Aliens is to Alien as (Blank) is to Predator

There's a new movie coming out this summer that sounds like it will fill my quota of action, blast-em-up movies. Predators, the next chapter in the franchise, features humans being hunted by a whole slew of aliens. I love when action movies that are clearly about blowing people up and violence try to insert a little drama and character development into them. Reading the article here sounds like it's dripping with testosterone. "If the Predators weren't hunting them, these humans would probably wipe themselves out," and "these are the best killers on Earth, only they're not on Earth anymore." Interesting choice of a cast: Topher Grace? Adrien Brody? Laurence Fishburne I can get behind, but some of the others leave me scratching my head. Still, if it looks fun, I'd be all up for checking it out. YouTube should have trailers up by now, if you're interested in checking them out.

Do CDs Even Exist Anymore?

Evidently Universal intends to cut the prices of CDs to the $10-$6 range. CD sales have been dropping steadily for a while, and they're hoping the drop in price will encourage people to come back to the fold.

For myself, I have been using iPods for my music. One nice thing about the drop in the CD prices is it means I can get a full disc of music for less in CD form and then download them than I can if I pull them off of iTunes. The only problem there is usually there are only a couple of songs on a disc I actually want to get, so it's not worth me picking up the whole CD.

Anywho, interesting article, I thought. Figured I'd share.

Dindrenzi Crush Insignificant Aquan Fleet

Brian and I got a game of Firestorm Armada in again last night. After a strong start, schedules got in the way and it's been over a week since I was able to play a campaign game. We hit up the table and rolled for attacker/defender. Being up on him by one system, he won the dice roll and picked to attack me, invading one of my systems, no less! This meant if he won, he'd wrest control of it from me, but it also meant I could come to the table with a full fleet.

We rolled for our mission and got another battle. This is the third out of four games we've played. We're getting quite good and blowing huge holes in each others fleets.

Our mission was Fleet Engagement. We each had to review some tactics for how we felt our fleets would come at the battle, and then compare our two sets of tactics on a chart to determine what the deployment would be like. In the end, I deployed on three sides of the board and he deployed on the last one. I couldn't take full advantage of that kind of deployment, though, because my ships are better at longer range than his are, and his are better at shorter range than mine are, so I wanted to keep him far away from me.

We set up our terrain, trying out a couple of new things. We had a moon and an asteroid field, but we also deployed a nebula (which you cannot shoot into, out of, or through) and a star (which is like a planet except that you take damage if you move within 6" of it and are destroyed outright if you move within 2" of it). They both proved very interesting additions to the battle.

In our choice of fleets, we both decided it was time for our flagships to hit the table. They act like normal ships, but the advantage is that your commander is present in the battle. He gives you bonuses to your hand size, and also gives you an option of rerolls during the game. Plus, it was just cool to have them there.

Early game involved a lot of shooting across the vastness of space. My Frigates (among the best in the game) took down a squadron of his and started taking control of the activation spreads. Soon I was running around with about three or four more activations than him, so I could avoid activating my big ships until he was closer in range.



His ships were able to punch forward and do a number on my cruisers, knocking them from six down to four and then three pretty quickly. My retaliation was to take out two of his cruisers in one squadron and put four damage on one of his battleships.




His cruisers broke past my ships, dropping another cruiser on the way, but I was able to flood his mass of cruisers with three mines as my battleships opened fire on one of his, dropping it quickly to six damage, and finally destroying it after that.




When the mines went off, they destroyed two more of his crusiers, leaving him with three remaining. His second battleship repaired back up to full hull and started firing on my battleship. His rolls didn't fall his way, though, and with another round of my battleships pounding, he knew he was likely to walk away with a crippled ship. Not the way he wanted to end. So he took his losses and shunted away, leaving the system safely in the hands of the Dindrenzi fleet.

Counting up the lost points on both sides, he had lost 560 points and I had lost 500 before he left. A very close match.

Two BSG Shows Just Aren't Enough

Evidently SyFy has ordered a pilot for another show to take place in the Battlestar Galactica universe. Not many details yet, but they're citing a return to the space opera that the first show had. The First Cyclon war, perhaps?

Caprica's doing better and better, which bodes well for the series. I haven't been watching it as it airs, but I'll probably pick up the first season to see how it is once it releases.

Beer Madness

Every March, the Washington Post runs a Beer Madness event. They take a bunch of applicants, 32 different beers from around the world, and set up a tasting bracket. This year they've got 8 Lagars, 8 Pale Ales, 8 Freestyles, and 8 Dark Beers. I managed to snag the section of the paper from my mom's house. Next step: head over to Total Beverage and see how many they've got and how many I'll need to sub in other brews for.

Oh, as an aside, one of the people who was selected for the testing is a pastor for the church across the street from the Brickskeller. I remember a time when I left the Brickskeller with Joe and felt a little sick when we reached the car parked in front of the church across the street. Hope the pastor wasn't too mad at me the next morning.

Now That's Comic Gold!

Did you know Kermit the Frog is from eastern Europe?
That's right, he's a tad Polish.


Why did Mozart have to get rid of his dogs?
Because they wouldn't stop baching!


A child and a serial killer are walking through the woods at night.
It's dark, and raining, and the trees are casting strange shadows.
The boy looks up at the serial killer and says: "I'm pretty scared Mister".
The serial killer says "You're scared?! I have to walk out of here alone!"


Two peanuts were walking through a park, one was -a salted-.


You guys heard about them corduroy pillows?
No?
Sheesh, you guys need to get out more. They're making headlines.


A horse walks into a bar, bartender looks over and asks -
Why the long face?


How many ears does Capt. Kirk have?
Three, the left ear the right ear and the final front ear.


What do the starship Enterprise and toilet paper have in common?
Both travel around ura-nus and wipe out kling-ons...

New Camera

Thanks to Dan, I was able to figure out what features I wanted in a camera and pick up a new one. It seems this crazy technology has advanced pretty extensively in the past, oh, eight years. Who knew?

My original plan was to get a PowerShot 10.0 from Canon (my previous camera was a PowerShot 2.0) but I ended up finding a cheaper version that had all the features I wanted (except the lens, which I do admit I miss) for about 1/2 as much. So here we are - the PowerShot A480 10 Megapixel version of a couple Malifaux models Laura and I have been working on recently.





>First we have Bad Juju, a poor sod who was cursed to immortality as, well, a mudman. Every time he dies, he just comes back again. He's understandably pissed about the whole thing. So what does he do? Kills folks. Nice chap. When I first put him together, he looked like he should be carrying a club of some kind rather than just holding his arm up high. So I gave him a coffin to smack people with. Where did he get the coffin? He dug it out of a cemetery, of course! The poor guy who used to live in that coffin is spilled out about the ground now. Bad situation all around.




My second pictures are of the Convict Gunslinger. The model itself isn't all that attractive, but Laura and I discovered something: paint it black and give it gold belts for bullets and all of the sudden, we've got Mr. T on the field! And nobody messes with Mr. T.

So there we have it - new camera = better quality pictures. All in all, not too bad if I do say so myself. Laura and I have four more Malifaux models to base (I just got some more green stuff too) and then they're all ready to fight.