World of Warcraft Trading Card Game!!!

I just got the latest issue of Scrye magazine, which had a feature on the World of Warcraft TCG, and I have to say I'm pretty excited about it. It looks like it will closely follow the online game and I think the play style is pretty close to the VS TCG by the same company, Upper Deck. Basically, each player has a deck based around a hero, and they duel each other using equipment, allies, spells, and pets. The hero cards are based on the race/class combinations from the online game. The regular game comes out in October, and hopefully we'll be able to get a few starter decks and play. Another exciting feature is that the packs of cards will have "loot cards" with codes that you can enter online to get different options and cosmetic changes for your characters.

And in November (WHICH HAPPENS TO BE THE MONTH OF MY BIRTHDAY <---------HINT), they will release a special raid deck. With raid decks, three players use their regular decks to fight one other person who plays the raid deck, which is akin to fighting a boss in the regular game. And each raid deck comes with a treasure pack, so you can roll for the special cards in it after you kill the boss. I'm pretty excited about that, and I think I've got my wife, sister, and brother-in-law excited about it, too.

Weird Al Should Make a New Song

And it should be a riff on Metallica's 'Master of Puppets.' The title: 'Master of Hobbits', starring the weeniest hobbit of them all, Frodo Baggins. I would buy that cd.

This Is A Respectable Trailer Park, Eh?

If this trailer park is so respectable, then why did I see what I saw today? On my way home from work I was driving through the trailer park to my sister's house (I was borrowing her car) and happened to look down one of the cross streets. Suddenly a rather large woman rushed out of a trailer, holding a pair of jeans to her front, sort of like you do in a store when you want to see if a pair of pants might fit you. That wasn't too remarkable, except that she had no pants on behind them. Aside from her shirt and her pant-shield, she was naked as a jaybird. Apparently holding your pants in front of you is sufficient coverage when you're making a quick run out to the car and back. And it's not like I come home from work at midnight or something, when perhaps a partially-clad person might be expected to run out of a house. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, a time when all people in the outdoors should be clad in something, even if it's a towel. So that is my shocking moment of the week.

I Might Be A Redneck

Jeff Foxworthy has said, "If your home is mobile, but your car isn't...you just might be a redneck." Well, I live in a trailer and my car's water pump just went out, so I guess I qualify for redneck status. Owning several flannel shirts doesn't help matters much. It's a good thing I can go "over yonder" and borrow my sister's car when I go to work. This car trouble has got me thinking, though. I don't know anything about cars. For example, when the water pump went out, all that I could gather from the situation was that my car got really hot all of a sudden, and then liquid started shooting out the front of the engine. It might be an interesting experience to pick up an old beater Nissan Z-car and spend some time with a shop manual and some tools tearing it up and figuring out how everything works. Or I could start out with something a little simpler and older, but the basic idea is the same, that being that I could gain some knowledge in an area that for me is pretty challenging and somewhat intimidating. My only problem is that our trailer park doesn't want to look like a trailer park, so we can't do any sort of mechanical work here at all. If you so much as lift your hood around here, the old manager dude comes out in his golf cart to tell you, "Better wrap it up. This is a respectable park, and we don't allow any mechanical work here. It says so on the rental agreement." So if I wanted to do anything like that, I'd probably have to take the car out to the farm to mess with it. The farm has advantages, such as a wealth of tools, my dad's mechanical knowhow, and a pleasant scent. We'll see if I actually get around to doing anything with it, but I've been thinking about it a bit lately.

I went to my doctor on a follow-up visit about some back pain I've been having, and he said my back hurts because I have a job. I've been thinking that if I want to be healthy, I'd better stay home for a while and rethink this whole job thing. I'm going to run that thought by the wife and see how she feels about it.

I guess in other big news, my sister (the one who lives over yonder) just had her baby. She's a pretty cute little kid. So now I have two little nieces. That's pretty exciting, although it seems like my wife's never around anymore. She loves to go hold babies, so I guess I'll have to get her one of her own sometime soon. That way she won't always have to go hold other people's babies all the time. My dad got promoted, so that was a pretty big deal. A couple of Generals came to oversee that and we had to shake a bunch of hands. It reminded me a little of when we came home from Iraq and filed by the dignitaries and officers and had to shake all of their hands. It was like, "I have no clue who most of you are and will probably never see you again, but thanks for the kind words." But it's pretty cool that my dad got promoted.

