Posts

Showing posts from January, 2013

My Favorite Rejected Superbowl Ad

Image

Arbonne Fizzy Sticks

Image
To say the least, I was not overly excited when my wife Sally signed up to be a sales consultant for Arbonne .  I don't want to get into it too much, but to say that we fought about it is the understatement of the year.  But regardless of my thoughts on the matter, Sally signed up, and now it's done.  Finis.  Sayonara.  Game over. I may not be a fan of Arbonne, but I can admit that their fizzy sticks are endurance recovery wonder-drinks. Why is this important?  Because while I may hate Arbonne with an abiding passion, I can still admit that their "fizzy stick"  drinks are without doubt the very best post-workout recovery drinks known to man.  They make me feel better after every workout absolutely without fail.  I literally chugged the things when I had the flu, and I put at least one down every single time I go for a long run these days. If you're wondering, fizzy sticks are basically a mildly caffeinated form of Gatorade, save that they have about a tho

Procrastination & Spring Fever

Image
I’m on the train right now, and today’s Game Post for the  Sellswords of Luskan  is done, and I know I ought to start working on some writing, but man, I just do not want to.   So here’s a question for the FR geeks in the room: How many of you know who  Loviatar  is?  If your party was being chased by minions of  Bane , and you suddenly ran into a church with runes celebrating the power of Loviatar, would you know that your party was in trouble?  I’m just curious. If you’re wondering, The Sellswords got lost in the woods this week up in the wilds of the  Spine of the World .  Then the temperature started dropping, and enough of them failed their attendant Constitution checks that they had to seek shelter.  But they accidentally wandered into the Shadowfell (thanks to a bunch of failed Woodland Lore checks), and so when they finally found a place to rest, it was an abandoned farmhouse owned by a vampire priestess of Loviatar.  But they made the Arcana and Forbidden Lore checks

Sneax & Elaina Emboo, Chapter 4

Our story so far:       Sneax owes "rent money" to Russitan Lassiter, a dangerous thug from the Docks District of the portside city of Wanderhaven.  Desperate to avoid getting her ears cut off for failing to pay, she volunteers to help Lassiter with a shady deal up at the Old Church, only to discover that the deal involves a Fire Elf!        Sneax and her best friend, the apprentice mage Elaina Emboo, are put on lookout duty while Drax the Fire Elf and Lassiter finish their deal, but then they see torches approaching.      And now... Chapter 4: Torches in the Night . 

Triathlon Diary: 1/21 to 1/27

Image
It was a pretty good week of triathlon training this week, and especially coming off of having the flu, I'm satisfied with where I am.  It'll be tricky to balance the need to get with the need to stay reasonably rested as the next few weeks come along, but this was a good week of base building, so I guess we'll see how it goes.

Sunday Comics: Bronx Angel--Politics By Another Method (Page 14)

Image
Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method , page 14. Click here to see the page at full size . I posted a link on Facebook yesterday basically saying that I was pleased to see how Sen. John Kerry 's confirmation hearings are going.  If you haven't been following, Kerry is the President's nominee for Secretary of State in the second term, and it looks like he's going to breeze through the confirmation process .  Yesterday's report was specifically about Kerry's call for the U.S. to get its financial house in order, in which he called our country's fiscal irresponsibility and inability to make difficult choices our country's most pressing national security issue.  More specifically, without a strong economy underpinning the goals of our foreign policy, we'll be less able to influence other regions of the globe, and we'll have less influence by way of leadership and/or setting the example of what a successful country is supposed to look like.  

Cartoon Night--Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes

Image
The girls and I sat down last night and watched a bunch of episodes from the Marvel cartoon series, The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes .  Season two is finally out on Netflix, so we've been catching up.  Last night we watched from Episode 2 to Episode 6.  At least, I think it was Episode 6.  It was the one with The Guardians of the Galaxy , so needless to say, Emma and I were very excited. The one weird thing about this episode, though, was the line up of the Guardians. We had Peter Quill , Rocket Racoon , and Groot , all of whom were expected given that they're the core members of the team, but they also added in Quasar and Adam Warlock , which is fine but a little strange given that neither is slated to be in the Guardians' movie next year.  Meanwhile, they left out Drax the Destroyer and Gamora , and they're both supposed to be in the movie. Anyway, all of this is ultimately irrelevant because for whatever reason Marvel Studios has cancelled Eart

