I got a heads up earlier that some person was complaining about one of the games I ran at Ubercon on behalf of his girlfriend or something. I, of course, popped over to his LJ to take a look and it wasn't hard to not feel grumpy about it. In case you want to take a look, the whole entry is here. Here's the relevant portion:

Mandy also got ticked off at some guy running Killer Bunnies who kept leaving the table, Henry Chi or something? Gonna find out if he's a playroom rep or if he's just some douche bag who kept acting like those playing his game were a nuisance or burden.

I swear to God, some people are such whiney sissies. I can only assume that she thought that I was supposed to sit there and hold her hand during the entire game.

The really obnoxious part about this is that I already end up scheduling and running twice the number of games that a GM is required to and actually slotted them in a way to maximize the number of events. That I would then get this person whining about it just gets my goat. It's not even as if I simply walked off after tossing the game on the table and vanished or something. I must've spent 15 minutes or so teaching the rules and then spent the entire time around 15 feet away. It's not even as if I were actually involved in another game or something. Actually, at the time I was having issues and simply didn't want to sit and make things any worse. I went to a nearby table where friends were playing something or other and knelt on a chair there, leaning on the table. June, who was also playing KB, waved me over a few times for rules questions and adjudications so I'm not sure exactly what this girl's problem was. Maybe she just felt she needed to be catered to or something.

The really ironic part is that I had been worried the game would be problematic at first because of the presence of a couple of newbies. I stuck around at the table for a while just to make sure that things were going well but after a time they seemed to have it all well in hand. I'm wondering if I should drop June a line and see if this girl was complaining the entire time or otherwise a problem since as far as I knew, things had run smoothly.

Feh. Sometimes I really wonder if it's worthwhile to run games. It's one thing when people are appreciative of the effort but quite another when you make the effort and still get crap because of it. God knows I didn't have to do as many events as I did, but I figured it was for the good of the con. Maybe it's time to rethink that metric.

---

Update:

So the guy responded to my comment on his blog and was actually pretty reasonable and even keeled in his response. That, of course, takes a lot of the wind and bluster out of my irritation. I even went back and edited some of my more colorful language. After all, it's not his fault really, he just ends up being the surrogate since it was his blog entry I was directed to.

Still, I am more than a bit cheesed about her supposed comment that I didn't have the materials for the game. I brought the game with every single expansion in it. What in the world did she want on top of that? The decks even had a smattering of all the omego and psi cards to boot. Feh. I'm definitely going to have to drop June a line and see what in the world was up.

---

I dropped June a PM over on BGG. We'll see what she has to say about it.

Sunday started earlier than I might have wished. I was hoping to sleep right up until I had to leave for the con, but stabbing pain had other plans. The real irritation is once up, the pain always gets worse and all you can do at that point is wake up, pop pills, and hope they eventually kick in. Since it takes up to 2 hours for that process to work itself out there was no opportunity to get any more sleep. Since I was up anyway, I headed over to the con early. To my complete lack of surprise, there weren't many people up and about. Certainly there were no games running and I spent my time playing old D&D games on the emulator until it was time for the Peggle championship.

As I recall, Lori had actually gotten the slot of first alternate for the competition but she hadn't been feeling well the day before and decided to skip Sunday altogether. Karen filled in for her and it was a Peggle duel to the death. I vanquished her in round 1 without too many problems but found myself behind early in the finals round. I managed to get lucky a few times and pulled it out. Here's a video of how Peggle works and a part of another game I played with last year's champion:



By coming out victorious, I won the grand prize. I never really was clear what the grand prize was, but I think it included a bunch of their game software. I guess I'll find out one of these days whenever they get around to mailing it to me.

If you think you'd like to give Peggle a whirl, here's a free version of it at Pop Cap Games. After a quick google search it seems that Peggle is pretty damn popular. It's made a number of most addictive/best internet game lists and has been ported to quite a few consoles. There's even a DS version set to come out soon from what I'm reading. Anyway, give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

After winning the Peggle championship, it was time to go back to running games. I taught and watched over a game of Dead Man's Treasure while simultaneously thumping Karen and Bernie at Ingenious. For my 'leet skillz, I was given a gift certificate for a 1 month membership to Board Game King in Bayonne. A bunch of us had made a trip there once to check it out but it's too far and I'm too adverse to going anywhere for it to be useful. Ideally, I'll be able to find someone to hock it to who might actually get some benefit out of it. Anyone willing to pay $20 for it? Retail price is $40. Anyone?

