

1 PROTEAN HYDRA

1 SEIGE GANG COMMANDER

1 SHIVAN DRAGON

Elvish Piper could be the combat trick nut or bust out the Dragon or the Commander quick. And the type of creatures just didn’t work with the Overrun plan. Yeah, there are Elves and Visionaries, but after that it’s just fat guy fat guy fat guy that don’t need Overrun to break the game open.

SPELLS

3 LIGHTNING BOLT

4 DOOM BLADE

4 RAMPANT GROWTH

2 FIREBALL

2 EARTHQUAKE

Hope you weren’t counting on your creatures winning this game for you ‘cause you’re going to be sad about that.

LAND

4 TERRAMORPHIC EXPANSE

1 DRAGONSKULL SUMMIT

1 ROOTBOUND CRAG

12 FOREST

4 MOUNTAIN

2 SWAMP

The only issue could have been the 4 mountains slightly underpowered the Shivan, but with the two duals and the fact that Shivan is a 5/5 flyer anyway, I’m not too worried about it.

We had to cut cards like Nature’s Spiral and Rise from the Grave that seemed great with Siege Gang and the Acidic dude. But again, the primary power of the deck outweighed the potential utility of those cards. Too much gas.

PLAYING THE GAMES:
ROUND 1: MIRROR (Actually, he didn’t splash for the black, but other than that his deck was better than mine because he had two Ant Queen and could play the Overrun as he chose to go with Howl of the Night Pack)

GAME 1: He’s mana screwed on a keep of Forest, Llanowar. I Bolt the Elf and he never gets back in the game. He states that he kept the hand because it had multiple Fireballs in it, which I am convinced is a terrible decision. No mana + x-spell sounds awful, let alone no mana + 2 x-spells.

GAME 2: Overrun after Howl. Bad for me.

GAME 3: Garruk into Acidic with 3/3 token already in play. Fireball for the win. Oh, I should make it clear that I won since he had Garruk, too. He also had Siege-Gang and Earthquake, but he put the ‘quake in the board, another bad move in my opinion. He was afraid of killing his own guys but never looked at ‘quake as the x-spell finisher it also is.

ROUND 2: W/U and then U/R (The old switch-a-roo)

GAME 1: He plays Elite Vanguard, Soul Warden, and the soldier guy who costs 2W, but never drops a second plains and can’t bring it home. He pacifies my mana ramp dude and Cudgel Troll stops the offense after I’ve Bolted soldier pump guy.

GAME 2: The red is not just a color swap, it’s a completely new deck. I find out after the game that he has 3 Sleep and 4 Mind Control in this thing. Ugh. It’s a slow game for both sides and he eventually steals my Protean Hydra at 5 counters. I chump it with Courser and don’t have the bolt to kill it so at EOT it turns up to 4. He starts to mount fliers but Shivan hits with removal in hand and he can’t top deck a needed second Mind Control.

ROUND 3: U/W/R

GAME 1: He gets stuck on just a couple of lands, and Cudgel Troll beats down pretty quickly. I did correctly play around multiple Harm ’s Ways by not attacking with the two Llanowar Elves in play, but he couldn’t muster an answer to the troll. The game ends with Doom Blade, Lightning Bolt, and Fireball still in hand, and an Earthquake as my next draw.

GAME 2: His land screw is even worse this time. A timely Flashfreeze (a clutch sideboard call against a primarily R/G deck) prevents back-to-back Acidic Slimes from destroying his only two lands. Shivan Dragon makes quick work of the empty board, and the deck goes 3-0!

It felt like an awfully good deck. If anything, more expensive crap would have been good. I know there was an Enormous Baloth or two in the pool so maybe they should have gone in.

I highly recommend you play box sealed sometime in your life. I would stick to a core set or the first set of a block, I think. Conflux box sealed doesn’t sound so great to me. Can you imagine Alrara Reborn? We’ll definitely try the event again in the future. 8 players was a huge success considering the cost involved. Mad props to all you who played.

NEXT?

I always try to close out with this but I realize that I have nothing to promote because of the free form nature of my blog. I don’t know what’s next.

