Timewalking Archive Trap: Not Helping

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap is presents select treasures (for very liberal definitions of "treasures") from yesteryear for the sole enjoyment of my readers.

So, you've probably heard about the Women in Refrigerators trope. I guess some guy was inspired to write a version for gays. The gay version was interesting because I've never heard of most of these characters and I haven't been able to keep up with the rest (not really too interested in buying a comic just because some of the ensemble are gay, especially since I bought the book with Freedom Ring to see what the fuss was about and it turns out it wasn't very good.).

Timewalking Archive Trap: 40k, Part 4 of 4

 

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap presents select treasures from yesteryear for the enjoyment of my readers and the easing of my creative duties. 

This one is dated 15 October 2007: 

Highlights
>My Assault Marines, despite being under lots of enemy fire, managed to totally decimate a pair of Tau Crisis Suits that Derek dropped in front of me to help out his ally. They got off a really good turn of fire before my Marines tackled them and ripped them into Taufetti.

>Terry's dudes didn't move very much. He sat back and made about four long range attacks each turn after his first advancing squad got wiped out. Derek's Tau moved a bit (a bit like a glacier) and managed to thin my ally's ranks. Most of this kept them from interfering with the Richard/Kris side of the map. 

>And the Tau really are spectacular at range.

Timewalking Archive Trap: 40k, Part 3 of 4

 

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap presents select treasures from yesteryear for the enjoyment of my readers and the easing of my creative duties. 

This one is dated 15 October 2007: 

The Play
I was visibly concerned about Richard's armies. Concerned. Not, 'concerned that he was cheating' like I was about his handwritten army list (We are collectively convinced he exports 99% of Louisiana's willful ignorances, self-justifications, and outright cheats). I can lose a rigged fight and salve my wounds with a one-off barb that gets under his skin. It's the fact that I knew I should have expected a gathering of elite, special ability unique-type Imperial Guard characters. That's what was bothering me before. Massed tactics with untrained units are something Richard sees as inelegant, clumsy, and relying on luck. He'd rather take one guy with fifty special abilities than fifty guys with one each. I figured each one of his guys was going to possess some kind of butt-kicking thing that would--when activated in concert--turn my Space Marines into so many genetically-augmented, pre-packaged cans of soylent green.

You see, at this point I thought he was merely inattentive, overprepared.

Timewalking Archive Trap: 40k, Part 2 of 4

 

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap presents select treasures from yesteryear for the enjoyment of my readers and the easing of my creative duties. 

This one is dated 15 October 2007: 

Learning Lessons

Derek had arrived earlier and given some color commentary towards the end, but it was a new familiarity with the rules and Terry's analysis (and the equipment that he used to kill me) that let me retool The Earls of Sandwiche to be less than a jet pack-enhanced suicide squad.

Terry still hadn't explained the mechanics to me(about strength/toughness, Ballistic Skills, Weapon Skills), but I had picked up enough from memory and watching that I was comfortable with how things rolled.

Derek also ran his army through the Army Builder program, and he and Terry argued quite a bit, flipping through the Codex (a list of all the different options an army for a certain faction has) of Derek's faction--the space-American Tau--and talking about point costs and special abilities and the program. I left, not because the conversation was heated (it wasn't), not because it was annoying (it was), and not because it was irrelevant (Derek's army composition was very relevant to me), but because I knew it would end with Derek relenting because he didn't know the rules as well and just using the army builder anyway because he didn't want the faint chance of dishonesty associated with making his army by hand.

Image courtesy of Requiem (Francisco Salinas). 

You can check out more of his stuff on his deviantart at: http://nataku956.deviantart.com/ 

Timewalking Archive Trap: 40k, Part 1 of 4

 

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap presents select treasures from yesteryear for the enjoyment of my readers and the easing of my creative duties. 

This one is dated 15 October 2007:

I played some Warhammer 40k yesterday for the first time. I didn't really like it.

Backstory
'The Guys' started showing interest in Warhammer about 3 months after I sold my dust-covered, all-but-forgotten starter box to someone else. It was the wargamer equivalent of finally throwing away my little black book, only to have that hookup whore on the side end up in all of my classes at school. At any rate, I managed to be supportive, given that after getting interested in April, Terry and Derek played their first game a few weeks ago. It isn't entirely fair to say that though; I've got a library of hundreds of Battletech that I've never fielded, which parallels Terry's contentment honing his mini-painting and landscaping techniques without ever rolling initiative.

