A very late Thank You to Dan

Some time ago (about a month at the time of this writing, give or take), Dan sent me a gift. This isn't particularly uncommon - Dan is a very giving person. Me, I'm a very taking person, so whenever I'm offered a present for conceivably no reason I get flabbergasted, especially when I receive a package of this, well, magnitude.

Dan sent me a set of the World of Warcraft Series 3 action* figures.

* "Action" is kind of a misnomer in this instance. Each figure has one (1) pose with approximately zero (0) points of articulation. There's nothing really wrong with this model - inspired, I believe, by the Todd McFarlane brand - but it gets to be problematic when you try to do things like have the toys stand under their own power.

This was brought about as a "reward" for my Blizzard Global Creative Writing (read: Fanfiction) Contest entry. Sadly, I didn't win, but at the time I was rather hopeful of my chances. So too was Dan, apparently.

As an aside, I can’t post my entry as dictated by the contest rules. Dan may or may not be dismayed to hear this, but even if he is he has a copy so he can read it whenever he wants. However, I'm mulling around the possibility of starting a (web)comic as an indirect sequel. Whether or not I go through with it remains to be seen. As of this writing, I'm still deliberating between two methods of production, preferring one over the other without actually making a decision.

Anyway, the figures:

You may notice that the Brave Highmountain Deluxe Collector Figure isn't pictured, probably because he wasn't included. To give a vague idea as to why, Highmountain is about the size of the other four figures in the series put together. As far as I'm concerned, this is a complete set.

Sadly, this set reminds me that I have no shelf space with which to display said figures, especially considering my roommates Keith and Andrew and their vast, respective collections. Thankfully Andrew was kind enough to place them in front of his anime DVDs so they can bask in displayed glory for the time being.

QUIN'THALAN SUNFIRE, Blood Elf Paladin

Quin'thalan continues the tradition of Blizzard characters wearing equipment that you can't acquire in the game. Seriously, if anyone has any idea where I can get a full body tower shield and double-bladed sword, both in Sin'dorei red and gold, do tell. Further, Quin'thalan continues another Blizzard tradition: ugly males. This is the ugliest blood elf that's been put to plaster. This is partially do to the paint job on his face, which makes him look like Clayface standing in the middle of a thunderstorm, but the sculpt itself is angular and wrinkly, two traits I don't commonly associate with blood elves.

TAMUURA, Draenei Mage

Tamuura is probably the best looking figure in series 3, if not the entire WoW figure line. The sculpt is amazing, the paint is evenly applied, and the color scheme fits very well. I bought this figure for my brother for Christmas to go with the blood elf series 1 rogue I got for him the year before, and I'm glad that I now own one. Tamuura is a progressive, forward-thinking character; you may not be able to see it, but she has a turquoise bellybutton piercing, in addition to fishnet stockings complete with garters.

The biggest disappointment of this figure, of all things, is her feet. Now, I don't have a problem with hot blue chicks with goat legs; it's a workaround, certainly, but not a dealbreaker. No, the problem lies with the bottom of her hooves and the figure's lack of a base. Her feet aren't flat. This makes Tamuura very prone to toppling over unless she's positioned so that she leans against something. During this photo session, Tamuura fell over at least 3 different times, spilling the other figures onto the floor. Thankfully these figures seem pretty resilient. Regardless - and it seems weird to say this - but she could benefit from a set of properly molded horseshoes.

SISTER BENEDRON, Human Priestess

This is one of my favorite armor sets in WoW, and I'm glad they made a figure that properly shows it--

--Wait a sec. What the hell is this?

That's not canon! D:<

I'm amused that an iconic priest figure wields a weapon that priests can't equip in the game. At least they took the fancy way of attaching it to the figure via a gold chain that runs around her waist, and not some gaudy pleather or plastic belt.

SKEEVE SORROWBLADE, Undead Rogue

Skeeve has a problem. It's a problem that's near and dear to my heart, and it's one that I'm sure you'll sympathize with.

Skeeve has no pants.

The part of his armor below the belt is a sort of kilt-like apparatus that isn't attached to the figure for some unknown reason. Maybe it's easier to manufacture that way (in fact, that's probably it), but it's plenty disturbing when Tamuura drunkenly knocks over her brothers and sisters in arms and parts of Skeeve's anatomy that shouldn't see the light of day are exposed for the world to see. Assuming said anatomy is still attached - again, probably not since it's easier to manufacture that way ;o.

That's the cast in a nutshell. Each and every one of them came prepackaged in shells of transparent adamantium, impervious to all but the most powerful of boxcutters which will ruin the packaging beyond all reason, destroying any hope of repackaging these figures for moving or storage. The various weapons and handheld attachments were taped next to them and came with instructions to combine them with the figures that amounted to, "Break this, then reattach as desired." Quin'thalan's shield was especially egregious in this regard, requiring one to twist it around his arm until either it's in position or his arm breaks, whichever comes first.

