Fly By Night

I love taking off in an airplane.

The sounds of the engines whirring to life, creating that gutteral rumble throughout the fuselage and up into your reproductive organs as the vessel taxis out to the tarmac. The rush as it accellerates down the runway, faster than a human was ever intended to go, and you wonder if it might just fly apart right there instead of to your destination. And as the runway lights shoot past your window, flickering, perhaps betraying the frame rate of the human eye, the rush of speeding toward death but without the commitment. Hopefully.

And as the plane ascends, the airport's lights give way to the rest of the city. In my case, O'Hare being swallowed by the rest of Chicago. Watching those lights. Wondering at them. Suddenly thousands, millions, nay, billions of globes of artificial illumination, staring back at me. Suddenly below holds more stars than above, and I am curious as to the stories of each individual bulb, how they were individually placed in their fixtures by the hands of mortal humans, whom I am above now. This is god territory. I could shit on the Earth from here....or save it.

The points of light begin to cluster up, no longer individuals, but pixels conveying the layout of Chicago's gridded roads, and I take my time drinking in the traffic patterns and jams, emergency vehicles rushing through them, and the artistic works of all the museum and corporate architects who perhaps never intended their masterpieces to be viewed from this vantage. It is glorious. There is so much life, and so much machination, beneath me that I could just reach out with my dirty boot and crush this colony of cyborg ants.

Our altitude continues to increase, and the grid has become  vast ocean. We soon exit the city, and that ocean tapers into lakes, then pools, more and more sporadic as the flight continues.

I love to fly at night.

Whiskey Thoughts I

Game night had just adjourned. Over the last few hours we'd put a decent dent in my freshly opened handle of Crown Royal. I made my way downstairs to make my nightly deposit in the turd bank.

With a flick of the switch, there was the flash of a bulb, and i staggered around, my already precarious balance having not been done any favors by this sudden pop of lighting lightning. I flipped it a few more times, but without result.

I thought the breaker had tripped, but the other switches still operated the exhaust fan and heating element. I quickly retreated upstairs.

"The light bulb in the bathroom's burned out!" I complained. My wife was already on her way up to the second level. "Wait, where are you going?"

"To poop!" she replied.

My panic was swift and unrelenting. "Nooooo! You can't!"

"Why not?!"

"WHERE WILL I POOP?!"

"Downstairs!" she called back irritably. "We have more light bulbs."

Remembering my state of mild to somewhat more than mild inebriation, i returned: "I'm not going to change the light bulb now! I'd probably fall off the toilet and have a dream about flux capacitors."

"Would that be so bad?"

"Well, no...BECAUSE THEN I COULD TRAVEL BACK IN TIME AND PREVENT THE BULB FROM BURNING OUT!"

Unintelligible gibberish. The end.

Fly, Thy Fowl Ravens, Once More Unto the Cataclysm! Shop 'Til You Drop!

This is another geeky blog. Non-gamers, move along.

Amanda and i were playing Sentinels of the Multiverse tonight when the most astonishingly well-timed combo just happened to, uh, happen. Amanda was playing The Argent Adept, a kind of super powered bard. I was Tachyon, sort of a female Flash. We were fighting The Matriarch, a villain whose power is controlling fowl. So i guess picture The Avengers vs. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, plus Dr. Who, because we were playing in the Time Cataclysm. Now that you've got an overview of the comic book shenanigans we were writing with our cards, i'm going to dive into gameplay terms. For the nerds.

For a good long while, we were getting our asses handed to us. Matriarch starts at 70 HP, and for a good hour we couldn't get her below 60. It was partially due to her Mask, which allows her to regenerate 2 HP every turn, and partially because she kept popping out bird after bird after fucking bird, and we just had to handle them before they killed us. Superheroes being destroyed by ravens? That's not going to look good on the ol' resume.