In addition to the Playroom games, I had also signed up to run a couple from Smirk and Dagger. The way the schedule worked out, they were placed back to back on Sunday with Hex-Hex first. I <3 Hex-Hex. It's one of those games that's quick and entertaining, requiring no real effort or thought. It's one game where I don't really mind the effect of luck and I personally think it's a lot more strategic than many people give it credit for. I took some video of the event:



Right after I turned off the camera, the guy who had held his cards in front of his face the entire time said 'some people think it's rude to take video or pictures of people without asking their permission' to which I responded, 'Luckily, I don't give a crap.' 10 to 1 he's probably some child molester on a FBI watch list. If any of you out there recognize him based on his forehead and hands, feel free to dial 9-1-1.

The game of Cutthroat Caverns didn't go nearly as smoothly as Hex-Hex. It ended up degenerating at some point into a pissing match between a few of the players. That seems to be a common phenomenon since so many of the cards end up being of the 'screw you' variety. Everyone starts politicin' trying to form cabals and convince people to hit others with the cards. If you let it go on, it usually degenerates into a mess. While I can usually sit in and play hex-hex while running it, I prefer to not play along with Cutthroat as long as I'm the one in charge. It makes it easier to push on with the game, establishing time limits and keeping the chaos at a minimum. In the end, the entire party perished by the time the last monster rolled around. I'm not sure they ever really got a handle on the whole teamwork aspect of the game, but they mastered backstabbing in spades.

By this point the con was winding down. There were only a couple games left on the schedule to be run and I decided to join in on a game of Pow Wow. This is one of the games I own whose box got crushed a couple of weeks ago.



I didn't end up winning, getting knocked out fairly early. I didn't have much to do after that so I wandered around twiddling my thumbs. As I was strolling past a table, someone offered me a white castle cheeseburger. Never one to turn free food, I of course accepted and in so doing picked up some unusual video.



And that was more or less it. Karen, Bernie, and I went to get something to eat at Harold's after that. I ordered a pastrami sandwich and an order of cheese fries, most of which I packed up and took home with me. Around halfway through the meal, I started to feel ill for some unknown reason. I broke out into a sweat and was having some stomach ache problems. I dunno what was causing it but I decided to cut the meal short and head out after that. Upon going to pick up my things, I found that some of my games had accidentally been packed up with the rest of the Ubercon stuff, though hopefully that'll be resolved at some point. At the time, I really couldn't spare the time to go into it.

And thus ends another Ubercon. It wasn't a total disaster, and in general went pretty well. I'll update at some point as to what I got for winning the Peggle championship and also if I ever get my games back from Ubercon.

Since I hadn't gone to bed and I wasn't doing much of anything anyway, I decided to head over to the con early on Saturday. The earliest thing on the schedule was a game of Oregon, a game I had never heard of before but was willing to try given the lack of other options. This was pretty much what I found when I got there:



Luckily, there were a few other early risers about and I spent most of my time chatting with June. That is, until I found out they had The Simpsons arcade game on the emulator. I then proceeded to play the game until I finally defeated Mr Burns and rescued Maggie. It turns out they also had the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game on there too, another one of my favorites, but I never found the time to go and give it a whirl. I used to love arcade games that would allow 4 or more players at once.

While sitting around and chatting with June and another person whose name I never got, they were describing the size of the pancakes at Harold's, the deli restaurant in the hotel. I was telling them confidently that I thought I could eat the whole thing, a claim that they expressed great disbelief in. I had never actually seen an order of pancakes from Harold's but everything there is super sized. I figured that I was hungry enough that I could at least put a significant dent in a short stack. I was wrong:



I knew I was in trouble the minute they handed me my order. The pancakes, as you can see, were beyond ridiculously sized but what I hadn't counted on was the thickness. They were around a inch thick in the middle. There was no conceivable way I was going to be able to eat the whole thing but I figured I would at least give it a go and see how far I could get. I took a few bites but then put it aside to join in a game of Key Largo.



The game was simple and fun, and the production value was high. There were actually little cardboard divers with lengths of hose that you could buy and attach to the top of their helmets. I thought I had actually won the game, making a gigantic score near the end, but Gil managed to pull it out with his slow but steady strategy. Well, either that or he was stealing money from the bank.