So Terry's been the number one guy on this; subsidizing minis, going over the rules, downloading army builders. He's spent the last few months going through the books at a leisurely, but characteristically thorough pace. There was a time--and I think many gamers can parrot this sentence with honesty--we'd rip open a new game system or sourcebook every week, devouring it, as Russo's zombies devour brains. Derek, the number two guy in 40k, was never so fond of that. He's really the type of guy that's more inclined to focus on the essential information and let practice do the teaching.

Timewalking Archive Trap:

Hey, I've got five final projects to complete in four days. I've got Wednesday queued up, you might very well be on your own for Friday, and Monday is late and it's a Timewalking Archive Trap from my old Myspace blog. Sorry.

So very sorry.

Mar 1, 2006

I took to the coffee shop today for studying. Public places are generally good places for me to study. I get to whip out a book and some papers and study. Well, I generally tend to sit alone when I do this (as my papers and things need "spreadin' out space"), but the coffee shop was pretty crowded. Not to look thwarted in front of a mall of (nearly) perfect (but not nearly perfect enough) strangers, I simply ordered my coffee, resolving that if someone didn't vacate a table within the time it took to get it, I would simply invite myself to sit with someone.

And I did.

We talked for a goddamn hour. A god. Damned. Hour.

Team Fortress 2 Videos

I could swear I've posted these before.

Team Fortress 2 is the sequel to a popular First Person Shooter that I've never heard of, but I can guess the name of. It uses a set of different types of characters you can play, from a flame guy(no video) to a soldier(video!). Anyway, the characters are visually and functionally distinct, giving them miles of personality, as the introduction videos below demonstrate.

Timewalking Archive Trap: Rules of War

Time: Oct 1, 2006
Location: A forum on the internet

[Name Withheld 01]: And I hate to say it, but where is ANY kind of body armor for ground forces....oh wait, they dont HAVE ground forces, they just send the "security" guys down there. Even during the Dominion War, no one even THOUGHT about putting any personell assigned to ground duty in any body armor.

[Name Withheld 02]: That's right -- Noone. Including the Cardassian and Dominion militaries.

VanVelding: There's a reason for that:
Scene: Start of the Dominion War, somewhere near the Cardassian/Federation/Bajoran/whatever border. Sisko, Weyoun, and Dukat sit down.
Weyoun: Captain, we should discuss the terms on which this war is to be fought.
Sisko: That's why I'm here gentlemen.

Timewalking Archive Trap: Nerd Points

TrackerMoonl: What did yall talk about?
VanVelding: Dukat, initially.
VanVelding: The badguy from DS9.
VanVelding: I'm like, "everyone has a stake in kicking his ass at the end."
VanVelding: Relatively speaking, Sisko was indifferent towards the bastard.
VanVelding: Their only beef was professional. Sisko was Jesus, and Dukat was that kid from The Omen.

Timewalking Archive Trap: Little-Known Facts About Dark Troopers

-DarkTroopers tie a camera into the trigger mechanism of their main gus so they can remember the faces of the Rebels they kill.

-Dark Troopers do not die; their hard drives just fill with pictures.

-Dark Troopers were originally equipped with a cluster-shot blaster with a much longer range. The Dark Troopers turned it down in favor of the current, close-range model citing the fact that they are 'people droids.'

-Contrary to popular belief, Dark Trooopers do have feelings. One feeling. Jealousy that others get to be killed by Dark Troopers.

Timewalking Archive Trap: The End of Aberrant

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap is presents select treasures (for very liberal definitions of "treasures") from yesteryear for the sole enjoyment of my readers. This one is dated 2006:

So it's over. The plot twists, the character development. The plot holes and character deconstruction. The puerile secrets, the highs, the lows, the intricately detailed non-player extras who were both the recipients of a great destiny and one of so many nameless bodies thrown on an indifferent pyre, the other non-player characters with hastily-hatched names and concepts to match ideas that were quickly constructed, vaguely defined, and much loved.

The best parts of life are the ones we do not plan for. We hope in those irregular occasions and events that we anticipate, but somewhere between the honest satisfaction and honest disappointment we lie at the end of a rainbow, under a continued hype that keeps us believing things were as good as expected--or at least better than they were--if not out of the simple need of hope for a varied, exciting, and worthwhile life, then out of a plain refusal to believe in failure.

In boredom.

In a daily regularity not worth sharing.

Not worth remembering.

Not worth telling.

Not worth living.

Not worthy.

It is the irregularities that make life more or less than this. It is the unusual which makes one's life special or miserable. It was the unexpected that found us in Aberrant. My controlled chaos, my friends' chaos and control. I have, at times, seen myself as a Disney villain. It fits the toothless acrimony of my villains and make them particularly suitable for portraying comic-action villains. I monologue, I underestimate my players, build superweapons that disable the heroes' superpowers and forget that Warlock carries a shotgun and a flack jacket.