I did see Bruno this week. Eh. Not as good as his last picture, but a solid comedy. A little too staged and less free feeling. Lots of shock value, some worked some didn’t But I did laugh quite a bit.

STUFF & THINGS 6

By Richard Early

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“It’s not illegal if you don’t get caught.”

NOTE: If it’s not illegal, why would someone be trying to catch you?

GROWING UP MARVEL

I got into comics through school and Battlestar Galactica. I got a subscription to Marvel’s BSG comic series in about 1978 or so at the ripe age of 8 or 9. Then it was the Micronauts. Oh, I love the Micronauts. Then it was Spider-Man. And then it was the X-Men.

The X-Men had a crossover with the Micronauts or I never would have heard of them. That’s why Marvel does things like Transformers/ Avengers, by the way. It’s not because they’re good, it’s because they want to market their characters with a big property. Anyway, that crossover clued me in to the fact that there was a larger world out there than just what I was reading.

Those who don’t read comics need a little assist here. See, Marvel Comics has what’s known as the Marvel Universe, just as DC Comics has the DC Universe. Any book set in the Marvel Universe is in continuity with every other book under that banner. So when I first realized that something that transpired in a Thor comic might affect the X-Men or Spider-Man, my young mind was overwhelmed. The concept of such a fictional realm was amazing. Imagine if all TV shows on Fox or ABC or wherever were interconnected. The guys on Fringe might end up under care of Dr. Greg House. Or maybe a Doll could be programmed to enter American Idol. Crazy, huh? Now imagine being 10 years old and figuring that out.

Marvel also has a very unique identity. They try very hard to keep their universe ‘real’. It’s gritty, dark, and cutting edge. They want the world their characters operate in to emulate ours as much as possible. For example, they tied Spidey in to 9/11 and more recently had President Obama team up with him. It’s very attractive in your teens as you learn about the world you live in.

So I grew up Marvel all the way.

Over the years, my fandom began to fade. As I got into my 20s, a pattern began to emerge. A pattern that’s hard to see when you’re new into comics. Basically, about every five years or so Marvel likes to throw in the towel and start over. Everything old is new again. Storylines are rehashed, characters are revived from the dead, plotlines are redone, or villains reappear for yet another final battle. That’s OK. Really. I want young readers to feel what I felt about comics when I was growing up. And for the most part, Marvel did a great job of these re-launches. Most times, they stayed pretty true to the origin of the characters or they found a modern reinvention that made sense.

The best example of this technique is the Ultimate line. Again, a brief explanation. Ultimate Marvel’s premise is to imagine that there has never been a Marvel comic before. In other words, they do Spidey and X-Men and Avengers but they redo them from square one. In the case of Spidey, they very faithfully started Peter over from the beginning. They made him a little more emo than originally, but they didn’t have emo in the 1960s. It made sense. The X-Men got a more intense overhaul with Storm becoming a mall girl and Colossus becoming a Russian mobster. But that seemed to work to.

Skip ahead to 2006 and Civil War. Civil War in concept was one of Marvel’s best ideas of all time. The premise of the 7 issue mini-series was that the government wanted to pass a super-hero registration act. This decision split the heroes. So instead of hero vs. villain, it was hero vs. hero and both sides held to what they saw as legitimate beliefs. On one side, Iron Man supported the law and on the other, Captain America opposed it. The series still impacts the Marvel Universe even today. The pro-reg forces ultimately win but recently, Norman Osborne has come to power and the good intentions of the heroes have been corrupted by some of Marvel’s main villains.

So, here it is, the moment I stopped growing up Marvel. Civil War #7 featured the final showdown of the rebel forces under Cap. As the battle raged on in New York, Cap’s group is actually winning. But suddenly, Cap is attacked by firefighters and police officers – the heroes of 9/11. Cap realizes that he is tearing the country apart with his continued fighting and surrenders to Iron Man.

