Using Facebook's Evil for Good

I really wish I had a OMGWTFBBQ?! tag/picture 'cause I would totally use is for this post.

Now I have to warn you this following video has some NSFW language, but to be fair it is narrated by a Brit and those guys use different swears than us, so it might be completely safe for work on the other side of the pond.

Not that I have any British readers, but with 62 Million of them over there it could happen....

This little blog gets around!

I have this little gadget on the left side of my blog that keeps track of all the visitors to this site. Every once in a while I'll take a gander at where my visitors have come from. It resets every year in the summer, so this is a snapshot of my visitors from basically the past 6 months.

Wow......I never realized how many visitors form so many places I get. Awesome...and thanks.

Weekend Visitors

Had a pretty good weekend here at the old “homestead”. We had Joe & Bethany Tolman come up from Salt Lake City for a weekend visit. Originally we were planning on playing the third round of the 1st ever HackMaster Wurld Open tournament. There were issues getting the tournament out in time, so we simply changed plans to, well pretty much do nothing. It was a nice change of pace to just “hang out” with friends instead of having a big agenda.

The Tolmans were up Friday afternoon and after a quick visit to Hobbytown we all went home and I made dinner. I guess Joe really likes lasagna and Bethany doesn’t make it much. I’ve never really tried so I figured I’d give it a go. It came out really well, but I made some changes to the recipe I had (ok, the one off the back of the pasta box). Instead of hamburger I used hot Italian sausage. I just cut the casings and cooked it up. Coupled with the fire-roasted pepper sauce and the whole dish was a bit “warmer” than I’d normally make. Joe and I loved it, but it was a bit much for the wives.

We just kind of hung out, but everybody was pretty tired and we all were ready to crash a lot earlier than Carolyn and I are used to. The cat’s weren’t really cooperative this weekend and Obie was quite pissed as being displaced from “his” room. He never did seem to get a good grasp on what was going on, but he did pretty much get the run of the house at night which is not normal. Crystal was pretty social and seemed to like Bethany and tolerate Joe (she seems to favor Carolyn and just tolerate me too). Miu spent a lot of time strolling by and saying “hi”, which normally means licking any exposed feet, much to Bethany’s chagrin.

We all woke up far too early (for my tastes). I heard Bethany up and around quite early, talking to my cat. Hearing voices wakes me up rather quickly. Of course it didn’t help at all that I went to be so early and can’t think of staying in bed past 9 hours. I had woken up several times earlier in the morning, and by the time I heard Bethany up I was needing to get out of bed. Since it was so early by the time we were all up and ready, we thought we’d take then down to Goldy’s for breakfast. If the farmer’s market was open we could just stroll that and eat whatever there (a fun thing to do). Unfortunately the market wasn’t open, even though it was a beautiful spring day. On the way into downtown, we passed by Moon’s Café and on a whim we decided to eat there. Now I like Goldy’s, but I’m glad we changed out mind at the last minute. The food was great and it seemed more like an old diner, which I like.

Afterwards we wrestled with the parking stub (it fell into the emergency brake housing never to be seen again) and headed off for some casual shopping. Bethany really wanted a VW hubcap so she can make her very own “Hubcap of Shame” for her home group. I own a 66 Beetle, but I wasn’t planning of donating any hubcaps, so after a quick side-trip to All About Games here in I took her to my auto parts store: Bow Wow Auto parts. $21 later and she has the principle component for embarrassing players at her table as required. The Hubcap of Shame is a joke from Knights of the Dinner Table. Since we were out & about, we figured we might as well make a grand tour of all of the game stores Boise has to offer. We stopped at Empyre Games , the only place in town you can pretty much find HackMaster product on the shelves, and then Magic Dragon games. I was actually surprised at some of the older/used product that Magic Dragon had (Joe found some older Rolemaster products).