In fact, I don't think Warlock's done much non-dramatic warlocking in a while...

We had characters that were complicated, and some that were simple. A bravo driven to overcome any opponent; one of the most powerful beings on Earth, who when he hears that an experimental compound has exploded in Nebraska calls his parents in Denver to see if they were safe, then flies out to cauterize a giant's knees off.

A redeemable Irish kid who made Spiderman look about as lucky as a millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. He gives up, but when history gives him the opportunity--the hope--to change things for the better, he steps up like a hero.

It wasn't perfect--nothing is--but it was good fun. The adventures were too big sometimes, the tasks too easy, the separation between honest roleplaying and self-insertion was thin at times (on both sides of the storyteller's screen), but we had fun. That's what we were there for, and that's what we left with most days.


"Death is not the end of a character, it is the final piece of character development."

Timewalking Archive Trap: Texas

I was born in Texas. As much as I am anything else, I am a Texan. I do consider myself a Southerner. I've lived in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina. My earliest memories were from Louisiana ('87-'90) before my parents divorced. The small town bisected by highway 90 and my first days in school. Things were good in Louisiana. I was a pretty happy kid there. I knew the crew, things went wrong sometimes of course, but there I managed to belong somehow.

Texas ('90 to '95) was one of the many, multiple current shifts in my life. I was an outside for the first time...not to see 'insider' again for some time. If it weren't for being the poor, geek kid, with glasses, and poorly developed social skills with the single mother family...if it weren't for that, I certainly wouldn't be the guy I am today. I wasted a lot of time trying to turn that around as a kid, and spent a lot of energy trying to get past it.

Timewalking Archive Trap: My Family Guy Romance

Peter Griffin: "...like that time I was in My Chemical Romance..."

*Cut to Peter Griffin standing alongside My Chemical Romance*

"Alright, it's been two years since we were in the studio...ah, let's get's started by playing our biggest song."

: "What do we do again?"

: "I think...it's, ah, You're Beautful?"

: "I don't know...I think that guy's British or somethin'..."

: "Weren't we in that video with the dancing dead girl?

:*thinking* "I think so. Boy, we must do some pretty dark stuff."

"Didn't we do, This isn't a Scene, it's an Arms Race?"

: "No, that's Fall Out Boy."

: This isn't Fall Out Boy?

: "Nope. This is...ah The Breakfast Monkey?"

*walks away.*

: "No, that's the cartoon I pitched to Cartoon Network."

: "Do we do 'Skeleton Crew'?"

: "No, that's the production company I founded for underprivledged bands."

: "Well, does anyone here have their own line of clothes?"

Pause *Everyone shrugs*

*thoughtful*: "Huh. You kinda figure...y'know, one of us would've had our own line of clothes by now--anyway, it's not important. Let's just go to Wal-Mart, find a CD that has our picture on the cover, see if that jogs any memories, and then we can get this whole thing started."

*They begin to leave*

: "So, do you guys gay off in pairs, or is it just like Caligula backstage?"
: "Actually, I'm married to a pop star no one's ever heard of."
: "No surprise there."
: "A girl pop-star."
: "No friggin' way!"

Timewalking Archive Trap: Hitler & 80's

Hitler

While I was watching a movie with some of my friends today, we were watching a preview for Valkyrie and we started talking:
Movie: "If they catch you, they'll tear you to pieces."
"...or they'll shoot you."

"You saw it?"

"Yeah, he and I saw it together."

"How was it?"

*Shrug* "Predictable. Hitler lives."

"Yeah. Guess that sucks about historical movies; you usually know how they end."

"It'd be great if there was a deleted scene where Hitler does die."

"It's Hollywood; they could just make that the ending and make the alternate ending what really happened."

*In movie announcer voice* " 'Inspired by the true events of World War Two: Hitler Dies Before WWII.' "
"They'd make a sequel!"
"And sell Hitler action figures with little coffin accessories-"
"Oh, and when you close it and hit the button, the Hitler spins around so when you open it again, it's a dried up Hitler-corpse."

"Nah, I'd use the horror ending; credits roll and a Hitler's hand thrusts upwards from his grave."

"Hah! Better: they're taking him away in the body bag, and he busts out with a fist to knock a guy out."

"No, no: Hitler salute that slices through the bag and catches one of the...dead body hauling guys...right in the windpipe"

"...and then he goose-steps the other one in the crotch."

"Then, he tears through the body bag like Boris Karloff, then stumbles towards the edge of the clearing. There, closes with the camera and we see that he's totally a zombie. He stops and gives another Hitler salute towards something off screen...pan back and there's the real Hitler with a bunch of Hitler guys and soldiers who mysteriously disappeared for the last 30 minutes of the film."

