A "Magic" Adventure - Legal Disclaimer: This is a fictional account of what happened. I never broke any law.
As some of you may know I just spent the last ten days in mainland Europe. I originally intended to spend much of my time playing Magic the Gathering but there were more than a few distractions in the end. This post is going to chronicle some of the finer elements of my journey and is in no way a "Fuck off non-magic player" section, that will come at later date.
Over the last few weeks I've had very few days off boozing like an alcoholic. It would appear that I'm not very good at going for "just one drink". "Just a couple" often ends up turning into a binge. Two Thursdays ago I decided to catch up with a friend for a couple of drinks before she went off to 2manyDJs, then I went to play some cards, intending to get some practice in. Then I went to catch up with a few more friends for a few more drinks, then a few more friends for a few more drinks then another friend for another few drinks. Basically it ended up like a one man pub crawl but knowing that I'd have buddies at each venue. It was no surprise then that I spent much of Friday with a hangover. Now hangovers as I'm sure you may be aware don't help too much when one has to do some flying. Especially if you have the breed of hangover that I have - one of those ones that start out fine then develop into a metric ball ache of badness. It meant I could sleep awkwardly on the plane between Belfast and London, then sit in a gelatinous like state in Stanstead before graduating on to the London to Gothenburg plane. The problem with that hangover was that I was carrying something on me that I really shouldn't have.
During the queue for security in Belfast city airport, I discovered a tiny bag of grass in my inside jean pocket. Just enough for a joint, nothing that I haven't been able to get through international airport security before and I figured, it was too late to turn out of the queue without looking deeply suspicious. I put all my belongings in the box, dumped my bag on the scanner belt and walked through the detector. *BEEP*
It's cool. I cracked a joke about swallowing a large lump of metal when I was a kid to the middle aged security guard. He laughed and explained that it was a random stop and search but my Transformers T-shirt was very cool and that he is a big fan of the movies. I agreed with this and put my arms out for the pat down. Nothing found. With one airport down, I figured the other two would be grand. Stanstead largely was. The last time that I had been through it my former friend set off a minor alert by forgetting that his "oregano" grinder was still in his luggage. It was only when I got to Gothenburg that it became a problem. The first thing that I saw soon when I got past the passport check was a sniffer dog Labrador. That was one smart looking labrador too, waiting for me with it's healthy golden fur and its bored looking trainers. I panic slightly, with the hangover in full swing, I'm just a tad paranoid. Nah fuck that, I'm sweating like a bitch in heat. I dive into the queue for the toilets which happen to be one cubicle unisex units, which is a long wait and a long time to look on edge and shifty right in front of the labradors and the Custom Agents. I finally get into the toilet, whip my dick out and start pissing, meanwhile unravelling the crap in my pocket to get the weed out and put it in the sanitary towel dispensary bin. Except I completely failed to do this, instead I dropped the weed in the toilet whilst I'm mid flow and have to reach in to swipe the baggie from the piss chamber before I can dispose of it. I washed my hands with a little extra soap and left to leave the airport.
"Excuse me sir, can you come with us?"
Hearing those words almost made me shit a brick. Nay, a high rise Singapore appartment complex. Where they allowed to put security cameras in toilets? I know it was an airport and all but surely we should be allowed some privacy.
I take a long drawn out but silent inhale through my nostrils to keep my composure and agree to the custom agent's demand. I'm asked about my reason for being in Sweden and they search my bag to verify whether or not I'm telling the truth. The cards confirm my reasons so they ask me for my passport. I check a few pockets and my mind begins to boggle. I'm now searching my entire inventory just for my passport. I run back into the toilet and grab it off the hand dryer.
"It was a good thing we stopped you sir, wasn't it?"
I nod and agree with a beaming smile and they let me go on my way.
I leave the airport, narrowly missing the bus into city centre. After that narrow escape I'm a little unphased, produce my book and wait for the next one.
"I think you have missed the last bus. Where are you going?"
I look up and it's the same two female custom agents that stopped me.
"City centre."
"Oh, that's where we are going, we can give you a lift into town"
I smile and hurry over to the car. They put the dog in the boot and I hop into the back seat. Minus one joint = plus one free taxi ride. Small fucking victories my friend.
When I get into town I have a little bit of difficulty navigating the way to my friend's house. Adam, who I've got to say is a fairly brave individual for putting up a random magic player who he'd only ever spoke to a couple of times on the phone after playing him at Magic over the internet gives me a perfectly good set of directions and I end up going the wrong direction. Eventually I rectify this issue and get there just in time to watch some channelfireball, play some proxied vintage magic (this is where the cards in the deck are worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars so you print off copies of the cards and stick the picture to already existing, not as expensive cards), drink some Lipton ice tea and go to sleep. We head to the venue and have a long day of magic to get through.
Long story cut short with Magic (I'll explain what I got up to in a later post for the die hard followers of my Magic articles), I end up scrubbing out but making a few friends in the process. I gain a Serbian fan club over the two days and end up going drinking with a new found English friend. This generally just meant about four pints in a rather crap Gothenburg bar. I'm not really sure what proper Gothenburg night life is like but this place was a mediocre bar in terms of venue, speed of service and music played. On top of that we were supposed to pay 40 Swedish kroner (about £3.50) to get in but the guy at the door didn't have the change for a 50 kroner note so let me in anyway. I knock it on the head early as I don't really want to keep on spending money in a venue with a ratio of about 8 guys to 1 girl. Honestly we were both positive the place wasn't a Gay bar even with it's dumb name: Charlie's Anglars. So I knock it on the head and go to bed early so I can get up and play magic the next day. Sunday night I'm treated to a traditional Swedish meal by Adam's father of succulent roast pork and a vegetable mix that seems to comprise of carrot and turnip.
At this point in time, I'm reluctant to head home. Whilst I had a flight booked to return home on Monday, I wouldn't actually get home until about eight o'clock in the evening. Why bother flying back to Belfast only to have to fly out to Amsterdam on Thursday. It wasn't like I had anything important to do on Tuesday or Wednesday. I sit until about three o'clock in the morning on Adam's computer researching the alternatives to going home whilst leaving him in his room to sex talk his girlfriend over the phone in both Swedish and Spanish. After trying in vain to find alternatives to going home that don’t cost £140 I hit the hay. Despite setting an alarm, I do one of those half asleep “wake up and acknowledge I have to get up for something but chose to sleep in anyway” moments. When I’m finally up for real it’s 09:30 AM and I have half an hour to get from Adam’s house to the airport before check in closes. The hell I’m risking £30 for a taxi that might not even make it on time.
Adam and I book my next flight. Copenhagen to Amsterdam. We head into town and grab some sushi before I take the train from Sweden to Denmark and Adam heads to college.
The train between Goteborg and Copenhagen takes about four hours but it has to be done on a sunny day. Whilst admittedly I missed hours of sunshine on that journey and ended up getting into Denmark when it was pissing with rain, I got to see the beautiful Swedish countryside as it was coated in rays of gold.
When I got there, I got to catch up with Daniel, Josephine and Martin, smoke a joint and head off to make dinner. I spent the next two days with Martin, Jackob and Sigurd schmoking and drinking, getting my liver prepared for what was to be a tame by comparison Amsterdam.
This was genuinely an awesome experience, Freetown Christiania is the hippy commune I’ve spoke about in previous blogs that is as phenomenal the umpteenth time you visit it as it is the first time you visit it. Danish pilsner is as great as ever.
After a quick flight that I spent trying to chat up some average looking Dutch girl beside me whilst being fucked off my face on beer and weed, I rocked into Amsterdam, grabbed a slice of pizza and took the train into city centre. This bit all went pretty smoothly. I bought some blueberry in some average looking coffee shop, hit a bong then traversed the streets to the Italian restaurant where the Magic players resided. We topped up our beer levels then head off to see a sex show. This is one of those things that you know in your heart you will only ever do once.
I mean it’s 30 euros for two crap drinks and a chance to watch grown men go up on stage and eat banana’s out of a fat girl’s flange. Except it’s hilarious when its your friends that are those eating the banana out of that girl’s flange. Better still is whenever your mate has his shirt off and he’s lying on the stage with the girl writing ‘Bad boy’ using a pen protruding from her flaps. That is something that you have to see to believe.
Arguably the best thing about that sex show was that it gave me the opportunity for the most perfect one-liner. Right in the “live sex” portion of the show, the woman lay on her back with her legs around his head so he could have tongue to twat reach. Queue UFC reference
“And she catches him with a triangle choke hold! IT IS AAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL OVVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEERRRRRR!”
After this we walked home, drinking tuborg and smoking joints along the way.
Thursday was largely spent being hung over, chomping on the breakfast buffet and having a nap. What followed was a spot of magic and a trip into town, drinking in a few bars. These were generally pretty sweet, I had a good eye for ones we could just chill out and grab a few pints of Bavaria. We even hit up a shisha bar with the fittest Scottish barmaid I’ve seen in quite some time. Whilst this was all cool and all, we kind of hit a little bit of a hurdle: most of the bars seemed to close at 1 and without knowledge of where the night clubs are, it’s quite easy to get distracted and put off partying for another night. You kind of end up just going back and guzzling the remainder of the beers purchased from the local supermarket. That’s kind of what happened for the remainder of our trip, we spent a lot of time getting pie-eyed in hotel rooms and seeing some bars. If not it was getting absolutely wankered at our hostel’s happy hour. 2 for 1 on pints of lager whilst we’re playing the best drunken foosball or mental magic we’ve ever engaged in.
A couple of the other guys had just that idea, taking a free tour of the zottay brewery, an 8% beer that tasted like it was about four. Not much to my liking, it kind of had a musty taste to it and when you’re filled with a hangover and ribs, you’re not going to be able to handle much in the way of musty beer.
We also went on the “Heiniken experience”, which wasn’t actually a tour of the brewery but a mueseum of Heiniken/a building of advertisement for the company. Whilst the people working here were pretty cool, I’d recommend hoofing a big bong before you even step foot in this building as fifteen Euros will only get you two free pints of Heiniken and that’s provided you answer the questions of the fit bar maids correctly. Hint: the head on Heiniken is designed to stop oxygen from getting and CO2 from getting out.
After the Heiniken trip, we had one little Sweedish problem. Outside the hostel, four of us were playing a card game called "9 Card Brag", basically a quick and easy to gamble on card game, that doesn't require any major skill. About half way through the game, a Swedish guy came and asked us about what we were playing. He seemed friendly enough but then he started into a rant about a Swedish card game that we should have been playing.
"Yes, it is called nigger and president"
Now I'd find this awkward at the best of times but there was a crowd of African students gathered by the picnic tables around us. Niall quite rightly suggested he didn't use that word and the guy dropped it. About three minutes later, he brings it up again.
"Yes, card game Nigger and President"
"Dude.."
"Yes, I know but I did not give the name to the game, it is a very popular game in Sweden, it is funny because the nigger can be the president at the same time.."
At this point we froze him out of our conversation. I'm inclined to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say that the guy wasn't racist but I wasn't prepared to deal with his stupidity. You don't loudly say a word that is discriminatory around the group it is likely to offend.
My tolerance to stupidity can be pretty low.
To soothe the munchies, I would recommend all you can eat ribs for twelve euro, where you can get a plate “ribbed for your pleasure”. I can’t remember the name of the place in town that did this deal but it was an Argentinan restraunt. The service could have been a little better but I wasn’t going to kick up too much of a fuss when I was stuffing myself with their ribs. Pretty good I have to say.
