An update.

Feh.

Supercar was misbehaving last week, which caused me to miss game (Boo!). I still don't knwo what happened, but I'm gonna assume it wasn't a TPK since that would have involved emails.

It's probably a matter of taste (I'm sure the 0D&D Grognards would disagree) but the common procedure for D&D characters since I can remember has been to start campaigns at 3rd level. This gives you a boost in available resources (spells, hit points, etc, etc) that adds more fun to the gaming experience. One of 4E's good qualities (one of; I do like it, folks) is that a first level player chracter starts out with a better selection of resources (neat at-will abilities, more HP, etc) than a PC from previous editions.

In essence, they recognized that the inherent fallibility/suckiness of 1st level characters was notfun, and rectified that. For that, I thank them.

Friday night was in with the wife; we watched BSG and ate Tacos and played Rock Band 2 (how do you import the RB songlist into RB2, again?).

Saturday was a big day out. We met up with mr_weasel and his wife at the AGO, where we wandered about.

We grabbed lunch at a cafe across the road, and I had a delish open faced blt with avacado. Man, that was a good sandwich.

mr_weasel and I got seperated from the better halves, and they ended up at the Rubens exhibit and we ended up going into this mind-stretching sculpture exhibit with a anthropomorphic suit-wearing man-sized rooster with, apparently, a scrotum for a wattle, and some kind of simian being eviscerated by shards of mirrors.

We ran, screaming, from the room into the comforting arms of Ken Thompson's collection of miniature boats. Sweet, sweet miniature boats. Then we looked at tiny Chinese snuff bottles and then checked out the Rubens. They sure liked 'em beefy back then, Normie!

Afterwards we killed some time at the Manulife centre, shopped at Indigo, and then headed to Lobby for our second Winterlicious session. Fascinating venue. They've got what appears to be life sized photos of Scarlett Johansen and Heath Ledger on the wall, which I assume fills some pretentious hipster requirement.

I got the potato & leek soup, which was tasty, and a chicken dish with veggies which was well plated, I guess. Dessert was a nice blueberry crumble. We all shared a hearty laugh over the price of a martini, and only debated for a few minutes over whether or not to tell our waitress she'd forgotten to charge us for our wine.

Virtue triumped over vendetta, but they only charged us for half a bottle. I can't imagine going back to it for a regular dinner, unless the standard menu has something that really draws me in.

Sunday was a quiet day. I was supposed to meet up with some guys in Hamilton for boardgames (Munchkin Quest, now with expansion!) but Cynra's leg had been bothering her since Friday, and a day of tromping around the downtown hadn't helped much. We spent the day doing shopping and cleaning. Yay!

(Insert Ghoul Pun HERE)

So, while pillaging the MPL's online card cataloge for new Graphic Novel additions (and all you can find on there are juveniles; if you want stuff from the adult GN selection, there's no luck, unless you know who the author is or what the title is.

Anyway, I saw they had four Tales from the Crypt books available, so I figured I'd give them a try. I assumed they were reprints of the old EC books, but when I picked them up from the library, I discovered that they were, in fact, new digest sized stories.

The stories are not GREAT, but they're fun and creepy little stories. They're hooked right into the zeitgeist, as it were. There's a story about an action figure collector who comes to a horrid end, and an MMORPG player who finds the events in his real life start to reflect in game, and vice versa. A lot of Duh Duh Duhhhhh! moments. The American Idol one is particularly enjoyable.

Nothing to compare to, say, the one about the baseball player with the poisoned cleats, but some fun storytelling.

Jim Salicrup's got EiC duties, and Fred Van Lente both write a couple stories in the first couple issues. Joe Lansdale does a story in the fourth issue. The publisher, Papercutz, is also doing GNs based on the Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew, and is republishing a lot of Classics Illustrated backstock.