a little of

Less serious post:

A: My P is coming out right now.

K: Oh, yeah, I should tan right now. *pulls up jacket sleeves*

I'm thankful for these random moments.

- I started writing reviews for books on goodreads after Eric suggested I start, and I got kinda carried away after the first one. Probably will start writing short blurbs on there more and save posts on here for more in-depth impressions when I feel it for certain books.

- Our Comcast internet started hating on all things Google the past few days, and in the process of trying to google I mean bing the solution I got bombarded by messages about how much better Bing is than Google... and got results to help sites hosted on Google servers, which didn't help much... and of course it all magically started working again a few hours later each time. I just hope this lasts long enough for me to finish writing this, cause of course blogspot and 70% of my other internet activity is hosted by Google. >_>

[It wasn't a service provider DNS issue cause the problem persisted even if you used direct ip addresses to the sites or used alternative public DNS servers... and my hosts file didn't have any references to google either. Sigh.]

- Played Ultimate Werewolf for the first time the other night. It's like Mafia but with more official roles cause there's a rulebook and role cards and artifacts that totally change up the gameplay. For the Hilgard folks, all of the roles we had when we played are there: Mafia = Werewolf [kills one player each night], regular folks = Villagers, Doctor = Bodyguard [prevents one person from dying each night], Detective = Seer [checks if one player is a werewolf each night], Town Fool = The Tanner [wins if he/she gets lynched], and Cupid is there in his full glory [chooses two people to be the Lovers and if one dies the other dies automatically] and I had a hell of a time being him twice in a row.

There was also the Sorcerer, who happens to be on the Werewolves' side (although they don't know who each other are) and gets a turn each night to ask the Mod if a person is a Seer; the Hunter, who immediately shoots someone dead the moment he's killed (and in one game unwittingly killed both of the Lovers I chose as Cupid hehehe); the Lycan, who is actually just a normal villager but appears to be a werewolf to the Seer; the Witch, who chooses once per game to kill/heal a player; and the first person to die in the game gets the ability to send a message from beyond the grave the next round in the form of a single letter to help identify who the killer is, so long as that letter isn't someone's initial (examples we used: "G" which meant glasses, "F" which meant fan, "M" which meant muscles, etc.).

Each player also got an artifact with a special ability that they could use once during the game. Some examples: copy a person's ability if they're special... which prompted the moderator to say "sorcerers wake up" rather than "sorcerer wake up" on accident once, so everyone knew who the sorcerer[s] were; force one person to answer a yes/no question truthfully; demote one player to a villager if they aren't one for the rest of the game; force the last lynched person to send a 1 letter message from the grave; steal another person's artifact; void, which means this artifact does nothing; and so on.

And there were a bunch of roles we didn't even touch because we'd need way more than ~10 people (Vampire: Kill a villager each night, who dies in the middle of the day; Drunk: is a villager until the third night when they find out their real role; Hoodlum: chooses two players on the first night and wins if they are dead and he/she is still alive; and the Chupacabra and a bunch of other stuff). Dan was complaining that there were too many special roles going on at night, which made the nights extremely longer than usual cause every single special role had to wake up on their own turn every night. To be honest, though, I thought it made for a really funny game even during the nights... which got compounded by the moderator having to ask people to wake up cause he/she forgot who they were haha. Fail mod.

- I've effectively been on a video game hiatus since I moved [not counting Dota cause that's not a game I binge on for days in a row and I only play when asked to], but I still follow news on video games semi-frequently along with all those kickstarter updates. I can't recall the last time I've been so hyped for upcoming games. Just this week:

-- Chris Avellone (writer for Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Mask of the Betrayer, and Fallout: New Vegas among others) and Patrick Rothfuss (author of The Kingkiller Chronicle, of whom I'm not solid on but this could still be good) added as stretch goals to the Torment kickstarter, which hit 3 mil today.

This combined with Ziets (creative lead on Mask of the Betrayer), Mitsoda (lead writer on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines), Morgan (composer for Fallout and Planescape: Torment), and what we've seen from McComb, Saunders and Cook so far... this is the game I'm most looking forward to... that isn't a sequel anyway, otherwise it'd be Dreamfall Chapters.

-- They also released a sample track from Torment that I've been listening to on repeat: The Bloom.

-- Double Fine Adventure officially announced with the title Broken Age.

-- The makers of Bastion announced a new sci-fi themed game called Transistor.

-- Ducktales (NES) announced coming out this summer remastered with the voice actors from the original cartoon. NOSTALGIA.

-- and this was from a couple of weeks ago, but season 2 of The Walking Dead, the adventure game, was announced as targeted for this fall.

- Since Sammy forced me to buy the latest Starcraft 2 expansion a few days ago, I'll probably be breaking the hiatus now... except I feel like playing Fallout 2 and Alpha Centauri and Front Mission 2 while watching videos of Anachronox instead and I should probably stop now.