(no subject)
So, I finally did something I'd resisted the urge to do for a long time: I picked up a collectible game. Specifically, I've been buying up bits for Monsterpocalypse, by the same guys who do Warmachines and its ilk. In my defense, a good chunk of the game is about to go non-collectible - and the rest of it is available in big, conveniently marked-down lots on eBay.
True confessions: when I was a kid, I got a bad case of strep throat about once a year. As illnesses go, strep's a pretty good one (as long as there's medicine): you feel lousy for a day or two, get out of some school, and then you're all right again.
Anyway.
My mom, who is and has always been firmly convinced that time spent unproductively was bad time, wasn't always able to be at home while I was laid up in bed, so she'd get me a movie for me to watch while I was laid up on the couch. Sometimes these were very, very bad (Exhibit A: Radar Men From the Moon). Sometimes they were very, very trippy (Exhibit B: Phoenix 2772: Space Firebird.) And sometimes... sometimes, they were Godzilla movies.
I loved Godzilla movies. I had a whole collection of little plastic monster toys, in various degrees of horrifying. I drew a very, very short Godzilla comic book. I read books summarizing the movies I couldn't find at the store. I cheered at every flash of radioactive fire breath and was known to imitate Godzilla's signature roar on occasion. I had a great deal of fun watching gigantic, rubbery monsters throw each other through skyscrapers.
I say all this to say, Monsterpocalypse scratches an itch that I haven't been able to reach since I realized just how bad some of those old movies were. Two plastic monsters, either of which could be a man in a zipped-up suit, smash each other across a four-inch-high metropolis. Every so often, someone gets hurt bad enough to start glowing and power up. Tiny tanks swarm innumerably about their feet, with a new one rolling into place whenever the last is destroyed. Deadly blasts of atomic fire hurl Martian saucers and mutated dinosaurs through whole city blocks. Japanese ninja robots stack and combine into mightier warriors.
The first game I played with people who had played before, I tossed a two-hundred-foot-tall stag beetle through the Statue of Liberty.
Thankfully, ladyarkham enjoys the resultant fictional mayhem, too, so we've gotten in a fair few games the last few times we've been together. It's good to be matched to her: not just on big, important stuff, like what we believe about God and reality and life - but on the little things as well. It's good at the end of the day - or the week, or the month, depending how our schedules run - to know that there's somebody I can trust to love me even as her rampaging ankylosaurus drags my mech through the flaming commercial district.
***
Having finished Under the Dome, I've been listening to Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes on tape for a while. I'm on "You Know the Got a Hell of a Band" right now, which, when I first read it, I had no idea was a song reference. Hearing the inspiration come on the radio for the first time was a little bit terrifying.
True confessions: when I was a kid, I got a bad case of strep throat about once a year. As illnesses go, strep's a pretty good one (as long as there's medicine): you feel lousy for a day or two, get out of some school, and then you're all right again.
Anyway.
My mom, who is and has always been firmly convinced that time spent unproductively was bad time, wasn't always able to be at home while I was laid up in bed, so she'd get me a movie for me to watch while I was laid up on the couch. Sometimes these were very, very bad (Exhibit A: Radar Men From the Moon). Sometimes they were very, very trippy (Exhibit B: Phoenix 2772: Space Firebird.) And sometimes... sometimes, they were Godzilla movies.
I loved Godzilla movies. I had a whole collection of little plastic monster toys, in various degrees of horrifying. I drew a very, very short Godzilla comic book. I read books summarizing the movies I couldn't find at the store. I cheered at every flash of radioactive fire breath and was known to imitate Godzilla's signature roar on occasion. I had a great deal of fun watching gigantic, rubbery monsters throw each other through skyscrapers.
I say all this to say, Monsterpocalypse scratches an itch that I haven't been able to reach since I realized just how bad some of those old movies were. Two plastic monsters, either of which could be a man in a zipped-up suit, smash each other across a four-inch-high metropolis. Every so often, someone gets hurt bad enough to start glowing and power up. Tiny tanks swarm innumerably about their feet, with a new one rolling into place whenever the last is destroyed. Deadly blasts of atomic fire hurl Martian saucers and mutated dinosaurs through whole city blocks. Japanese ninja robots stack and combine into mightier warriors.
The first game I played with people who had played before, I tossed a two-hundred-foot-tall stag beetle through the Statue of Liberty.
Thankfully, ladyarkham enjoys the resultant fictional mayhem, too, so we've gotten in a fair few games the last few times we've been together. It's good to be matched to her: not just on big, important stuff, like what we believe about God and reality and life - but on the little things as well. It's good at the end of the day - or the week, or the month, depending how our schedules run - to know that there's somebody I can trust to love me even as her rampaging ankylosaurus drags my mech through the flaming commercial district.
***
Having finished Under the Dome, I've been listening to Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes on tape for a while. I'm on "You Know the Got a Hell of a Band" right now, which, when I first read it, I had no idea was a song reference. Hearing the inspiration come on the radio for the first time was a little bit terrifying.