[Misc] What I've Been Up To, Part XVIII
Last weekend - that is, not THIS weekend, which hasn't ended quite yet, but LAST weekend - I resolved to take advantage of some of the good weather before it gets cold enough that Gwendel wouldn't appreciate it. (We're in Florida, after all. Autumn is when it finally gets to be nice enough to stroll outside without need for air conditioning or a swimming pool to jump into.) I decided to make a trip southward. I don't like doing this much, what with the ever-increasing price of gas, but the way things are going, best to do it now while the weather's nice and the price of gas is somewhere BELOW $4 or $5 or $100 a gallon, or wherever it will eventually rocket to before we all go back to horses and buggies.
Most of Saturday's journey was along OBT - Orange Blossom Trail. I'd gone along little pieces of it, where it intersects some of the more major roads, but never so far in one stretch. It was kind of interesting to mentally connect the dots between the various locations. We visited another Orange Country library that Gwendel hadn't noticed before, and I picked up an interesting book on the history of piracy. (It's one that endeavors to clear up some of the overly romanticized visions of piracy, and it has some nice information about certain regions and eras less well-covered by quick forays into the internet on the topic.) I made a quick stop by Coliseum of Comics.
We passed the Florida Mall, but decided not to bother going in; although the M&M store is interesting, the past few times we've been there, it's been unbearably stuffy inside. Enclosed malls should be uncomfortably *chilly*, if anything, not making me gasp and wish to get outside in hopes of encountering a breeze. (And it's a pretty bad sign for me if Gwendel was uncomfortably warm in that place, too. Usually, if I'm comfortable, she's chilly - and if she's comfortable, I'm too warm. I doubt she'd ever be able to stand for us to move anywhere north of Florida....)
So, on to Kissimmee! I decided to check out that street with the inviting fancy gate/archway overhead that proclaimed "Historic Downtown Kissimmee." Historic Downtown Kissimmee was rather a bit of a dump, sad to say. However, I discovered that as we parked there, there was ... another Coliseum of Comics! Good grief! Gwendel was actually mildly interested in the stop, since the building it was housed in was old, and she spent most of her time checking out the molded tin ceiling and other architectural details. We walked up and down the streets and checked dumpy knickknack shops, but that was about it. Most of the storefronts were closed.
A bit further down 192 was something more like it: "Old Town." This consisted of a small street of old buildings (or, perhaps, buildings made to look old - I couldn't be sure) with a bricked street that it was safe to walk up and down without dodging much traffic. (Some cars crossed a couple of points, but were obliged to go slowly.) There were some tourist-trappy shops, some tacky haunted house setup, and an A&W place where we got lunch. (The A&W root beer there was awesome ... and for ice cream, I got scoops of banana and coconut! Ooooo. It just couldn't get any better than that.) Best of all, though, there were a bunch of older cars there for the "Saturday Night Cruise." Some of the cars were built within my lifetime - so that was definitely sobering to see those among the "oldies." There were a few cars that looked remotely like my old 1950 Dodge Diplomat - though not quite the same thing. Gwendel was fascinated with several of the cars, and I took snapshots with my digital camera. (I had confused Old Town with Historic Downtown Kissimmee, and the Saturday Night Cruise was in fact what I'd brought my camera along for.) This was one of those moments where I really wished my dad could be along, since he knows far more of these things than I do. Even though I might recognize a few bits and pieces of older cars, I can't speak intelligently about any of the details. In fact, when Gwendel asked me various questions about them, I was embarrassed that any of my fumbling and probably incorrect attempts at answers might be overheard by the car owners who would most likely know better. (None of them were quite chummy enough for me to actually ask them questions, though. I got outright ignored a couple of times. I guess, without my Diplomat, I'm no longer in that exalted in-crowd of oldies-car-owners. Man, I feel so left out!)
Oh yeah. On the way back, we stopped by the Coliseum of Comics at Fashion Square Mall, since we were going past it. I mean, I'd just stopped at two of the three stores - one of them by accident. There was just no way I could pass up the chance to visit all three in one day! I figured it had to be worth some sort of geek points.
Sunday, we ended up going down again, but this time to Celebration. We caught the farmer's market, and had breakfast at Market Street Cafe. (I just had to get eggs benedict again.) We spent a lot of time just sitting around and enjoying the day, rather than doing much in the way of exploring. We did peek at a place called "Sherlock's" but the menu selection wasn't all that enticing for the prices involved. (The tea sets were interesting, but that seemed to be more appropriate for a larger social gathering than just the two of us.)
