Miraclo Miles

The Weekend Rolls Away Winding down for the night. If Crypt Leak and Abbygal went ahead with ice cream plans, etc. on Saturday I'll find out about it tomorrow. All fell silent on that front this weekend. Saturday saw it confirmed that the big Heroclix announcement of the convention was that Heroclix based on NBC's HEROES show are in the works. It would almost certainly have to be as an Action Pack - roughly seven characters from the show, complete with a map, rules, and probably some bystander tokens of other people from the show. New figures in civvies. a new map, who knows if they'll get their own TAs or simply have keywords and special powers? No word yet on when these are scheduled for, but indications are the deal came together both suddenly and recently, so it's now a matter of how far into 2008 we'll be before these are produced. I could only speculate how the finances of the deal have been worked, and there's little point in doing so. Back to hereabout...

Quick Shuffle One of those Saturdays begun early and foggily, where nothing seemed rushed until I suddenly realized how late it was getting. An annual company cookout function yesterday after work was nice enough -- everyone else seemed to really enjoy it, but I become so wound up during these things that it takes a while to unwind. I don't handle most social functions well, much less ones connected to the workplace. I have week 3 of the 5-week Coming of Galactus tournaments coming up shortly (11:30 this morning), the timing of which meant I had to turn down a last minute invitation to get together with Abbygal , Crypt Leak and whoever else might have said "yes" to go into the city for some ice cream event. I'll be tied up until heading for 3 today with the game. After that I'm largely open (as in having much else to do this weekend, but that's all at my discretion to schedule) but I don't know how long they're planning to be down in the city and wha...

The Coming Of Galactus: Week Two Pictured here is the participation prize - Terrax the Tamer - from this week's Coming of Galactus tournament, which, for me, began at 11:30 Saturday morning. The sculptor is to be commended for capturing the look of the character from John Byrne's original presentation of the character. As with last week's kick-off, the turnout was good and the event was fun. Not pulling an assortment I really felt like fielding straight from the booster, I fielded last week's participation prize, the Silver Surfer , along with the 65 pt Grim Reaper , who was present as a Perplex assist to the Surfer and a secondary attacker. I was amazed that so many of the Surfer players (though quite a few didn't play him) didn't seem to have a clue about Soaring. My first round was against a Surfer, Crossbones and a Ken Hale bystander. He was definitely one of those competitive players who did not take the road to defeat well - not that anyone enjoys a loss....

Belated & Overdue The clip collection of the unintentional self-parody that is David Caruso was emailed to me by Abbygal most of a week ago, though it was to my work email where cruel Cyberlords have blocked all things YouTube. I'd forwarded it to my home email and, today, finally got to take a look. Speaking of herself, congratulations to Abbygal , whose hard work, determination, creativity and combined forces of will & personality recently saw her offered and accepting a new position with a new department in a prestigious academic setting. Give her two years and she'll be officially running the joint. (Give her two weeks and she'll be doing it unofficially.) (While I'm thinking of it, a belated thanks for Abbygal & CryptLeak for having me over a couple Saturdays back, and being such fine hosts.) Congratulation, too, to Darren for being among the winners in a recent short fiction contest by On The Premises e-magazine. Other congratulations to the harri...

Welcome to the Third World. Look Familiar? I've long said that one of the fundamental problems in this nation is the way healthcare is treated as a for-profit industry, and such benefits as are available are generally job perks. This is an inhumane and even inhuman practice, no news to me there. Having just returned from seeing Michael Moore's SiCKO , I see that if anything the situation is even worse than I'd allowed myself to realize, and the choice to correct things even simpler. The link above is to Michael Moore's site, where he is continuing to counter the counter-attacks and attempted undercuts of his documentary's message. As I'd predicted upon watching the latter section of the movie, his use of Cuba as an example part of the attempt to shame us about the selfish state of our healthcare system has drawn in other enemies, as there's a powerful lobby that will not brook anything approaching a hint of positivity about any aspect of Cuba as it has exist...

Battles! This weekend, at least for me, kicked off the Coming of Galactus series of weekly tournaments. For me, they'll be Saturday events. Getting some packages to the post office was most of the first order of business, an unexpected problem and delay in the mix, but that's since been dealt with. By Monday the last bits will be on their way and hopefully by Wednesday all will be where it's supposed to be. The first event went off well. I not only pulled a Super Rare, I pulled one that was solid for this format and was one of the two I was looking to bring my set closer to completion: Winter Soldier . Another Guardsman in the mix (not that I played him, but if I'm going to pull another duplicate at least this virtually generic bit of armor is one I'll be aiming to hold onto; that makes 7 for me, so if I want a bunch of lame-ish flying guards for a Vault scenario, I'm on the way; they will help dress up a SHIELD force, too) and the Angry Surfer, along wit...

Heraldry The heralds of Galactus that will be participation prizes in a succession of four events starting next week have begun to arrive at venues, and the info's being spread around. (Updated: Wizkids posted the info.) Week One: The Silver Surfer A somewhat angry-looking Surfer, eh? The special power (Cosmic Speed) is similar to the super rare Quicksilver's from this set, and presumably represents a savings over what simply giving him Hypersonic Speed for those clicks would cost. A very active piece, as with all of the heralds in this series the Power Cosmic's immunity to Outwit and built-in Willpower will allow him to be active two out of three turns. He should do nicely in this format, and since a herald from the previous week can be substituted for part of one's team in the following week, I expect to see many Silver Surfers during week two, though perhaps the lack of a prize to be won will find more people deciding to simply have fun by playing teams made strict...

Sailing the Accountantseas Yeesh. Ebay changed their entire template on me in the months since I last sold anything, so I ended up having to re-do sections of my template... over and over again, as I'd typed out my listings offline, in advance, using my old format. Bleary-eyed (especially with this being done on top of much rush-rush-rushing of calculations and reports for work) I've gotten all that needed to be set up for auction for a friend, along with some other items I'm looking to sell to help defray some local costs. The list of what's running is here . All Buy It Now-formatted items, they will sell or they won't over the coming week. I may decide to add more tomorrow night, but I'm in no state to deal with that at the moment. Now I'm going to take something for this headache and try to relax for bed. Another stack of calcs and reports lies ahead of me, starting in about 7 hours.