Sunday though was the God of all days. After playing Magic semi-successfully I joined the other eleven Northern Irish magic players for the best activity known to man: boating on Amsterdam canals. For three hours we bombed around on motor boats barbequing, drinking beer and smoking thick pre-rolled joints. I think even the people in Amsterdam were slightly confused to see us gnashing huge chunks of chicken clean off the bone that was fresh cooked on foil instant barbeques. There were some hilarious moments on that boating expedition too. Take for instance the “Zattay drop” a competition where contestants have to set a bottle of zattay perfectly upright on an Amsterdam houseboat for maximum points or trying to schmooze attractive women who were in boats along side us. The boat rental guys didn’t look too happy with us when we returned the boats with a live and smoking barbeque still going.
Sadly whilst we were all finally in the mood for going out and sleazing on some Dutch girls, the old “no where is open past 1” conundrum really applies on a Sunday. We made up for the problem by chomping our way through some seriously good kebabs and I collapsed in my half assed made hostel bed covered in beer sweat.
I want to thank everyone who made this trip what it was, in particular, Adam for letting me stay in his beautiful family home, Martin for letting me stay in his gaff. Dog and Gar get a shout out for organizing the boat trip.
Ratings (out of 5)
Swedish hospitality: *****
Danish Hospitality: *****
Scrubbing out at magic: *** (At least I learned a few things and made a few friends)
Christiania: ****
Heiniken Experience: **
Eating ribs: ***
Beer: *****
Renting boats: ***********************************************************
Some idiot outside a hostel:
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Inception
- Overrated, but not that bad.
I'm sure you were all thinking "Why doesn't he go and see Inception so he can tell me what he thought of it", well you might like what I have to say about it. If you have seen it then get ready to bicker with me, if you haven't seen it go to the £3 screening of it on a Tuesday. I'd be slightly adverse to paying full price for it.
Brief synopsis? Enter a world much like our own except a device was created by the military that allows people to "Dream Share". That is multiple people can experience the same dream and explore various levels of consciousness. Leonardo DiCaprio and his friends - some English guy, the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun and some random guy that gets taken away from everyone else earlier on in the film work as their own organized company of dream data protection. You know how big companies hire trained hackers to test their network security and find ways to improve it, well these guys pretty much do exactly that except they train CEOs, etc. do militarize their dreams so that if anyone illegally dream shares with them and tries to steal secrets and information kept in the subconscious, their efforts are foiled. DiCaprio as we learn pretty early on in the film is wanted for murder of his dead wife and desperately wants to get back to his kids. Ken Watanabe offers him the chance to return to America and see his kids undeterred by law enforcement if he has an inception. The movie title refers to going into someone's dream and carefully causing the dreamer to develop an idea. In this case Watanabe's character wants Cillian Murphy to disolve his father's company to avoid a superpower energy corporation from forming.
We are to believe this has never been done before or if it can be done it's very difficult. The first half of the film we see the team being assembled, it's like the scene is being set and we get to see the dynamics between each character. Because this is done so quickly, it's almost as if it's a little forced. "How can we show this guy knows his shit in a thirty second montage". Whilst all of the actors are good, I found it kind of difficult to see the characters as characters, more often we're seeing them as the actors or the characters they've been in previous films - "Oh look, there's Ken Watanabe, DiCaprio, Juno, the kid from 3rd rock from the son, Michael Caine, Scarecrow". That's partly because of such an all star cast being used, the fact that pretty much everybody has already been in a Christopher Nolan Batman film and because of the sound in this film. In true Nolan style there is an orchestral score going through pretty much all of this film. I don't remember anything other than strings, trumpets and bass. The latter led to such a wobble of the speakers sometimes it was a little off putting. Whilst it didn't mean the dialogue was hard to make out, it did however mean that you were slightly distracted by the music as the characters spoke. Meaning that their names were lost in the aether pretty early on.
As far as the story goes, it's quite good for a while. It's a pretty novel science fiction idea that Philip K. Dick probably should have thought up. It's got the sort of Existenz/Matrix/Ghost in the Shell plug yourself into another reality with the classic DesCartes message of "I think therefore I am" philosophy built in. The film also tries to work on multiple levels of the subconscious and "projections" appear - characters or places that are brain pieces together without our control. Leo's wife almost acts as an antagonist to the characters because she just pops up there causing him to act like a dick without him being able to stop her. Yes there's an emotional and sentimental reason as to why this happens but often enough I was just thinking "Would somebody just shoot the dumb bitch". The script is reasonably well written but at times it gives me a bit of a *sigh* moment. As if it was a little too laboured/maybe borderline pretentious. Partly that's because of the humourless nature of the entire film. When I go to see a big budget action movie, I like to at least have a chuckle from time to time. It's why the Arnie films are still good to watch. That's not to say you have to cover the thing with melted mozarella but throw a good one liner in the dialogue to mix it up. Tom Hardy almost grants a chuckle here and there but it's barely enough to even give a half smile. Nolan would do well to remember that Batman Begins had a great dynamic between Bruce and Alfred. If you're going to have Michael Caine in your film for little to no reason, you may as well have him use the word bloody.
The second half of the film when they're in the dream starts off pretty well. There's some gun fights, a car chase with a train in it and some mastery with a rocket launcher. There's a constant tension within the dream because of whats at stake if someone dies within the dream (I'll not spoil this bit) and the action is pretty good. The characters all have to go deeper than the dream itself, into several states of dream within dream. Some stay on some level, some on another. Whilst there is a strong level of intelligent script writing in doing this, at times the camera seems to constantly cut between the mutliple dreams, so we're constantly reminded of what's going on but it's almost setting out to be a mind fuck. Ever seen the "I'm the Juggernaut bitch!" voice over of the 90s x-men cartoon. This is what parts of these scenes reminded me of, I felt like yelling out "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FALLIN?!". The slow-mo sequences at times became a little tedious. My friend sitting right next to me at times was yawning and laughing at things he shouldn't have been laughing at. The multiple dream idea also had an element of "Ok we've got three mediocre plotlines, what should we do with them? YES! I'VE GOT IT! COMPOUND THEM ALL TOGETHER! IT'S A MASTERPIECE!" I think what part of this film pulls it down is it's determination to explain everything in retrospect. You have a glimpse of something important and we're supposed to be wondering why so that we can have our questions answered somewhere later on in the film. It's kind of why I never got into Lost. Usually I have a curious and inquisitive nature but in certain circumstances it's just plain irritating to have this mandatory notion of intrigue.
Even right through to the end we have moments were the film tries to pull a Donnie Darko on us and go "I wonder what the hidden meaning behind this is? What's really happened?" In simple terms, it's an action film that's trying to force us to think. Is life just a dream?
There's a few thing it really delivered on. The effects were pretty good. A gravity shifting fight scene was very nice to watch. Yet a lot of the other effects will date really badly. Go back and watch the Matrix. A lot of it just doesn't seem as slick by today's standards, yet it was a huge milestone in the industry. Inception is going to suffer in the exact same way down the line, yet instead of having a wooden Reeves that we can laugh at we've got a super serial hench as fuck DiCaprio to endure.
It's arguably overly long too, which is kind of typical for a Nolan film. After a few times watching the Dark Knight, you kind of question "Do I really need to have another twist to add another thirty minutes to this plot line?", Inception does this from the start. From the moment you have time distortion explained within dreams, you know there is going to be a way to drag things out.
Lastly what really bugged me is why are the dreams so constipated? In the dreams that we wake up and remember, stupid shit happens. They're kind of like acid trips. Waking Life does this tremendously. Yes, it does go on a mutliple tangents about existentialism but with a blunt smoked you're prepared to go off on these tangents, questioning your own reality. At least if you had some sort of trippiness, you could have got the laughs in. "Why is the Queen of Spain in a hot air balloon?" "Whats with all these cartoon bears?" "The Blue meanies?! Noooooooo!"
Now I will have plenty of people prepared to argue with what I've said about this film but all I'm saying is, it's not perfect. Of course, it's a better film than the A-Team but it's not half as much fun and that to me is the film's problem. It's clever but it's not fun enough. The damn film almost made me cry too. Stupid talking to father on death bed scenes, that's not even fair. Cunts.
- Overrated, but not that bad.
I'm sure you were all thinking "Why doesn't he go and see Inception so he can tell me what he thought of it", well you might like what I have to say about it. If you have seen it then get ready to bicker with me, if you haven't seen it go to the £3 screening of it on a Tuesday. I'd be slightly adverse to paying full price for it.
Brief synopsis? Enter a world much like our own except a device was created by the military that allows people to "Dream Share". That is multiple people can experience the same dream and explore various levels of consciousness. Leonardo DiCaprio and his friends - some English guy, the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun and some random guy that gets taken away from everyone else earlier on in the film work as their own organized company of dream data protection. You know how big companies hire trained hackers to test their network security and find ways to improve it, well these guys pretty much do exactly that except they train CEOs, etc. do militarize their dreams so that if anyone illegally dream shares with them and tries to steal secrets and information kept in the subconscious, their efforts are foiled. DiCaprio as we learn pretty early on in the film is wanted for murder of his dead wife and desperately wants to get back to his kids. Ken Watanabe offers him the chance to return to America and see his kids undeterred by law enforcement if he has an inception. The movie title refers to going into someone's dream and carefully causing the dreamer to develop an idea. In this case Watanabe's character wants Cillian Murphy to disolve his father's company to avoid a superpower energy corporation from forming.
We are to believe this has never been done before or if it can be done it's very difficult. The first half of the film we see the team being assembled, it's like the scene is being set and we get to see the dynamics between each character. Because this is done so quickly, it's almost as if it's a little forced. "How can we show this guy knows his shit in a thirty second montage". Whilst all of the actors are good, I found it kind of difficult to see the characters as characters, more often we're seeing them as the actors or the characters they've been in previous films - "Oh look, there's Ken Watanabe, DiCaprio, Juno, the kid from 3rd rock from the son, Michael Caine, Scarecrow". That's partly because of such an all star cast being used, the fact that pretty much everybody has already been in a Christopher Nolan Batman film and because of the sound in this film. In true Nolan style there is an orchestral score going through pretty much all of this film. I don't remember anything other than strings, trumpets and bass. The latter led to such a wobble of the speakers sometimes it was a little off putting. Whilst it didn't mean the dialogue was hard to make out, it did however mean that you were slightly distracted by the music as the characters spoke. Meaning that their names were lost in the aether pretty early on.
As far as the story goes, it's quite good for a while. It's a pretty novel science fiction idea that Philip K. Dick probably should have thought up. It's got the sort of Existenz/Matrix/Ghost in the Shell plug yourself into another reality with the classic DesCartes message of "I think therefore I am" philosophy built in. The film also tries to work on multiple levels of the subconscious and "projections" appear - characters or places that are brain pieces together without our control. Leo's wife almost acts as an antagonist to the characters because she just pops up there causing him to act like a dick without him being able to stop her. Yes there's an emotional and sentimental reason as to why this happens but often enough I was just thinking "Would somebody just shoot the dumb bitch". The script is reasonably well written but at times it gives me a bit of a *sigh* moment. As if it was a little too laboured/maybe borderline pretentious. Partly that's because of the humourless nature of the entire film. When I go to see a big budget action movie, I like to at least have a chuckle from time to time. It's why the Arnie films are still good to watch. That's not to say you have to cover the thing with melted mozarella but throw a good one liner in the dialogue to mix it up. Tom Hardy almost grants a chuckle here and there but it's barely enough to even give a half smile. Nolan would do well to remember that Batman Begins had a great dynamic between Bruce and Alfred. If you're going to have Michael Caine in your film for little to no reason, you may as well have him use the word bloody.
