As a wise man once said,

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.*

So the last couple of weeks have been busy. Far too busy to keep up with posting here obviously. Part of the time was spent trying to earn some money, part with family, and part with playing games. The family had games parts were much more successful than the money part so far.

Especially with the last couple of days, dealing with taxes. That has been especially depressing, but at least it is past now. Just the regular bills draining my resources at this point.

To combat the various depressing parts of the last couple of weeks, I have been spending too much time buried in City of Heroes. Issue 14 is live now, and I had to bring over and update an arc from the Test server. Feedback immediately got me started re-writing parts and searching for typos. The re-writing is done, but I do not believe it is possible to get rid of all the typos. They hide from me, just to jump out and bug the players.

Frankly, between the time spent working on a website for someone else, and writing I have been doing on my arcs for the Mission Architect, I have not had the time, nor really the inclination, to  get much written here. But I am currently between arcs on City of Heroes, and before I start on the website, I thought I would drop a quick update here.

I am also considering how, or even if, to proceed with the plugin reviews. I enjoy looking at the various offerings the plugin developers  give us, but I really need to spend more time making money, which my writing reviews will not do. Will have to wait and see how life happens I guess.

Oh yeah, if anyone that reads this is a COH player, try out Future Skulls, ID 4727, and Simple Times, ID 70801, and let me know what you think. Both are low level arcs, with related stories.

*John Lennon of course.

Went to visit friends last night, like I try to do most Fridays. We generally play games and visit, and eat cheese. The cheese is important. We have only been doing it a couple of decades now, so we already know what everybody thinks about most things, but we say it anyway.

Last night was not a good night at the table for me. While waiting for others to show up, three of us played a game of The Ark of the Covenant, a variant of Carcassonne. It was made a bit more interesting because we were playing on an end table, the large table being used by the children for a game of Killer Bunnies.

The much smaller space made it much easier to decide to close off the castle holding bubba. (The prophet piece. I had to look that up, we never call it that. Big meeples are bubbas, in all the games.) The turn before I played a piece to share sheep with another player, who had more than me, the third player put down a piece to block it. At the endof the game, the third player ended up winning, with me second, and the other player last. If I had managed to share the sheep, I would have won the game.

When everybody showed up, we started a game of 6 player Empire Builder. This is very rare for us, we usually only manage to get 3 or 4 people at a time there, because 2 of us live over an hour away, and the others mostly have lives. We really wanted to make it a game of Iron Dragon or Lunar Rails, but one person had only played once before, and we were getting a late start because of the Killer Bunnies game.

I went first, and because of the 6 players, I decided not to try the sugar run to Chicago I had. I figured it would be too expensive to get through the Rockies since others would grab cheap routes. So I took a shorter double run of Lead to a couple of places in Mexico. Then I watched everybody else build East of Kansas City. The entire eastern half of the US was packed.

That is an example of how the decisions I made worked for the rest of the game. I am not bad at these games, I won the Empire Builder International championship at the Puffing Billy tournament at Origins this last year. But lately I am getting my butt kicked at our weekend games. Good thing I am the only one from them that makes it to conventions.

But it was a fun night, even though I was just over $100 million when the game ended. And the 5th place person had almost $200 million. It wasn’t even close.

I finally got my monthly shipment of comics from Mile High Comics. I do not particularly like getting all my comics once a month, rather than every week or so, but the local shop closed several years ago and at the time I did not make the drive to other towns to find a shop there. In the years since, I have found a couple of shops in nearby towns but Mile High is doing well enough to keep my business.

My reading list has changed over the years, mostly super-heroes, although I do pick up the occasional non-super title. And I read from a variety of companies, the exact mix depending on what I feel like reading that is being published. These days it is mostly DC Comics, with some odds and ends from other publishers. I am not reading anything from Marvel on my monthly list these days. Not because I hate Marvel, but simply because of economics. I have been liking the DC books more since Infinite Crisis and One Year Later.

I do pick up trades of the Ultimate Marvel books, and the current Captain America run. Ed Brubacker is doing a great job on that title. And I will be checking out the trades for Captain Britain and MI13 and for the current run of Thor. I have been hearing really good things about them and am looking forward to reading the stories.