Friday Mad Science: Manhattan Trailer Parks, Women in Combat, and Old Man Winter

Image
As I write this, it’s eight degrees outside, and I gotta say, all this cold weather is messing with my mind.  I went running on Wednesday afternoon, and I swear it was the coldest run of my life.  Forget winters in Korea; this was no-shit cold.  Temps in the low twenties with maybe eighteen miles per hour of wind coming in right off the frozen Long Island Sound.  Yikes! I was fine for the first four miles or so, but then I got past the beach and made the turn for home, and suddenly the wind was in my face, blowing straight in off the salt marsh, and it honest-to-God took my breath away. I’ve heard that running or riding in cold weather forces your body to burn more calories, and  although science seems to dispute this , the fact is that I felt it.  When I got done with Wednesday’s run, I felt like I’d been on the wrong end of a beating.   MapMyRun  seemed to think I’d burned something like a thousand calories; it felt more like two thousand. Anyway, looking at the weather

Friday Hair Metal: Somebody to Love

Image
I was gonna play "White Rabbit" but decided that this fits my mood a little better.  Less trippy, more straight-up rock-n-roll.

First Race of the Season!

Image
Sally and I are definitely running the Stratford Sweetheart Run this year.  The race starts at Booth Hill Memorial Park in Stratford, and from there it's a winding single loop course with rolling hills and one tough climb at the three-mile mark. The race is on Saturday, February 9th, with a race start at 10:00 am.  It's $17, or $22 after February 2nd. Come on out!  We'd love to see you there.

Thoughts on the Sellswords and D&D Next Playtesting

Image
We’re about two weeks into the new and improved “ Revenge of the Sellswords of Luskan ”  campaign, a resurrected version of my formerly long-running Play-by-Post (PbP) campaign,  The Sellswords of Luskan , which is/was hosted on the  Myth-Weavers  forum .  The original Sellswords ran for about four years using D&D’s  4 th  Edition  ruleset, from 5 th  Level up to about 14 th Level.  Sellswords was kind of a Stronghold campaign, heavy on high concept and  Forgotten Realms  divine mythology.  I’d like to re-use a lot of those same concepts for Revenge, but  I've  only just now had time to sit down and figure out what the immediate arc of the game is going to be.  Part of that was me wanting to see how my Players would react to the new ruleset and to the changes that it necessitated to their characters, but there was also a certain amount of inertia and flu-inspired laziness as well, so we’re not off to what I’d have termed a scintillating start.  Still,  we've  had one m

Sneax & Elaina Emboo, Chapter 3

The Old Church Wanderhaven has been a port city for a long, long time.  In the days when single-masted longships plied the ocean's trade routes without ever leaving sight of shore, the rocky headlands and natural cove on the eastern edge of the Bregaen Sea were a natural landmark for sailors looking to gauge their progress or to find shelter from a storm.  In time, the place became a common meeting point for seaborne merchants looking to trade goods, and a small community grew to support those for whom this once rocky and inhospitable spot now represented a port and perhaps a bit of comfort and safety amidst the ever-present dangers of the sea.  On the bluff overlooking the new port town, sailors went to pay homage to the gods they held in highest esteem—Poseidon, the patron god of the sea, and Hades, the god of fate and death.  Over the next century, a great and mighty temple grew, and in time, Poseidon was adopted as the patron god of not just the sea but of Wanderhaven itse

Triathlon Diary: 1/14 to 1/20

The big news this week was, of course, that I got the flu.  I came down with it Saturday after Tri Practice last weekend, and I was in bed from the time that I got home until sometime Tuesday afternoon.  I went to work on Wednesday, but in retrospect, that was a day too early, and it was Friday before I really started to feel like myself again. Swim I swam twice this week: once on Friday night and once of Sunday afternoon.  Friday my goal was just to get into the water and see how my body would respond to a little light exercise.  Sunday was a more active effort, and I put a lot more of myself into that workout.  It went like this:  - 5 x 100 @ 1:40 warm-up (aerobic pace)  -- 1 minute rest --  - 5 x 100 @ 1:30 (Temp; holding 1:15)  - 6 x 50 kick @ 1:00 (2 x fly / breast / free)  - 100 drill (catch-up / fingertip drag)  - 6 x 100 pull @ 1:30  - 100 cool down Don't get me wrong; I still feel like I have a lot of work to do to get to where I want to be as a swimmer.  But t

Sunday Comics: Bronx Angel--Politics By Another Method (Page 13)

Image
Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method .  Page 13. Click here to see this page at full size . And now we're into background.   My rule of thumb is that background should be now more than 20% of your story.    Here, I think we've got all of one page in the first twenty-two, so that's good.  Plus, given that we've already met Angel's parents, I thought it was necessary to explain how he managed to wind up in a gang rather than at Harvard or something.   Truth is, a good kid from a decent family in the Bronx has plenty of opportunities--even in the south Bronx.  The problem tends to be not that the opportunities aren't there but rather that the kids' homelives and family structures are often incredibly chaotic, making any kind of academic and/or traditional success difficult, especially in the kids' formative years.  And once the kids fall behind, get the idea that school's not for them, or basically just give up on making it in any sort of