We also stopped by a local convenience store (sorry, no linkage) to try and nab a soda mentioned often in KoDT: Faygo. It’s actually a pretty good soda, but out here you can only find it in vintage styled large glass bottles. Back east you can buy it like you buy Pepsi. The location we went to only had Root Beer and Black Raspberry. My favorite is Rock & Rye. Oh well. We grab our sodas and get back to the house and vegde. The girls did their thing and Joe and I spent the early afternoon playing video games. Joe brought his laptop and played World of Warcraft while I fired up the Playstation 3 and played Call of Duty 3. There was a problem with the Activision servers this weekend, so I couldn’t play multiplayer like I normally do. Instead I furthered the single-play game and realized I had gotten quite used to a few features only found in the multi-player version. Whoops.

While Carolyn and the Tolmans watched the new James Bond flick, I made dinner. I invite a co-worker/friend form work and her husband (nice guy) and we all had a turkey dinner. I like making turkey since I’ve figured out how to make a good go of it. We were all a bit crowded around my rather small kitchen table, but I don’t think anyone minded…..or if they did they were very polite about it. After dinner I showed off the PS3 and HD television by watching the only Blue Ray DVD we own: Sky High. Staurday ended rather late.

Sunday we all stayed in, ate left-overs, and played a couple games of Power Grid. The rules could be written a bit better, so of course we (actually I) ran things the totally wrong way. After sending the Tolman’s off in the afternoon (they were going to visit family on the way back) I looked up Power Grid on Board Game Geek, I found some downloadable quick-reference sheets that will make our next game a bit easier to play.

All in all, we had a great time even though we didn’t do much. I hope I don’t get to do much next weekend too!

Game night

The Mrs. and I have a group of friends that we hang out with and play games with not nearly often enough. I love playing games, most notably RPGs such as Hackmaster. We are also in a D&D 3.5 group, but it is hard to get everyone together to play. Last night we couldn't play D&D so we were going to start a new Hackmaster campaign. Carolyn wasn't quite ready to go and was a bit tired from working that day so we finished up a couple of loose ends with our previous Hackmaster session and played some other great games.

First we played a couple rounds of Bang. If you haven't played Bang, I recommend it highly as it is a fast and fun game. The players have defined, but secret, roles except for the player who is the Sheriff (everyone knows who he is). The Sheriff must kill the Outlaws and Renegade to win, while the Outlaws must kill the Sheriff and the Renegade must kill the Outlaws first and then the Sheriff. If you have enough players there is one or two Deputies who must simply keep the Sheriff alive. Depending on the number of players you can usually guess who is who, but the Sheriff can easily be in the dark. That player might have a clue who the Outlaws are, but not wether the player helping him is the Renegade or maybe a Deputy. Anyway it is fast and fun.

After a bit we switched over to Lawless. It is a longer game than Bang and just as simple to play. I guess we were going for a Western theme night. In Lawless you try to win by having the most land, money, cattle, and cowboys. The cool thing about this game is that at the end you score points based on your standing amongst the others in the four scoring areas. You can win the game by consistently coming in second in all the areas, unless another player consistently comes in first. Carolyn kicked ass playing her first game of Lawless. Out of 20 possible points she scored 17.

The last game we played that night, aside from some Game Cube/Playstation when people had to step out for a bit, was Illuminati. This is a longer and more complex game which can be fun, but is great for trash talk and screwing with the other players. One of our group (Check out my very first post in the December Archives!) who has since moved away was really into this game. I think that most of the rest of us weren't into it as much as he was and playing with him wasn't as much fun. The table-side meetings to work alliances and such have pretty much dissappeared when Illuminatirob left. Carolyn doesn't care for this game, so we don't play it much. On the plus side I won again, so that makes my winning streak with this game a good 4 in a row for an 80% win ratio. I'm not cocky though since its been pretty much luck and I'd get my ass handed to me with "real" players. If you are interested in playing this in some tournament (like at a convention), be prepared to spend the whole day doing so and having enough Machavelien action to make you feel like a true Venician.

All in all I think we all had a good time even though we really didn't play any RPGs. Just getting together for some fun and interaction is worth it.