Magic the Containering

Due to recent interest from my good friends regarding the classic what-kinda-crazy-game-are-those-middle-schoolers-playing-and-how-can-I-get-my-hands-on-some-of-those-sweet-ass-looking-cards trading card game Magic the Gathering, I have found myself with an excess of aforementioned sweet ass-cards and have been searching for a proper storage container for a bit. I, being the cheap ass-self that I am, decided against buying a professional grade card container with killer artwork featuring several (or a few) dragons fighting scrawny elves set against a magical foresty backdrop. Instead I thought "Hey, I can totally make an artwork on a container myself that probably won't be nearly as cool looking as that and might not fit cards in it perfectly and instead of paying actual money I only have to pay a hug to my mom so she won't notice me stealing one of her many random wooden boxes sitting in her sewing room!"

So make an artwork I did.

Representing the five elements of nature: Electric Colorless Sun, Rain Drop, Death by Purple, Top View of a Fiery Hammerhead Shark, and Cauliflower Gone Bad.

 What's that? You want some close ups, you say? Well, you still get them.

 Oh, now you wanna see the inside of the box too? Too bad, here it is.

20-sided dice, also property of my mom. I kinda wish I was joking about that.

Really? You still want another picture, I hear? Meh, whatever.

Now all I need is an exceptionally sturdy clasp with a huge ass-lock on it, because people stealing my noob decks of Magic cards is a very real fear of mine.

Accolades Part 2: Red

Part 1 here, yo.

In continuation of my real-life-clearly-isn't-exciting-or-video-gameish-enough-for-me tirade, I move away from the blues and into the reds. While the Blue Accolades provided some more mellow and tranquil accomplishments involving lightning and microwaves, the Red Accolades focus more on the extremer (holy crap, that's actually a word? Extremer?!) aspects of life, such as fiery hurtling space balls and explosions. Pretty much everything that comes to my mind when I think EXTREMER!

I was thinking of naming these Magmarizer, Camperupt, and TM35 respectively, but I didn't want a Pokemon overload.

MAGMA RISER: This is the first half of the two-part meta-achievement called DIG DEEPER, which is in the Blue set. It revolves around digging a personally satisfactorily deep hole in the ground, ideally deep enough to create a miniature volcano in my backyard, or at least flood a portion of my neighborhood with liquid-hot magma.
ASH PASSION: Be close enough to an active, smoke-spewing fire-mountain to get a nice thin layer of dusty ash or ashy dust on my person. Namely the hair. I mainly just want ash in my hair, that's all. But I don't want to be that weird dude who goes to parks and sticks his head into those nasty-ass public grills then walks away like he owns the place, because nobody wants to be that guy.
THROWER OF FLAMES: Construct, then operate, a fully functional and fully lethal flamethrower that can throw flames like nobodies business. Or construct, then instruct, a fully functional and fully lethal fire Pokemon who can use Flamethrower. I'm aiming for the former, but I'm dreaming of the latter.

The "P" in the SECONDED Accolade is the beginning of the word "PLACE". Jus' sayin'.

TARGET PRACTICE: Shoot a gun. Like some of these here Accolades, this one might sound like a pretty damned easy one to pull off (or squeeze off, if you wanna shoot correctly according to the movies), but for me this might not be the truth. But damn hell ass, do I wanna shoot a gun.
SECONDED: Earn second place in a beauty pageant. Why second place? What sort of beauty pageant? Is this a reference to the Monopoly chance card which awards a person $25 for winning second place in a beauty pageant which I think is ridiculously hilarious? My only answer: yes.
BIG IN JAPAN: Attend one of those crazy, crazy Japanese game shows. The more rubber-banded noses or funny-looking moving shapes to leap through or tiny Bruce Willis lookalikes the better. And while I write this "...Ooh, the Eastern sea's soooooo blue..." is flowing through my head, with a sound like a melody.

I was in a very dark place when I made these three. Because one of my kitchen lights burnt out while my parents were in Turkey and I was too lazy to change it.