An old friend from high school found my Myspace page and sent me a message to call him. So I did. That was pretty cool, although talking on the phone is awkward for me. I am mostly just putting this paragraph here because he now has the link to this site and I want him to feel extremely important. If I had any embarrassing pictures of him, this is where I would post them. You're safe for now, David.

I have been terribly neglectful of my miniatures lately. In fact, I've been neglectful of pretty much everything lately. I have a picture of my painting queue as it now stands. I didn't even blow all of the dust off, so you can see just how bad I've been at painting lately. On the front left, you can see my life savings.

A Note for New Readers

If you are a new reader here, I am an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran. So in yesterday's post about college kids telling me what's going on in Iraq, I am not completely blowing smoke. I've been there and seen it for myself. And maybe someday I'll get motivated to talk about it here. Or maybe I'll talk about fun stuff like miniatures and video games. But I do have a picture or two to put up tonight. One is me and my dad in Iraq together, and the other is a very special guest.

A Small Addition

I almost forgot to mention that my friend, Alec Longstreth, who I met at his booth in Seattle at the Emerald City Comic Con a couple of years ago, just sent out his latest comic book. He self-publishes a comic called Phase 7 as well as a few other mini-comics and has pretty much dedicated himself to making a living doing what he loves. I have a link to his site on my list, so go check it out. He's won a couple of awards and does plenty of interesting stuff, so there should be something on his site to interest you.

Ninja Master!

I haven't posted for a while, as I've been caught up in other things for a couple of weeks. For feeling so busy lately, I really don't have anything to show for it except a messy house. I finally put the finishing touches on the five Stormvermin I was working on last month, so that unit is 75% complete and I'm up to 106 miniatures painted this year. At this rate I will finish my Skaven army sometime in 2012 and my Witch Hunters army three or four years after that. My pirates project will be finished after I move to the Mars colony in 2037. I do have a picture of the Stormvermin I've got done so far.

I also have all of the miniatures I need to paint for my two starting Reaper Warlord armies. It's only 20 figures (and 10 of them are skeletons, easy money), so hopefully once I finish my last rank of Stormvermin I'll be able to knock those out really fast and invite my brother-in-law over for a game. If he's too busy, at least I'll be able to get some solo games in. After that I will probably work on some of the smaller Skaven units, like my two Poisoned Wind Globadiers, a Ratling Gun team, and some Night Runners with throwing stars.

Probably most of my time recently has gone toward World of Warcraft. My wife and I want to have our characters to level 60 by the time the expansion comes out, and we should be pretty close to making it. My Fantasy Baseball teams have finally started taking off. I'm ranked 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 2nd in my leagues. Fantasy Football season is coming up, so that's pretty exciting.

And the school year is getting close to starting. I'm currently signed up for two classes, although I'm not sure if they'll work out with my schedule. I may have to switch some things around if I want to go to school and actually pass this semester. It's hard for me to go to school anyway, but now that I've been away for so long it makes it even harder. It doesn't help that Boise State University has inferior instructors and their website is a mess to work with. The University of Idaho is so much better, but there are no jobs up in Moscow unless you want to work at minimum wage. Even then, you'll be fighting a million people for jobs. I also don't like all of the anti-Bush and anti-government baloney that goes on in the classrooms. It's fine if you feel that way, but I'm paying to be educated on English or History or Science, not on some teacher's view of the current world situation. I especially hate sitting in classes with fresh-out-of-high-school kids want to tell me exactly what's going on in Iraq. Maybe once you've been there you can tell me about it, kiddies. Rant over.

I had an interesting experience in my car today. Some guy in a 280Z pulled up behind us at a light and I could tell he was looking at me. Then he took out this big yellow camera, held it outside of his window, and took a picture of my car. At the next light we were in the left-turn lane and he pulled up beside us and said, "Looking good!" I guess he's a fan of Z-cars.