Since we were in the area, we moved on to Downtown Disney - and discovered that we'd blundered into the "Festival of the Masters." We checked out booth after booth, and Gwendel wrote down notes of all the really interesting ones, while I slowly got sunburned. We did some token Christmas shopping, only picking up a single "Disney Princess" themed calendar for my two little nieces. (The humor in it would probably be more appropriate for their mother - my sister - to catch on to - though it was still Disney-appropriate. At least it wasn't as "for the adults to giggle at" as a Tinkerbell calendar that had various off-color references on it, such as "Are you Dustworthy?" Ack.)
Outside the Lego store, there were lots of displays of clever Lego constructions from the local Lego Fan Organization, or whatever it's called. I think one of my favorites had to be the motorized Godzilla attack scene, with Godzilla taking a burning bite out of a building, among other things.
We took a boat ride back to the West Side, and paid an uncomfortable (for me) amount for dinner at Wolfgang Puck's, since Gwendel has been wanting to eat there for a while. (She got sushi and sashimi. I got the BBQ chicken pizza, which was the cheapest edible entree I could spy on the menu, since we didn't go through the "Wolfgang Puck Express" part of the restaurant. At least we didn't go into the Dining Room with its $40-$50 entrees; I was about to go into shock at the sight of those....)
And then, there was the week. We had two projects going on, and I was kept busy playing "tech support" for both of them, as well as working as a word processing specialist for one of them. Hey, who'm I kidding? I like to be valued. During my free time, I drew more paper model designs for the "Wonderland No More" Savage Worlds campaign setting, and some road warrior paper models for the "Savage Wheels" Savage Worlds campaign setting.
Then, on Saturday, we had another Pirates session. I'm afraid it got rather bawdy. I really should know better than to put Egyptian scantily-clad "babe" minis on the table; someone's bound to make references to their state of dress - or lack thereof. (Yes, I did modify the miniatures to put on more clothes than the sculptor originally intended, but that only goes so far.) At least we're past the Egyptian part. The vast majority of my pirate minis are far more conservatively dressed. I still shudder to think that somehow the PCs thought that because a wall mural depicted a procession of Egyptian priests, that they were supposed to shave themselves bald and put on silken slapdash approximations of Egyptian-ish-looking attire in order to properly enter an Egyptian ruin in order to swipe an artifact they were there for. The idea of a bunch of anthropomorphic animal characters SHAVED BALD ... (shudder) ... is not the nicest mental image, really.
I suppose the telling thing is that the player who most pitched the idea of the shaving-bald requirement ... had the only PC who didn't actually shave himself bald to participate in this little venture. Hmmmmmmmm.
Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair....
Next topic!
Today, I resolved to work on some paper model vehicles for the Savage Wheels setting, as downloadable PDFs. However, I got an email back from MagusRogue, whom I've not heard much from for a while. He sent me some "proofs" for the Warcraft project, so it looks like things are back in line. I'm in the middle of redlining them (but I decided to take a break and write an entry, since it's tedious business, and a bit late to start on a new document anyway). It'll be nice to finally get that off the deck.
This week, things look to be pretty slow at work. Most of my co-workers took the week off, to take full advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday. I'm basically there to cover phones and so forth. Monday night, Chris is going to have some sort of board-game get-together, though I don't know exactly when he intends to start or end. (I'll call to find out, naturally.) It looks like he'd like to make this a regular, weekly (or maybe bi-weekly) thing.
I hope to have a little bit of the Savage Wheels and/or Wonderland stuff done for "show-and-tell" at some point. I just have to get things to a more finished state.
In other news, we had a really bad anime day. I take back most of my "recommendations" for anime fan-subs this season. Full Color's Sketchbook {sic} is the only series that I can feel confident about recommending ... and I'm not sure who it would really appeal to (aside from Gwendel and myself, at the very least). It's very mellow, very harmless, but also minus any drama to speak of. As Gwendel noted, the fact that this anime and Clannad are our picks of the season doesn't bode well. (Clannad, after all, is basically "yet another Air or Kanon," and what drama it has is mitigated by over-the-top silliness from time to time.)
We saw episode 4 of Ghost Hound, which had been impressing us with a very atmospheric approach and interesting characters, and a general success at making things pretty creepy and sinister. Then, suddenly ... it went off the road and fell into Stupid Valley. I'm not sure how to explain it without giving spoilers. We'll watch the next episode to see if it recovers, and I really hope that this incident was just a fluke - that maybe somebody on the animation staff was on drugs, and that he'll be fired before next episode. Hey, I can only hope.