FIRE WORKER: Construct, then operate, a fully functional and fully lethal flamethrower firework that can work fire like nobodies business. And I don't mean any of that small and boring quarter stick or half stick or full stick or twelve sticks of dynamite crap, no, I'm talking professional grade firework. Like the ones that make me feel like I'm five again because they're hella bigger than I am and they have such a bass-y BOOM that my lungs threaten to collapse each time they explode. Yea.
GRAND OPENING: Use comically large scissors to cut a comically cliche tape which is blocking the entrance to a comically uncomical building, like a hospital or a morgue or something. Basically I want to be the dude who first cuts that tape or first digs that hole or first tosses that pitch or first steps on the moon or stuff.
METEORAIGHT!: Observe a real life, living and breathing, flaming and soaring, break-aparting and semi-vaporizing meteorite. Then go out there and retrieve said meteorite. Yes, this one is gonna be a doozy, but judging by that one death clock (DETHKLOK DETHKLOK!) website I still have a few decades before I go up to that spirit in the sky (which I'm guessing is whiskey, as it seems like a pretty godly liquor), which I can spend combing the night sky with my eyeballs.

That chain took so long to make, I tell you what.

WRECKING BALL: This is the Red Accolade's meta-achievement, and by Gob is it meta! For this one, I'm going to need to survive both a ship wreck AND a plane wreck. In the same week! Okay, just joshing about the last bit, but I'm deadly serious about the first two bits. Deadly serious.
???: ??? (Yup, one of these oh-so-sweet cop outs is gonna be present in all three sets. And if you have a problem with them, just check out how cool that question mark looks! Stare at it long and hard [that's what she...said?] then just try and complain to me about how lame of accolades these are.)

And that, my patient blog-reading friends, is the full extent of the Red Accolade set. Next up on the list are the Green Accolades, and after that I'll probably have died after attempting to build a flamethrower or microwave a microwave or catching a falling meteorite in a thunderstorm or some crap.

Accolades Part 1: Blue

Not being completely content with the enormous amount of various accolades, achievements, challenges and the like included with every single video game made since late 2005, I decided to implement them into my own actual un-accolade'd life. My halfway completionist self is mildly jumping for joy! I decided that three different flavors of these accolades will be made, one for each color included in those little tiny boxes you see when you stare unhealthily close at an old school TV screen. Otherwise known as red, green, and blue. Now enough with the chit and the chat, onward to the blues!

That down there at the bottom was supposed to be so sweet robot arm with an even sweeter lightning bolt jolting around in the background, but thanks to duochromatism the robot arm looks like it has little windows in it.

Now how the helk (a port, a man, and a toe walk into a bar. A portmanteau walks out!) do I know what any of this crap means, you ask angrily? Well, my easily upset blog reader, my brain has the answer for you.

RAIN AWAY: Go one entire year without getting a single drop of rain on your bare skin. Oh, and the majority of the year in question has to be spent in Seattle. Look out, video games, here's even more of me!
GEAR GRINDER: Hear, without any sort of push, pull, prod or other provocation from yourself, "That really grinds my gears!" or "You know what grinds my gears?" Or "MY GEARS ARE GRINDING!" or any other gear/grind combination in the same sentence. In person.
STRIKE OUT: Get struck out during a game of outdoor baseball played during an em-effing thunderstorm. PUSH IT TO THE LIMIT!

And that's a microwave there, not a Texas Instrument. No accolade should ever be made for a Texas Instrument. Also, that SMASH! picture is supposed to be the Smash Bros emblem, but it kinda got mixed up with those jerk-ass police dudes symbol from V for Vendetta.

THE AXE: Manage to axe-chop enough wood to sustain a universally agreed upon as enjoyable fire for a universally agreed upon as enjoyable amount of time. For me, this is most definitely a challenge. I have worse aim when it comes to axe-chopping than a blind pitcher in a baseball game during a thunderstorm. Fable II totally lied to me about the simplicity of chopping wood! Also about getting paid to do it.
SMASH!: Step one: find a free or "free" printer. Step two: bring aforementioned printer out to a field someplace. Step three: Press the play button on whatever device is playing "Still" by the Ghetto Boys. Step Four: Utterly and completely annihilate aforementioned printer using any combination of baseball bats, fists, or heels. Nuff said.
MACROWAVE: Microwave a...       ...wait for it...       ...microwave. Yea, you heard (or read, rather) right. A microwave microwaving a microwave. Oh, and that microwaved microwave has to be microwaving something as well, like a trinket both small and awesome when microwaved. I'm pretty sure this is one of those ways of creating miniature black holes, but it would be soooooo worth it.