You may notice an ominous shape to the right of these photographs:

For those possibly in the know, this is the castle setpiece for Matt's capstone film (which I discussed in my previous post). It's been sitting in our home, gathering dust and using up previously unused table space, since the completion of his film. It's made up of Warhammer terrain and modeling clay, and was never intended to be moved from wherever they shot their footage. As a result, it's very fragile and probably won't survive another trip.

Unfortunately, the WoW figures just aren't the right scale for the model, otherwise I would have positioned them at various locations around the castle. That doesn't mean it's uninhabited.

"Could be worse. Could be stuck in Africa with a hot chick with terrible AI."

Student films suck

The UCF Film School Capstone Screening was tonight. Don't know if I Capitalized that right, but them's the breaks. Capstones, as far as I can tell, are the final film projects for the production students at the college. Matt, my roommate and future filmmaker, went first with his capstone "Macguffins & Monsters," which I helped write. It turned out pretty well. There was a last minute rewrite that I wasn't aware of until I saw the movie, but this pass added centurion whales so I can't complain much. I asked Matt for a copy to send to Dan, but Matt apparently isn't done tweaking with it yet.

Unfortunately the films continued after his. The film following Matt's was a woman staring into the distance for twelve minutes. For those of you who have never been to a student film screening, don't. There are two possible outcomes for any given student film: either it'll try to be funny, or it'll try to be depressing. The former may succeed in actually showing some form of competence for comedy, while the latter may succeed by driving you to cut yourself to get out of watching the film in its entirely. Thankfully there were 100% less films involving suicide than we were forced to experience in recent years' screenings. To compensate, this batch included 100% more flying bone pinata dildos.

This round of capstones included documentary films, of which there were blessedly few. They were tolerable, but someone's idea of a film was fifteen minutes of their vacation to China without any hint of a narrative. One subset of the film students experimented with 3D. That's all well and good, except when the 3D doesn't work. This goes double for the last of the 3D filmmakers, whose project consisted of him doing jumping jacks while the director swiveled one or both of the cameras around. The last film before the intermission was a beautifully shot piece that had something to do with elephants where nothing at all happened.

After a dozen or so we had an intermission where free hotdogs and hamburgers were served; this was not enough to sway Andrew or me into staying. We went to Bojangles instead. I had a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit which was pretty good, and Andrew ordered the adamantium berry biscuits. Matt mentioned the kids from the capstones were going to see Star Trek after the screening. I agreed with Andrew that might be more movie in one day than we would really be willing to experience.

Perhaps I'm in the wrong line of work

Last night was the culmination of weeks of work on my entry to Blizzard's Creative Writing Contest. I'll quickly point out that it's essentially a fanfiction contest with the prize being a potential job interview with one of the largest and most influential video game companies in the world and leave it at that. I had almost a month to work on my entry - from the start of the contest entry period. I didn't actually start work on it until the last week of March and, despite creating goal posts and milestones to get my fat ass into gear, work on the project didn't kick in until about April 5th or so, and at no time was there a rough draft or proofreader copy.

The final (only) draft of my story didn't begin until April 9th, 4 days before the deadline. The contest entry requirements state the work of fiction should be between 3,000 and 10,000 words. On April 12th at 10:00 AM, I had roughly 1,200 words on paper. That day also happened to be Easter, so I was forced to spend some time with the family - not that I'm complaining, we had a nice dinner and I really enjoyed my time with my parents, but the fact remains that was time I could have spent on my story. I was at about 2,000 when I went home around 2:30. When I returned to my apartment, my roommates were pretty interested in getting caught up watching stuff on TV - Dollhouse was the main offender, but was followed by the first episode of the Fullmetal Alchemist series and episode 2 of Basquatch (thing Gurren Lagann with basketball). Since the living/TV room doubles as my main writing area, you can see the conflict.

Serious effort on my story resumed around 9:30 PM EDT. I had until 2:59 AM (11:59 PM PDT) to finish. In that time frame, my story ballooned to a modest 6,897 words. That's a little under 4,000 words in five and a half hours. Roughly 727 words an hour, 12 words a minute.

I finished the story at 2:52 AM.

Of course by 'finished' I mean it was forged into a form that could be passed for readable. It was somewhat coherent, there was a plot, and it had a beginning, middle, and end. The final product contains about 80% of what I intended to go in there. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what all went in there. From 1 AM to 2:52 it's all a blur.

I still had to submit the thing. At 2:53, I filled out the Blizzard submission form... only to have it reset. So I did it again... and it reset again. I refreshed the page, filled out the form, hit submit to upload my Word file... and it kicked back an error.

The time was 2:56 AM.

I hope I didn't wake up my roommates as I cursed at my laptop, uploaded my file to the network, raced up the stairs to my desktop, then pounded away at the keys in a mad dash to fill out the form again. I hit submit... and it uploaded successfully, even giving me an email confirmation.

The time was 2:58 AM. I had submitted my story at - literally - the last minute.