After the game I reapplied myself to the pancakes from hell. I tried, I really did, but was unable to finish even one of them. The attempt alone was enough to make me nauseous and I ended up having to have a lie down in the corner for around a half hour before I started to feel better. All I know for sure is that I won't be buying pancakes again anytime soon. It's officially on my Do Not Eat list for the foreseeable future.

After I had recovered enough so that the chances of puking all over myself were minimal, I decided to join in on wanderingasian's game of Illuminati. I'm not a huge fan of the game, but it's fun as long as you disable the cheating rules. It's probably the only game in existence where the rules explicitly state that it's not cheating unless you get caught. This has lead to a variety of ingenious ways to thwart the system include pocketfuls of spare money chits and incredibly fuzzy math. I'm pretty sure that I'd be a good cheater, but I just don't have the will or inclination to watch other people like a hawk to make sure they aren't doing the same. The simple fact of it is, I just don't give a damn.

For those of you who have never played Illuminati, the basic idea is that there are secretive and powerful cabals (read: Jews/stone masons, etc) who are striving to control the world by dominating diverse groups and organizations. You job is to control more groups than the other cabals (read: other Jews/stone masons, etc) or to accomplish your group's goal. Illuminati almost always devolves into a pissing match at some point. Luckily, as soon as one started, I was able to grab the flip ultra.



Murph ended up being right so far as the game ended before wanderingasian got another turn to go. Victory wasn't as certain as he thought though. The next two people both failed to snatch it and I ended up winning. As I recall, I also won the last Illuminati game that wanderingasian ran at Ubercon IX. Despite my general ambivalence about the game, I've now struck gold twice. Not bad considering I only play it at Ubercon which means twice a year tops.

After the game I couldn't find anything interesting on the schedule so I mostly just lounged around while running the remainder of my Playroom schedule. It wasn't all that bad, though I thought I was going to have some major problems for the Killer Bunnies game. Of the four people who wanted to play, two of them had never played before. Considering that I had all the expansions with me, I was pretty sure it was going to be a nightmare. In the end, they didn't seem to have any real problems. I had to be around to answer lotsa rules questions, but the game kept moving for the most part.

By this point, it was getting on to early evening and I was dragging. The lack of sleep the night before had finally kicked in and I had to resist the urge to just lie down in a corner somewhere and go to bed. The really obnoxious part of it was that there were no games on the schedule worth playing. I just ended up sitting around twiddling my thumbs, well, up until someone from the neighboring LAN setup asked if anyone wanted to join some sort of video game championship. Normally, I wouldn't touch something like that with a 10' pole because I have no interest in repeatedly being headshot and having no clue wtf is going on. The game he described though was like the old Price is Right game, Plinko. I <3 Plinko. Actually, I don't think I know a single person who doesn't love Plinko. It was a game that gave you money and required absolutely no effort on your part. It was like a slot machine that you were almost certain would pay out.

The reason he was trying to drum up players is that only 2 people had shown up and it would be a pretty crappy qualifier round if they advanced without even having to play. In the end, Lori, Karen, and I all decided to give it a whirl. I got a buy in the first round so ended up sitting around practicing. The game is simple enough. All you have to do is hit all the orange blocks with a limited number of balls. The green ones active a special ability, the purple ones give you bonus points, and the blue ones are just the peons. There's also a bucket floating around at the bottom of the screen and if your ball falls in, it means even more bonus points.

I don't remember the order of it all, but I beat Lori at some point and ended up advancing to the finals the next day. By then, I could barely keep my eyes open. As I staggered my way to my car, I seriously wondered if I would wreck before getting home. Luckily, it's only a 10 minute drive or so and I made it without any problems. I stuffed the leftover pancakes into the fridge, took a shower and then passed out.

Well, if I don't do this now I never will. Recapping is always such a pain and I've let too many event slide by without making entries about it as it is. What's the point of having a journal if you don't put in all the daily bits you're likely to forget or misremember years down the line, eh?

Anyway, Ubercon X took place this past weekend and I trekked over there around 3:30 pm on Friday. To no surprise, I was having pain management issues at the time so I spent the first 15 minutes or so huddled at a table popping additional drugs and waiting for them to kick in. It was in my infirmity that I was cruelly set upon by another fellow con goer. An errant comment on my part made him believe that I gave a flying fuck what was going on in his life. After that, it was impossible to get rid of him as he ranted and raved and frothed at the mouth about his housing issues.

