aka Blog v4.0
I seriously considered staying in my PJs all day today, until I walked back into the bathroom and saw the clothes I meant to wear after showering.
I put them there 3 hours earlier, but I got caught up watching Doctor Who.
I showered and changed, then reheated the fries and pizza that I ordered for dinner last night.
Now I’m watching the Godzilla Lounge Lizard Marathon on Comet TV.
At some point I’ll watch the new episode of Doctor Who, but that’s not for a few hours.
Cheers, everyone!
At work, having just finished a breakfast burrito from Philz. Their ‘Gratitude’ holiday blend is pretty good, too.
This isn’t the worst year of my life, far from it.
But I think it’s the worst year of our collective lives.
Because we’ve been living with this shit together, but apart.
I hope to see many of you soon(tm), in person, again, soon(tm) being the type reserved for when updates to City of Heroes would come out.
I let out a primal scream for about 1/2 a block as I drove to work today. That actually felt good.
But then I couldn’t find parking near the Chinese bakery to get pork buns, so I had to opt for the Philz breakfast burrito.
Anyways, just rambling this morning, not rumbling like it was around 5:42 am. I sat there thinking that this was it, this is how 2020 was going to finally do us in.
But the rumbling stopped after a couple of seconds, it was more like a boop on da nose.
So cheers to you all, my friends and family and imaginary people on the other end of the internets, here’s to making it to the end of this crappy ass year and to the new beginnings of the upcoming year.
Not that I expect everything to change overnight, y’know.
It’s a symbolic thing. You understand.
2021 = 2020 won? No, fuck that.
It was never a game to begin with.
Welcome to life, mother fuckers.
Let’s ride.
Everyone knows that Han Solo is my favorite Star Wars character, period.
And everyone knows that a close second is Boba Fett. So much so that I’ve always seen him as a hero, not a villain. The guy is just trying to get paid by whoever hires him.
Even though he was paid to capture favorite character number one in The Empire Strikes Back.
Anyways, when Return of the Jedi came out, even I thought that Fett went out stupidly, knocked into the sarlacc by a blind scoundrel a.k.a. favorite character number one.
But I never thought he was dead.
I always believed that his armor would protect him and somehow he’d escape the sarlacc.
And for 37 years I never waivered from that belief, even when so many people would try to convince me otherwise.
Then came The Mandalorian.
The show featured a character dressed like favorite character number two; indeed, he did everything that I always thought that character would be capable of doing, Baby Yoda aside.
This season, however, they took a turn toward rewarding my belief in that character, first by casting the last person to voice him in the revised Special Editions, and who played his Dad in Attack of the Clones, in a cameo in the first episode of the season that featured his iconic armor.
And then they revealed that that was indeed him, first by showing his goddamn awesome spaceship, Slave 1, and then showing him off as a badass warrior without the armor.
And then, he was back in the armor.
And they showed him to be that badass that I always knew him to be, even if just in Expanded Universe stories and my own imagination.
A couple of episodes later, at the end of the season, the biggest surprise of all came, a Christmas present to me as far as I’m concerned.
A separate series on favorite character number two. I’m extremely excited about this. Probably more than I was when the Solo movie was announced, or when The Mandalorian was announced.
Thank you, Jon Favreau.
I think I figured out why I liked Star Trek The Motion Picture so much when I was 12 years old, and continue to enjoy it to this day.
I’ve been a Star Trek fan since as far back as I can remember. It was a staple of my childhood, alongside The Six Million Dollar Man and Underdog.
In 1977, a movie called Star Wars came out, and I was not interested in seeing it, mainly because it wasn’t Star Trek. Reluctantly, I went to see it with my immediate family and a couple of my aunts.
It fucking changed my life.
But that’s another story.
For two years I was more gung ho for Star Wars than Star Trek, though Trek was more readily available to watch because of syndicated television. All we got for Star Wars on TV was a Holiday Special, which, incidentally, introduced my favorite Star Wars character of all time.
But that’s another story.
When The Motion Picture finally premiered, it seemed to ‘make things right’ in my mind. Star Trek made it to the big screen.