The second half of the film when they're in the dream starts off pretty well. There's some gun fights, a car chase with a train in it and some mastery with a rocket launcher. There's a constant tension within the dream because of whats at stake if someone dies within the dream (I'll not spoil this bit) and the action is pretty good. The characters all have to go deeper than the dream itself, into several states of dream within dream. Some stay on some level, some on another. Whilst there is a strong level of intelligent script writing in doing this, at times the camera seems to constantly cut between the mutliple dreams, so we're constantly reminded of what's going on but it's almost setting out to be a mind fuck. Ever seen the "I'm the Juggernaut bitch!" voice over of the 90s x-men cartoon. This is what parts of these scenes reminded me of, I felt like yelling out "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FALLIN?!". The slow-mo sequences at times became a little tedious. My friend sitting right next to me at times was yawning and laughing at things he shouldn't have been laughing at. The multiple dream idea also had an element of "Ok we've got three mediocre plotlines, what should we do with them? YES! I'VE GOT IT! COMPOUND THEM ALL TOGETHER! IT'S A MASTERPIECE!" I think what part of this film pulls it down is it's determination to explain everything in retrospect. You have a glimpse of something important and we're supposed to be wondering why so that we can have our questions answered somewhere later on in the film. It's kind of why I never got into Lost. Usually I have a curious and inquisitive nature but in certain circumstances it's just plain irritating to have this mandatory notion of intrigue.
Even right through to the end we have moments were the film tries to pull a Donnie Darko on us and go "I wonder what the hidden meaning behind this is? What's really happened?" In simple terms, it's an action film that's trying to force us to think. Is life just a dream?
There's a few thing it really delivered on. The effects were pretty good. A gravity shifting fight scene was very nice to watch. Yet a lot of the other effects will date really badly. Go back and watch the Matrix. A lot of it just doesn't seem as slick by today's standards, yet it was a huge milestone in the industry. Inception is going to suffer in the exact same way down the line, yet instead of having a wooden Reeves that we can laugh at we've got a super serial hench as fuck DiCaprio to endure.
It's arguably overly long too, which is kind of typical for a Nolan film. After a few times watching the Dark Knight, you kind of question "Do I really need to have another twist to add another thirty minutes to this plot line?", Inception does this from the start. From the moment you have time distortion explained within dreams, you know there is going to be a way to drag things out.
Lastly what really bugged me is why are the dreams so constipated? In the dreams that we wake up and remember, stupid shit happens. They're kind of like acid trips. Waking Life does this tremendously. Yes, it does go on a mutliple tangents about existentialism but with a blunt smoked you're prepared to go off on these tangents, questioning your own reality. At least if you had some sort of trippiness, you could have got the laughs in. "Why is the Queen of Spain in a hot air balloon?" "Whats with all these cartoon bears?" "The Blue meanies?! Noooooooo!"
Now I will have plenty of people prepared to argue with what I've said about this film but all I'm saying is, it's not perfect. Of course, it's a better film than the A-Team but it's not half as much fun and that to me is the film's problem. It's clever but it's not fun enough. The damn film almost made me cry too. Stupid talking to father on death bed scenes, that's not even fair. Cunts.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
A History of Card Playing Failures
This entire article is FONMP (Fuck off non-Magic Player). There's no point reading it if you don't play Magic.
Anyone who knows me would say I'm pretty bad at a lot of things. Losing is one of them. Give the most talentless idiot the biggest competitive streak and you have a recipie for disaster right in front of you. I've been playing card games for years. I first got introduced to the scene back when I was twelve years old, with his head more in the world of Warhammer than in the "cool teenager" scene. Being a rare breed of socially inept character, I could talk to almost everyone but piss them off by talking whilst my head was lodged firmly up my ass. Meanwhile I had the co-ordination of a newborn Giraffe and the athleticism of a sloth. Couldn't run, couldn't catch, even rowing was an egg I couldn't hatch.
So off on and on I drifted through card games, roleplaying games, computer games and books. Like many teenage geeks, I was quite happy to escape the world of reality without needing any drugs*. Whilst my competitive experience of magic was fairly non-existant, I understood the game fairly well. When I came back to Belfast after three years of University, I had no intention of getting stuck into the game, just the odd draft. Within weeks the odd draft had turned into two drafts a week, I was playing on MODO too, sometimes even going on Workstation so I could test the decks to beat without shelling out insanely high prices for mythics. This was inbetween working, training in muay thai and attempting to help out at home. I have no doubt that in years to come I shall be filled with guilt about the latter of these things being skimped on in terms of time and effort invested.
Given time I was actually winning drafts, the odd occasion multiple drafts in a row. It was as if I had pushed through that barrier from casual player to someone who could actually do quite well. Or that's how it felt. You see where this is going; I got too big for my boots. This didn't help too much when I was basing part of my ego upon how good I perceived myself to be getting. Remember back in school and you had those guys far too arrogant for their own good, strutting around knowing that because they were so good at rugby the rest of the world were going to fall at their feet. I was getting that from doing well in Magic. Ridiculous I know - no-one outside of a comic shop is going to give a shit about your first pick first pack Sword of Vengeance or how you couldn't believe you were passed multiple Pelakka Wurms. Rugby will get a lot of guys laid. Magic.. not so much. If you've read any of my older posts, you'll know my views that geeks can get laid for being geeks but it's not by boring a woman to death or by her watching you make top eight in a Pre-release. Yet I was going out in clubs and bars thinking I was shit hot because I took home a foil fetchland for coming first in a triple Zendikar draft. Granted I wasn't bragging about it to random women, but I was carrying this unbelievably positive energy for being so chuffed with myself.
In my blog I haven't chatted much about the death of my father or how it has affected me. It's not something I've wanted to bring up too much because I feel I should write about it when I'm ready but since he has passed away, I haven't done too much. Worked a little bit in a bar, or doing the odd temp shift. I've also had a few trips to England and one to Denmark (more on that in another entry). What I'm trying to get at is my ridiculous obsession with magic. How it's kind of filled a void since I have no full time work. I played so much of it that it was as if I was gearing myself up in the back of my head to be a Pro. Now I do keep telling myself how ridiculous this notion is. To be a professional magic player is probably about as difficult as being a professional poker player. Nay, probably more so - once you get good at poker you can do it at a bare basic level, picking up just enough money to get by from a couple of good nights play a week in casinos in bars. Magic requires you to be sitting around waiting for Grand Prixs and pro-tours to appear. Doing well in those requires you to pit yourself up against hundreds of people who may be genetically brighter than you and better trained when it comes to the practice.
In fact what makes this more ridiculous is that even the guys who are really good at Magic in Ireland prioritize Magic as second to their full time employment. Our champions tend to be guys with multiple degrees in Pharmacy and Law. My single BA is probably not enough to cut the mustard in the academic skills required for excellent play. Now that's probably not really the reason I don't do well but I'm going to try and illustrate to you just how bad I am at the game and how supersilious I was getting.
Once a year though, every player has something to look forward to. The Irish Nationals. Bringing players from all thirty-two counties together for a weekend of playhing savage games of cards and drinking like fishes. You grow out of Christmas. As a magic player, you do not grow out of nationals.
In most counties, qualifying for nationals is a nightmare. The level of play skill is a whole nother level to the scrubs that rock up at the drafts or the FNMs with their Lorthos the Tidemaker combo decks. In fact fromn what I gather, anyone qualifying for their national event has probably done very well for themselves in just that feat. On our little emerald Isle, it's notoriously easy. You have little kids rocking up with unsleeved pre-con decks, with ill conceived notions of what they are actually likely to face. Anyone with half a brain and a few hundred quids worth of cards in their hands should make the grade no problem.
In the North of Ireland alone, we had 4 qualifiers. Each of those had about 30 people attending with 14 getting through. So basically, you just have to be better than half of the field? Yeah. That's it. In fact one of our qualifiers, yesterday had 16 people there. Ten made it through. I played 4 qualifiers and I couldn't get through any of them. I got beat consistently by people that I conceive to be worse than me. This isn't one of those gamer arrogance things either, this is half of the players in Northern Ireland wondering why I'm not qualified.
When I break down each qualifier, I see mistakes in most of them. I see my inability to deal with pressure and it's crushing.
People that most people around me were questioning how I got beat by them
Qualifier number one
After putting together the guts of Finest Hour Mythic the night before and running it with a few proxies in the FNM (we are allowed up to five proxies in our decks at FNM), I'm quite excited for this day. I mean, after all I won the FNM. The problem lies when I'm putting together the deck on the morning. No-one has the Baneslayers they can lend. The bigger problem lies within me getting the Finest Hours. No-one in Northern Ireland has even seen the mythic enchantment. It seemed like such an unlikely card to make a top deck it was ridiculous. Anyway, running Thornlings over Baneslayer Angels, I'm still thinking I can win enough. I come up against some junk in the first match. This guy is running Bladetusk Boars which whilst I really liked in Zendikar draft have limited reach even within a limited format. I win 2-0. Some other guy is playing some other junk for the second match. It doesn't make sense why he'd even bother showing up with his Lilianna Vess deck but I don't think anyone ever explained to him the notion of a good deck, poor guy, just needs a lot of practice. I soon get blown out of the water in the final three matches by decks packing 4 journey to nowhere's, oblivion rings and day of judgements. This mass control deck match up is too much for me to battle through, despite me and Niall singing a duet of "Touch too Much" by AC/DC, with me haven beaten him the night before with smart plays and proxies, he hoses me. Matt follows by by beating me with his mono-white jank control deck and at this point even if I win my next match, I still can't go through. I even try and be a dick by attempting to dream crush a friend. Pete beats me solidly with blue white control and can relax for the next few months.
After this I throw my first well known tantrum. The fucking tonka truck is hoofed right out of the pram. I'm slamming my deck on the table. Shit is bad. I'm for quitting Magic because I'm hit with the first slap of realizing I'm not as good as I think and my serious nature just doesn't cut it. After about two days of being pissed off, I come round to some realizations and pick up a few notions.
Lessons: Don't bring a half built deck to a qualifier. Play Jund.
Qualifier 2
At this point, Rise has been out for a month, I play Jund with Sarkhan in it and am coming up against decks that are likewise making the most of the format changes. Next level decks and decks throwing down Gideon. I play against Greg who's piloting a better version of Jund. Rather than my slightly cumbersome Savage Land heavy version of the G/R/B midrange, Greg throws down a Terramorphic Expanse, Lotus Cobra build that out-Junds me in the second game, five spells to my four. This I can handle, I've still got my hopes in it until a crushing third game. Turn two lotus cobra, turn 3 ruinblaster. Turn 4 ruinblaster. My hand extends and I shrug. All I have to do is win 3 matches out of the 4 remaning. My opponent for the second match would actually automatically be qualified on rating if he decided not to show up for that day. Anyway DJ is playing next level bant. He beats me first game, I beat him second. The third I play like a tool. I don't cast consuming vapours for no apparent reason. I don't cast Sarkhan the Mad for some other obscure reasonless piece of logic. Ok, ok, I'm paired down for the final three matches. Good start to the winning streak.. I hope. Round three is mono red. I win the first game by throwing the lightning bolts and terminates at the hell's thunders, goblin guides and lightning bolts before they have a chance to make an impact. Throw down two Sprouting Thrinaxs and blow him out by maelstrom pulsing the elemental tokens spawned by devastating summons. Game two I side in some more instant speed removal and suck some life up with a Malakir Bloodwitch. Unreal. I go to the pub to nab a drink before I go and play the next round. This time I'm facing down Mono Black Vampires. I don't fear it too much. Whilst Simon is a solid player, at that moment in time I didn't have a lot of belief in his deck archetype. He gets mana screwed in pretty much two games, I give him an apology and go for another pint to get me solidly relaxed for my final round. This time I'm playing off against a guy that isn't known for his technical ability and he is piloting his friend's Boros Bushwhacker. Whilst the deck wasn't that good, it had a pretty good match up against Jund and I get beaten horrendously 2-1, largely in part to an overwhelming God draw in the third game and my sheer stupidity. Yeah, despite Path to Exile being one of the most well used cards in standard, I completely forgot that it does more than just remove a creature from the game. It fixes my lands. Being able to cast Consuming Vapors on the third turn would have been pretty devasatating and might have given me a good chance but alas, I'm an idiot. Whilst I don't take it as badly as I did in the first qualifier as I know there are another two qualifiers, I end up getting incredibly drunk. So drunk in fact that after drinking for a solid seven hours, I try and steal a kebab, pee in a bin then I end up back at my friend's girlfriend's flat and I'm trying it on with her friend with such great lines as "Sarah? When are we going to bed?" Then hoovering the entire living room floor.