Finally, as Tachyon, i managed to pull out a Hypersonic Assault on her. 1 damage to each non-hero target, which kills every last one of her god damned birds (they only have 1 HP each), and no target damaged by it can deal damage until Tachyon's next turn. It's also important to note that Matriarch is Tachyon's nemesis. In the game, nemeses deal an extra 1 damage any time they hit each other.

Amanda's turn, as Argent Adept. She activates Counterpoint Bulwark, a power that gives any two targets Damage Taken -1 until her next turn, and naturally chooses Argent Adept and Tachyon. We had actually debated for a few minutes whether she should play that power or a different one, and mutually agreed that taking less damage would be pretty cool. We didn't know how crucial that would be.

Environment moves next. It plays Surprise Shopping Trip, which seems like a pretty weird title for a card based on a time anomaly. Game text: "Whenever a card comes into play, deal each target 1 damage. At the start of the environment turn, destroy this card."

Huh. Absolutely any time anything comes into play until the environment's next turn, every target will take a damage. "Every target" includes both players, the villain, all of her birds, her Mask...everything.

Villain's turn. Here's the epic plot twist. She draws Darken The Sky. Take all Fowl cards and the Mask of the Matriarch out of the villain's Trash and put them into play. Remember how i had just destroyed all of her birds with Hypersonic Assault? There were fifteen Fowl cards in that discard pile, plus the mask. That's 16 new cards coming into play...

...Which triggers Surprise Shopping Trip 16 times...

...So every target, including Heroes, the Villain, every Fowl that just landed on the board, takes 1 damage, 16 times. Since the Mask was on the top of the discard pile, it goes into play first, so it gets hit by all 15 birds and gets destroyed again immediately. The Matriarch takes 16 damage. And we the Heroes take...none. Because it's just one damage 16 times, and we have Damage Taken -1, thanks to Amanda choosing Counterpoint Bulwark. One of The Matriarch's powers is that each time a Fowl leaves play, she deals 1 damage to the Hero with the lowest HP, which would be me (12). Since i'm Tachyon, her nemesis, that would be 2 damage for each bird, so even with my Damage Taken -1, i'm still looking at 15 damage. But wait! What did i play on my last turn? Hypersonic Assault? SHE CAN'T DEAL DAMAGE UNTIL MY NEXT TURN!

It was glorious. Her entire playing field had been cleared, where we were previously staring down 18 or 20 cards, and now she was sitting at 43 hit points. Apparently she sent her army to Wal-Mart on Black Friday. Within a few turns, i managed to play two Lightspeed Barrages at once, and with 13 Burst cards in my Trash, that comes out to 28 damage.

In the end, the environment finished her off for us, hitting her with both a Charging Triceratops and a Marsquake on the same turn. Which is just as well, if that Marsquake hadn't happened, i'd have taken out the big, main Villain with a Sucker Punch on my next turn. I suppose a Marsquake is the less humiliating way to go out.

It was just so epic i had to share. Thanks for reading, nerds.

And I'll Look Down and Whisper, "No."

+5 nerd points if, by the end of this entry, you understand its title and how it relates to the story.

So, kitchen disasters. A friend recently, by mistake, left a watermelon in a cupboard next to her oven for several weeks, until it disintegrated into mush and an inch of standing juices in said cupboard. When it started to smell, they tried to track down the source but couldn't. Her husband even cleaned the oven, but to no avail. Eventually the offending fruit was discovered, which incited a spirited discussion on Facebook, encouraging her friends to post their worst kitchen disaster stories. I contributed the donuts of disaster, but within days, i had a new one. Not a worse one, but definitely a more disgusting one.

On a recent Thursday or Friday, i had cooked Amanda a stir-fry and half of a chicken breast for dinner, to take to work with her. We buy our chicken breasts in bulk from Costco nowadays, they come in convenient two-breast packages which are perfect for freezing. I've been feeling lately that when i take a package out of the freezer and put it in the fridge, once i cook part of it, the rest goes bad pretty quickly. So, i've recently gotten into the habit of just cooking both entire breasts and putting the fully-cooked remainder into the fridge for convenient access at a later time. It lasts longer, and it's less work when i need it later.

