Gaz: Big in Japan

….although I think I’m prepped and ready to move on to 102 sharpish.

So this last week I’ve had a lot of free time, a virtual mushroom cloud of available time fallout and I have done precisely nothing with it. Well nothing isn’t exactly true, I have read almost every single comic from “Questionable Content” (thanks to Dave for the recc – although I say thanks with the words “for stealing the better part of my week” in quotation fingers) and watched a relatively poor quality copy of the Iron Man movie (which I couldn’t wait until September to see – although I still intend to see it on the big screen and purchase the DVD, it was great).

Today and tomorrow, due to the school trip to Tokyo for 3rd years, I have zero lessons. Not a single one. A wise man would probably plan umpteen weeks of elementary school classes, selection classes, activities for team taught classes and study Japanese with the 16 hour gaping hole of inactivitiy. I, however, am questing to see what other webcomics may be worth reading having already ruled out Megatokyo, because like their tag-line states “I just don’t get it”. I’m also experimenting with deck building for “George R.R. Martin’s a game of thrones collectable card game” (from here on referred to as GRRMAGOTCCG). I’ve never once been tempted to play a ccg before, I never had enough self confidence to scale the nerd stigma of Tragic: The saddening and playing the World of Warcraft CCG just seemed like an utterly ridiculous idea, why would some play a ccg of a mmorpger? It’s like being a car enthusiast who collects spark plugs.

Playing GRRMAGOTCCG is an oddly compelling experience, even for someone who loses heavily to Theo as I always do due to massive buffoonary and not reading of the rules or chosen cards leading me to counter +11 card of assballs death with the you have a nice fish for dinner, invite some friends defense card. Part of my ineptitude stems from having never done this sort of thing before, but thanks largely to Owen I am a huge fan of trying new and interesting table top games (no thanks to Dillon and his 13 dead end drive which was just a bit shit – save that we used to the pieces to play “Kill Dr. Lucky” years later). The point is, I intend to get better, and I usually do get better at these sort of things given some time, I think I now have a deck made that isn’t quite as hilarously useless as previous incarnations. The downside of GRRMAGOTCCG is in the “CCG” part. To fully enjoy the experience one does have to spend a large sum of money, the upside of this however is when you do receive a monstrous sum of cards suddenly you get whisked away to the days when every penny of pocket money was spent on football stickers and the biggest issue you had in life was whether or not the next pack contained the missing Gary Pallister.

In summation, read the books, play the game have a better life.