"Then?"
"Sequel city."

The 80's

The 80's were so Eighties that someone once said, "Let's make a movie about Batman?"

And then someone else said, "Who should be Batman, the Dark Knight? The Crusader in a Cape? The living scourge of Gotham's Underworld?"

"Michael Keaton," said the other guy, "He was Beetle Juice."

"Radical! And for this this gritty exploration of a city wrapped in eternal night, this man driven to avenge the grisly deaths of his parents deaths and his homicidally maniacal archnemesis...music?"

"Prince!"

"Hell yeah! This will totally fucking beat Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!"

Ten Months Later...
$400,000,000!
(And it totally beat Indiana Jones.)

So if anyone ever asks you how eighties the 80's were, the correct answer is, "I'm Batman."

Timewalking Archive Trap: Video Collection, vol 2

Hooch...

...is crazy!


And Hodges. Because Hodges rocks.




Based on this commercial. It should come as no surprise I like the Shatner one better.












Yeah, sounds about right. All it's missing is Slappy Squirrel at the end telling us how that's comedy.



I forgot that when I make something, I waste half a night's sleep making things too good. And don't read too much into those placements; they're random.

The song is Piebald's "Karate Chops for Everyone But Us."

Timewalking Archive Trap: Video Collection, vol 1

Doom stands up:

Awesome.


Music.


Music.


Shatner music.

If you're not keeping up with these, you should be:








Star Wars cut up over the voices for a Departed trailer.


TMNT over Reservoir Dogs. :D


Someone asked about Wilford Brimley the other day.

He's cool. Also, he's the unofficial spokesman for Diabetes(diabeetus).


He has, naturally, been spoofed by the interwebs.


Really, this shit goes on, but they're all variations on the same theme:

Timewalking Archive Trap: Greatest Idea Ever

What If Rorschach Took Up Gaming?

It was Kovacs who said "Mother" then, muffled under a Doom Blade. It was Kovacs who was put into a graveyard. It was Rorschach who was Unearthed and exiled at end of turn.

"Dan said his Kor Firewalker had protection from red. It didn't have protection from hairspray + pack of matches."

* * *

It's the Magic: even more Timewalking Archive Trap

Shiny!
Submitted without comment:

That's Funny
Sharing some other answers to the essay question portion of the GDS2. Questions in bold. Commentary in italics.

8. Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the best designed? Explain why.

Persist is awesome, and yes, it’s awesomely designed.

Persist is effective; it gives you two creatures for one card. It functions very simply; even a novice player can discern how it works.

It's the Magic: Timewalking Archive Trap

Shiny!
Submitted without comment:

This Week's Best Thing Ever!
This is actually an old one (in keeping with the theme), but it's a good one.

3-Way EDH Planescape Archenemy Game

Life Totals:
Josh - 4
Kris. - 20
Terry - 13

Josh's Turn: Plays Walking Archive. Puts 2 additional +1/+1 counters on it, forcing everyone to draw three extra cards during their Draw Step.

Terry's Turn: Draws four for Walking Archive. Schemes for A Display of My Dark Power, doubling everyone's mana until Terry's next turn. Planeswalks us to Feeding Grounds, reducing the cost of Red and Green spells.

Kris.' Turn: Draws four. Schemes into Your Puny Minds Cannot Fathom to draw four more. Plays a land. Taps out for 28 mana of varying levels of each color. I play Enchanted Evening (everything is an Enchantment), Patrician's Scorn for free to destroy all Enchantments (everything), then follow up with Lord of Extinction, Meglonoth, and Gleancrawler. Has 8 mana left over. Rolls for planeswalk four times, getting Chaos twice putting 6 +1/+1 counters on both Meglonoth and Gleancrawler. At EoT: 51/51 Lord of Extinction, 12/12 Meglonoth(tramples), 12/12 Gleancrawler(tramples), and a justified sense of smugness.

Josh's Turn: Schemes Your Will is Not Your Own, gaining control of Kris.' Lord of Extinction, giving it trample and haste. Plays a forest. Attacks with Lord of Extinction, which is blocked with Meglonoth. The Meglonoth's ability triggers to kill Josh and the Lord of Extinction tramples to kill Kris.

Terry's Turn: Wins.

Timewalking Archive Trap: The Agenda

City of Villains, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, where people across the country can land in one city and become any type of fantastically-costumed ne'er do well they can imagine. The creator of Mac Hall and Three Panel Soul joins the world reluctantly.

The beginning.

The middle:


The end.

...it was a good run, guy.