This set of three makes me want to urinate, for some reason.

LIGHT HOUSE: Visit a light house's light room while the light house's light is lit. This will probably be the second most difficult accolade to get in the Blue set, mostly because I'm already halfway blind (as a blind pitcher during a thunderstorm) and the temptation to look at the awesome raw power of a lit light house light would be too great. That, and it might not be the most legal thing to do.
BRRZAP!: Find one of those sweet-ass glass sculptures on a beach that form when lightning hits the sand. This has to actually occur naturally, because Sweet Home Alabama wouldn't lie to me, right? And remember what I said about the last accolade being the second most difficult to attain? I totally lied. This is.
SHIP WRECK: Survive the sinkage of a ship or ship-like craft. I mean, what with my best friend being a sailor and me living somewhat close to a large amount of water, this has to happen eventually. Maybe not the surviving part, but the ship wreck part for sure!

Fun fact: I always always giggle when somebody says "Well, dig deeper, Watson!" in response to anything. Call me immature, but I think butts are hilarious.

DIG DEEPER: Now you know those pain-in-the-assbutt (teehee!) to get meta-achievements that involve two or more other achievements to get? Yea, this is my version of one of those. The meta-accolade. The first accolade (which will be part of the Red set) will involve digging a personally satisfactorily deep hole. I almost accomplished this while digging up sewage lines with my pops the other day, but I think it was too smelly to be satisfying. The second related accolade (which will be part of the Green set) will involve climbing a personally satisfactorily high tree. I know, I know, there's a lot of "personal" bull honky with this one, but they're my accolades, not yours. So bully on you!
???: ??? (This one is pretty much just an excuse to go out and do something awesome, entertaining, dangerous, ridiculously fun, or an orgasmic combination of all of the above and call it "accolade attaining". Also, I needed the total amount of this set to be 11, because 11 is the best number ever according to Kingdom of Loathing.)

So there's the entirety of my Blue set of accolades. The Red set will follow, closely (by which I mean probably a while afterwords) followed by the Green set.

Some Words Which May or May Not Rhyme Part 2: Ophelia

 (Part one is over here)
An unspecified amount of time ago in the early spring of 2007, I had a senior year school assignment which consisted of me creating some sort of art piece regarding Hamlet and all his crazy Shakespearean eccentricities (oh em gee, seriously, soliloquies are soooooo turn of the 17th century). We went to an art school where art was incorporated into everything, from Spanish class to Science class to Art class, and poetry was considered the "cool" thing to do. In all honesty, our school was so full of art nerds and so not full of anti-art non-nerds that poetry was actually cool, when compared to drama drama and "Impressionistic" self portraits. Needless to say, I fit right in. And without further much ado about nothing, here is Ophelia: The Untold Story.

Yes, that says "GLOBE", not "GOBE" or "GOB", as much as I wanted to write a ballad about Arrested Development.

I love how many apostrophes I got to use in the making of this poem. ''''''''''''''''''

Yes, I initially wrote "HAVOK", because video games and video game related subjects are constantly floating about my head.

Really? "T'would 'pear"?

Pretty much Ophelia's a badass who masterminded everything important that happened in Hamlet, save for the old king's ghost bumping around in the night and the constant lover's quarrel and incessant flirtatious bickering between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Which, in retrospect, the latter would have made for some much needed comic relief. Oh well, maybe next time I decide to write a five page ballad about a boring old not-comedy by Shakespeare (or as I like to call him, Shakeshaft *snicker snicker*).

Some Words Which May or May Not Rhyme Part 1: ET's Dumb Dick's Girlfriend

So this is a story all about how our lives got flipped turned upside down so I'd like to take a minute just sit right there and I'll tell you all about how ET got a dumb Dick's girlfriend.

Yes, our singular "SHOE" are worn down to its multiple laces.

The entirety of this night was one eventful, beautiful blur. Patrick "Partick" Luhrs bought several too many bags of frenched fries at the aforementioned fast food joint earlier on in the evening, then traded the still relatively full bag (after we had successfully drenched our insides with enough grease to grease something that really needed grease) of frenched fries for a bottle of blowing bubbles from a particularly kind homeless man wearing a particularly cool jacket. While we were all congratulating each other on a trade well done we happened upon Dave Matthews both out and about with his wife/girlfriend. Naturally we discussed this recent bag o' grease for a bottle of bubbles trade with Dave Matthews, and he agreed it was a pretty danged good deal. From that day on I liked Dave Matthews a tad bit more. I still don't much care for his music, however.

Some dude's chest eats a shirt and his face grows hair hella fast

So if you haven't already heard, some dude's chest eats a shirt (a green shirt!) and his face grows some hair hella fast, all documented by both me and my trusty camera, Camera.

This is the soon to be consumed shirt. Green shirt!

Shortly after I told my camera, Camera, to take this picture, a mustache sprouted and his undershirt (otherwise known colloquially as a "husband beater") ate his shirt. His green shirt!

Every type of hair on the face needs a name. His 'chops are very slightly fluffed, so...Fluffchops?

So here I am, just trying to non-creepily take a picture of my good friend's face for old time's sake, when this 'stache pops up and his 'chops get fluffed and his shirt gets ate. Eaten. I considered it a fluke, until this happened:

Following the previous picture's law, I call it the Gay Sailor, or "Gaylor"

At this point, he gets all smugged out thinking he's the fly's eyes with his freshly grown handlegays and gayburns. Yea, you may be tough now, but just wait until your freakish insta-hair face decides upon the Creepstache Pedobeard! Who'll be smug then, I ask jealously? Fortunately, this is not the end of his face's shenanigans.

As per Facehair Law:  The Continental Wolverine.

Done with being upset with that fact that this amazing mutation is not happening on my face, I began to contemplate what ET just said, and I quote: "Yea, some kid slapped some other kid with his...penis?" My mind doesn't remain for long on this enigmatic sentence, however, for soon after it's uttered:

Hmmmm...The Continental Wolverine Delux, for sure.

It seems that now his hair is content to purely increase in girth, yet remain fixed in a similar style. Again, I'd be completely and blissfully happy with this, if it were only to happen to me. At this point, my own face is cursing its own hair, yelling obscenities at it through every pore in every cheek on my face. I think my face might be drunk, and my facial hair is shrinking away in fear of my belligerent face. Perhaps ET is siphoning off hair from my face instead of growing it itself? I'll ponder on this at a later date, because ET's face is doing stuff yet again:

At this point, the Delux evolved into, I dunno, a Reverse Beardhawk?

I see now that the two sides of the facial hair war that is currently waging upon ET's face are about to clash in one explosive massive chin hair battle. I'd assume that a Reverse Beardhawk would either be a finishing move tactfully carried out by a rogue mercenarial (dude, "mercenarial" should totally be an actual word) strand of gingery hair, or one of the Commanding Officers in charge of commanding officers of this epic war. The result would be this:

The aftermath of the battle. AKA The Beard.

An enormous explosion rocked me and my camera, Camera's, worlds. Neither of us could see for at least several seconds, for the air was thick with hair-debris and hair-carcasses. Finally, the hair-dust settled and there it was: The Beard. Welcome to this world, Beard, I think you'll be treated pretty well here.

A few Pokemon Pokemoning

Speaking of which, I've been involved in an extremely serious and not at all not serious survey regarding the words "few" and "several", and the numeric quantities one would assign to those woefully ambiguous words. The entire thing has broadened my perspective, and now I believe roughly 88% of everything in this world is absolutely crazy and probably mistaken, up from my previous assumption of 77%. But this be a discussion for a day when something as important as Pokemon and the various ways they go about Pokemoning is not at hand. So without further anything,

I think, judging by the electricity, this one is called Zapdos or something.

Yes, one of my favorite Pokemon. I mean, Silph Co. has an entire floor dedicated to making this dude into various somewhat useful common household appliances created out of pure energy! And has Silph Co. ever been wrong about anything? My case is resting.