I had met Robert Washington at previous gaming events and he had always seemed like a relatively normal person. He mostly whored games for Days of Wonder so I would often see him with Matt Lee. This time around he was all upset about the fact that he was being kicked out of his apartment. Apparently he lives in some rat trap in New York where he only pays something like $300 a month with utilities included. There were severe building code violations there and the housing inspectors came by telling everyone to get the hell out immediately. My comment was that it didn't seem likely to me that they would just throw everyone out on the street, only giving them a day or two to comply. At that point he started to froth at the mouth and spray spittle as he repeatedly told me I was wrong and he knew how the system worked, and assorted other derranged rantings. Like I said, I was dealing with pain issues at the time and was just hunched at the table hoping my meds to kick in as he went on and on. It was my own fault really. I should have just told him to fuck off but I kept throwing out the occassional comment which no doubt he interpreted as interest. It was clear he just wanted someone to rant to and if I wasn't there he would have accosted some other poor schlub. Eventually, after around 15-20 minutes, he finally ran out of steam and I was able to sit in peace until my pills kicked in.

The first thing I did gamewise, was run a game of Bull in a China Shop for some other early arrivers. It went off without a problem, though some of the players took an inordinate amount of time to complete their turns. It's a very simple game and it's not like there are a huge number of options. It's like watching someone suffer analysis paralysis over a game of Candy Land. After that I was over, I went to Gil Hova's table where I had signed up to learn Year of the Dragon. I currently have the game on pre-order almost entirely because it looked interesting. I figured I should at least play it once beforehand to see if maybe I'd want to cancel it in case it was a real stinker. All in all, it turned out to be one of those grind you to death games with people constantly dying and you being perpetually short of vital commodities/income. It reminded me a lot of Age of Steam where there are also no perfect options and you always stand on the brink of collapse. If the railroad barons had to go through something like Age of Steam, it's a miracle they came out of it with 2 pennies to rub together.

I ended up having to leave Year of the Dragon early because I had another game I needed to run. Portobello Market went pretty smoothly and all I had to do was teach the rules. The players handled the rest themselves, playing the game twice in the end. By then Lori, as well as Bernie and Karen, had arrived and I spent some time chitchatting with them. Bernie had signed on for the con as my helper monkey and to fulfill her exulted role, proceeded to run Poison while I tried my hand at the Munchkin tournament. The latter went on for what seemed like forever. I qualified for the final round pretty easily but we all got snookered by Eileen who snatched victory because no one was paying attention. This was only after repeatedly complaining throughout the game she was losing, of course.

I just don't like Munchkin much anymore. The feedforward system where whoever's in the lead just has a tendency to get stronger irritates me. Still, we were playing with the original which is a bit better balanced than some of the dozen or so add-ons since then. Just thinking about my one experience with Super Munchkin makes me want to punch Steve Jackson in the face. Not only was it and most of the other expansions an absolute abortion, but he charges $25 for a product with some of the most shoddy print quality I've ever seen. Munchkin cards start to fray and whiten around the edges fresh from the box before you even touch them. I've seen toilet paper that stands up to harsher handling.

After the Munchkin game, I decided to just head home and call it a night. Despite being tired, I ended up staying up all night watching episodes of 24. By the time morning rolled around and it was time to go back to the con, I was starting to feel the effects of exhaustion.

Well, I got back from the con and after around 12 hours of sleep, I'm feeling much better overall. It'll probably take at least 12 more hours tonight, or a good length nap, for me to really catch up though. I just finished having a breakfast of leftover pancakes, a meal which I'm likely to repeat at least 4 more times over the next day or two if I want to be able to finish it. I'm sure you'll understand why as soon as I manage to post all the flip videos.

In fact, that's pretty much my primary focus for the day. It's going to take a while but I need to weed through the various video clips and then get them spliced together and uploaded. I'll also try to get around to doing a quick con recap at some point. I won't have pictures to anchor it like usual, but I figure the video more or less tells the story just as well.

