Weekly dose of randomness

Actually, I don't really have anything all that random to point you towards. The San Diego Comic Con is going on and apparently all the Twilight fans are out in droves for hopes of a glimpse of Paper(cut) Moon New Moon. Le sigh. Don't they know there are real movies worth being interested in? I somehow doubt it.

Finally caught Taken the other night. It was a decent action flick. Typical Dad knows best, torture is ok, completely silly ending sort of movie. I'm just glad it was only 90 minutes. Otherwise actually thinking about what was going on would probably have ruined vast amounts of that film. Other than the ending. Seriously. How was he not in jail by the end? But Liam Neeson does kick some serious butt.

We have since played a few more games of Dominion. I'm finding it to be rather enjoyable if a bit mysterious. I'm not at all surprised it won the SdJ this year, there's a fair amount of depth as you try to figure out the best way to construct your deck. There's not a whole lot of player interaction (at least not with the initial set of recommended cards) but the up side is that any mistakes you make are pretty much your fault. There's not a lot of luck involved (and that's a great thing). Definitely worth picking up if you like relatively light strategy games.

This is a long weekend and I couldn't be happier. Well ok if it were much cooler out and I didn't have as much stuff on my schedule I might be a touch happier, but still pretty happy. We may try a recipe for meatballs that involves grape jelly. I'm a little scared, but supposedly it's tasty...

Oh I should point out that G let us know last night that eating celery had made his mouth hot. I feel science should study this effect. The power of celery to raise one's mouth temperature. Sure beats some of the studies they do. I'm not entirely convinced it was really celery that caused this as we had curry for dinner and that was a much more likely culprit, but he seems convinced.

On podcasts

It's been a while since I've rambled on about the podcasts I'm currently listening to, so you poor souls get to deal with that for a post. The rotation has morphed a little, I haven't listened to Escape Pod or any of the spinoffs for a while. Mostly because the stories started getting too long. I had a hard time finishing them in a commute. That and I found a few others I liked listening to a touch better. Also I stopped listening to them at work. Old job used different parts of my brain or something so I could actually listen to them a little easier than I can now.

At any rate, the top dog is still Listen Up by the 1up folks (formerly 1up Yours). It's generally 2-3 hours of commentary on the video game world. They start off with what they're currently playing and then move to news and industry commentary. I really like several of the guys that are regulars and this is pretty much where I get my news/reviews type fix from. Although they can be a touch down on Nintendo.

In a related podcast (for a couple reasons) I also listen to What They Play. This one is also video game oriented, but the site is a parent's guide to video games type site. They let you know what sort of content can be found in the games your kids are begging you for. I started listening because I really like the host John Davison (formerly of 1up and still on Listen Up) but I've kept listening because I like their take on the industry. It's a little more geared for my life as a gamer at the moment. (i.e. the rug monkeys are playing all the games, when did that happen?! Gimme that controller back you rug monkey!)

For the analog equivalent (boardgames) I listen to Pulp Gamer: Out of Character and Myriad Games. I like Out of Character as that's the roundtable show where they cover a pretty wide variety of board games (as well as some industry news and listener feedback). They've since started building a boardgame podcast empire and Myriad Games is the other offering I really enjoy. This one is run by the staff of a game store and they cover everything from game reviews to rules to random solicitation of hate mail. Be sure to get your free pair of dice by leaving them a review in iTunes. Mine are a nice shiny blue color. Alas they're only d6's, but nobody's perfect.

Let's see, for music based podcasts there's Random Signal (they do geek stuff as well) and the Irish and Celtic Music podcast. TMBG have one (I'm getting tired of hunting links). I follow the Dungeons & Dragons podcast whenever the Penny Arcade guys are in a campaign (Acquisitions Inc! There's no dark magic like Jim Darkmagic.) The Retronauts podcast is usually a pretty humorous look at older video games. Hmm. Yeah, running out of stuff. Reality Break is an infrequent, yet enjoyable look at the sci fi industry. A Life Well Wasted is This American Life does video games. (Yeah, yeah I listen to a lot of gaming podcasts...) I'm sure there are others, but those are certainly the big names that take up my weekly commutes. So give them a look, you might find something of interest.

In other news, we picked up Dominion, this year's SdJ winner. It's a deck building card game. So far we've played a couple games (lovely wife, oldest rug monkey and myself) and I've not managed to win a game yet. Well ok, when it was just my wife and I, I did manage a rather stunning victory. But oldest rug monkey took us both to the cleaners the second game we played. Basically you try to collect cards that allow you to build your deck in such a way that you can buy the really good scoring cards so that you have the most points at the end. There's a decent amount of strategy involved as you can build your deck several different ways and there are (I believe) 20 types of cards that you use - only a game is just played with 10 of them. So lots of room for different types of decks and ways to keep the game from just being the same thing over and over. Nice.

Leverage is back on and that's nice. Eureka has started up as well. I believe Psych isn't too far behind.

Whiteout is a nice little murder mystery set in Antarctica. I believe they're turning it into a movie. And Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress is a fun look at the world of D&D through a woman's eyes. But that's enough of that. I believe this post has run its course.