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July 15, 2004

Not My Month For Cars

So, today it took me an hour to get home from work.

I know many people for whom that isn't at all unusual, but I live close enough to almost be able to walk, barely 3 1/2 miles. And while there was some traffic due to the construction mentioned here, that was only the secondary cause of my delay. While stopped waiting on construction traffic, however, I heard an all-too-familiar crunch and felt my car jerk forward.

Yeah. I'd been rear-ended.

Turns out the nice girl in the Taurus wasn't really at fault, though. She'd been hit herself, and rather hard, by the teen boys in the Voyager. Their front end was completely crunched im, her front and rear bumper had collapsed... and I have a small nick in my rear bumper, barely more than a cut through the white coating over the metal.

The rest of the delay was 30 minutes waiting for the police to take down all the details.

Of course, I have no idea how much fixing the tiny nick will cost (and I will need to, if only to prevent it becoming a bridgehead for rust), but I think I had a lucky end to an unlucky event. Though I'd much rather have just made it straight home.

Posted by ghoul at 06:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 06, 2004

Does Whatever A Spider Can

Well, it wasn't perfect, but it sure was good!

Spider-Man 2 is the sort of sequel we need more of. It's completely aware of its role, it restarts and expands upon pretty much every tread of the first film, and because of that it almost feels like we just got to see the next few reels of a single project. The cast is solid, both the returning actors and the wonderful new Doc Ock. Here we get another man driven insane by the source of his powers, just like the Goblin in the first, but that's where the resemblance ends. Gobby was driven by anger and revenge, Doc is trapped in his obsessions, willing to do anything to prove he was right. Add to this Molina's willingness to let Doc be the tubby scientist left bare-chested for scene after scene and you have a perfect recreation of a comic-book character I never expected to see actually moving around.

Meanwhile, Spidey's cascade of life's little tragedies continue. If things went well for him, he'd be another superhero. Oh, he gets something of a happy ending, but there's still a lot of mess in his life. There's two or three more villain's I've already spotted set-ups for, and I was much more a DC fan than a Marvel fan in my heavy comics reading days.

They over-compensated a bit for the first movie's biggest problem (a lack of facial expression visibility), but when that's the biggest flaw of a film, I really can't complain.

Sam Raimi really has a nigh-perfect grasp of how to do Spider-Man, and we can only hope for more and more.

Posted by ghoul at 06:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

WhaleCon

If you're not in the North-Eastern part of the US, this entry will likely not be of any interest to you. Sorry.

As I did last year and the years preceeding it since moving to New Hampshire, I'm going to be celebrating my birthday by inviting folks to join in on a Saturday afternoon whale watching cruise. It's a great way to spend a Saturday, a chance to see one of the more impressive animals on earth up close, and just a lot of fun. This year, my birthday's actually on a Saturday, so it's not even an approximate date!

Info on the cruise itself can be found here, and I see no reason not to just open up and let readers of this blog who might be close enough to make it to Rye, NH on August 28th are welcome to join us. Tradition has us follow the whale watching with yummy seafood dinner here.

Yes, it's more than a month and a half away, but I'm going to be making reservations toward the end of this month, so I'd like to know who to expect!

(The "WhaleCon" name is mostly just a joke, based on the fact that I only see many friends at gaming conventions. This isn't really a convention at all, just a fun summer activity.)

Posted by ghoul at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

Holiday Weekend

I can't call it the most productive of weekends (too much time in cars or trains), but there was some good gaming, interesting conversation, and some of the best inspiration I could imagine for my currently-stalled bronze age RPG project imaginable (a full afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, including all-too-brief time in the Classical and Egyptian sections). Absolutely nothing "July 4th" like, unless you include driving to the World Trade Center site, but that was just to drop friends off at the PATH station not to join the pilgrims to Ground Zero.

But tomorrow, it's back to work and the pressing (and undefined) product deadlines. Maybe I will find time to get something moving on the new game inspiration, though...

Posted by ghoul at 09:37 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack