Dick on a Stick!

Alright. ALRIGHT! I admit it... I knew I couldn't keep it from you for long... You'd find out. You always do. It's like you know!

I didn't write.

BUT IT WASN'T MY FAULT! ... Well, okay, that's not entirely true. Actually, it's not true at all. It is my fault. But I can still explain, to some degree... You see, I had full plans to write on Saturday... My day was SUPPOSED to consist of hanging out with Bunny until about 12, 12:30 when she would go to work. Then, at some point, I was supposed to go out to a late lunch with my parents, sister and grandmother for Mother's Day because Sunday was bound to be over-crowded everywhere. But I get a call at like 1 or so from them, while I'm playing a video game [WWE Smackdown! vs Raw 2009] to tell me that something was not working for them and they would have to go tomorrow. This was both good and bad news. The good news is that Bunny could come along, as she wasn't working today [Sunday] The bad news is, however, that I was already into my video games and with my kind of gamer addiction, the only thing that would pull me out of it is sex, family events, sex, the bathroom, sex, Bunny coming home to spend time with her, sex, exhaustion and sex.

Did I mention sex?

So I wound up playing a few of my video games... For awhile, I kept playing WWE, leveling up one of my favorite CAWs [Create-A-Wrestler] Styx [no, not the band] but after that got on my nerves, I started playing Fable II, which I realized how much I've missed as I picked up where I left off with my female character, Blade [more about this later as you keep reading. If you keep reading, that is!] Then today, Bunny and I woke up to do the whole "family" thing and afterward, we spent some time together. We also bought something really cool, a Vampire-Werewolf themed chess board, which we've already christened and was a lot more fun than regular chess, for some reason. Anyway, the end result is that there's no way I'm blowing a whole day with Bunny just to write, as days for "us" are few and far between with her recent working schedule [no more on this, though. MIND YOUR BUSINESS!] I might try writing sometime during the week when Bunny closes at her store [she's an Assistant Manager in a retail store near where my warehouse is, 30 minutes from where we live] to make up for it, but with how tired I typically come home, that's kind of a "who knows"/"no promises" thing, ya know?

Lots to talk about in this one... That was just the top of the skyscraper... Iceberg... What is that saying? Tip of the something... Iceberg, right? I'm not crazy...

Okay. It's the tip of the condom. There. My version.

ANYWAY! I've been thinking of a lot of stuff lately, one of them being the old Goth's High comic. For those of you who DON'T know, I created and ran and online comic for almost a year called [as I'm sure you've guessed] Goth's High. It centered around three high school students [who were, yes, goths] Kevin, Sarah and Chris. They basically went through their school days, being picked on by Jocks, Preps, Cheerleaders and the other social groups of school, while still having reckless, typically destructive fun. There was going to be a huuuge plot line later on in the series, involving cults, Satan, God and oh, SO much more! It was a great idea and everything, but sadly the team I collected fell apart for good and bad reasons and in the end, the updates became a chore for me to do alone. So I dropped it and didn't renew our year-long contract for the hosting we had and we all kinda went our separate ways.

Now, my idea isn't to re-make Goth's High, as that would be kinda cliched. However, I am considering a new comic and idea, with a whole new kind of art and plot. It would basically be centered around me and probably named Crossology 101. It would follow me through work and home life, dealing with people I work with to people I'm friends with. All the names would be, of course, fake [like they've been in this blog as of right now] and a lot of things would be changed around to protect certain things. Like changing around people and things at work so that if anyone from work ever finds it, I don't get my ass fired. Because, ya know... That would kinda suck.

So that's the general idea. The art would be more anime-styled and probably black and white to start off with. The only thing really in my way is the scanner, which I do have access to, but is currently in the living room and hooked up to my sister's tower PC. I'm not sure how motivated I am to really screw with it and get it hooked up to my laptop and make sure it works, but I don't think it'd be too hard. In the end, it's not a lot of work, just something that requires dedication. Another huge advantage would be creating a small army of comics before it started, so that I never had to worry about updating on time as I would always have the comic ahead of time. WAAAY ahead of time. In the end, if I worked it out right and scheduled it properly, I could probably do a comic a week or so without much trouble. The only thing is a comic a week is only 52 comics in a year and I'm not sure if I could deal with the comic story moving that slowly... I'd have to work out something I could deal with [time-wise] and still regularly update. One thing I would NOT want to do is skip updates, like we did with Goth's High. I think that was the main thing that eventually killed the web-comic, and it's hype.

We'll have to see.

Okay, so before, I mentioned something about Bunny and I buying a Vampire-Werewolf chess game, right? It was actually really cool. I was never really motivated to play chess before and when I did, I never thought about it much. Thus, I typically never won. However, this time, something about the atmosphere of the game with the different pieces compelled me to do better at this game. I remember a long time ago, someone I knew who was fairly good at chess told me a few little things that didn't really HELP me play, but they made me understand the nature of the game a little better.

"Chess is a game of trading. You don't want to trade a knight for something like a pawn, unless you're going to get something else out of that pawn. Don't give pieces away."

"Chess isn't action and re-action. You can't make a move expecting just to re-act to your opponent's retaliation. You have to try to know what they're going to do, or force them to do what you want if you can. There is no luck in chess, only wits versus wits."

When I was playing, I thought harder about what Bunny's moves would be if I moved this piece there and that piece here. I looked at what available to her, what would be available to me afterwards and then even what was going to be available to her after that. I tried to think a good two or three steps into the future and tried my best to move her where I wanted to move her. It didn't work every time, naturally, as she really surprised me a few times. Some of it was also, from both of us, not understanding which pieces were which. At one point, I had accidentally moved a knight like a bishop and we didn't catch it until we had done three or four moves each. We had to actually back-track until the board was right again and I re-did my move, this time properly.

The pieces are really beautiful, too. Especially the werewolves, as the fur required a lot of detail. The knights were either Vampires dressed as knights with swords, or werewolves crouching over what looked like a fallen knight, a shield on the side. Bishops were either Vampires holding tombs or a Werewolf sitting atop a cross that looked like it might have been a grave. Rooks were forest trees for the Werewolves and castle towers for the Vampires. Then, of course, the Queen and King were simply huge, impressively looking pieces of either race and the pawns were crouching generic looking "warriors" for each race. The board itself is glass and when we have the room for it, it sits in these four corner stands that look like crumbled castle towers. All of it was beautifully made in the end, and I'm very happy with my new toy. I think I'll be playing chess a lot more, now.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Blade, however, is a whole different topic. Blade is my female "pirate"esk character in Fable II. I originally played through as a guy and didn't really know what I was doing. I was evil a lot and wasted a lot of time just killing people, trying to look more and more evil. With this character, I decided to take the good route, especially because when I played as my original character, I didn't know that the Temple of Light crumbled because you didn't donate to it, or protect it from Shadow-Worshippers. I did all that and was amazed to see how beautiful the Temple turned out to be when you got out of your ten years working in the Tattered Spire. Overall, I think I'm pretty happy with my choices.

The character was named Blade as

a) I try to use the Blade spell the most, as I have it maxed out already, while my other spells only have one or two levels in them.

b) I use a Steel Cutlass for now, as I've only recently gotten availability to Master items.

Now that they're available, I'm searching stores for a Master Cutlass with two augmentation slots, not to mention the same type of Flintlock Pistol. My character is probably my best looking one I've ever made on any Fable. I color-co-ordinated her clothing to be all dark brown, colored her hair red and went for an overall "look" [one of a pirate, including the eye-patch]

I'm really happy with her and apparently so is most of the world. I've bought every building in the Bower Lake Gypsy Camp, Oakfield and I was working on Rookridge the last I tried. I'm already a master Level 5 Bartender, so after only a few pints, I'm making hundreds of dollars per pint. And if I can get it maxed out, I make 1125 gold per pint! Not bad! Plus I make about 1k gold from my real estates, gaining tons of purity all the while just from lowering all the rents and prices to -20%. Not a bad deal, really.

Overall, I was pretty happy with Fable II. I even came up with an idea for a Fable III! Imagine another few centuries down the road, the Four Heroes that defeated Lucien have brought Heroes back into the world of Albion. Instead of a single guild, the different Heroes with their radically different personalities have split off, creating 4 different guilds. Hammer leads the Guild of Strength in Oakfield, Garth runs the Guild of Will in Brightwood and Reaver [much to everyone's surprise] cleans up his act as a crook and founds the Guild of Skill in Bloodstone [maybe even turning the port town into something, you know... Decent. What a concept!] and the fourth Hero, who's name is absent from what's left of the legends was rumored to have taken refuge in the old Chamber of Fate and founded the Guild of Justice, training Paladins and Clerics to roam the world and try to heal the lands of the evils of Lucien and past horrors.

The plot line would be that after hundreds of years of bare tolerance, the Guilds general dislike of each other has reached a boiling a point and broken out into all-out war. Now, the enemy isn't some great evil, threatening the entire Hero society, but the Hero society itself threatening the rest of the world in the wake of it's wrath. In the end, I don't know who the Hero would be [direct descendant of the fourth Hero?] or who the main evil would be [Maybe Thereasa? She was in control of the Spire at the end of Fable II, maybe it corrupted her and she manipulates and lies to the lead Heroes until war breaks out?] but in the end, I thought it was something new and interesting.

Like Fable II did, there would, of course, be technological advances. Guns would become more sophisticated, perhaps explorers and trains have broken through the eastern mountains of Albion and revealed new, exciting lands that no one's ever seen before. Ships and perhaps the beginnings of flying machines can populate the seas and air, giving brand new possibilities to the entire thing. Magic could be warped and changed by technology, maybe even merged with it somehow to create brand new fusions of the two.

It'd be a brand new world, that's for damn sure.

So imagine THAT philosophy... If you can.

Class dismissed.

P.S. ~ Extra Credit

The title of this blog came from Looking for Group, a web-comic I really love. One of the main characters is Richard, an undead Warlock with a great sense of humor. At some point, Richard was tied to a ship's mast and another main character had to burst out laughing because he couldn't get over the idea of "Dick on a Stick".

Classic. Loved it.