Mr Shiny is in town for work related reasons (those of you who have no clue who Mr Shiny is, probably shouldn't worry about it. The short answer is he's a friend I met at gencon). We had chatted over email a few times before he arrived and I had mentioned the battletech setup up in Pomptom. It turns out that he was an old school mech pilot from back in the days of the dinosaurs. Okay, it was the early 90's, but that might as well have been the jurasic era considering the pace of technological advancement. Anyway, I gave Matt a ring and asked him if he wanted to come along and so it was that last night we all met up for a night of battletech.

It was probably a poor idea right from the start. I've gone on a bit about how things haven't been great lately. Pain has been extreme at times and I've had really problems keeping it surpressed with meds. My therapeutic window is small and whenever I misjudge I end up with nausea and vomiting. I'm afraid I didn't exactly end up being a great local host of sorts. I spent a good chunk of the night sitting on the couch just trying to keep my stomach contents where they were and after a while I had to leave and ended up sprawling on the floor of the breezeway upstairs. I'm hoping that Mr Shiny had a good time, but I wasn't in any real condition or position to judge.

For some reason, the nausea didn't get better on the ride home and I actually had to have Matt pull over at one point so I could spew along the side of the road. I'm sure he felt like he was driving the drunk wagon home. I hadn't actually eaten anything since the morning other than a couple strips of beef jerky and I have no clue what I was actually puking up. By the end, it was nothing but pure bile. I could have done my own acid spray attack.

I made more bile deliveries even as I staggered up the driveway home and eventually passed out with my head still spinning. I've spent the rest of the day between altering states of unconsciousness and agony followed by pill popping with frantic entreaties for it to work freaking faster. It hasn't been a good 24 hours or so.

I really should give Shiny a ring and see how his day went and apologise for the neglect. I hope he found something interesting to do today before his work starts.

It was battltech again yesterday up at the Pompton Lakes Pod Bay. They were having a newbies training day there and Matt and I decided to head up. Once again, he graciously offered to drive which is pretty much a godsend. The only car I have access to at the moment is the Expedition and I really don't like taking it long distances. For one, it guzzles gas like a sherman take and second, it pretty much handles like one too. The wind ends up blowing it all around the road and I just generally feel very insecure in it. It's also nice not to drive since I almost invariable get hit with motion sickness after too many missions in the pod. I think it has a lot to do with which game we're playing as the problems only pop up with things like Capture the Flag and King of the Hill. Basically the games which involve a lot of twirly movement and not as much straight on combat.

Once the nausea hits, there's not much that shuts it down. I actually went and took a liedown on a couch in the breezeway yesterday and actually ended up dozing off for a while. All in all, I probably spent close to a couple hours out there and still couldn't shake the urge to vomit. No doubt the whole thing also ties into the fact that I still feel sleep deprived and one of my classic responses to lack of sleep is nausea. Since Matt was driving, I was able to doze on the way back home. I ended up going to bed soon after, but like clockwork was up again a few hours later. It just seems that the pain issues will never let me sleep for long, no matter how tired, and I should be gateful when I can even fall asleep in the first place.

On a sidenote, I crossed the 25 mission threshold and now qualify for my 'Clan Pin'. Apparently battletech pilots collect pins like boyscouts collect merit badges. There are pins for winning tournaments and there are pins for number of missions flown. The lowest threshold gets you the clan pin and then additional ones at 50, 100, 200, etc. I already have that Calamity Jane pin from the Pro-Am and will add the Clan pin to it whenever I head up next. I wonder if I should get something to affix them to. I noticed that some of the others had them on patches or hats or things like that. No doubt it's handy when you want to go around impressing the civvies. Yeah, I headshotted an Atlas once. Who wants to touch me?

Despite how tired I was on saturday, sleep was pretty erratic. I woke up somewhere in the early afternoon with some more shrieking pain in my mouth, but a handful of pills managed to mute it enough so I could pass out again.