My thanks go out to my friends who encouraged me to keep going. I popped in to twitter several times to receive gentle proddings to keep myself on task, so thanks there, too - especially Dan, who was like the coach in Punch Out for all intents and purposes, except he didn't steal my bike. Also my apologies for not completing the story sooner as I asked you to proofread but I never delivered on my end. When I get home I'll be gloating by sending out to my friends whatever the hell it is I submitted to Blizzard so you all can point derisively at the shitpiece I cranked out in the span of about eight noncontiguous hours.

A rant on the general writing process is soon to come.

So, yeah...

Trouble was brewing at the Pokemon Platinum release party earlier today, caused by none other than the notorious team rocket. An overweight, sweaty, and generally unkempt man dressed as James from the Pokemon Anime distributed his own, edited version of the flyers being handed out by nintendo officials, including an extra line regarding a mystery gift event (which was not officially scheduled to occur). Using his own hacked copy of the game, he distributed a mystery gift containing a shiny level 100 Gengar named "NIGGER" (moveset: Thief, shadow claw, sludge bomb, and snatch). After several announcements through the loudspeakers dotting the area around the event not to download any mystery gifts (because they would "corrupt your game"), officials finally tracked down James and escorted him off the premises. As he was dragged away, the overweight cosplayer rebeliously yelled "TEAM ROCKET'S BLASTING OFF AGAIN!" No, really. You can't make this shit up.

On the one hand, I'm pretty appalled by this behavior. On the other, as 4chan put it, "that's some god mode trollin' right there."

It's something, I'll give it that

/tg/ seems to have a Burmecian (from FFIX) kick as of late, and seeing all the 3.5 stat blocks made me adapt them to 4e out of spite. Unfortunately, no one seemed to care one way or the other.

BURMECIAN

Ability Scores: +2 Dexterity, +2 Wisdom
Size: Medium
Speed: 6 squares
Vision: Normal

Languages: Common, Draconic
Skill Bonuses: +2 Athletics, +2 Nature
Burmecian Weapon Proficiency: You gain proficiency with the halberd and the longspear.
Muridic Shift: You can move up to two squares when you shift.
Leaping Strike: You can use leaping strike as an encounter power.

LEAPING STRIKE Burmecian Racial Power
You leap into the air, then bring your weapon to bear as you land on your opponent.
Encounter * Weapon
Standard Action Melee
Target: One creature
Special: You can jump up to your speed as part of this attack.
Attack: Dex vs. AC
Hit: 1[w] + Dexterity modifier damage and push the target 1 square. You move into the square the target occupied.
Increase to 2[w] + Dexterity modifier at 11th level and 3[w] + Dexterity modifier at 21st level.
Weapon: If you're wielding a longspear or halberd, you gain a bonus to damage equal to your Wisdom modifier.

I'm not very good arguing a point

In an effort to link this post with one preceding it: Coraline was good. It took chances other films aimed at similar audiences don't take, but stretched out in the middle making me wait for shit to kick in gear. Interestingly enough, the average age of the showing we went to was around 22, with a solitary six-year-old bringing down the average a little while also being the only person there under the age of 18.

After seeing Coraline, the realization came to me that there's nothing I want to see until Watchmen comes out. For some this might be seen as a boon - I could be doing anything else besides blowing $10 to sit still for two hours - but for me it's a down note. I like going to see movies. I like going to see movies with my friends, I should say. I'm severely disinclined to go to the theater alone; I may as well stay home and pop in a DVD. Meanwhile, not seeing a movie does not mean I will do something else instead. Eliminating cinema does not equate to me taking up mountain biking, for instance.

Soon after defining the movie-going void that stretched until 03.06.09, I found this piece concerning views voiced by Alan Moore, creator and writer for Watchmen. My enmity for this man deepens as time goes on. Is there a bigger hypocrite in comics? Please, tell me so I can add to my repertoire of vitriol. His points are essentially: 1) movies suck, 2) comic book movies suck, and 3) comics themselves suck, with two additional inferred points 4) you suck for liking them, and 5) I rule.

Y'know, I was gonna get angry. Angry over the words of an old English hippie. Mr. Moore may have been burned by the movie industry for his entire professional career (either due to or despite his decisions concerning his involvement), but at the end of the day he's going to get a fat residuals check for the work on a movie that he didn't do. Moore spent 0 hours on the set coaching the actors, 0 hours consulting the director or producers, and 0 hours editing, fine-tuning, or even writing the screenplay. If the Watchmen movie is bad, he can say he had nothing to do with it; if the Watchmen movie is good, I can say he had nothing to do with it. Either way, he gets paid*.

He's a detractor, not a creator.

* To be fair and a bit more precise, Dave Gibbons (artist of Watchman) gets paid, as Alan Moore will abdicate any money he'll receive from the film to Gibbons, the same situation that occurred with V for Vendetta. Gibbons was heavily involved with the shaping of Watchmen, so if anyone deserves praise or residuals for their work on the movie, it's him.

Gonna see Coraline tonight in 3D

EDIT: Damn this YouTube. I had to edit my blog template to make this video fit.

EDIT2: Further damn Blogger. Now I feel the need to customize everything.