And imagine, if you will, an entire house filled to the brim with these electric ghost's phantasmagorical appliances! Imagine how crowded that would be and how uncomfortable it would be to live there. BUT THEN, take out the majority of these cute little ectoplasm-trailing lawn mowers and washing machines and heaters and fans, and you'd have the most energy efficient house in town! Yep, global warming could be solved by the enslavement of ghostly transforming Pokemon. You heard it here first, people. And if you didn't, well somebody beat my brain to the punch.

Next up are three handsome, basically-colored coded gentlemen with big ol' hearts hiding under an even bigger layer of armor. I present, a piece I like to call "Three Dudes Kicking It".

A giant sky dragon, an armored dinosaur and a whale walk into a bar. They get promptly thrown out for being too awesome.

The dude on the top is the cool guy, with his new hairstyle and his trimmed fingernails. The dude in the middle is the slightly chubbier guy with sweet sideburns and the rad jacket he always wears. The dude on the bottom is the pothead stonerman who cracks jokes better than a whip cracks itself. All three the best of friends, all three kicking it like dudes.

I had another thing that would be going here, but I think it got jammed up in some tubes somewhere down the line. It's pretty alright, and I guess you'll just have to take my word for it's alrightness. Out.

Hybrid Board Games part 2: Nuclear BattleRisk

Sure, discontentment with just one boring old Monopoly board and the subsequent desire to add two more boards into the mix (see Hybrid Board Games part 1) is understandable and perhaps unavoidable. But now messing with the very foundation of Battleship?! Come on, that game is as close to flawless as quick-action board games get. Except for two glaring problems: the quick-action part and the complete lack of nuclear weaponry. So what's the solution? Adding Risk to quench my thirst for drawn out prolonged games and adding nuclear weaponry to sate my hunger of, you know, nuclear weaponry. The result (which is even more rough-drafty than that smelly drunk pigeon-fighting draft of Sorry Duopoly) was this:

Yup, that's exactly what North, Central, South America and Australia look like!

Fairly self-explanatory. Instead of the typical A1 through J10 method of missile placement, there is now Latitude and Longitude. And instead of an open sea to fight on, there are now continents. And instead of ships there are armies, which consist of battalions that must be completely eliminated (battalions are forcibly clumped together in groups of various sizes that must be completely destroyed before their power fails, just like Battleship ships). And instead of plain crappy regular surface-to-surface projectiles, there are now nuclear missiles. And instead of only attacking once per turn, you can attack as many times as continents you own (owned = army battalions present on the continent). Perfectly self-explanatory, ayup.

In the near to far future I would also like to involve some naval warfare as well, because there is a significant amount of water in each map. Perhaps one less-powerful missile per group of ships? Ooh, ooh, or maybe a reconnaissance ship that can activate a radar and the other player is forced to reveal any pieces in the area you have chosen to be radar'd! Tight.

For now, however, it will remain a not particularly mystifying mystery. Until the next time I have the sudden urge to perfect an unstable prototype of a hybrid board game!

Hybrid Board Games part 1: Sorry Duopoly

There are few things in this world I enjoy more than a good old fashioned seemingly eternity lasting board game, rife with alliances, betrayals, teamwork, corruptness, money, fame, and prizes. But not being content with the usual Monopoly, what with its boring singular poly, I decided to move on to bigger and probably not better things. First was the two Monopoly boards overlapped at the GO to make a continuous figure eight, otherwise know as Duopoly. This, however, had been done to quite a large extent. At least according to the great and powerful internet, because we all know the internet never lies. So I was yet again discontented with my lack of sheer ridiculousness involving the board games at hand. Then, one day while rolling on the floor laughing my ass off out loud due to Sheldon Cooper's antics in the Big Bang Theory, it hit me: Monopoly and Sorry, combined into one glorious confusion of a game. No wait, let's make it roughly 33% more glorious and confusing:

Sorry Duopoly.

Yup, essentially three board games jammed into one silly looking mess of a piece of cardboard. I drew out the beta version immediately for fear of the design leaking out of my brain, and because of the promptness of it all it came out looking pretty rough. Well, really rough. Like, this draft is often found stumbling drunk on the ave wearing half of a trench coat alternating between singing Tom Jones songs and yelling angrily at passing pigeons. That rough. So don't judge just yet, at least not until the final board is complete.