All in all, I probaly got around 3 hours of sleep and change, and was woken up by a phone call from Matt. Saturday had been the gameday at the Panera which I realized pretty early that I was not going to be able to make. That evening was also a Pro-Am battletech tourney and it had been something that Matt seemed to be really looking foward to. As from my previous entry on battletech, I was a little more ambivalent about the whole thing, mostly due to my general lack of skills in piloting. It's never much fun being the gimp I find.

Anyway, I dragged myself out of bed with some effort and made my way to the Panera. I seriously considered bailing altogether since I was certain that there was no way I'd be able to handle the drive back from Pompton Bay, even if I could make it up there in the first place. Matt offered to carpool up there and since he said that he wasn't going to end up going unless I came with, I tossed in my two bits.

The tourney was pretty interesting overall. It was a double elimination 2v2 with amateurs teamed up with pro players to provide what was hypothetically supposed to be even teams. It was also another mini-reunion of sorts. There's a guy I met around a year and a half ago at Dexcon who played in and won the Killer Bunnies Tourney I had been running there. I had seem him at other con events and we played email tag a few times about the liklihood of him coming to local gamedays. It turns out that he had been involved with the battletech group up north since '94 in various incarnations up to the point when Sauron bought the pods and moved them private. What can I say? It's a small world I guess.

As for the tourney itself, you can see the breakdown here. Not surprisingly, I pilot under the callsign 'henwy' and actually managed to take second place.

A little sidenote about nicknames and callsigns....I never could manage to pick one of them without it setting off my internal bullshit alarms. It just seems pretentious to give yourself some sort of snazzy moniker when what you're actually doing is geeking it up in an oversized computer game. Yeah, just call me Devestator, bitches and feel the wrath of my long range missiles and PPC lasers.

Anyway, I did pretty well in the tourney. All the vets seemed to more or less target one another and there were a lot of mutual kills, which left the more noobie pilots in a dueling faceoff. I ended up deciding the fate of 4 of our matches, ending with a 2/2 ratio. Overall, I did a far better job piloting and targeting than I had the first time around and it helped a lot that we eliminated a lot of the clutter. When there are only 4 mechs on the map and only 2 are enemies, it becomes a lot simplier to maneuver and toss in some basic tactics rather than blind shooting. For placing second, I was awarded a calamity jane battletech pin and no doubt, the awe and respect of my peers.

While I had a pretty good run at it, Matt's team ended up crapping out in straight losses which ended up with him sitting around and doing bupkiss for a good chunk of time. We ended up sticking around up there running in missions until we finally left at around 4am. By then I was about ready to die. The gum where my tooth had been had started to throb, I had a headache pounding behind my right eye, I was a bit nauseous and motion sick, and just really, really wanted to go home. The drive seems long on the way up there but it seems infinitely longer coming back in the middle of the night.

By the time I got back, I was ready to collapse and die. It didn't end up working out quite that way, though I did finally manage to get to sleep around 6:30 or so. I woke up again around 8 due to pain and after another dosing got to sleep again by 10. As for what happened that sunday, it'll have to wait for another installment.

Today was Bill M's birthday and the entire group of people trekked over to the resturant to celebrate just like last year. I think around 14 people showed up in the end. After eating and gift-giving, most of us stuck around and played a few board and card games. No one was interested in the superbowl results save a couple people involved in office pools. Bill made off with a pretty nice haul overall, a good mix of games and other useful things.

Matt and I got to chat a bit about the battletech experience and he seems to be hooked. He wants to make it back there as often as possible whenever there are events. I'm a little more reserved in my first impression, but that might have something to do with the prevaling nausea and vomiting. I find that tends to distort your impression of new experiences.

On a sidenote, that taping the mouth thing didn't seem to work out all that well. I felt like I about exploded my entire head open when I had to cough a couple times. It felt like my sinuses were all about to pop like a balloon. A quite unpleasant feeling.

Matt and I headed up to Pompton Lakes for battletech tonight straight on into the teeth of a mini winter storm. The location ended up being a bit further along than I had thought and with the snow and wind and rain, it wasn't a pleasant drive up. All in all, I think it was around 45 miles up which translated to over a hour's travel time.

