Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

Last night I played games at Sheri & Stephane’s with them and with Ursula, Dimitri, and Rebecca. We played Apples to Apples and that wasn’t bad. Then we played Settlers of Catan and I wasn’t really that into it, but it was still fun to hang out and yell things. I brought a fresh pineapple and it was so good I bought two more today.

Tomorrow, by the way, Drexoll is having a free game-a-thon from 11am-11pm and I’m going to be there around 4:30-6:30 if anyone wants to game!

On Sunday I’m going to see War of the Worlds (for free – I don’t want to support Tom Cruise’s bad habits) so I’ll let you know how I like it, or don’t, as the case may be.

I got some awesome presents for my 35th birthday, which was on Wednesday.

custom made Rocket Robin Hood shirt from Stewie
razor and razor blades from Stewie
pilot ink pen from Taylor
$$$ from Mom
DQ ice cream cake and Cinemark (Tinseltown!) gift certificates from Sheri & Stephane
House of Leaves from Marlo
Some miniatures from David

Also I will be having a birthday auction, I just haven’t decided when. I think July is probably a good month for it…possibly the last week.

Today Stephane and I went to play basketball but we were the only two who showed. We played 21. Then we found two pylons and set them up on the court, and tried to get balls to bounce as little as possible off rebound shots and land in between the pylongs. Then we made up a game where we kicked the pylons towards the place we found them and tried to get them there with as few kicks as possible – like golf with pylons. We called it gylon. We tied at that game, every other game we played I lost. But I got sweaty so that was good.

In Greece, New York, Bush discussed his plan for Social Security. “You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in,” he explained, “to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

NASA planned to put a laser in orbit around the moon.

Three hundred thousand residents of Beijing have been moved out of their homes to make room for the 2008 Olympics; some of those who protested the evictions have been jailed.

In North Carolina a man was released from prison after serving thirty-five years of his life sentence for stealing a $140 TV set, and in Waxahachie, Texas, the high school student yearbook neglected to include a girl’s name in a photo caption, referring to her instead as “Black Girl.”

A road crew in San Jose, California, dug a fresh 10-by-15-foot pothole so that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger could be photographed filling it.

The nine members of Thailand’s anti-corruption commission were found guilty of corruption.

Last night was a blast. Thanks to Joe, I had the opportunity to see a preview screening of Serenity, the Firefly movie. If you don’t know what Firefly is, it’s a space western tv series by the creator of Buffy, Joss Whedon. Only it’s about ten times better than Buffy. I was a little excited to see the movie, but having seen it, I am now really excited to see it again (in late September). I expected it to be good. It was great. I was amazed at how bold it was, I enjoyed the economy of the storytelling (one scene was about 3 seconds long and consisted of one line: “Define ‘disappeared,’” and there was nothing missing from the series. One of the stars of the show, Jewel Tait(?) who plays “Kaylee” the mechanic, was on hand to answer aggravating nerd questions (I was reminded of Homer saying “you nerds! He’s trying to save you money on long distance!”), and she said if enough people go and see it there could be a sequel. It is definitely worth a second or third screening for me, so I heartily recommend that you go see it when it comes out. And it would help if you saw the series. I might just go out and buy the DVD set so that all my friends can borrow it and watch, and to support Firefly in general. Awesome. Thanks again, Joe.

Well summer is here, and I’m getting friction rashes in hard to reach places from working at the warehouse. The sunny days are way too hot. After work today I just wanted to crawl into a hole…a cool hole…but I had D&D to get ready for.

I am on a new diet. On this new diet I am cutting down on carbs, fat, and most importantly, sugar. The special terms of the diet is that I can eat all the junk food I want as long as I don’t buy it. So far this week has been pretty good as one of the guys at work had a kid and brought in a bunch of Indian sweets, and the next day we had a company BBQ involving donuts, chips, ice cream, pop, and hot dogs. Then tonight Kelly brought her chocolates as usual.

I’ve been having lots of weird dreams lately. Dreams about being an invisible Caesar, dreams about killing a hoodlum who stabbed my brother, dreams about giant dandruff flakes and sex with girls at work, and annoying dreams involving my parents. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, either, and I got in shit for being late for work yesterday. Sometimes I wish I were fired but I know that’s unwise.

But the good news is that I’ve been seeing lots of movies lately and tomorrow I’m seeing Serenity, which I’m pretty sure will be awesome, if it’s even only one step up from the series.

Also Geisel will be running a D&D session next week in which I get to play for a change (instead of DMing), and I’m really looking forward to it. After that we might play some Call of Cthulhu, and I’ll also be adapting a CoC adventure to the SSZ mod, which Stewie calls “E.I.” and is kind of a Kolchack meets Ghostbusters meets Buffy meets X-Files meets…I don’t know what.

Batman Begins was about as good as I expected it to be, which was so-so. I saw trailers that just included the Bruce Wayne stuff and I thought “ooh this will be good” then I saw a trailer that just included the Batman stuff and I thought “uh oh, I spoke too soon.” That was exactly my reaction for the actual film. All the stuff with Bruce Wayne was very well done. The stuff with Batman just harkened back to the quadrology of the old Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher/whatever adaptations: guy in armored suit clunks around and the batmobile is ridiculous. Also, again I will say to Hollywood: if you’re going to have fight scenes, do me the courtesy of letting me see what’s going on. These tight shots full of fast editing do absolutely nothing for me. Finally – the romantic interest needed to be completely edited out of the film as it served no purpose whatsoever.