Over the weekend i had rifled through the fridge, looking for the extra breast and a half, but couldn't find them. I had a moment where i wondered, "Did i already eat them? I must have. They're clearly not here." And although that thought didn't make a hell of a lot of sense, i simply moved on to trying to find something else to eat, and completely forgot about the errant chicken.

Tuesday night, late. Amanda and i return from the gym after a workout that i would describe as "particularly grueling" and she would call "Tuesday night," i set about making us some dinner. I start cooking some rice, and i plug in the George Foreman grill to make some fish. As i was waiting for the rice to simmer and the Foreman to warm up, i remember thinking, gosh, it's weird that the grill is already sizzling like that. Must just be a lot of stuff built up on it; i'll need to give it a thorough cleaning soon.

Ten minutes later, when i open the Foreman to throw the fish on it, all of the maggots which had not yet fried to death stand straight up out of those chicken breasts and reach toward me, as if screaming "Save us!!"

Eyes wide, mouth agape, i backed away slowly and walked over to the living room while trying to clear the fuck out of my brain. Amanda came up from the basement with clean laundry and started talking to me about something or another, it was all bouncing off of my gelatin-like mind at that moment. Finally, "Are you ok?"

"Um, stay out of the kitchen."

"Why? What did you do?"

"I figured out what that weird smell was for the last few days." We had thought it was just something funky in the garbage can.

When i finally got the story out, her reaction was along the lines of, "Oh cool! I need to see this!" I tried to stop her from going into the kitchen, but really, why bother?

Why bother? Because of what happened next. See, Amanda's not the one i'm trying to protect here.

She immediately started using MY PHONE to take pictures of the maggoty meat and send them to Alyssa.

"You don't understand! Usually when i see maggots, they're inside of living animals! This is totally different and FASCINATING!"

>.<

Fucking vet techs are weird, man.

So i eventually got a garbage bag and used a spatula to remove everything from the Foreman. I carried the device itself outside and left it propped up on the regular grill, hoping for rain, but intending to spray it down with the hose the following day. Fortunately, Wednesday is garbage day, so the trash can was already out at the side of the road, i just added this to it.

I took a whole pack of Party Lite candles (my mom was constantly giving me Party Lite items for years; i think she's all out now), arranged them strategically around the kitchen, dining room, and living room, and let them burn entirely down.

So ABOUT THAT RICE YOU WERE PLANNING TO EAT.

A New Chapter

 

Eat it it's good for you.

The Tumblr Years

Here's the master list of everything that i've ported over from tumblr; as you can see, i didn't write much. Once you get into following more than a handful of blogs over there, it just becomes reblog this, reblog that...and once i got behind on my reading list, i just stopped checking tumblr entirely.

I Will Love You Briefly as Long as It Is Not Inconvenient
Someone Keyed My Starship
A Place to Bury Audience Members
Elly Jackson's Teeth
We're All Buried in the Nude
My Bloody High School Roots
PAC Liner Notes 2012
Poor-Ass Statistics
PAC Liner Notes 2013
2013: The Year All the Things Happened

...and that's all. That's two years worth of regular blogging on tumblr. But then there's also our Eurotrip blogs, which can all now be found at the39000steps.blogspot.com.

More of This Bullshit

So, i've decided to start blogging again. Just telling my stupid stories, because i narrate life in my head anyway, i may as well jot it down somewhere.

I had initially quit using this blog because i was migrating over to Tumblr, which turned out to be a stupendously poor choice. Tumblr may look like a blogging tool at first glance, but it most assuredly does not function as one. So while Paradigm Pudding II: Stop Saying Words will most likely continue to exist over on Tumblr's servers, as well as Amanda + Trevor's Europalooza (the sequel to Kiwiland, Ho!), i'm going to be moving all of the blogs (not the re-blogs) that i wrote over there over to Blogspot/Blogger here, eventually. For now, though, i've got a couple new stories that i think need to be told before i forget all of the particulars.

Long story short, i'm back.