This Week in Geek (1-7/10/07)

Buys'n'Gifts

While I don't make a habit of paying for .pdf files, do you know how much AD&D 2nd ed. Planescape products go for on eBay? Not uncommonly 80-100$ and that's before they fleece you on the shipping. But since I'm running that very game, I can't very well sell my stuff off and retire to an island in the Carribean. And I've got most products anyway, but not everything. So eBay -too pricey. Amazon.ca - nothing. Amazon.com - plenty but won't ship to my address. Torents - no available sources online at the moment. Screw it, DriveThruRPG is selling all the old AD&D products at less than 5$ a pop. Not books, but searchable, printable scans. 40$ for Hellbound, Guide to the Astral Plane, Guide to the Ethereal Plane, Uncaged, Faces of Evil, In the Cage, Inner Planes and The Planewalker's Handbook as opposed to 10 gazillion bucks. All I'm missing now is On Hallowed Ground (didn't have it) and Faction War (been warned away too often). Let the gaming continue, I am complete.

In a more physical form, I got me some DVDs: the UK series Shakespeare Retold, which intrigued me as a trailer on As You Like It. These are modern retellings of some of the plays and look amusing enough despite the lack of the Bard's words. Watched about half of it already, and I think it's a winner (more later). And I coupled that with another masterpiece of Japanese cinema, Invasion of Astro-Monster. Don't worry, Godzilla's in it.

And a gift! My good friend Elyse came to Moncton and brought me a fun little book called Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived. Thanks to her, but no thanks to the guys sitting on the electric car since the 50s. Booo.

"Accomplishments"

Ok, well, at the beginning of the week, I managed 14 Doctor Who CCG cards based on City of Death, which is a great story, but really involved as far as temporal effects go. 5 Scaroths, a way to use them all simultaneously, and plenty of weird and funky effects. I'll probably finish things up on that one tomorrow since we have Canadian Thanksgiving off. The kind of stuff I'm proud of:
Then I got sidetracked because my roommate bought himself an XBox 360 and Halo 3. Finished the storyline a bit quickly (Heroic only though), but I've never flipped a Halo in co-op mode before. Still, I give it props for some great battles with lots of players, really creepy Flood creatures, and much less repetitive stages than the previous two chapters. I loved playing the Arbiter, even though it was obviously Master Chief's story, as he's way cooler and I like Covenant weapons better anyway. Still, I do wish it had ended with the two of us fighting each other over "unfinished business". Ah well.

And finally today played a little Planescape with my group which has quickly devolved into a duo of adventurers. They're well suited to each other, but I'll still make an effort to recruit more. Made the Great Modron March start at the tail end of an adventure in the border town of Automata - in which I used a number of tricks I learned running Paranoia - which amused one player, and bored the other. As a Sensate, the drab, orderly lifestyle would have had that effect, yes, which pushed him to rashly use brawn instead of brains this time around. Still, the story set them up to keep an eye on the March until campaign's end.

Website Finds
It's all Ragnell's fault. When she mentioned indexing her Discworld novels on LibraryThing.com, I was intrigued. And now I'm indexing my vast collection of books into it as well. Beats another Excel file collecting dust on my hard drive... but do I need another long project?

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