I should be asleep right now. Instead, I've got pain issues spiking all over the place. In addition to my normal issues which always manage to keep me entertained, I managed to acquire a toothache in the past couple of days. I'm pretty sure it's that other wisdom tooth going bad. I had to have the previous pulled a while back and had been in considerable agony because of it. Now, it's compatriot is acting up and I went through most of yesterday with pain radiating up the side of my face and stopping behind my left eye. Not exactly a pleasant experience.

I can't help but wish that pain was one of those things that ended up canceling itself out. Sort of like that one Simpsons episode with Mr Burns.

Has every disease known to man, and survives only because they perfectly counteract one another, an extremely rare medical condition known as "Three Stooges Syndrome."

Barring that, I'm pretty much stuck with it at the moment and I am not a happy camper. No matter which side wins the current agony wars, I can be pretty sure I'm going to be the one who loses.

The con itself has been going okay more or less. I'll try to get back at some point and recap more in depth. All the games I've supposed to run have gone off without a hitch. I've snagged some video with the Flip Ultra that I'll be porting online in the next couple of days. The only real downside has been more my fault than anything else. I ended up staying up all night on Friday which meant that I spent most of yesterday in a daze. By around 7:30 pm or so, I could barely keep my eyes open. I would normally have stuck around for at least another few hours but I just couldn't handle it anymore. I ended up cutting out early and after dealing with all the various gobbilygook, was asleep by eleven.

It had been my plan to sleep right up until it was time to leave again this morning, but my constant warring companions had different ideas. I've popped a handful of meds but there's no chance they're going to kick in in time for me to get any more sleep. Nothing's worse than just getting a couple hours when you're already exhausted. You wake up feeling like the living dead.

So all that's left is for me to just sprawl here and watch 24 while waiting for some pain relief. I've got 6 episodes left in season 5 and season 6 is waiting in the pipe. I figure I'll write a general review of the entire series when I finish and then try to figure out what I'm going to watch next.

The feeling as drugs kick in is pretty spiffy. Maybe this is what ends up hooking some of the addicts, though in my case it's likely compounded by the easing of pain. It's just sorta nice. At first it's just a minor blunting around the edges but then it creeps in like a fog rolling in. Then all of a sudden, poof, the pain is gone and all that's left is this vaguely bemused sort of feeling. All in all, I heartedly recommend it.

So, there's not much to report around these parts. Ubercon starts tommorrow and at some point I'm going to have to dig through the games closet to gather up everything I'm going to have to bring to the event. Other than that, my day today has been pretty much on cruise control. I finally got around to catching up on my sleep, which is a plus. For some reason, I tend to constantly be sleep deprived and then one day a week I just catch up out of the blue. It's like going to take a nap and just not waking up for 10 hours or so. It probably has something to do with a kismet of being tired and having a good day with pain issues. Nothing owie pokes me and wakes me up. That's certainly not the case most nights.

You know, you'd think that a government counter terrorism unit would run better background checks on their employees. From the very first season it's been mole after mole after mole at CTU. It starts to get a little ridiculous that none of these people seem to be tested and polygraphed on a regular basis. If this show goes on much longer, the only person who'll be left is Jack Bauer. Everyone else will have worked for the terrorists at one point or another and gotten themselves whacked.

On a sidenote, I never thought I'd actually use this icon for anything other than sciency issues.

I'm around 8 episodes short of finishing season 4 right now and season 5 is being bittorrented as I type this. It's unlikely I'm going to get a chance to start it since Ubercon begins on Friday. I've got a full schedule of events to run starting at 4pm and the rest of the con will be pretty packed as well. I'm going to take the Flip Ultra with me, so I'll probably be posting some video of the con at some point. One of the things that always drives me nuts about running games at cons is I absolutely hate having to transport all the games I'm running back and forth. I really need to find some sort of carry device other than stuffing everything into plastic bags and hoping nothing rips. I could really use some sort of hugeass rollycart.

Lastly, I guess I should mention that I went to the DMV today and got a replacement ID. Don't you hate it when you find out you're theonly person who's actually following the rules? I went to the website and it said you needed a notorized statement that your id had been lost. I spent a chunk of time getting that done only to have the lady at the DMV look at me blankly when I gave it to her. Turns out most people just claim they lost it and their word is good enough. Feh. On the plus side, I was in and out of there in 15 minutes. I didn't bother to get the card laminated and just tucked it into the wallet for safe keeping. I'm likely going to need it when I go to traffic court on Tuesday.