I think they can do a batman film, and you may hate me for saying this if you’re a Batman fan, without having a rogues gallery villain. No Joker, no Scarecrow, no Mr Freeze, no Clayface. Batman is a human with no extraordinary powers – sure his gadgets are pretty sleek, but they don’t really define him, not for me. Put him up against a crime boss. At first, during Batman Begets, you think this is what’s happening, but then the over-the-top traditional Batman bad guy stuff takes over and the entire first half of the film – all that verisimilitude they so carefully crafted – seems to slip away.

One more thing I’d like to criticize about the film – the Batman I know would not have risked all those lives (especially cops) to save one girl. That batmobile chase scene was gratuitous and over-the-top and just plain lowest common denominator.

So there’s some of the negative. But the acting was good and Gary Oldman and Liam Neeson and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman were great, and despite my musings the traditional batman bad guys worked well, all things considered.

I didn’t do any artwork this weekend. I planned it. I had finished my last piece for my last job on Thursday, and although I have assignments, the deadlines are a comfortable pace away. So I spent a lot of time with friends. On Friday Marlo’s folks took us out to Cipriano’s (Yvonne I saw you walk by but you didn’t see me even though you looked in), then I slept over at Marlo’s and we watched Firefly episodes and played Knights of the Old Republic. On Saturday we went to a BBQ to see our gamer friends Martin and Adelaide off out of the province. Back to Quebec with them. There I saw Michael Beck and Bev and Shawn Wowk and his little spawn Madoka, and Jon Dawes and Adrian etc etc. Then, back to my place where Stewie was having a zombie fest with Darcey and Taylor. After a change of clothes and a shower we went back to Marlo’s to watch Superman cartoons and Justice League and Firefly. The next morning, more Knights of the Old Republic and a long walk, and then to Sheri’s surprise birthday party at Incendio’s Pizza in gastown. The food was great and we saw Stephane & Sheri who we learned are now engaged (to be married, before you ask). We talked about old cartoons with the people across the table from us whose names I forget. I think my brand new Rocket Robin Hood shirt was partially the catalyst, along with Batman Begins.

Last night I saw Howl’s Moving Castle and it was enchanting. I look forward to seeing the subtitled version as soon as possible. Miyazaki seems to bring something fascinating and familiar over from his previous movies and adds something new with each film. I would say that if you liked Laputa: Castle in the Sky and/or Spirited Away you will enjoy Howl’s Moving Castle.

I met up with Kirsten and Geoff at Tinseltown to see the movie and I got my first birthday present of 2005: a taro milkshake bubble tea. The perfect drink/desert. After the movie we just sort of wandered around downtown, and it reminded me of how infrequently I’m down there (and to a lesser extent, why).

Today was released a D&D e-book that I did artwork for, called Hungry Little Monsters. For $7 US, the D&D nerds can get a book full of well-designed 3.5 edition monsters written and at the same time, contribute to http://foodforall.org/01_overview.html

Hungry Little Monsters
A Charity Book Benefitting FoodForAll.org
by representatives of the d20 industry

Hungry Little Monsters is a compilation project initiated by Sean K Reynolds to be a charity fundraiser for FoodForAll.org, a program to help feed the hungry.
Hungry Little Monsters features 43 new monsters (each approximately one page long) for the d20 system. The theme for this book is “monsters for which you can use existing miniatures or tokens.” Rather than a collection of bizarre-anatomy creatures that you can’t represent with anything on your miniatures shelf or in a store, this book is full of creatures which you can represent in play with commonly-available miniatures or tokens. This is set up by a serious of monster archetypes — corpses (skeletal or zombielike undead), fiends (your typical bat-winged demonic or devilish creature), humanoids, oozes, spirits (bodiless undead), and so on.
This book is authored by volunteer members of the RPG industry, including Sean K Reynolds, Dave Mattingly, Matt Forbeck, Scott Bennie, and Ed Greenwood, as well as a dozen other established game designers. Likewise, the editing, art, and typesetting is donated as well. Hungry Little Monsters is created entirely on volunteer time. The game material in the book is entirely open game content as defined by the Open Gaming License.
All proceeds from this book are donated to Food For All.org
A special thanks to typesetter Jeffrey Visgaitis who spent more time working on Hungry Little Monsters than any other contributor. Jeffrey, you went the distance for this project, and if it weren’t for you it never would have been finished.
About the Cover Artist: Brooklyn-based illustrator Gerald Lee went through college thinking his soon-to-be mentor Tony DiTerlizzi was in fact a girl. Fortunately, Tony was amused by this mistake and agreed to take Gerald as an apprentice. Gerald has a certain knack for meeting great artists throughout the industry and applying what he learns from them (through trial and error and a lot of imagination) to his own art. Expect to see a lot more from his drawing board.

63-page PDF (plus 22-page illustration book and 4-page token book), product number SKR003
Price: $7, available from

* DriveThruRPG — watermarked PDF (unlimited print/copy/paste)

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=50&products_id=2437

Finally, they found a way to speak to me:

http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

Stretch out with your peelings!

There was a peregrine* falcon in the warehouse today. It was sure cute, and distracted everyone from their work, so that was a bonus. It mostly perched on the pipes 30′ up in the rafters and occasionally flew hither and yon. The bosses tried to figure out how to get it out. I managed to get close enough to see the whites of his eyes.

* yes, we have bird field guides at work.