Lessons: Play Jund better. Remember what Path to Exile does. Just becauase you're drunk doesn't mean you're funny.
Qualifier 3
Ok this was just last Friday passed. I'm geared from the start for this format, I love limited and I've done fairly well in it in the past. I end up with the same sealed pool that I open as the sealed pool swap involes passing to the right then swapping with the person opposite you. I've got the weakest sealed pool at my table, with what seemed to be about five mythics, none of them mine but I should still be in a shot, playing big beats green and black, running two whispersilk cloaks to overpower my opponent with Spined Wurms. In match one this is exactly what I do, the guy has a similar pool to my own, but he's playing a splash of white which makes a sideboarded in Deathmark extremely potent in the third game. Round 2 I'm up against one of the top Southern players, the guy Fitz has the most broken U/W flyer pool since the one I opened at the pre-release. Sword of Vengeance, Air Servant, Serra Angel, Mind Control, Frost Titan, Angelic Arbiter. Games one he curves out pretty solidly as well, landing Stormfront Pegasus, Cloud Elemental, Assault Griffin and Serra Angel. There's just absolutely no way I can race that perfect curve whilst I'm dithering around casting spells like Sylvan Range and Cultivate to give me more lands in order to cast the green fatties. Game 2 I sideboard in a mountain to blast him with double combusts, but again he curves out and I never seem to draw my additional removal leaving me in a clustered mess. We play a few games after the match and I manage to win a few of them quite convincingly. I still think I can qualify seeing as that I got beaten by what seemed to be the most absurd deck in the room. Match 3 pits me against Michael Grough who I have a tendency to overwhelm in drafts. Game one I race him with a 4/4 steel overseeer and a Barony Vampire, making a huge problem for his Cloud Elemental with its unable to block non-flyers. Game two though the tables fully turn, he slaps down a White Knight turn 2 and has equipped a warlord's axe to it on turn 4. With a 5/3 first striking pro-black guy charging me down, I'm pretty much losing board just to avoid taking so much damage. He fireballs me out and it's over. Game 3 I face down much the same problem although it's not so much the white knight that is giving me jip, just about any creature with the warlord's axe equipped to it. Whilst I put in the combusts in for this match up I was quite tempted to put in white instead of red just to give me condem and solemn offering, something I really wish I had done. Despite eventually stabilizing, leaving him with one card in hand, no board and me having a whispersilk cloaked royal assassin, I get fireballed out for one more than lethal the turn after signing in blood into a Spined Wurm and an Overrun. I kind of had a hunch he had the fireball but I felt I had to draw the gas before he drew the last land. In fact we had a look at the deck and found he was two cards off the land. I wouldn't have had time to finish him off anyway. The fourth match I'm paired against an eight year old. My hopes are high, although I hear he has a solid deck, in fact he was at my table and was filled with glee as he opened a Grave Titan. Game one he hit me with an 8/8 flying Stone Golem. Game two he Diabolic Tutors for a Grave Titan, whilst I'm already on the backfoot hoping to draw the Plummet to the Armoured Ascensioned creature. At this point I scoop and try and prepare myself for the fourth and final qualifier.
Lessons: Learn to Sideboard better, don't get beat by eight year olds
Qualifier 4
This time it should have been too much of an issue at all but I'm already on tilt. Someone was for lending me a perfect RDW deck but I decide to opt for R/G tokens, a build that eventually won the very same nationals I was attempting to qualify for. Game one I face down Dave Glennon, the same guy who I beat in the first match of the sealed qualifiers. He's playing this G/W ramp deck that blasts out Overgrown Battlement, ramps into Summoner's Trap at the end of my turn 5, spitting out a Primeval Titan, tutoring for Eldrazi Temples that are activated by the turn 4 Garruk into an Emrakul. Game 2 goes much the same. Not to mention I draw dead for turn upon turn. Match 2 I'm facing off against some U/W control player. Now my deck usually has a good match up against it but I face off against Baneslayer in the first game with no monument to push the damage past. Game 2 there's a big hiccup in communication. Seeing that I'm massively on tilt I'm playing too fast and saying things I don't really mean, like "Go ahead" when I haven't taken my second turn, fail to realize my opponent has played his second turn when I'm going first and he thinks I'm onto my third. After picking up a game warning, I lose anyway, drawing nothing but lands turn after turn. In my third match I get trounced 2-1 by Pyromancer's Acenscion, drawing none of my sideboard cards ever (Acidic Slimes, Baloth). I shake hands and leave in silence only to run out the door and hoof a boot clean into the electrical cupboard, scaring two random passers by in the process. At this point I go to nail pints and spliffs to drown my sorrows and fight back the tears of rage and self loathing. Literally this thing fills me the whole way through the second day. It comes to me in the bath how I failed to learn any of my lessons from the previous four qualifiers.
Lessons: Always play Jund. Always. Don't tilt. Seriously, don't tilt. You're shit at magic. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you if you act like a douchebag higher than your station for the last four months. Magic is just a game, try and get a real career.
Enjoy yourself.
So there you have it. Playing magic occasionally puts life into perspective. I'm sure I could attempt to bring in tons of metaphors of magic in life like knowing the metagame of women in a bar. Like how some girls you need to be all passionate and Red Deck winsy with whilst others you need to be all showy offy with some retarded combo deck whilst others you just need to play it cool, not pay too much attention and U/W control them out of it by countering their spells (or knocking them down with insults). However this is would be largely contrived. Even more contrived would be for me to compare martial arts to decks too. Muay Thai might by R/G stompy by some stretch of the imagination, I'm sure.
*Until I discovered drugs
This entire article is FONMP (Fuck off non-Magic Player). There's no point reading it if you don't play Magic.
Anyone who knows me would say I'm pretty bad at a lot of things. Losing is one of them. Give the most talentless idiot the biggest competitive streak and you have a recipie for disaster right in front of you. I've been playing card games for years. I first got introduced to the scene back when I was twelve years old, with his head more in the world of Warhammer than in the "cool teenager" scene. Being a rare breed of socially inept character, I could talk to almost everyone but piss them off by talking whilst my head was lodged firmly up my ass. Meanwhile I had the co-ordination of a newborn Giraffe and the athleticism of a sloth. Couldn't run, couldn't catch, even rowing was an egg I couldn't hatch.
So off on and on I drifted through card games, roleplaying games, computer games and books. Like many teenage geeks, I was quite happy to escape the world of reality without needing any drugs*. Whilst my competitive experience of magic was fairly non-existant, I understood the game fairly well. When I came back to Belfast after three years of University, I had no intention of getting stuck into the game, just the odd draft. Within weeks the odd draft had turned into two drafts a week, I was playing on MODO too, sometimes even going on Workstation so I could test the decks to beat without shelling out insanely high prices for mythics. This was inbetween working, training in muay thai and attempting to help out at home. I have no doubt that in years to come I shall be filled with guilt about the latter of these things being skimped on in terms of time and effort invested.
Given time I was actually winning drafts, the odd occasion multiple drafts in a row. It was as if I had pushed through that barrier from casual player to someone who could actually do quite well. Or that's how it felt. You see where this is going; I got too big for my boots. This didn't help too much when I was basing part of my ego upon how good I perceived myself to be getting. Remember back in school and you had those guys far too arrogant for their own good, strutting around knowing that because they were so good at rugby the rest of the world were going to fall at their feet. I was getting that from doing well in Magic. Ridiculous I know - no-one outside of a comic shop is going to give a shit about your first pick first pack Sword of Vengeance or how you couldn't believe you were passed multiple Pelakka Wurms. Rugby will get a lot of guys laid. Magic.. not so much. If you've read any of my older posts, you'll know my views that geeks can get laid for being geeks but it's not by boring a woman to death or by her watching you make top eight in a Pre-release. Yet I was going out in clubs and bars thinking I was shit hot because I took home a foil fetchland for coming first in a triple Zendikar draft. Granted I wasn't bragging about it to random women, but I was carrying this unbelievably positive energy for being so chuffed with myself.
In my blog I haven't chatted much about the death of my father or how it has affected me. It's not something I've wanted to bring up too much because I feel I should write about it when I'm ready but since he has passed away, I haven't done too much. Worked a little bit in a bar, or doing the odd temp shift. I've also had a few trips to England and one to Denmark (more on that in another entry). What I'm trying to get at is my ridiculous obsession with magic. How it's kind of filled a void since I have no full time work. I played so much of it that it was as if I was gearing myself up in the back of my head to be a Pro. Now I do keep telling myself how ridiculous this notion is. To be a professional magic player is probably about as difficult as being a professional poker player. Nay, probably more so - once you get good at poker you can do it at a bare basic level, picking up just enough money to get by from a couple of good nights play a week in casinos in bars. Magic requires you to be sitting around waiting for Grand Prixs and pro-tours to appear. Doing well in those requires you to pit yourself up against hundreds of people who may be genetically brighter than you and better trained when it comes to the practice.
In fact what makes this more ridiculous is that even the guys who are really good at Magic in Ireland prioritize Magic as second to their full time employment. Our champions tend to be guys with multiple degrees in Pharmacy and Law. My single BA is probably not enough to cut the mustard in the academic skills required for excellent play. Now that's probably not really the reason I don't do well but I'm going to try and illustrate to you just how bad I am at the game and how supersilious I was getting.
Once a year though, every player has something to look forward to. The Irish Nationals. Bringing players from all thirty-two counties together for a weekend of playhing savage games of cards and drinking like fishes. You grow out of Christmas. As a magic player, you do not grow out of nationals.
In most counties, qualifying for nationals is a nightmare. The level of play skill is a whole nother level to the scrubs that rock up at the drafts or the FNMs with their Lorthos the Tidemaker combo decks. In fact fromn what I gather, anyone qualifying for their national event has probably done very well for themselves in just that feat. On our little emerald Isle, it's notoriously easy. You have little kids rocking up with unsleeved pre-con decks, with ill conceived notions of what they are actually likely to face. Anyone with half a brain and a few hundred quids worth of cards in their hands should make the grade no problem.
In the North of Ireland alone, we had 4 qualifiers. Each of those had about 30 people attending with 14 getting through. So basically, you just have to be better than half of the field? Yeah. That's it. In fact one of our qualifiers, yesterday had 16 people there. Ten made it through. I played 4 qualifiers and I couldn't get through any of them. I got beat consistently by people that I conceive to be worse than me. This isn't one of those gamer arrogance things either, this is half of the players in Northern Ireland wondering why I'm not qualified.
When I break down each qualifier, I see mistakes in most of them. I see my inability to deal with pressure and it's crushing.