I haven't made many entries lately for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, I've spent a pretty obscene amount of time watching episodes of 24. I just finished up the third season and I'm trying to decide whether to start the fourth or to just put it off until tomorrow. The show's not bad at all and the characters really start to grow on you after a while. I'm happy to report that the third season is also the first where I haven't felt the intense desire to choke Kim Bauer to death whenever she's on screen. The thing I usually hate most about shows like this is the fact that I really don't like cliffhangers. Well, there are no cliffhangers when you can watch the episodes back to back to back. In fact, it's that avoidance of cliffhangers that has had me watching episodes for 12 hours straight or more at times.

I should also mention that after watching the show I feel I should be making some sort of entry relating it to current day politics. The parallels, especially in the first season, seemed pretty startling. We had a black presidential candidate who is all (supposedly) morally and a boyscout and then we have the domineering type-A personality in the form of his wife. Am I the only person who immediately thought about Obama and Hillary parallels? It just seemed that Sherry was the perfect caricature of Clinton. All smiles in public but the long knives come out behind closed doors. Yet, for all you can say about how she's evil incarnate, she's also very, very, very good at what she does. I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't want her as Chief of Staff as long as they could somehow leash her so she didn't run amok.

Anyway, I've gotten a bit far afield with the whole 24 thing, but one of the other reasons I haven't been making entries enough is pain management issues. When things have been going good, I've been doing the whole 24 thing. When things are going bad, I couldn't bring myself to tap out entries even if I wanted to.

I am going to try to force myself tonight and recap the last few days before it gets completely ridiculous and outdated. Mostly this is because Ubercon starts this friday and I just know that if I don't get some things jotted down now, I never will. There's always a huge backlog whenever there's a con and there are other things percolating about as well.

I'm writing this in a notepad file because my internet connection is on the spazz. It does this all where everything slows down to a crawl and connectivity goes out the window. I have no clue what causes it but the problem usually goes away after a hour or two. It's just completely unpredictable. I've been sitting here trying to read a couple articles on Slate and it's taken uncounted number of refreshes just trying to get the pages to load. Since I'm not doing anything useful, I figured that I would go on to the day 2 recap of ubercon. I can always paste it in later when things clear up.

( Ubercon IX )

I'm going to give recapping a whirl. i'm not exactly sure why I'm putting myself through this particular agony since I'm relatively sure no one gives a rat's ass and these rambles always end up taking more time than they should. Well, okay. I know _one_ reason why I'm going to be doing this and it's because I only just noticed that certain other con events have entered folklore without a contemporary record. One incident sort of touches on something that happened at Ubercon and went I went back through my LJ archives, I found that I had left it out of the recaps. No doubt, at the time I thought I was being discrete, which dosen't sound like me but it's all I can think of.

( Ubercon )

I ended up getting a pretty good night's sleep (goof for me) last night but it wasn't near enough to counter the fiasco the day before. I only ended up getting to the con on time to run my 9am event because I had forgotten about daylight savings time. The additional hour made it so I got there with nothing to spare.

The day itself was sort of interesting but I'm not sure I really want to sit here and type about it right now. My eyes keep drifting close and I'm starting to think that maybe a voice post wrap up would be better. I can always flesh in the details at some point tommorrow in a longer entry. I got a couple of funny and interesting pictures from the con and I'll be popping those up at some point.

Well, the con started today and I'll be scarce over the weekend. I probably won't end up making any more journal entries for the duration until things wrap up there. I brought a camera along with me but I dunno if I'll actually be taking many pictures. There'll probably be a voice post here and there whenever I remember to make them.

If anyone desperately needs to get a hold of me for some reason, just ring my cell phone. I should have that with me no matter what. I assume most of you who need to know already have the number somewhere. I've also included it in previous entries where I've gone out of town for extended periods.

Things have been pretty blah over the past couple of days and I'm not sure exactly why. More than anything else, it's probably just the normal cycle I tend to get hitting another peak. I've increased the dose of codeine but it hasn't resulted in any positive effects yet. I'm just generally McGimpy.

The sleep disturbance is getting more obnoxious too and I've been using the time to get some reading done. I finished Jacobs' book in less than a day and I've already started on Until Proven Innocent. After that, I've got a bunch of books that I bought years ago and never got around to finishing. When you mostly read books that come in a series format, it's easy to get waylaid halfway through or buy a couple of the beginning books but never follow through on it. It seems a huge waste to just have them sitting around never read after I went through the cost of buying them.

