Halfbrown

There’s nothing like a sexy Santa to, um, lift your holiday spirits.

Thank you, Scott Kurtz, for creating such a funny webcomic: PVP.

Brilliant! Epic! Astounding! A rollercoaster of emotions! And yes… I liked it a lot! I definitely have nothing bad to say about this incredible movie!

What a great film! Kimberly and I hit the 3:10PM showing of ROTK. Luckily we found two great seats right next to each other even though the show was sold out and we got in 10 minutes before the movie started. Thank goodness I bought our tickets online at Fandango.com the night before.

I can’t say enough good things about the movie other than I would definitely pay full-price to see this movie (even though the viewing we saw was a “matinee”), and it’s one of the few movies I would consider seeing more than once in the theater. And if you know me and how cheap I am when it comes to the movies, you’d know that this is high praise indeed. The sets, the cinematography, the acting… everything was impeccable. And the few things I noticed that I felt were a little odd and/or out of place are so miniscule in comparison to the whole of the movie that even mentioning them seems trite.

Now that I’ve seen the entire trilogy on film I must say that the entire Lord of the Rings franchise is my favorite movie of all time, beating out the long-time champion “Boogie Nights“, and I really, really like Boogie Nights! Now I need to see if I can find a way to see Return of the King at the theater again.

Our good friends Rachel and Spencer have become the newest parents in our circle of friends, with the birth of their lovely daughter Aidan Jane. Congratulations to you all!

Today when visiting Kimberly at work Evan had a boo-boo, commonly called “Nursemaid’s Elbow“. It’s kind of like having your elbow dislocated, but according to the Doctor that makes it sound much worse than it is.

Evan was doing what all kids do; you know… the spaghetti legs routine where they stop standing up straight and just flop to the ground, especially when they don’t want to do something. Anyhow, once I figured out that there really was something wrong with him (note: he’s at the age where they know just saying that they are hurt will get them attention… no, I’m not just an uncaring father! ) I took him to our local Prompt Care clinic.

Why they call it “Prompt Care” I’ll never know, because it took about 4 hours to get in and out for about 1.5 minutes of cure (the Doctor basically turned his forearm and held it there for a minute). The nurses and the x-ray tech were all nice, though, and he was a good little trooper the whole way through.

All’s well now, and he was back to his old self about 5 minutes after getting it popped back in.

I’ve been thinking about going back to school recently, and since my current vocation is that of a web developer I’ve primarily been looking at computer courses. Of course, I see many of the introductory and even some of the intermediate class descriptions and I think to myself “Hell, I could teach this course!“.

My friend Andrew then points me to a course they are teaching at the University of Washington entitled “COM 480: Ethnography of Online Roleplaying Games“.

Yeah… yet another course I could teach.

Apparently there are no real X-Files, but there are definitely other files.

An email from my buddy John comes to me with a headline from an Oregon newspaper:

Beavers no match for Trojans.

So many things come to mind…

Yes, I still play Dungeons & Dragons. I think we’ve covered that before. I’m usually the Dungeon Master when we play, but I’m not your normal DM… oh no! Some DM’s throw some orcs or goblins at you, and maybe give you some fire elemental action… I go a step further. I throw in parental guilt… you know; the kind of wound that never fully heals.

Yesterday’s game had our Half-Drow Cleric of Eilistraee, Magdalena (played by my friend Joan), finding the body of her recently killed mother. To add insult to injury, she also found her (nearly dead) father hung upside down, crucifixion-style, at her characters sacred ground (The Mouth of Song, for those of you in the know about all things Forgotten Realms).

After caring for and consoling her father and burying her mother, she found out that her father wanted her to move away with him to a bigger city and out of the middle of nowhere (Waterdeep was his first choice). Having a close connection with the Silver Marches, and the Moonwood in particular, she didn’t want to leave, and the farewell scene that we role-played between her character and her character’s father was a thing of beauty as far as familial manipulation goes.

It was roleplaying at it’s best, ladies and gentlemen, and I was proud to be a part of it.

There’s a post on Slashdot that has a link to a pretty funny story on interviewing with the NSA. While the story itself is OK, the funniest thing, to me, is the first comment on the post, which is a joke/story about interviews for a CIA assassin.

I think the title says it all, folks. Check it out.