People that most people around me were questioning how I got beat by them
Qualifier number one
After putting together the guts of Finest Hour Mythic the night before and running it with a few proxies in the FNM (we are allowed up to five proxies in our decks at FNM), I'm quite excited for this day. I mean, after all I won the FNM. The problem lies when I'm putting together the deck on the morning. No-one has the Baneslayers they can lend. The bigger problem lies within me getting the Finest Hours. No-one in Northern Ireland has even seen the mythic enchantment. It seemed like such an unlikely card to make a top deck it was ridiculous. Anyway, running Thornlings over Baneslayer Angels, I'm still thinking I can win enough. I come up against some junk in the first match. This guy is running Bladetusk Boars which whilst I really liked in Zendikar draft have limited reach even within a limited format. I win 2-0. Some other guy is playing some other junk for the second match. It doesn't make sense why he'd even bother showing up with his Lilianna Vess deck but I don't think anyone ever explained to him the notion of a good deck, poor guy, just needs a lot of practice. I soon get blown out of the water in the final three matches by decks packing 4 journey to nowhere's, oblivion rings and day of judgements. This mass control deck match up is too much for me to battle through, despite me and Niall singing a duet of "Touch too Much" by AC/DC, with me haven beaten him the night before with smart plays and proxies, he hoses me. Matt follows by by beating me with his mono-white jank control deck and at this point even if I win my next match, I still can't go through. I even try and be a dick by attempting to dream crush a friend. Pete beats me solidly with blue white control and can relax for the next few months.
After this I throw my first well known tantrum. The fucking tonka truck is hoofed right out of the pram. I'm slamming my deck on the table. Shit is bad. I'm for quitting Magic because I'm hit with the first slap of realizing I'm not as good as I think and my serious nature just doesn't cut it. After about two days of being pissed off, I come round to some realizations and pick up a few notions.
Lessons: Don't bring a half built deck to a qualifier. Play Jund.
Qualifier 2
At this point, Rise has been out for a month, I play Jund with Sarkhan in it and am coming up against decks that are likewise making the most of the format changes. Next level decks and decks throwing down Gideon. I play against Greg who's piloting a better version of Jund. Rather than my slightly cumbersome Savage Land heavy version of the G/R/B midrange, Greg throws down a Terramorphic Expanse, Lotus Cobra build that out-Junds me in the second game, five spells to my four. This I can handle, I've still got my hopes in it until a crushing third game. Turn two lotus cobra, turn 3 ruinblaster. Turn 4 ruinblaster. My hand extends and I shrug. All I have to do is win 3 matches out of the 4 remaning. My opponent for the second match would actually automatically be qualified on rating if he decided not to show up for that day. Anyway DJ is playing next level bant. He beats me first game, I beat him second. The third I play like a tool. I don't cast consuming vapours for no apparent reason. I don't cast Sarkhan the Mad for some other obscure reasonless piece of logic. Ok, ok, I'm paired down for the final three matches. Good start to the winning streak.. I hope. Round three is mono red. I win the first game by throwing the lightning bolts and terminates at the hell's thunders, goblin guides and lightning bolts before they have a chance to make an impact. Throw down two Sprouting Thrinaxs and blow him out by maelstrom pulsing the elemental tokens spawned by devastating summons. Game two I side in some more instant speed removal and suck some life up with a Malakir Bloodwitch. Unreal. I go to the pub to nab a drink before I go and play the next round. This time I'm facing down Mono Black Vampires. I don't fear it too much. Whilst Simon is a solid player, at that moment in time I didn't have a lot of belief in his deck archetype. He gets mana screwed in pretty much two games, I give him an apology and go for another pint to get me solidly relaxed for my final round. This time I'm playing off against a guy that isn't known for his technical ability and he is piloting his friend's Boros Bushwhacker. Whilst the deck wasn't that good, it had a pretty good match up against Jund and I get beaten horrendously 2-1, largely in part to an overwhelming God draw in the third game and my sheer stupidity. Yeah, despite Path to Exile being one of the most well used cards in standard, I completely forgot that it does more than just remove a creature from the game. It fixes my lands. Being able to cast Consuming Vapors on the third turn would have been pretty devasatating and might have given me a good chance but alas, I'm an idiot. Whilst I don't take it as badly as I did in the first qualifier as I know there are another two qualifiers, I end up getting incredibly drunk. So drunk in fact that after drinking for a solid seven hours, I try and steal a kebab, pee in a bin then I end up back at my friend's girlfriend's flat and I'm trying it on with her friend with such great lines as "Sarah? When are we going to bed?" Then hoovering the entire living room floor.
Lessons: Play Jund better. Remember what Path to Exile does. Just becauase you're drunk doesn't mean you're funny.
Qualifier 3
Ok this was just last Friday passed. I'm geared from the start for this format, I love limited and I've done fairly well in it in the past. I end up with the same sealed pool that I open as the sealed pool swap involes passing to the right then swapping with the person opposite you. I've got the weakest sealed pool at my table, with what seemed to be about five mythics, none of them mine but I should still be in a shot, playing big beats green and black, running two whispersilk cloaks to overpower my opponent with Spined Wurms. In match one this is exactly what I do, the guy has a similar pool to my own, but he's playing a splash of white which makes a sideboarded in Deathmark extremely potent in the third game. Round 2 I'm up against one of the top Southern players, the guy Fitz has the most broken U/W flyer pool since the one I opened at the pre-release. Sword of Vengeance, Air Servant, Serra Angel, Mind Control, Frost Titan, Angelic Arbiter. Games one he curves out pretty solidly as well, landing Stormfront Pegasus, Cloud Elemental, Assault Griffin and Serra Angel. There's just absolutely no way I can race that perfect curve whilst I'm dithering around casting spells like Sylvan Range and Cultivate to give me more lands in order to cast the green fatties. Game 2 I sideboard in a mountain to blast him with double combusts, but again he curves out and I never seem to draw my additional removal leaving me in a clustered mess. We play a few games after the match and I manage to win a few of them quite convincingly. I still think I can qualify seeing as that I got beaten by what seemed to be the most absurd deck in the room. Match 3 pits me against Michael Grough who I have a tendency to overwhelm in drafts. Game one I race him with a 4/4 steel overseeer and a Barony Vampire, making a huge problem for his Cloud Elemental with its unable to block non-flyers. Game two though the tables fully turn, he slaps down a White Knight turn 2 and has equipped a warlord's axe to it on turn 4. With a 5/3 first striking pro-black guy charging me down, I'm pretty much losing board just to avoid taking so much damage. He fireballs me out and it's over. Game 3 I face down much the same problem although it's not so much the white knight that is giving me jip, just about any creature with the warlord's axe equipped to it. Whilst I put in the combusts in for this match up I was quite tempted to put in white instead of red just to give me condem and solemn offering, something I really wish I had done. Despite eventually stabilizing, leaving him with one card in hand, no board and me having a whispersilk cloaked royal assassin, I get fireballed out for one more than lethal the turn after signing in blood into a Spined Wurm and an Overrun. I kind of had a hunch he had the fireball but I felt I had to draw the gas before he drew the last land. In fact we had a look at the deck and found he was two cards off the land. I wouldn't have had time to finish him off anyway. The fourth match I'm paired against an eight year old. My hopes are high, although I hear he has a solid deck, in fact he was at my table and was filled with glee as he opened a Grave Titan. Game one he hit me with an 8/8 flying Stone Golem. Game two he Diabolic Tutors for a Grave Titan, whilst I'm already on the backfoot hoping to draw the Plummet to the Armoured Ascensioned creature. At this point I scoop and try and prepare myself for the fourth and final qualifier.
Lessons: Learn to Sideboard better, don't get beat by eight year olds
Qualifier 4
This time it should have been too much of an issue at all but I'm already on tilt. Someone was for lending me a perfect RDW deck but I decide to opt for R/G tokens, a build that eventually won the very same nationals I was attempting to qualify for. Game one I face down Dave Glennon, the same guy who I beat in the first match of the sealed qualifiers. He's playing this G/W ramp deck that blasts out Overgrown Battlement, ramps into Summoner's Trap at the end of my turn 5, spitting out a Primeval Titan, tutoring for Eldrazi Temples that are activated by the turn 4 Garruk into an Emrakul. Game 2 goes much the same. Not to mention I draw dead for turn upon turn. Match 2 I'm facing off against some U/W control player. Now my deck usually has a good match up against it but I face off against Baneslayer in the first game with no monument to push the damage past. Game 2 there's a big hiccup in communication. Seeing that I'm massively on tilt I'm playing too fast and saying things I don't really mean, like "Go ahead" when I haven't taken my second turn, fail to realize my opponent has played his second turn when I'm going first and he thinks I'm onto my third. After picking up a game warning, I lose anyway, drawing nothing but lands turn after turn. In my third match I get trounced 2-1 by Pyromancer's Acenscion, drawing none of my sideboard cards ever (Acidic Slimes, Baloth). I shake hands and leave in silence only to run out the door and hoof a boot clean into the electrical cupboard, scaring two random passers by in the process. At this point I go to nail pints and spliffs to drown my sorrows and fight back the tears of rage and self loathing. Literally this thing fills me the whole way through the second day. It comes to me in the bath how I failed to learn any of my lessons from the previous four qualifiers.
Lessons: Always play Jund. Always. Don't tilt. Seriously, don't tilt. You're shit at magic. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you if you act like a douchebag higher than your station for the last four months. Magic is just a game, try and get a real career.
Enjoy yourself.
So there you have it. Playing magic occasionally puts life into perspective. I'm sure I could attempt to bring in tons of metaphors of magic in life like knowing the metagame of women in a bar. Like how some girls you need to be all passionate and Red Deck winsy with whilst others you need to be all showy offy with some retarded combo deck whilst others you just need to play it cool, not pay too much attention and U/W control them out of it by countering their spells (or knocking them down with insults). However this is would be largely contrived. Even more contrived would be for me to compare martial arts to decks too. Muay Thai might by R/G stompy by some stretch of the imagination, I'm sure.
*Until I discovered drugs
Friday, July 30, 2010
Movie Review: The A-Team
"They are the best and they specialize in the ridiculous"
Right from the trailer we know that this film will be nothing shy of over the top. Being that it was a remake of one of the most over the top television series that the 80s could spawn - the 80s being one of the most over the top decade ever. OTT summarizes the whole thing pretty damn well.
Whilst I wasn't around in the 80s to see the first run of the A-Team, I loved catching reruns on RTE during the 90s. As a kid it was great to see the MacGuyver routines of making bombs out of old fairy up liquid bottles and hundreds of blank rounds being fired without a single bad guy killed. Whilst a lot more bullets in their target in this modern update, we're still treated to seeing plans unfold with the use of scrap metal and stolen engines. In some respect this film appears to borrow a few elements from the Italian Job remake of 2003, with a side order of the Kansas City Shuffle idea implemented in Lucky Number Sleven but these are largely entertaining. Despite the fact many of the twists and turns of this film are predictable, we don't sigh whenever they appear - as an audience we end up smiling in agreement with the script writers in a "Aha, I see what you did thar" as the protagonists escape from sticky situations in ways we expect. From what I gather parts of the storyline are taken directly from the original 1980's episodes.
This is the film SWAT wished it was and the film Miami Vice should have tried to be. It doesn't bore the audience with boring dialogues about the drug trade, the wise cracking is done in the heat of battle. Anything we need to know about the characters, we are shown and not told. A lot of Superhero films could learn from this too. The origin story takes off at lightning pace, there are punches thrown within the first minute. We see why BA, an Airbourne Ranger has a phobia of flying and we see how he Pitys Fools. We bare witness to Face man's ability to seduce and the trouble it gets him into and Murdoch's craziness. There's even a slight philisophical slant with Hannibal's obssession with a good plan from the early stage. There's even some character development of BA in the middle of the film which almost parodies the no-killing ideology of the original series.
The cast is largely terrific. As a big fan of Rampage Jackson, I was glad to see he didn't act too badly. He's no where near Oscar winning level but lets face it, Mr T. was never heralded for his thespian slant either. Sharlto Copley's Murdoch shows a touch of the Jim Carey whackiness but we are able to appreciate Copley as a human more as there's a slightly vulnerability that allows us to have a bit more warmth towards him than the semi-obnoxious Carey along with arguably more comedic flare. Fans of The Hangover will appreciate Bradley Cooper in the role of the cool and seductive faceman. As for Neeson, he's been doing a good bit of kicking ass recently and we're intrigued by his wisdom and his intelligence throughout.