The event itself was pretty spiffy. It's really amazing that this guy Michael (callsign: Sauron) managed to buy these pods and set everything up in his den/basement. It's remarkable considering the amount of work and setup that must've gone into it. He was commenting at one point that if you add up all the money he poured into playing battletech while it was at Dave and Busters and the amount he's paid to buy and run the pods, it's the equivalent of a new car. Now that's dedication.

My first impression is that it's a really good group of people too. No nutjobs or rejects, no Aspy's or social incompetants. I even bumped into someone there I already knew from Steve (The Evil One's) poker/game days. We ended up running in around 10 games or so each, and it was quite an experience to try to pilot the damn thing on advance mode. I still don't really have the hang of it and frankly, I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to acquiring the skill necessary. Something about the whole spatial orientation for the mech just throws me off and makes it very counter-intuitive.

The only real downside of the night is that I grabbed the wrong bottle of meds as I left home and so only had percocets on me and nothing else. I ended up popping one while there and suffered full blown nausea. I'm sure the FPS nature of the pods didn't help there. I find that repeated vomiting never really improves an evening.

By the time I was on the way home, I was in pretty poor shape with pain management and other issues. All I wanted at that point was a means to teleport myself home. On the plus side, a car traveling right in front of me got pulled over and we were both traveling around the exact same speed, 5 miles over the limit. I guess the cop just played eenie meenie and I got lucky.

Roses are Re... Ech. Just submitted a few of those valentinrs and got into a sort of rut.

Hotel rooms have been booked for Origins. I ended up snagging a trio of rooms at the Hyatt after the Crown Plaza proved to be booked solid. In the end, it was around $10 cheaper a night and I guess that's worth the lack of breakfast or free internet. I'm still feeling a distinct lack of enthusiasm about the summer cons but I'm sure most of that is due to medical reasons. It's hard to be all anticipatory and positive when you're not sure if it'll turn out to be a bloody and painful mess. Certainly if things don't improve, it'll probaly be a rough time for sure.

This friday is also the trip up to Pompton Lakes to give the Battletech Pods a whirl. Like most local events lately, I might look forward to them up until the date gets close and then there just seems to be so much inertia to overcome. I've been reading a bit about the mechs and operation manuals for them. If we're lucky, personalities will mesh well enough that this can become a regular sort of thing. It's always nice to be able to frag someone when you're having a bad day.

So yesterday was the trip to Dave and Busters as a sendoff to Kath who's heading to Texas in a week or so. God help her. I don't think any of us believe it's going to be a good fit for either her or the state. Bill S had an idea that maybe they should get her a 'I <3 Bush' bumpersticker just so she'll fit in there. Apparently there have been some hints that lesbos are okay as long as they hold the right political ideology.

It's sad but Dave and Busters will always be sort of a disapointment no matter what since the battletech pods are no longer there. It's not like it's not still fun...but it will never be as good as it was. I had sort of resigned myself to the fact that I would never again pilot a battle mech again. After copious web searches, I discovered that the only battletech centers left in existance were all out west or south. The closest one to where I am would be either South Carolina or Michigan, neither of which is exactly a short trip.

It turns out, however, that all hope is not lost. Someone ended up buying all the battletech pods from D&B's when they ripped them out and the guy set up a center in his basement. Now he runs battletech events on a donation basis and the site is only around 50 minutes away. I dropped him a line about it and got a quick response in return. So far, things are looking good for actually getting a chance to pilot a mech again and, even better, I'll get to introduce the entire group to it. Well, at least Matt and Joyce. I have no clue how the Bills will take to trekking out there to try battletech. I'm pretty sure Matt has caught the fever however, even without ever having played the game in the first place.

According to the emails, the battletech group meets every friday and has their next large event in mid february. Because of Dreamation this thursday through sunday, it'll be at least two week sbefore we could head up there to give the pods a looksee.