The Obligatory Cthulhu Set expansion for Smash Up will be in stores in September!

pic

Just when you thought Smash Up might escape… the International Gaming Authority reminded us we were honor‑bound to include Cthulhu in one of our products. So we set on to make the Cthulhu‑est product ever which you will soon hold in your hands.

I will indeed. Since I’m already well on my way to acquiring the largest and most complete collection of Cthulhu-including board games ever, this one is of course a given addition.

Smash Up will be on season 2 of TableTop, by the way, and it was also one of the games played by Wil Wheaton and guests on International TableTop Day. So it’s great.

If you find a Superman comic worth $150,000 in the wall of an abandoned house…

Keep it to yourself, or this might happen:

A 1938 comic book featuring the debut of Superman that was discovered in the wall of an abandoned house could set a new auction record, a dealer has said.

Action Comics #1, currently bid at $137,000 (£88,000), had been packed in the insulation of a house in Minnesota.

But David Gonzales, the home remodeler who discovered it, said its back cover was subsequently torn in an argument with his wife’s relatives.

Dealer Vincent Zurzolo told the BBC the damage decreased its value by $75,000.

Moral of the story: Don’t be married.

Scientists call for action on climate change before everything goes to hell – and absolutely no one cares.

This was released two days ago, and it still hasn’t been reported anywhere (except here, here, and here) as far as I can tell.

I don’t care anymore, either. The solid wall of ignorant, ideology-driven stupidity and sheer evil is simply too massive to penetrate. Nothing in the history of existence deserves to go extinct more than humanity, and my only regret is that I won’t be here to see the last human die a hopefully slow and agonizing death.

Or maybe I should rephrase that. It’s the evil shitbags that are destroying everything today that should die slow and agonizing deaths, but the sad fact is that they will get away with it. It’s their children, and their children’s children, who will pay the price.

Spam comments, spam comments, spam comments, fucking spam comments…

This is a personal blog that is still under construction and only haphazardly updated.

And I have so far made no effort to attract any kind of attention in any way whatsoever (since I’m just randomly flailing about while trying to figure out what I want to do here).

And I set this thing up so that readers must be logged into WP in order to write comments.

But despite all this, I still get so many automated spam comments that I had to turn off commenting completely (at least until I’ve installed some plugins to deal with this).

Welcome to the internet.

Would you pay $40 for a Sherpa pen with Cthulhu on it…?

pic

I’ll admit, I’m a total sucker for this sort of thing – just slap Cthulhu on something, no matter what it is (even a half-rotten banana peel will do), and I’ll practically throw my money at you. Those who feel the same way can go here and here for the Cthulhu Sherpa. Or not. Iä.

Today’s crazy: The guy who spent four years copying the Bible. By hand.

Ok, to each their own, but it would be difficult to conceive of a more pointless way to waste four years of your life than this:

Four years after he began his project to write out every word of the Bible, Phillip Patterson penned the very last lines Saturday at an upstate New York church.

‘Every single curly-q, every single loop, it was all worth it,’ said Patterson, 63, moments after inking the final two verses of the King James Bible. ‘I’m really going to miss this writing.’

But why?

Patterson has said he started the project to learn about the Bible, not as a spiritual quest.

This would have been so much easier. And faster. Also, I hate it when people talk about “the Bible,” as if there’s some sort of one true version that trumps all the others. There are a gazillion different versions and translations, and they’re all significantly different from each other. So until he’s copied at least one Catholic version, not to mention the Ethiopian one, Patterson’s potty project is still unfinished.

By the way, many years ago – I think I may have seen this on Ripley’s Believe It or Not – there was an idiot who achieved his fifteen minutes of fame (it didn’t last, since I can’t find him anywhere on the web now*) by adding one plus one on a calculator until he reached a million. I don’t know how long that took, but maybe he and this Patterson guy should start a club.

(*And I searched for at least half a minute.)