However, the film does have some considerable flaws. Most of the action scenes are relatively spot on but there are times it uses shakey camera work in the middle of fights which left me confused at their hecticness. Sequel makers take note that if you are going to have characters brag about their Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai skills it'd be nice to actually see how they apply them rather than give us a blur of limbs in a dark room. This is also one of those films where you just wish the bad guys would stop farting about and shoot the heroes when they have the chance rather than giving the "I win because I'm the evil villain" speech and ending up distracted by flying vehicles. It's also from a critic's point of view a film that is largely style over substance but that's to be expected from an action film. The Expendables out this Summer is likely to be largely the same. Lastly it's very much a big boy's film. Whilst there is an attempt to have Jessica Biel as a strong but beautiful female protagonist, she's frequently outclassed by her male counterpart in Face. I also don't think long faced Biel is that good looking and just about every other woman Cooper's character seduces in the film is far more attractive.
Despite these flaws, the A-Team delivers plenty of bang for the buck. In terms of films I've seen this year, I'd place it better than Iron Man 2 but a good bit behind the phenomenal Kick Ass.
***
"They are the best and they specialize in the ridiculous"
Right from the trailer we know that this film will be nothing shy of over the top. Being that it was a remake of one of the most over the top television series that the 80s could spawn - the 80s being one of the most over the top decade ever. OTT summarizes the whole thing pretty damn well.
Whilst I wasn't around in the 80s to see the first run of the A-Team, I loved catching reruns on RTE during the 90s. As a kid it was great to see the MacGuyver routines of making bombs out of old fairy up liquid bottles and hundreds of blank rounds being fired without a single bad guy killed. Whilst a lot more bullets in their target in this modern update, we're still treated to seeing plans unfold with the use of scrap metal and stolen engines. In some respect this film appears to borrow a few elements from the Italian Job remake of 2003, with a side order of the Kansas City Shuffle idea implemented in Lucky Number Sleven but these are largely entertaining. Despite the fact many of the twists and turns of this film are predictable, we don't sigh whenever they appear - as an audience we end up smiling in agreement with the script writers in a "Aha, I see what you did thar" as the protagonists escape from sticky situations in ways we expect. From what I gather parts of the storyline are taken directly from the original 1980's episodes.
This is the film SWAT wished it was and the film Miami Vice should have tried to be. It doesn't bore the audience with boring dialogues about the drug trade, the wise cracking is done in the heat of battle. Anything we need to know about the characters, we are shown and not told. A lot of Superhero films could learn from this too. The origin story takes off at lightning pace, there are punches thrown within the first minute. We see why BA, an Airbourne Ranger has a phobia of flying and we see how he Pitys Fools. We bare witness to Face man's ability to seduce and the trouble it gets him into and Murdoch's craziness. There's even a slight philisophical slant with Hannibal's obssession with a good plan from the early stage. There's even some character development of BA in the middle of the film which almost parodies the no-killing ideology of the original series.
The cast is largely terrific. As a big fan of Rampage Jackson, I was glad to see he didn't act too badly. He's no where near Oscar winning level but lets face it, Mr T. was never heralded for his thespian slant either. Sharlto Copley's Murdoch shows a touch of the Jim Carey whackiness but we are able to appreciate Copley as a human more as there's a slightly vulnerability that allows us to have a bit more warmth towards him than the semi-obnoxious Carey along with arguably more comedic flare. Fans of The Hangover will appreciate Bradley Cooper in the role of the cool and seductive faceman. As for Neeson, he's been doing a good bit of kicking ass recently and we're intrigued by his wisdom and his intelligence throughout.
However, the film does have some considerable flaws. Most of the action scenes are relatively spot on but there are times it uses shakey camera work in the middle of fights which left me confused at their hecticness. Sequel makers take note that if you are going to have characters brag about their Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai skills it'd be nice to actually see how they apply them rather than give us a blur of limbs in a dark room. This is also one of those films where you just wish the bad guys would stop farting about and shoot the heroes when they have the chance rather than giving the "I win because I'm the evil villain" speech and ending up distracted by flying vehicles. It's also from a critic's point of view a film that is largely style over substance but that's to be expected from an action film. The Expendables out this Summer is likely to be largely the same. Lastly it's very much a big boy's film. Whilst there is an attempt to have Jessica Biel as a strong but beautiful female protagonist, she's frequently outclassed by her male counterpart in Face. I also don't think long faced Biel is that good looking and just about every other woman Cooper's character seduces in the film is far more attractive.
Despite these flaws, the A-Team delivers plenty of bang for the buck. In terms of films I've seen this year, I'd place it better than Iron Man 2 but a good bit behind the phenomenal Kick Ass.
***
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Okay if you read the last entry, you'll know what a FONMP section is. This entire post is a Fuck off non-magic player bit. There is very little interest in this entry to anyone outside of the gaming hobby unless you like reading my reading that is.
M11 Pre-release weekend review
I love pre-release weekends. Without a doubt they are the most fun you can have in a sanctioned event. There's a lot of reasons why. Firstly you get to crack open fresh packs that haven't even been released in the shops. You get to see the artwork of cards up close rather than just on website previews. Then of course, loads of characters pop out of the woodwork to see some new cards and sling some spells. There are some people that only ever play at pre-releases because they know how fun they can be. It's always good to know how people are doing and know that they're still up for a bit of the game of kings err.. planeswalkers.
Booster draft Friday
Usually the store in Belfast (Serenity) has midnight drafts on the Friday night. These function as a lock in the same fashion that a pub would whenever its open only to its staff or its regulars. Although anyone is allowed the door is locked so as ne'erdowells don't wander in on the way home from a night out and asking stupid drunken questions such as "whats that do? whats this?". Although we do let Gary play in the shop despite these issues.
On that Friday night I ended up turning up to said booster draft. Although this was after having a few pints with an Australian girl on a failed date, a session of muay thai and a few more drinks. Magic, beer and talking shite - the cornerstone of a Northern player. Anyway in that draft I ended up drafting a bit of a mess of a deck. Having opened nantuko shade and being passed Captivating Vampire I did my best to draft a mostly black deck with a splash of red for Act of Treasons, goblin tunneler and a few red cards with Chandra's something in their title - a slightly more costly searing blaze and a 1/3 flyer for 3 with a kiln fiend style ability. Now apart from the fact I could make the shade unblockable or attack with the opponents creature only to fling them or sacrifice them to bloodthrone vampire, the deck wasn't particularly good. I got beat by Dave Robinson, currently number two in Northern Ireland for beating kids in FNM every week for the last five years (or so the rumours go). Dave beat me soundly for the two games of the match though in the games that we played after my deck seemed to largely outperform his. That could be largely down to the fact he had little or no answer to the powerhouse that is nantuko shade but it didn't worry me too much. Third place in the pod still hit prizes, everything was to play for and if I won out I got a couple of packs.
Match 2 I come up against Conor McVarnock packing some kind of G/W stompy build. His deck ramps up impressively first game landing two aciding slimes off the back of a bird of paradise. He sets me back a land with each of the slimes, wrecking my tempo and forcing me to trade unfavourably to avoid taking four points of damage a turn. His deck also seemed to have a number of pacifisms and other gems. Second game becomes much more of a battle and here I got a glimpse of what a core set draft is like: typically back and forth removal spells, often piquing with moments where both sides of the field have no actual threats leading to a stalemate broken by the first creature. This is kind of how the second game went although with me refusing one of Conor's takebacks that might have given him the game. It was quite strongly settled by me equipping my warlord's axe to a bloodthrone vampire and laying the beats. The third game largely involved better board positions and effeciencys of creatures with nantuko shade living up to its bomb potential.
Third match was up against the Prince of Persia himself Niall Graham. Aside from being the guy that runs the shop and doing a good job at it, Niall is one of those good players who have always been cheated out of victory at big events by some bad bit of luck. Things like having the deck that beats 80% of the field but being paired against the other not so favourable 20% three matches in a row. This was a great match up until the third game. We had both put a considerable amount of pressure on each other with Niall using his Squadron Hawks and Honor the Pure to swarm out. I'm not so sure if I'd be bothered trying to grab multiples of Squadron Hawks. Without the aid of mass creature pumps having a 1/1 flyer is largely underwhelming where the hill giant has been a staple of the core set format. That being said one can't complain too much about multiple 2/2 flyers for little card disadvantage. Game two had me using nantuko shade and goblin tunneler to carve up Niall's life total and finish him with a fling. Game 3 had us both mulliganing to 5 and me being stuck on one land despite the constant pile shuffling, rifling and redrawing. A second swamp should have set me up for a decent go of things as I was packing Sign in Blood. Unfortunately it never came and Niall landed with tempo, kicking my tar in in less than six turns.
Trent and I played a few games after this and he consistently kicked my tar in with his blue/black deck. We found Jace's Ingenuity to be an unsurprisingly phenomenal card in this format. Having drafted ZEN/ZEN/WWK only a few times I never really got to see how mysteries of the deep was. Whilst I assumed it would be pretty good, the fact it relied on landfall meant usually playing it as a sorcery to get its full effect was a pretty limiting factor, particularly as zendikar was such a fast format with most decks relying on packing multiple 2 drops. With almost every colour having good removal or bounce spells games can spin out almost as long as they do in straight ROE drafts.
Pre-release Saturday
Having packed it in about 4 am, I got about seven hours to sleep before I had to get up and get my stuff together for the pre-release ahead of me. If you read my last tournament report, you'll know that I took a less than stellar sealed pool through to the finish GPT. On this occasion I wasn't required to play average packs at all. This time I was given -the nuts-. Whenever we sit down to draft or play sealed we are given the opportunity to pick what pile of boosters we are going to be ours. In a gaming kind of superstition sometimes you get a good feel for a pile of boosters. In my case I had a good feeling about the pile with the dragon on the first booster. To this Niall laughed at but when I popped a Baneslayer Angel, a Vengeance Archon, Conundrum Sphynx, Dragonskull Summit, Foil Haunting Echoes and Stormtide Leviathan.
Not only that but my commons and uncommons for blue and white looked like they had been selected for a pre-con deck.
8x Islands
8x Plains
1x Mistifying Maze
1x Stormfront Pegasus
2x Aether Adept
1x Maritime Guard
1x Palace Guard
1x Roc Egg
1x Cloud Elemental
1x Assault Griffin
2x Azure Drake
1x Conundrum Sphynx
1x Serra Angel
1x Baneslayer Angel
1x Tireless Missionaries
1x Vengeful Archon
1x Mana Leak
1x Ice Cage
1x Inspired Charge
1x Sleep
1x Foresee
1x Mind Control
1x Crystal Ball
So other than a few other cards (arguably sideboard options) this deck was the nuts. About half the non-land cards were bombs and I can only complain about a few of these cards could I complain about. Maritime Guards is pretty underwhelming as a two drop, I think I'd much rather have a bear such as Silvercoat Lion. Palace Guards was also a bit bland, however it could be argued that this is because of the defensive nature of the card when my opponent was usually too busy having to deal with my absolutely absurd threats. Lastly Tireless Missionaries is a watered down version of Angel of Mercy. Having started in Portal Second Age, I'm slightly disappointed not to see another reprinting of the 3/3 flyer/healing salve for 5 however this is perhaps a decision by R+D to avoid making white too strong in limited when they were doing the set design.