And it’s not like there was ever a competition between the two franchises in my mind, I just seemed to shift focus from one to the other over time. Nowadays I watch both equally, whether it’s a episode of TOS or TNG or one of the films, or introducing my niece to the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series, or the latest episode of The Mandalorian.
But back to The Motion Picture.
Sure, it can be a boring film, but to me it’s as captivating as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Depending on your mindset.
And as I’ve gotten older, I seem to be in that mindset more and more.
But that’s another story.
Despite today’s 3-3 draw, it was quite a moment to see Gareth Bale return to Spurs.
He started his career the same year (2007) I started following the English Premier League, and Tottenham Hotspur.
At that time, Robbie Keane and Dimitar Berbatov were the top players on the team, so I gravitated toward rooting for them.
Bale slowly became a favorite of mine, and then he left for Real Madrid, another team that I followed back then.
I certainly don’t follow Real Madrid as closely as I do Spurs, so I don’t know all the details of the rift between Bale and Zinedine Zidane.
So seeing an OG Spurs player who was there at the beginning of my being a Spurs fan is pretty cool, especially a favorite player.
And yeah, he should have scored on that great move near the end of that match.
#COYS
After another successful online D&D session, I again revisited my character and how he did in the adventure.
My biggest problem was with paladin spells, my character cast 3 and failed on 2 (Command, Compelled Duel) while one resulted in nothing significant (Detect Magic).
So I went and redid the prepared spells for my character.
I dropped Command and Detect Magic, and added Heroism and Searing Smite.
Hopefully Kal Jadestone will be more effective in this next adventure. His bear companion Zod has played better than he has.
Hi, Mom.
It’s been 16 years since I held your hand and felt your last breath leave your body.
All things considered, I’m doing okay right now.
I had a hell month in August with a kidney stone.
I’m currently in the office, working on a couple of laptops and a desktop.
It’s been a crazy year.
There’s a guy that just arrived up there that you may want to say ‘Hi’ to, Chadwick Boseman. Dad knows who he is. He can tell you about him.
I just wanted to drop a note and tell you that I love you and miss you.
In a normal world, Nelson and I would probably be heading back to the Bay Area from Anaheim, on the last day of Star Wars Celebration.
Instead, I made a Target run to see if I could get anything from the new Galaxy’s Edge Trading Post items that went on sale today.
I went to one Target and they had no such items out. I saw another customer with a basket of figures, asking an employee if they had a particular figure in back. I asked the customer if they had put up their display anywhere, and he said no, he found the figures in the regular Star Wars display in the toy section. I told him that other Targets had end cap displays for the new stuff.
I then went to the other nearby Target, where I was greeted with this:
That same customer from the other Target came up behind me and asked if this was what I was looking for, and I said yeah.
To be honest, the sight of this made me feel sad that I wasn’t in Anaheim, because I had planned to visit Baatu and Black Spire Outpost and even build my own lightsaber. But it wasn’t meant to be this year.
I almost bought the cheap Jedi Blade Builders saber that they had, but decided not to. I’ll build mine at Galaxy’s Edge, someday.
Instead, a porg and a LOTH CAT jumped in my basket.
They brought along a deck of Sabacc-shaped cards to keep themselves busy.
The majority of the other merchandise was rebranded Blade Builders sets, Q’ira’s blaster from Solo rebranded and recolored as a Mandalorian blaster (Double barreled? No.), droid factory action figures and plush droids, and some masks and books.
And yeah, I’m wearing yet another Star Wars shirt today.
I have no memory of this, but when I was really little, maybe even before I was born, my Dad would play chess in the company chess club. He’d play on Friday nights, and according my Mom, when he’d get home, late, he’d still be down in the living room or dining room, setting up a chess set, and studying it, looking where he made a mistake that cost him a match. I don’t know how long he would do that, couldn’t be more than an hour. Or two.
Flash forward to now:
We played Dungeons and Dragons online last night, and the first thing I do when I get up this morning is futz around on Roll20 and DNDBeyond, looking at my newly leveled character and figuring out how to make spells work correctly from the online Roll20 character sheet.
I did that for about 2 hours before I realized what time it was, and took a shower.
Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I guess.
* * *
I do like the online tools for D&D, but I miss face to face interaction.