For my money, this is bar none the worst event in the history of Marvel Comics. First of all, Cap is the epitome of a soldier. He has fought in World War 2 all the way through Civil War. He’s fought in Secret Wars, Kree/Skrull wars, and a hundred other major conflicts. If anyone knows the consequences to war, it’s Cap. That means that going into Civil War, deciding to take up arms against Iron Man, he already calculated the costs. That would have to be part of his decision. If he was resolute enough to begin the engagement, he would not give up on that conviction at the very moment of victory. This brings up another point. The war was about to end. The damage was about to be over. Iron Man was at Cap’s feet. So the conclusion that the cost was too high is meaningless since the worst of it was already behind him. This is an absurd twist of character to service upcoming events. It’s a betrayal of the character and the ideas he represented to perpetuate conflict.

That’s just part of my complaint. That’s just the ruination of Captain America, one of my favorite characters. Let’s move on to the implications to the Marvel universe as a whole. Cap’s rebellion is based on his fundamental belief in individual freedom. Forcing people to register simply because they have powers is akin to Nazi Germany registering people for their religious beliefs. It also undercuts the concepts of privacy that should be fundamental to a truly free society. By having Iron Man win, Marvel is validating the opposite. They are thematically validating the power of the state over its citizens. They are validating fascism.

In the early 1980s, Chris Claremont and John Byrne defined the X-Men with “Days of Future Past”. In that story, the government comes to round up the mutants. Not only do the mutants fight back, so do the major heroes of the Marvel Universe. That defined the moral supremacy of our heroes and reasserted the inherent evil of oppressive rule. Now, over two decades later, the Marvel Universe has completely reversed course. The dark future is not only upon them, but the heroes are part of it. They don’t resist, they actively fight for it.

Oh, and also, if you disagree with your government, not only should you be jailed, as Cap was, but you should be shot, too, as Cap subsequently was.

I haven’t gone back very much. I own Civil War #1-6 but refused to pay money for #7. I have read some comics from Marvel, such as Old Man Logan or the Twelve. But those books are not in continuity. I will probably go back some day. Maybe not until the current editorial staff is gone. But some day. I love the characters way too much.

What’s my substitute? That’s a whole other blog. I’ll say this: I read as many or more titles than I ever have, be they single issue monthly books or trade paperbacks.

I want to end by saying that the purpose of this blog is not to sway anyone’s opinion on Marvel Comics. I have a life long love. In fact, I wouldn’t be so upset otherwise. If I didn’t care, it wouldn’t bug me so much. I also firmly believe that the current Dark Reign concept is fantastic and am interested in where they take it. Just from a distance is all. They have great creative teams and great product. I don’t want this blog to be about me shoving my opinion in your face. I just want it to be stories about me or Paradox and this is one that is squarely on my mind as a comic lover and a comic retailer.

In fact, I can remember being a kid and getting opinions shoved in my face. I hated it then and I hate it now. So please take it for what it is. Oh, and I’ll tell you about being a kid reading comics in Fargo someday, too.

WHAT’S NEXT

The record streak will continue. I know that much. I’m planning to catch Bruno and the new Harry Potter flick in the near future. I’ll definitely have something to say about Brett Favre, possibly by next week.

Thanks for your attention. Again, please let me know what you think. I’m pretty happy with the way this is developing. I’m feeling like I’m finding myself here as I go along. Each week’s posting has felt like a little improvement over the last. Going back and reading the first already seems silly.

STUFF & THINGS 5

By Richard Early

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“How much are the quarter packs?”

THE BOY WHO NEVER FOUGHT DRAGONS

I’ve played a lot of role playing games in my day. But I was just thinking about the fact that I have never played a game of Dungeons and Dragons, in any version. Sure, I owned the old AD&D box set like everybody else. I may have even rolled up a character. But I’ve never played.

In high school, a friend of mine got me started in RPGs with the old ICE Lord of the Rings system. I loved it. We played that all the time. I was this warrior human from Gondor named Rog-we (a pun of the word rogue). We did it all. We fought orcs and dragons and Balrogs. I became so powerful I basically ruled the country and we eventually had to dump those characters and start over. One of my friends and I each learned one word in the black language of Numenor so we could send each other signals during combat. I learned “Chips” and he learned “Ahoy”.