So, we decided to try another episode of Myself, Yourself, yet another teens-in-high-school reunited-with-people-you-only-vaguely-remember-from-childhood melodrama. Seriously, there are enough of those that it ought to be a genre, though this one doesn't combine it with any sort of supernatural or sci-fi element that I can tell. We could hardly make it through the first few minutes of episode #2; it was just that bad. This was painfully like a photocopy of a Xerox of a mimeograph of one of those other series, with so many derivative tropes that it was like Gwendel just read my mind when she exclaimed, "So ... want to see what else there is?" Awkward-polite Japanese boy with annoying "endearing-polite" habits, surrounded by far too many pretty girls with annoying (no, "endearing") quirks, and we have to be treated to his inane internal "state-the-BLATANTLY-OBVIOUS" monologue while all this is going on. That and just in CASE we couldn't notice that the "glasses girl" was drawn to be over-endowed, it is *repeatedly brought to our attention* with sound effects.
Really, please. NEXT!
Another series Gwendel has been interested in was Mokke, a fairly harmless series about two sisters, one of whom repeatedly draws the attention of (mildly) malevolent Japanese spirits, the other capable of actually seeing them (and grandpa is a shrine priest). The thing is, this is definitely one of those series where they blew a good portion of their budget on the opening sequence and maybe the first episode. The animation was painfully bad in this one ... and the writing stank, too. It wasn't the same problem by any means as Myself, Yourself, but at this point we were definitely on a losing streak.
So, we tried episode 3 of Blue Drop. Yes, again, characters are all kids in high school - this time girls in a private school - and it's another one of those rare series where girls aren't wearing super-short mini-skirts that blow up at every opportunity. And the animation in the first episode was pretty dazzling.
Well, I guess they blew their budget on the first episode. And the writers? Who knows what they were thinking? It feels like this series is a great big mish-mash of ideas ... a plot written by committee. Oh yeah, and all the characters are girls and yet there's still a hint of romance. Yeah. It's THAT kind of anime, after all, but even before we found that out, it was obvious that all the "mystery" in the first couple of episodes was just to cover up the fact that they didn't have a real plot. Gwendel was distinctly disappointed, because she was hoping for a series with at least a little drama that didn't turn out to be a bomb. So, our losing streak continues.
Gwendel wasn't in the mood to check out some more Claymore. Routine dismemberment and fountains of blood (even if it's alien and purple) doesn't do much for the appetite. Baccano! is no better, what with its gleefully psychotic and nigh-immortal characters. In fact, it's a bit worse, especially with its bizarre portrayal of a Japanese image of America. (I still can't get over it every time they mention the name of the passenger train that's the center of the show - the Flying Pussyfoot. Snurk!) Oh yeah, and American characters have such memorable names as "Jacuzzi Splot." No, seriously. It's an AMERICAN NAME ... according to this series. I wonder how many Splots I'd find if I check Switchboard for the entire United States? Hey! I could check! Let's look. Drumroll, please? ... ... ... ZERO! Gee, should I be surprised?
We ended up - against my token protests - watching another episode of So Long, Mr. Despair. Not to our surprise, it had entirely too many time-wasting, space-filling so-called-funny filler bits, and lame, gratuitous innuendo. At times, the show has some interesting artsy bits, but it's a bit too self-referential and in-jokey. At least we knew what we were going to get. But to our surprise, the end of the show was actually somewhat amusing, as the writers (through the main character) lampooned the media's fascination with celebrating and obsessing over things that are not newsworthy ... but we're supposed to go along with it, because it's the latest thing, and they say so: celebrities who are famous for no particularly good reason, the latest rumor on what foods are good/bad for you, and so forth. I gathered that they were lampooning Japanese media, but it applied just as well to American media, too.
At least we ended up on a decent note the other day when we finally finished up Devil May Cry. It's a pretty silly series with none too much thought going into the plot or its resolution, but the overpowered hero is likeable because of his deadpan manner and occasionally genuinely funny quips. Its "fantasy America" setting is blatantly anachronistic - and oddly appealing for it. I can't say that it's a "great series" or anything, but it was nonetheless a great deal more entertaining than most of what we've been watching.
And, let's see, what else to cram into this post? Ah yes. Necronomicon. Apparently the Tampa Hyatt booted out Necronomicon (cancelled the contract). We had idiots setting off smokebombs in the hallways at night (and staining the walls), breaking into a room under renovation and taking a bathtub and jamming it onto an elevator, slashing up a chair, and doing lots of other damage to the hotel. Necronomicon got billed for all the damages, and the Hyatt apparently decided they'd had enough of this. For 2008, it looks like Necro is going to have a membership cap, and is going to be moving to another location - which will either have less space, cost more, or (quite likely) both. Also, it looks like there will have to be strict rules on establishing "quite times" and cutting off events past certain hours. (It seems that a lot of the stunts might be connected to some of those wee-hours party events where alcohol is involved. Hmm.) I don't know if I'm keen on having to drive further and pay more for a convention taking place in even less space. We'll see how it goes, I guess.
And that's about it for now!