As you can imagine it was pretty awful sitting with me. I was like blastoise kid opening Baneslayer Angel, having made the money of the sealed back in one card. When the rest of the cards showed themselves my only fear was the ridicule I would be on the end of if I scrubbed out due to constant misplays. Indeed, I made a few throughout the day but thankfully the deck was so good it didn't really matter.
Without further ado I'll give you the breakdown of the match ups.
Conor Holmes: U/W
I tried taking a picture of the former Irish champ but in his tired and hungover state he wasn't having any of it. Indeed taking pictures of the whole thing was a bit of a joke. Our good friend Sherlock wasn't too happy with his sealed pool, from what I could see of his deck his only bomb was triskillion, which only became an issue in the third game. By his own admission to win the match up he needed me to get mana screwed, unfortunately for him he was the one that suffered the mana screw in the first game. The second game seemed to be running smoothly for my deck, whilst both of us were building up board position and trading blows Conor surprised me with a Mighty Leap, Armoured Ascension blow out. This meant I felt like a complete fool as I was left with a sleep in hand. Nice. The third game involved a board build up again but with me landing Baneslayer Angel. Conor almost killed it by mighty leaping a Cloud Crusader and using his last triskelion counter to do the damage. I countered this with an Inspired Charge, pretty much ending the game from that moment on. No skill involved ladies and gentleman just mythic rares.
Inbetween match ups I fix a kid's G/B deck for him, show him why Dark Tutelage is good in limited and that Cudgel Troll and Acidic Slime or brilliant in a deck with two Llanowar elves.
Cubby - R/W/B
Jokingly trying to persuade me into an ID before the match, Mr. Walker bragged about his deck having 5 mind controls and 6 Pacifisms. Of course it had none of these things and instead was a bit of a mesh of three colours in order to use its two mythics: Chandra and Grave Titan. Whilst the first game went pretty swiftly to me curving out and winning with flyers, Cubby landed the red planeswalker in the second game. Between this and a blinding mage slowed me down considerably as I fought to keep him from getting eight loyalty counters on Chandra. It meant mind controlling a three drop just to have another attacker, whilst holding back bigger threats that he could destroy by removing x counters and dealing x damage. With the help of Crystal Ball I was able to stack my deck and draw enough smaller threats to swarm out. Without the scry mechanic Cubby found himself drawing an abundance of lands by comparison and had to keep his ready for tapping down Baneslayer. After building up a board Cubby can't really compete with I do the dirty and reveal sleep. Utter bomb.
Alan - U/W
Last time I came up against Alan he was the one who had opened the bomb mythics as his ROE pool included Gideon, Sarkhan and Consuming Vapours. We had an interesting match up as both decks shared a few cards in common: Mistifying Maze, Ice Cage. These two plus what seemed like three Pacifisms meant that the game was going to be going into eight or nine land territory as I was often forced to use my Aether Adept to bounce Sphynx with a Pacifism. Once he was out there he really was MVP. Combined with Crystal Ball he netted me an extra card per turn whilst often moving Alan's bombs to the bottom of his deck. Eventually I see Alan's Leviathan but I chose just to fly over it and finish up with an Inspired Charge. I sideboarded out Maritime Guard for my copy of Leviathan seeing as this game went so late. Unfortunately I never saw it as Alan lands a combo of Air Servant and Leviathan. During this game I make a pityful mistake, bouncing Air Servant one turn then Ice Caging Leviathan. With a number of ground attackers and an Inspired Charge it was totally the wrong play. My failure to read the "no activated abilities" it on Ice Cage acts as my downfall and despite having gained about twelve life from Alan using Mistifying Maze on my Tireless Missionaries early on in the game, Alan keeps me locked down with Air Servant and beats me to death. Third game I just plain draw better and Conundrum Sphynx prevents him from the same Air Servant win by sending the card to the bottom of his deck and my Baneslayer too. That seemed to fix his cockyness for a bit.
New Guy with Glasses - G/W
I do have to apologize to this guy as I have completely forgotten his name. This guy was playing a pretty good build of Green White stompy, with Fauna Shaman, multiple copies of Cudgel Troll and Serra Angel. Pretty impressive considering he hasn't been playing for too long. Unfortunately for him I took a Roc Egg start both games meaning that to push any damage through at all he would have to give me a 3/3 flyer token. Mean while I pushed on through with Azure Drakes and Cloud Elemental. Game two was much the same. This time showing how Sphynx was almost more of a game winner than Baneslayer.
Irish/American guy - U/B
With us both sitting on twelve points, we're only playing for a bit of pride, DCI points and me wanting to keep the OP of those that I had played. In fairness this guy has a pretty good deck. No rares, no mythics but it's well constructed and packs Two Air Servants, Multiple Lilliana's Specter, Gargoyle Sentinel and a pretty nice removal base in the form of Diminishs and Doom Blades. After a fairly lengthy Aerial Battle and me having to discard cards I really wish I got to play I cast Forsee and grab Vengeful Archon. After the turn after it attacks, he plays Sleep, intent on finishing me off but he makes the mistake of attacking into me whilst I have open mana for Archon's ability and I retaliate viciously. Game two sees him control the board successfully with Air Servant, something which is futile to put an Ice Cage on as he controls a Warlord's Axe. With no spot removal and no good ground threats he puts the beatdown with the 7/5 flyer and wraps the game up. Game three I'm mana screwed but not too concerned as I'm through to the top 8.
With the top 8 booster draft starting at about half four and my shift starting at six, I figured the only point in playing was to rare draft. And rare draft I did, I managed to pick up an Ajani Goldmane, my second Dragonskull Summit of the day, foil Silence, Birds of Paradise and Dark Tutelage. When I went about picking cards for the actual deck I originally was planning on some sort of green deck that could utilize the BOP. When I got passed a Jace's Ingenuity on the second pick, I figured DJ on the right of me was going to keep blue open for me so he could use whatever bomb rare he drafted. However Blue dried up and I began taking multiple cultivates and any random bits of green fat along the way. Late Garruk's Companions were great picks and I moved into Red as I got a fifth pick lightning bolt. What was in that pack I do not know but never one to look a gift horse in the mouth I took it and went into red. To be honest my draft felt like I was almost picking random cards. Random cards that I liked but I didn't expect the deck to be any good.
What was ironic about the top 8 was that apart from Conor everyone I played managed to make top 8. I'd like to think that's down to my near perfect OP but I don't want to brag about that, the deck was the one that did the work.
What I ended up with was a messy mesh of Green, Red and Blue.
3x Island
9x Forest
6x Mountain
1x Birds of Paradise
2x Garruk's Companion
2x Augury Owl
1x Awakener Druid
1x Manic Vandal
1x Brindle Boar
1x Giant Spider
1x Canyon Minotaur
1x Vulshok Beserker
1x Azure Drake
1x Garruk's Packleader
1x Yavimaya Wurm
1x Earth Servant
3x Cultivate
1x Lava Axe
1x Thunder Strike
1x Lightning Bolt
1x Unsummon
1x Volcanic Strength
As you can see it's not too great and whilst it was never a problem on the day there is little point having scry mechanics from cards such as Augury Owls when you are running multiple deck-shuffling Cultivates. I ran 41 cards for some strange reason and I possibly could have ran the Jace's Ingenuity but I thought it would be stretching myself thin. I'll have to learn to draft this for nationals, no doubt.
First game I come up against the father of the guy that came top of the Swiss after beating me. Seemed like a very intelligent man, a lecturer of English in the states apparently. Had a lot of respect for Lancaster University too. Good to know I didn't go to a useless hole after all. He was a little burned out by this point and had been surprised to make the top 8. He said his sealed deck was better than he played it and he hadn't drafted in years. Anyway, Game one I cultivate and play Garruk's Packmaster, followed by Yavimaya Wurm and Canyon Minotaur. He's playing R/W and his board is mostly made up of smaller critters, I quickly overrun him with the fatties and we go to game two. Game two seems like a pretty sure for me as I've built up an arsenal of big creatures again but he declares "If I get a land on my turn this could get interesting" and I point out he'd need to pop his terramorphic expanse on my end step so his basic isn't tapped the turn he needs it. Thanking me for my advice and chuckling about his oversight he does so, shuffles and draws his land. Boom. The board is wiped after he casts the new Wildfire: Destructive Force. Now if I had sacrificed the right lands I might still have stood a shot of taking the game but I sacrificed down to a forest and a mountain thinking that I wouldn't hit any more blue spells. Unfortunately the next card I drew was Azure Drake which would have been a perfect counter to the Silvercoat Lion he dropped the next turn. My six points of life total quickly disappeared and we went to game three. This game was going pretty much like the first game until Platinum Angel was cast on the other side of the table. With an Azure Drake and a Giant Spider under my control he wasn't attacking with his angel. I used Garruk's Packmaster and the multitude of power 3 or greater creatures in my deck to cycle through and grab the answer to the angel. Slapping a volcanic strength on Yavimaya Wurm meant that with a couple of swings, his life total was in the negative. Casting Manic Vandal got rid of that "Opponents can't win the game" clause pretty well.
With a shake of a hand it was onto a much quicker round two.
At this point I was dangerously close to being late for work and I decided I was going to feign ignorance as to when my shift was supposed to start and show up an hour late. Due to the fact it was the weekend of the twelfth and a ridiculous heavy bout of rain there were very few customers about. DJ was also trying to avoid being late for his bingo calling job so we shook hands shuffled and drew.
Game one consisted of me casting an early cultivate, following up with a Vulshok Beserker and a Canyon Minotaur consecutively. DJ also had to answer my Awakener Druid with a Bee Sting. I soon slapped a volcanic strength on the minotaur and went to town, ending the game with a Lava Axe. Game two went much the same though this time I'm playing Packmaster on turn 4. DJ answers this by attacking with the very gay looking Prized Unicorn, utilizing the allure ability and employing a Giant Growth to dispatch the Packmaster. I was slightly sad about this - Packmaster is an absolute beast of a card and I think will define
DJ tries to race with a Shiv's Embrace on an Ember Hauler but I Unsummon the Goblin in response to the aura. Minotaur + Volcanic Strength combo materializes and Lava Axe fixes the remaining five points after three swings of the minotaur. DJ goes to work and the final is on.
For the third match I'm paired up against the same guy who was on twelve at the end of the swiss. Before we play we agree to split the boosters with the winner getting the remaining booster, the t-shirt and pre-release champion title. Again he's playing U/B so there won't be any easy victories with Volcanic Strength. In fact for me there would be no victories at all. First game I kept an awful hand. At that point I couldn't really give a damn, I could hardly be bothered mulliganing. In the second game I create some problems with fat creatures such as Yavimaya Wurm and spend a turn Lava Axing with no other relevant plays. My big creatures quickly become irrelevant as he develops his board with two Azure Drakes. He also clones his Captivating Vampire and begins amassing an army of minions. As soon as he hits five that's pretty much game over, I scoop and he reveals a Doom Blade and an Unsummon. I was pretty happy with the shared booster pile and I get ready for work, looking like a sexy bastard in a white shirt black tie combo.
Moral of the story: U/B is pretty good in M11 limited and try and open a good sealed pool.
M11 Pre-release weekend review
I love pre-release weekends. Without a doubt they are the most fun you can have in a sanctioned event. There's a lot of reasons why. Firstly you get to crack open fresh packs that haven't even been released in the shops. You get to see the artwork of cards up close rather than just on website previews. Then of course, loads of characters pop out of the woodwork to see some new cards and sling some spells. There are some people that only ever play at pre-releases because they know how fun they can be. It's always good to know how people are doing and know that they're still up for a bit of the game of kings err.. planeswalkers.