We had this great basement at my buddy’s house. It was finished and there was cable TV and a VCR and all that good stuff. Friday nights were play night. There was a convenience store about two blocks away and this one friend of ours would get a 2-liter of Mountain Dew and a bag of Doritos and eat it all himself.

The other big game I got into was the Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game. I ran these games and was a total fanatic for the system. We played in the Marvel Universe, but always with our own characters. I killed off so many of my group’s characters that I was able to bring them all back to life as an opposing team at one point (sorry Geoff Johns). We had such diverse heroes as Clubber – you might be able to imagine his power. Yep, a strong guy with a club. One of my favorites. Then there was Sparky, a dude made out of Diamond (sorry Emma Frost). Or one guys Punisher rip off, whose name I can’t even remember. All I know is that he called him Kovaks as a Watchmen reference. We had characters made out of copper who could conduct electricity. We had a guy who could control gravity but had no legs. He was called Gavel and was studying to be a lawyer. I always wanted him to become a judge eventually. We were a bloody group, too. We loved to phase people into objects and let go of them or teleport people into walls. Al the stuff that never happened in the comic but made sense to a bunch of sixteen year old guys.

I can remember most of our adventures. One of my favorites was trapping the team in a room made of adamantium with no exits and pitting them against some enemy team. But right in the middle of the room, a black hole appeared. Let me just say the survival rate was not high on that one. Our last adventure ever was set on the moon. I teleported the Baxter building there and our heroes had to reach the top floor to prevent the cosmic forces of the universe from destroying the Earth. All the universal entities were tired of us mucking around with them and decided o be done with us. But one of them, whom we had helped, convinced the rest to give us one last chance to survive. I stacked the building with every powerhouse villain we had ever faced. In the end, Clubber was the last character standing and he set off a nuke that destroyed him, the building, and the bad guys. The Earth was spared because his sacrifice was selfless. But the planet was sealed off from the rest of the universe. Sure, it sounds stupid today, but you had to be there.

Plus that adventure took place as we were graduating high school. Some of our friends were leaving. While everyone else was drinking and hooking up with the girl or guy they always wanted to, we were fighting for the fate of the world. Awesome.

I tried Cyberpunk, Traveler, Twilight 2000, Champions, Killer, and several others. We played lots of Steve Jackson games. We played OGRE and Car Wars. We tried the original FASA Star Trek: the Next Generation. We tried the Star Wars game. And I picked up Battletech and tried that. My personal crush was for the Robotech system from Paladium. I was a huge Robotech junkie and went nuts for the game. At one point, I owned every piece they released for the game. Man, that was an awesome system. We pretty much cut the role playing out on that one and just piloted Veritechs against Hordes of Invid and Zentradi. Loved it.

But in all that time and the twenty some odd years since, I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know why that is significant, it really isn’t. It just popped into my head today when someone was talking to me about 3.5 vs 4.0.

Nobody on my staff right now is a role player. It’s been that way for a while. I’ve had a mind to hire someone in that area but just haven’t done it yet. I was thinking recently that maybe I would go back to my pre-Magic roots. Maybe I would pick out a game to run. I of course contemplated D&D, but I’m just not feeling it right now. I really liked the superhero stuff we used to do. There are two major systems out there right now: the Hero System, and Mutants and Masterminds. I decided to try out the latter. I just got the core book and haven’t cracked it yet. I know it started out as a d20 game so I’m interested to see what I think of that. I’ll probably let you know some week.

WHAT’S NEXT

As usual, I have no idea. So far I’m pretty much finding that I blog about something that hits me on a Friday. I start off the day wondering what to blog about and three pages later, I’m done. I like it, it’s fun.

I’m also starting to have random people I barely know mention that they have read it. That’s kind of scary but also kind of exciting. After all, that’s the whole pint, right?

Oh, quick acknowledgement. Thanks to Brian Hellevang who makes this legible every week. I asked if he had read last week’s yet and he said, “Read it? It’s unpublishable until I fix it!” I’m pretty much a big word whore who doesn’t care about typos. After all, I know what I'm trying to say.

See ya.