Like I said, rough. I mean, the Jail is a single "J". And those Home Zones look like a sheriff badge drawn by a particularly untalented two year old.

Everything is abbreviated and mostly terrible looking, but that doesn't stop me from being stoked on playing it. "S" means the Start Zone in Sorry, "RR", "J", and "COMM CHEST" stand for Railroad, Jail, and Comm Chest respectively. And that stupid "X" marked place to put a pile of cards is absolutely nothing.

So before we continue, how the fudge do you play? Well, the rules are surprisingly simple at first. Then get increasingly complicated. You start with double the normal amount of Monopoly money (referred from here on out as Monopomoney purely because it sounds funny), with your five Sorry pieces in your start zone and your one Monopoly piece on the GO tile, facing towards the first Monopoly board (the upper left one). Then, you use a 12 sided die (if you don't have a 12 sided die then you clearly don't play enough D&D) to control both your Monopoly piece and your Sorry pieces. From here on out, the game play follows both the standard Sorry and Monopoly rules, only with a few kick ass exceptions. These are:

See? That's totally a two year old's sheriff badge up at the top there.

In case you can't read my flawless, beautiful handwriting, the exceptions are these:

- All players begin with 2x Monopomoney. As stated above.
- Rolling a 6 (six) awards a "Sorry!". This "Sorry!" acts exactly as a normal one would.
- Winner of "Sorry" receives one piece of property (chosen randomly) per "Sorry" piece not in "Safe Zone" at end of game, from all players. This means that every single Sorry piece that isn't inside those five Safe Zone squares or the Home Zone when somebody wins is a piece of property lost. Chosen randomly by covering the backs of the property cards with one hand and fanning out the rest with the other. If the player doesn't have enough pieces of property, then they haven't been buying enough crap and will have to relinquish 200 Monopomoney per sorry pieces not in the Safe or Home Zone.
- If both "Sorry" and "Monopoly" piece land on the Railroad at the same time (with the same roll), one receives an automatic "Sorry Duopoly", which can be applied as a normal Sorry in "Sorry" or a jail sentence in "Monopoly" to a player of choice. Player does not pass GO or collect 200 Monopomoney. I think an automatic jailage of somebody is far more damaging than an auto-Sorry, but we'll see.
- There are definitely doubles, in the form of rolling a 2 (two). This applies to both Monopoly and Sorry. Yes, it will get a man out of the Start Zone in Sorry, and yes you will get jailed for getting three in a row in Monopoly.

Later, after some beta testing and countless inevitable frustrations, I will add Chance and Community Chest cards that affect either Monopoly, Sorry, and/or both.

One of those up somewhat close and vaguely personal shots.

Also, I'd like to think that having two different themes for the two Monopoly boards would make things a lot simpler in the real estate area, ideally so drastically different that they would be damn near impossible to confuse. Mine are Star Wars and Scooby-Doo.

I'll be back with more on the lates, moosh! (I love Paul Rudd)

Anti-Zombie Armor Part 1

Having too much extra spare free time on my hands, I decided to pass it all by strategizing (really? Strategizing isn't a real word?) out a plan of action for when most likely eventual zombie apocalypse occurs. It began with concepts involving a shotgun filled nautical escape (thanks to my ridiculously well-equipped good friend) and a large amount of tasty tasty canned beans and Swedish Fish (because without Swedish Fish, what's worth living for?). Then the concepts graduated from their conceptual college and moved on into the real world the moment I realized you could buy stuff off Ebay, not just adjust the price setting to Highest-Lowest and giggle at the crazy listings from crazy people. I mean, an LCD Jumbotron for $50k? A single dusty video game cartridge for a quarter of a million dollars? The Shroud of Turin for a few million?!  Sorry, I digress.

Anyways, I decided to begin purchasing different pieces of Anti-Zombie "armor" (AKA AZA) from various colorful Ebay sellers, and it came together as something like this:

This is me modeling the AZA on the floor, minus me.

The real steal was the riot helmet. Or maybe it was an anti-riot helmet...Whatever, it cost me $15 and feels as safe as at least a $16 piece of head equipment!