Other than that, there's nothing all that interesting. Two halloween parties on saturday and then Ubercon the week after. I'm not exactly looking forward to any of it. It's hard to view events as anything other than a burden when you feel like crap. I might end up missing the parties but I'm pretty much locked into Ubercon. I agreed to run events there and I could hardly reneg on that now. Hopefully things will be better in a week or so.

Well, things are still pretty crappy in the whole meta-analysis. I'm managing to keep a base level of functioning with the opiates and ibuprofen, but it's not a pleasant trip overall and I tend to hit craplods of potholes. The most annoying part is that the whole pain issue just feeds procrastination. When every little action has a little extra grief surcharge attached, it's harder to convince yourself to do it. I've yet the photo recap completely founder as well as other things I wanted to get to. I'm glad I got the Stardust review up, but there I had the addeded incentive of irritation. Seriously though. Claire Danes. WTF?

Enbrel injections are on-going and still don't seem to be doing a lick of good. I've toying with the delusional idea that it might provide some sort of short term benefit, just in the hours following the injection itself, but I'm sure that's just wishful thinking. As a whole, it seems to be a dud as far as my particular circumstances are concerned.

On the plus side, there isn't all that much that I need to do so I can sort of wallow in misery for as long as I want. Summer Con season is over and there's nothing that I absolutely have to sally forth to do. The next event of any sort is Ubercon IX in early November and they just moved it so that it's like 2 miles from the house. It dosen't get much more convienant than that. To boot, as long as I don't sign up to run too many games, I can always blow it off or take it easy if I need to.

It sometimes seems like without intending it, I've moved into the perpetual twilight portion of my life.

Well, Ubercon has ended and I'm feeling pretty charred and toasty. I'm officially sick to death of cons, running demos, and people in general at the moment. This tends to be a seasonal sort of thing and is pretty much right on schedule. It's always chaos starting from the end of June until now with con season and burnout is sort of inevitable. What I really need is just a long break from having to run games. If my plane ticket were fully refundable, I'd probaly flip SoCal the bird right about now.

All of that being said, the demos at Ubercon were more than passingly successful. Every game with the exception of one was completely full for the run. Most were so full that I ended up simply teaching instead of playing. For instance, there ended up being 4 tables worth of Killer Bunnies players during the con, and it probaly would have garnered even more participants if there were other slots avaliable. Other than the games I ran, the only things I got involved in was a game of Illuminati and Are You a Werewolf. The latter has become a keystone in Ubercon tradition and this time around it seemed more like something you had to do rather than one you wanted to.

On the plus side, I ditched out of Ubercon saturday night and went to the Nightmare Before Christmas CCG tourney at Little Shop of Comics and then went to see the 3D movie. I placed third in the former and the latter was absolutely fantastic. It's been at least a decade since I've last seen a 3D movie and the technological improvements are staggering. The film looked stunning as 3D. At first, I was slightly worried that motion sickness might be an issue, but I held up without problems. I strongly recommend catching the show if it's avaliable in your area. I ended up singing along with the entire thing and that's always entertaining. Part of me hopes that there might be a resurrgence of interest in and popularity of NBC due to the re-release. Perhaps even enough of a groundswell that the CCG is resurrected. Snowball's chance in hell most likely.

Well, it was probaly inevitable but it looks like the Nightmare Before Christmas CCG is official on life support and doomed to die. The company that produces the cards, NECA, has announced they will stop supporting the venture and just sell out their remaining stock which means that we can pretty much kiss any additional expansions goodbye. Feh. It sorta figures that the first time I get involved in a CCG again in 10 years and it goes bellyup within the year.

On the plus side however, it looks like disney is re-releasing the movie in 3D! It's coming our in theatres October 20th and more info can be found at the website as to theatres at http://www.nightmare3dmovie.com. The only place that's showing it in the state is in Elizabeth and just happens to fall on Ubercon weekend to boot. Some diehards on the NBC forums are organizing a trip to see it saturday and I'm probaly going to tag along. I just have to see if I'm scheduled to run any events during that window....Weee, looks like I'm clear.

Anyone who's in the area or coming to ubercon is welcome to jump in. I should offer a slight warning though that it's almost a certainty I will be singing along with the movie.