Other non-DC books I am reading include Angel: After The Fall and Buffy: Season Eight. I was a fan of both shows when they were on and have mostly been enjoying the continuing stories in the comics. I also follow PS238 by Aaron Williams. I had heard about it on a message board and picked up the first trade at Origins a couple of years ago. After I read part of it, I picked up the other trades that were out before the end of the convention. Then added it to my pull list when I got home.

I picked up The Boys after reading about it on Newsrama and because I have liked [W: Garth Ennis] in other works. It is a super-hero comic, but not like most of them. I am afraid it is a more accurate protrayal of what the world would be like if super-heroes were possible than most attempts. It is certainly filled with more bloody violence and sex than most.

Enough for now. I will talk about the DC stuff and some specifics in later posts. Not that they will be particulary timely posts, since I don’t get my issues until long after the show at local stores. But that is the beauty of personal blogs. They don’t have to be timely.

It was a pretty good weekend, except for the parts that weren’t. I guess that technically fits all weekends, but at least most of this one was good. Well okay, most of it wasn’t really good. It just wasn’t bad.

Went over to see friends in Indiana Friday night. This is a pretty regular thing, we try to get together every Friday, although we do sometimes have scheduling problems, like holidays, vacations, or illness. We have been doing this for years. Actually, we have been doing it for a couple of decades at this point. We started after college graduation and have kept it up ever since. Even when I moved to Virginia for five years, the others continued getting together. We originally got together on Saturday nights, but moved it to Friday nights earlier this year because it worked better for work schedules.

Why do we go this, for over 20 years now? Well, for one, we like each other. We don’t agree about a lot of things, like politics or religion, but we still like spending time together. We show up, usually at Linda’s house, and spend several hours talking and playing games.

Guess I forgot to mention the games. That is how we started hanging out during college. Sort of. Most of us met and became friends and started playing games there. We had heard about some sort of game dealing with wizards and dragons and wanted to try it. So we found some Basic Edition Dungeons & Dragons and basically taught ourselves how to play. Our DM at the time was not the best, but we still enjoyed the games.

From there, we expanded to board games, especially Risk. We also played other thing, like Rook, Shogun, and Civilization. We were pretty open to playing about anything, as long as we enjoyed it.

Getting older did slow us down a bit. Jobs made it harder to find the time, I lived an hour away from the rest of the group, then I moved to Virginia. But the others kept getting together and playing games. We went to Gencons (before it was in Indy), Origins (I still get to this one as much as possible), and a local game con. One of us died very suddenly on a Saturday morning, a few hours before we got together, leaving his wife and 3 daughters. And still we get together as much as possible.

These days we mostly play train games. We started with Rail Baron, then moved on to the Empire Builder games. We own all the versions and like playing them, but the India version is pretty much our favorite. Well, I am not liking it all that well after the last 2 weekends. My game both weekends was poor to say the least. But that is how it goes sometimes, you just don’t get the cards you need when you need them.

We also played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride using the USA 1910 cards. We like that version because of the large number tickets available, making each game so different. We also play the Switzerland version on occasion. It can get pretty cutthroat, but is still fun. I did manage to win one game of Ticket to Ride, but again failed miserably at the second.

So it was mainly a losing effort Friday night. An hour drive, got my butt kicked at multiple games, then an hour home. Lots of fun. Wish we could get together this week, but the holiday schedule makes it impossible.

Saturday was more fun. I drove to Kentucky and participated in an orienteering event put on by the Orienteering Cincinnati group. It was marginally closer than the event the IndyO people were running. Considering how badly I did, the less time I had to drive to get home, the better.

I do not expect to do extremely well at the events. I left myself get too out of shape over the last year for that. I go to get out of my house, get some exercise, and basically have a fun walk through the woods. But that doesn’t mean I want to do badly on the course. And this time I did. I was doing the orange course and read the map wrong at the first control. (A minor mistake, after all, how important is reading the map at an orienteering event.) So I found the second control first, realized what I had done, and had to go back to the first control, then back to the second. Given my slow speed, this was a real problem.

So I walked through the woods, occasionally frustrated, usually sweating, and trying to find the shortest way between two points. Since I like the straight line definition, I did some of the sections the hard way. It was mostly fun, except for the cramps I had most of the time in my quadriceps. I didn’t warm up enough before starting, and it was a chilly day. They were painful, and driving for over 2 hours getting home didn’t help. Which was why Sunday was not a fun day at all.

Which pretty much leads me back to my first paragraph. It was a good weekend. Except for the times it wasn’t.