The Big Bang Theory sucks big, hairy, sweaty balls, and I’m done with it. So there.

I have tried for so long to be patient with this show, tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, tried and tried to fool myself into thinking that it isn’t just repeatedly shoving a giant dick up the ass of every real geek out there, week after week – but no more. Not after this week’s atrocity of an episode. There are certain lines that should never be crossed, and when they are crossed, there is no going back.

So fuck you, Big Bang Theory. Fuck you.

And fuck you Chuck Lorre. Maybe Charlie Sheen was right after all. Who knew.

Proof of inseam – Community: “Advanced Introduction to Finality.”

So how to end the season (and probably the entire show)? By bringing back paintball, of course. And evil beards.

The darkest timeline strikes back, and Evil Jeff arrives Terminator-style in the Dean’s office to make sure that good Jeff turns bad or else… But since Community has firmly established that this sort of thing does not happen within the reality of the show (unfortunately), it’s clear from the start that events are unfolding in someone’s imagination, or it’s a dream, or Abed made it up, etc. Except that it’s not Abed. It’s Jeff, experiencing anxiety about his graduation, and here’s the problem: Why keep this ambiguous at first and then suddenly reveal that “it’s all in his head”? Why not do the usual wavy thing instead, before zooming in on Jeff’s face, or whatever? That would not have been original either, of course, but at least it wouldn’t have felt like a desperate cop-out or a cheat the way this did. As it is now, it creaks badly and it doesn’t fit. This is Jeff, after all – why would he suddenly start imagining things that seem to be coming straight out of Abed’s head, complete with subplot, and not his own?

I love the darkest timeline and the dimension-jumping – what true geek and Community connoisseur wouldn’t? – but the way it was mishandled here makes it seem as if two completely separate episodes were forced together, violently. But at least the episode managed to avoid the kind of over-emotional, tearjerker crap fest that was looming threateningly on the horizon for a while there. At least that part was nicely balanced, by being minimized.

And Pierce was back again, for the very last time (that much, at least, is certain). He wasn’t killed off and he wasn’t abandoned without being written out, instead he simply graduated. So much for that. And what happened to Dean Spreck and his evil plot? That was left hanging with no resolution and not even a mention, and it’s likely to remain that way unless (by some miracle) there really is a season 5.

And now I really have to start catching up on some other shows. If only there weren’t so many…

(Addendum: The miracle occurred. Guess the bear knew what he was talking about.)

pic

Chevy Chase spots a doughnut

In the distant mists of a lost era – Community: “Heroic Origins.”

I really hope this was not the next to last Community episode ever. But if that does turn out to be the case, then at least it was a good episode, both bittersweet and nostalgic. Abed has delved into the history of the study group, connecting the dots from every scrap of information he could find, and even going so far as to present a “crazy quilt of destiny” to show how the members of the group (minus Pierce) were all “destined” to meet at Greendale. “Like a team of superheroes,” Abed says, and this is their origin story, although for me an origin story conjures up images more of lab explosions and radioactive spiders rather than this kind of interconnectedness (and I was thinking more along the lines of Lost than Unbreakable, anyway). But that was old-school origin stories. Then come the sequels and the prequels and the desperate need to go back and explain how everything really got started – and this is more often than not a bad idea, as Abed comes to learn to his regret (even making him contemplate a letter of apology to George Lucas), before everything is made alright again over some frozen yoghurt. Every hero needs an enemy, indeed. (And since Pierce is not available anymore…)

As it turns out, the members of the study group were all (directly or indirectly) responsible for each other’s misfortunes just prior to Greendale, which means that this is also why they all decided to come to Greendale in the first place – with a little help from a certain individual currently pretending to suffer from Changnesia. And so everything neatly resolves itself, and every loose end is tied up. Which does not bode well for a fifth season, but at least the show has a good chance of going out on a high note, now, with only one episode remaining.

pic

The floating head of Alison Brie was almost as unnerving as Troy doing an impression of Abed