I'm slightly scared to wonder where those visor scratches came from...

And I decided to affix a baseball bat holster to the rear of those definitely-are-not-youth-football-shoulder-pads shoulder pads for those times when you wanna machete some undead limbs off instead of baseball batting some zombified skulls.

WARNING: This device is pretty tight.

One 2" ABS coupling, one 2" ABS female adapter, two 4" zip ties and a metric ass-ton of ABS glue later and it's affixed!

Now all I have to do is wait patiently, fully AZA'd out. In my living room. Playing Zombie Apocalypse. Listening to the 28 Days Later soundtrack. And eating Swedish Fish.

Next time: pictures of me modeling said AZA on the floor. Only instead of "minus me", it'll be the opposite.

A lot of stick figures stick figuring

My dear old ma asked me once to draw as many stick figures fighting, decapitating, stabbing, shooting, exploding, jet-packing, hand-grenading, and just generally acting like your run-of-the-mill stick figures as I could on a 1' x 1' piece of lacquered wood. So naturally I said "heck yes, when do I start?" She didn't respond. All she did was hand me a piece of 1' x 1' lacquered wood and one of those fine point Sharpies I so love. So I got to work and after several hand-paining hours this was born:

I think this might be kinda blurry, but I don't know what a camera is.

The same thing only slightly closer and at an angle, as well as in the sun kind of but also a bit of a shadow:

Is this one blurry too? Damnation.

This is the one that's in the sun kind of but also in a bit of a shadow.

There are some heads floating around on this if you look hella closely and don't squint, but for every head there is a headless body acting thoroughly confused. The same goes for every rogue arm, leg, and RC plane equipped with lasers floating around. After all, you can't fly an RC plane equipped with lasers without a stereotypical bespectacled nerdy nerf-herder holding an over-sized remote control! True story, look hella closely and don't squint!

Battle of the Door Part 1

There we were, driving in the U-District minding our own pickup truck when we suddenly encountered these doors situated close to a "FREE" sign. Finding myself unable to not take them (as I often find myself when stumbling upon anything near a free sign. Er, a "FREE" sign), we took them. One nearly broke my thumb until our driver, a man with the strength of at least ten men, assisted us. I call him ET.

The discarded doors we discovered. The one laying on its side is the stupid Thumb-Breaker.

So what will we do with these fantastically ordinary doors? Send them through a wood chipper and then attempt to reassemble them a la Monsters Inc? Mostly due to our lack of wood chippers, no. Thankfully, due to our lack of lack of fine point multicolored Sharpies, I will draw on them. Actually just one of them, because Sharpies would blow on that stupid Thumb-Breaker one. So I spent a quiet afternoon beautifying that white slab of cheap wood.

In my basement, looking like a well beautified white slab of cheap wood. With a bonus doorknob! Zang.

Then came the drawing of the door (I want to call it "dooring", but that just doesn't cut it as a portmanteau). I began by creating the four factions who would be space-battling to the death. Firstly, the Anchors, A diabolical spherical corporation hellbent on out-space-battling the universe. Secondly, the Delta Fleet, the triangular good to the Anchors' roundish evil, hellbent on stopping the Anchors. Thirdly, the Broken Boxes, a technologically advanced alien race hellbent on exploding anything they don't much care for. And finally the Seekers, a band of former mercenaries joined together as a rebellious group hellbent on making some extra cash by blowing space dudes up and selling their scrap as scrap. This is how it started:

Faction colors, because I see the world as one big RTS.

And it continued the next day, all while watching a lovely collection of Mythbusters episodes.

Yea, that's a Ghettoblaster and some gold Nikes in the back. What's it to you?

And the next evening...

Yet another endless Risk game lying on the floor, just waiting for me to "accidentally" pay somebody to sabotage it.

Close up of the Anchors' mothership. Yes, I have been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 lately and yes, Protoss is still exceptionally badass.

The Delta Fleet's mothership. Yes, I do enjoy Star Wars and yes, I prefer the Old Republic to the new one.

And it shall continue until the entire door is filled to its white cheap wood brim with space battles and similar space related and/or battle related material. Stay tuned!