Short Attention Span Review: "Weeds"

What the hell?

I ask that, during the last episode of the season, Nancy finds her once-dead husband coming out the shower - Bobby Ewing-style - so we can chalk this abortion of a season off to being a bad dream.

Short Attention Span Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Visually impressive, but not my favorite of the bunch. They cut a lot of good stuff that I would have liked to have seen and put in some things I could have done without. Solid, sure, and mostly entertaining.

I particularly enjoyed Jim Broadbent's performance.

Oaks at Weston - the Epilogue

So, in the end, the assholes at Bell Properties got that money out of us. Basically, it amounted to $600.

A good friend of ours was recently looking to move to a new apartment. I steered her well clear of the Oaks at Weston. Had matters ended on better terms, I might have encouraged otherwise. But, under the circumstances, she opted against moving to the Oaks. She might have paid them $750 a month or so to live there for a year or so.

And that's how the payback goes. I don't get my money back, but I keep them from getting thousands of dollars.

Yes, I feel kinda good about that.

Short Attention Span Review: "True Blood" 7/12

Nothing but love for this episode.

Marianne's taken her freaky passion-tuning-fork act on the road! And it's a road trip for Sookie and Bill and Jessica to Texas, the land of big hats and big hair and, apparently, vampires with really bad attitudes. Meanwhile, Sam TRIES to take a road trip, but he gets all sidetracked by the cute waitress with the mysterious scars on her back.

And Lafayette. Dude. The post-Eric blood shenanigans were hilarious.

Speaking of Eric: Good to see him evolving into a regular character. He amuses me.

The wacko church plot is interesting, but oddly predictable thus far. May get better next week?

Weeds 7/6

I'm sort of baffled by this episode, mostly because it didn't really make much logical sense. At all. Yes, it was funny but:

* I just can't buy Nancy's decision not just to move in with crazy Mexican murder-man, but also to take her SON, who she spent part of the episode trying to redeem from an impending life of gangster living.
* And I can't buy Nancy's willingness to let Celia walk away with a cell phone full of dead fridge guy shots. Seriously? That's just stupid.
* I had a knee-jerk peeve about the portrayal of the MMO gamer woman from the bank being a crazy virgin. Not all of us are virgins!

Sorry, show. Fewer plots this week, which was a plus. But...c'mon. Get better.

Fireworks Part 2 post-mortem

As much fun as I had with Fireworks Part 1 (the Medlidikke attack and the arrival of the Phyrrians), I think it's safe to say I actually had a little more fun with Part 2, MUCH later on Saturday.

* First, a group of Phyrrians came over from their warships, babbled about the Overmind at Tamila, and then died.
* And then I got a page from Alastair Hall that his team had made it to the Gearclanger Hub and wanted to see what they could do to bring the systems back online.

Well. This had advanced faster than I expected. I didn't think anyone would bother trying to bring Comorro out of her coma until Sunday! Now I actually had to come up with the whole story of how the Medlidikke managed to put Comorro out of commission. I thought I'd at least get to sleep on it!

Oh, well.

Originally, I was going to go with some kind of EMP. Then I was just going to have a sedative cloud of some kind. Finally, I settled on something far ickier and possibly more fun: A giant tentacled energy parasite that had grown to fill most of the engineering chamber. Not just giant, of course. It also had to be slimy.

There were some amusing moments during this scene, particularly with Eylohta trying to stab the tentacles, Alexandra trying to dodge them while hanging onto the generator the beast wanted to grab, and then Reode got to fly in and snatch the generator back from the monster. Finally, with help from a Healing Hands action card, Alastair and Alexandra came up with a nasty pharmaceutical concoction that killed the critter.

The team got nice and slimed. Win for me! And they rescued Comorro. Win for them!

My only complaint was that during the final minutes, we had a player come wandering onto the scene from the docking hub "to be where other people were." First of all, that's a classic case of metagaming. VERY bad form. Second, even if it's true that the player had no other motive, the appearance is that they're trying to muscle in on the scene. How much fun is it to spend hours working toward a solution for a scene when someone else just pops in at the final moment to screw things up (or steal the limelight)?

Don't do that kind of stuff, folks.

Anyway, great job everyone. The first IC medals are being given out today and I hear some rumblings about vengeance and such. Always a good sign!

Fireworks post-mortem (with less mortem than usual?!)

Today's Fireworks event was the first big-ticket holy-crap no-kidding Brody-tries-to-kill-everyone showcase since we made the transition to the new OtherSpace and implemented action cards.

A lot of people turned out to let me take a few shots at them. I appreciated the opportunity. I dropped 12 Medlidikke pirates into Comorro Station and rendered the sentient vessel unconscious so that she couldn't bring her own impressive array of weapons to bear on the bad guys.

To make reffing a bit cleaner, I rolled for all 12 pirates at the beginning to determine their various result levels. So, for the rest of the fight, there would be a consistent and unchanging outcome for the bad guys. The only variable would be how the good guys did and what cards they might need to employ to overcome the bad guys.

By the end of the fight, Varal, Thayndor Zahir, and Zabyra were badly injured. Seven pirates had been decapitated, disemboweled, plasma-vaped, or neck-shot. The five remaining Medlidikke grabbed Thayndor and teleported out with help from none other than Ancient Shog, everyone's favorite Thul.

First important note: No characters died! Zabyra and Thayndor came close, but Thayndor played his Tier 2 Whoa card and Sheppard came to Zabyra's rescue with a Tier 1 Lucky Break card.

I did not, as Markiel predicted, kill Markiel.

The event was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed giving the players a challenge, but it wasn't anything they couldn't overcome, and the generosity of players like Sheppard toward Zabyra was really heartening. As it concluded, I'd managed to reintroduce one of the game's oldest villains (Shog!), introduced some new villains (the Medlidikke, up close and personal), and dropped a mysterious dozen Phyrrian warships on Comorro's doorstep.

What's up with that shit? You'll just have to wait and see.