Month: April 2013

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Third Run in Shadowrun

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Last night was my group’s third campaign in Shadowrun, and it went pretty well.  I think the main reason for its success was the source book I used called Ghost Cartels.  It centers around a new drug being traded in Seattle called tempo.  It gives non-magic users a little taste of what it is like by being able to see peoples auras, and being able to see the plane that all magic users have access too.

Ghost Cartels starts you out as low level street spies, and that is the part of the book we played last night.  The real bonus is that there is a lot more to do, and the book is very flexible on what you can do and how you do it, so if you are crafting your own campaign you can use this to supplement it.

Just like always the game is most fun when you are playing with a bunch of people that just want to have a good time, and forgive the multitude of mistakes made by the GM.

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Bruce Campbell Vs The Army of Darkness!

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The Army of Darkness is the third film in the original The Evil Dead franchise.  It is Sam Raimi’s dark comedy send up to A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court.  Is it as good as the classic Evil Dead II?  Yes it is.

The plot continues after Evil Dead II.  Ash defeats the Demon at the cabin then is sucked in to a worm hole and ends up in the past.  He then has to help the people of that time ward off The Evil Dead.

It is amazing how this franchise changed from movie to movie.  The first movie is a straight up horror movie, all be it a low budget one.  Then second one blends in humor with the horror, and Army of Darkness is a straight up dark zany comedy.  I hope that the new franchise follows this path because it is one of the better trilogies ever made.

Sam Raimi must love old school special effects because he uses them all in this movie:  stop motion, puppets, overlaying two sets of film, and almost any other technique you can think of, and it gives this movie a very old school swash buckling feel, and it is wonderful.

Bruce Campbell is his usual jerky hero, and he had perfected it by this movie, and plays it so well it was a shame they never made another sequel, as of yet that is.  The rest of the cast does their job well, but they are pretty much just reacting to the amazing Bruce Campbell.

Of the three movies Evil Dead 2 is still my favorite, but Army of Darkness is a close, close second.  It is also the reason I forced myself to sit through the new Evil Dead movie, so I could have a chance to see Bruce be Ash one more time.

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TV Need a Boost Try the Samsung HW-F355

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I was trying to get away without a messy looking sound system until I could save up for a good one, but my TV sound was just to lame, so I decided to give it a little help.  I kept looking all over the internet until I found a simple setup with an optical input that didn’t have a ton wires to hide.  What I found was the Samsung HW-F355.

The Samsung HW-F355 has a few inputs: a regular audio input, an optical input, USB, and Bluetooth so you can play music from your phone.  It also has the nice feature that it will turn on when it feels the optical input activate, so it saves you some button presses.

The sound is good, and much better then my TV used to have, but it is not as good as a full fledged 7.1 sound system, but you do get a good bang for your buck.

I am quite happy with my new sound bar system, and it will tide me over until I can buy all the equipment I need for a nice In-Wall system.

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Star Trek Looks for The Undiscovered Country

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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country came out in 1991, and is that last film featuring the complete original crew.  The sixth film was going to be a reboot of the franchise, but fans and the original cast wouldn’t let them.  Though as we know they would reboot the series with the 11th film.

The movie starts off with the crew of the USS Excelsior led by Captain Sulu being caught in an energy wave caused by the Klingon moon Praxis exploding.  This moon was the Klingon’s number one energy source.  With this information the crew of the soon to be decommissioned USS Enterprise are called into a top secret meeting and are told by Spock that the Klingons can no longer afford the cold war they have been having with the Federation, and need to create a lasting peace, so the Enterprise is sent out to guide a Klingon ship to Earth for peace hearings, and as you can guess things don’t go as planned.

After the disaster that was Star Trek V, this movie was an excellent way to send off the original cast.  It has a very Star Trek story about the galaxy becoming a better place through peace, and they get to show the audience something new: like the Klingon Home World, and a prison mining camp, and Kirk gets to be Kirk by fighting aliens and making out with alien ladies, so kudos to Leonard Nimoy for coming up with this story.

They had all sorts of fun with the casting by working Worf (Michael Dorn) and Christian Slater in to the movie, and one of the greatest Star Trek villains of all time Christopher Plumber as General Chang.  He like Khan loves to quote Shakespeare and blow stuff up.  It is wonderful.  I can only hope that they have Benedict Cumberbatch quoting Shakespeare in the new movie because that is what good Star Trek villains do.

For some reason I thought William Shatner directed this movie, but he did not.  Thankfully the director was Nicholas Meyer who also directed Wrath of Khan, and helped write The Voyage Home, so if you are thinking he was involved in all the good early Star Trek movies, you would be right, and it is a shame they didn’t just get him to do them all.

This is one of the few truly good Star Trek movies that is also just a good movie period.  If you want to watch a good movie with the original cast, watch this movie or Wrath of Khan, and I am sure you will have a good time.

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No Post

I didn’t watch anything, and I am still reading a book and playing a video game, so nothing to share with you today, except that I am not sharing anything with you, so I am kind of share something, but not anything worth reading, so I am sorry if you have read this really long and pointless sentence.