Booster draft Friday
Usually the store in Belfast (Serenity) has midnight drafts on the Friday night. These function as a lock in the same fashion that a pub would whenever its open only to its staff or its regulars. Although anyone is allowed the door is locked so as ne'erdowells don't wander in on the way home from a night out and asking stupid drunken questions such as "whats that do? whats this?". Although we do let Gary play in the shop despite these issues.
On that Friday night I ended up turning up to said booster draft. Although this was after having a few pints with an Australian girl on a failed date, a session of muay thai and a few more drinks. Magic, beer and talking shite - the cornerstone of a Northern player. Anyway in that draft I ended up drafting a bit of a mess of a deck. Having opened nantuko shade and being passed Captivating Vampire I did my best to draft a mostly black deck with a splash of red for Act of Treasons, goblin tunneler and a few red cards with Chandra's something in their title - a slightly more costly searing blaze and a 1/3 flyer for 3 with a kiln fiend style ability. Now apart from the fact I could make the shade unblockable or attack with the opponents creature only to fling them or sacrifice them to bloodthrone vampire, the deck wasn't particularly good. I got beat by Dave Robinson, currently number two in Northern Ireland for beating kids in FNM every week for the last five years (or so the rumours go). Dave beat me soundly for the two games of the match though in the games that we played after my deck seemed to largely outperform his. That could be largely down to the fact he had little or no answer to the powerhouse that is nantuko shade but it didn't worry me too much. Third place in the pod still hit prizes, everything was to play for and if I won out I got a couple of packs.
Match 2 I come up against Conor McVarnock packing some kind of G/W stompy build. His deck ramps up impressively first game landing two aciding slimes off the back of a bird of paradise. He sets me back a land with each of the slimes, wrecking my tempo and forcing me to trade unfavourably to avoid taking four points of damage a turn. His deck also seemed to have a number of pacifisms and other gems. Second game becomes much more of a battle and here I got a glimpse of what a core set draft is like: typically back and forth removal spells, often piquing with moments where both sides of the field have no actual threats leading to a stalemate broken by the first creature. This is kind of how the second game went although with me refusing one of Conor's takebacks that might have given him the game. It was quite strongly settled by me equipping my warlord's axe to a bloodthrone vampire and laying the beats. The third game largely involved better board positions and effeciencys of creatures with nantuko shade living up to its bomb potential.
Third match was up against the Prince of Persia himself Niall Graham. Aside from being the guy that runs the shop and doing a good job at it, Niall is one of those good players who have always been cheated out of victory at big events by some bad bit of luck. Things like having the deck that beats 80% of the field but being paired against the other not so favourable 20% three matches in a row. This was a great match up until the third game. We had both put a considerable amount of pressure on each other with Niall using his Squadron Hawks and Honor the Pure to swarm out. I'm not so sure if I'd be bothered trying to grab multiples of Squadron Hawks. Without the aid of mass creature pumps having a 1/1 flyer is largely underwhelming where the hill giant has been a staple of the core set format. That being said one can't complain too much about multiple 2/2 flyers for little card disadvantage. Game two had me using nantuko shade and goblin tunneler to carve up Niall's life total and finish him with a fling. Game 3 had us both mulliganing to 5 and me being stuck on one land despite the constant pile shuffling, rifling and redrawing. A second swamp should have set me up for a decent go of things as I was packing Sign in Blood. Unfortunately it never came and Niall landed with tempo, kicking my tar in in less than six turns.
Trent and I played a few games after this and he consistently kicked my tar in with his blue/black deck. We found Jace's Ingenuity to be an unsurprisingly phenomenal card in this format. Having drafted ZEN/ZEN/WWK only a few times I never really got to see how mysteries of the deep was. Whilst I assumed it would be pretty good, the fact it relied on landfall meant usually playing it as a sorcery to get its full effect was a pretty limiting factor, particularly as zendikar was such a fast format with most decks relying on packing multiple 2 drops. With almost every colour having good removal or bounce spells games can spin out almost as long as they do in straight ROE drafts.
Pre-release Saturday
Having packed it in about 4 am, I got about seven hours to sleep before I had to get up and get my stuff together for the pre-release ahead of me. If you read my last tournament report, you'll know that I took a less than stellar sealed pool through to the finish GPT. On this occasion I wasn't required to play average packs at all. This time I was given -the nuts-. Whenever we sit down to draft or play sealed we are given the opportunity to pick what pile of boosters we are going to be ours. In a gaming kind of superstition sometimes you get a good feel for a pile of boosters. In my case I had a good feeling about the pile with the dragon on the first booster. To this Niall laughed at but when I popped a Baneslayer Angel, a Vengeance Archon, Conundrum Sphynx, Dragonskull Summit, Foil Haunting Echoes and Stormtide Leviathan.
Not only that but my commons and uncommons for blue and white looked like they had been selected for a pre-con deck.
8x Islands
8x Plains
1x Mistifying Maze
1x Stormfront Pegasus
2x Aether Adept
1x Maritime Guard
1x Palace Guard
1x Roc Egg
1x Cloud Elemental
1x Assault Griffin
2x Azure Drake
1x Conundrum Sphynx
1x Serra Angel
1x Baneslayer Angel
1x Tireless Missionaries
1x Vengeful Archon
1x Mana Leak
1x Ice Cage
1x Inspired Charge
1x Sleep
1x Foresee
1x Mind Control
1x Crystal Ball
So other than a few other cards (arguably sideboard options) this deck was the nuts. About half the non-land cards were bombs and I can only complain about a few of these cards could I complain about. Maritime Guards is pretty underwhelming as a two drop, I think I'd much rather have a bear such as Silvercoat Lion. Palace Guards was also a bit bland, however it could be argued that this is because of the defensive nature of the card when my opponent was usually too busy having to deal with my absolutely absurd threats. Lastly Tireless Missionaries is a watered down version of Angel of Mercy. Having started in Portal Second Age, I'm slightly disappointed not to see another reprinting of the 3/3 flyer/healing salve for 5 however this is perhaps a decision by R+D to avoid making white too strong in limited when they were doing the set design.
As you can imagine it was pretty awful sitting with me. I was like blastoise kid opening Baneslayer Angel, having made the money of the sealed back in one card. When the rest of the cards showed themselves my only fear was the ridicule I would be on the end of if I scrubbed out due to constant misplays. Indeed, I made a few throughout the day but thankfully the deck was so good it didn't really matter.
Without further ado I'll give you the breakdown of the match ups.
Conor Holmes: U/W
I tried taking a picture of the former Irish champ but in his tired and hungover state he wasn't having any of it. Indeed taking pictures of the whole thing was a bit of a joke. Our good friend Sherlock wasn't too happy with his sealed pool, from what I could see of his deck his only bomb was triskillion, which only became an issue in the third game. By his own admission to win the match up he needed me to get mana screwed, unfortunately for him he was the one that suffered the mana screw in the first game. The second game seemed to be running smoothly for my deck, whilst both of us were building up board position and trading blows Conor surprised me with a Mighty Leap, Armoured Ascension blow out. This meant I felt like a complete fool as I was left with a sleep in hand. Nice. The third game involved a board build up again but with me landing Baneslayer Angel. Conor almost killed it by mighty leaping a Cloud Crusader and using his last triskelion counter to do the damage. I countered this with an Inspired Charge, pretty much ending the game from that moment on. No skill involved ladies and gentleman just mythic rares.
Inbetween match ups I fix a kid's G/B deck for him, show him why Dark Tutelage is good in limited and that Cudgel Troll and Acidic Slime or brilliant in a deck with two Llanowar elves.
Cubby - R/W/B
Jokingly trying to persuade me into an ID before the match, Mr. Walker bragged about his deck having 5 mind controls and 6 Pacifisms. Of course it had none of these things and instead was a bit of a mesh of three colours in order to use its two mythics: Chandra and Grave Titan. Whilst the first game went pretty swiftly to me curving out and winning with flyers, Cubby landed the red planeswalker in the second game. Between this and a blinding mage slowed me down considerably as I fought to keep him from getting eight loyalty counters on Chandra. It meant mind controlling a three drop just to have another attacker, whilst holding back bigger threats that he could destroy by removing x counters and dealing x damage. With the help of Crystal Ball I was able to stack my deck and draw enough smaller threats to swarm out. Without the scry mechanic Cubby found himself drawing an abundance of lands by comparison and had to keep his ready for tapping down Baneslayer. After building up a board Cubby can't really compete with I do the dirty and reveal sleep. Utter bomb.
Alan - U/W
Last time I came up against Alan he was the one who had opened the bomb mythics as his ROE pool included Gideon, Sarkhan and Consuming Vapours. We had an interesting match up as both decks shared a few cards in common: Mistifying Maze, Ice Cage. These two plus what seemed like three Pacifisms meant that the game was going to be going into eight or nine land territory as I was often forced to use my Aether Adept to bounce Sphynx with a Pacifism. Once he was out there he really was MVP. Combined with Crystal Ball he netted me an extra card per turn whilst often moving Alan's bombs to the bottom of his deck. Eventually I see Alan's Leviathan but I chose just to fly over it and finish up with an Inspired Charge. I sideboarded out Maritime Guard for my copy of Leviathan seeing as this game went so late. Unfortunately I never saw it as Alan lands a combo of Air Servant and Leviathan. During this game I make a pityful mistake, bouncing Air Servant one turn then Ice Caging Leviathan. With a number of ground attackers and an Inspired Charge it was totally the wrong play. My failure to read the "no activated abilities" it on Ice Cage acts as my downfall and despite having gained about twelve life from Alan using Mistifying Maze on my Tireless Missionaries early on in the game, Alan keeps me locked down with Air Servant and beats me to death. Third game I just plain draw better and Conundrum Sphynx prevents him from the same Air Servant win by sending the card to the bottom of his deck and my Baneslayer too. That seemed to fix his cockyness for a bit.
New Guy with Glasses - G/W
I do have to apologize to this guy as I have completely forgotten his name. This guy was playing a pretty good build of Green White stompy, with Fauna Shaman, multiple copies of Cudgel Troll and Serra Angel. Pretty impressive considering he hasn't been playing for too long. Unfortunately for him I took a Roc Egg start both games meaning that to push any damage through at all he would have to give me a 3/3 flyer token. Mean while I pushed on through with Azure Drakes and Cloud Elemental. Game two was much the same. This time showing how Sphynx was almost more of a game winner than Baneslayer.
Irish/American guy - U/B
With us both sitting on twelve points, we're only playing for a bit of pride, DCI points and me wanting to keep the OP of those that I had played. In fairness this guy has a pretty good deck. No rares, no mythics but it's well constructed and packs Two Air Servants, Multiple Lilliana's Specter, Gargoyle Sentinel and a pretty nice removal base in the form of Diminishs and Doom Blades. After a fairly lengthy Aerial Battle and me having to discard cards I really wish I got to play I cast Forsee and grab Vengeful Archon. After the turn after it attacks, he plays Sleep, intent on finishing me off but he makes the mistake of attacking into me whilst I have open mana for Archon's ability and I retaliate viciously. Game two sees him control the board successfully with Air Servant, something which is futile to put an Ice Cage on as he controls a Warlord's Axe. With no spot removal and no good ground threats he puts the beatdown with the 7/5 flyer and wraps the game up. Game three I'm mana screwed but not too concerned as I'm through to the top 8.
With the top 8 booster draft starting at about half four and my shift starting at six, I figured the only point in playing was to rare draft. And rare draft I did, I managed to pick up an Ajani Goldmane, my second Dragonskull Summit of the day, foil Silence, Birds of Paradise and Dark Tutelage. When I went about picking cards for the actual deck I originally was planning on some sort of green deck that could utilize the BOP. When I got passed a Jace's Ingenuity on the second pick, I figured DJ on the right of me was going to keep blue open for me so he could use whatever bomb rare he drafted. However Blue dried up and I began taking multiple cultivates and any random bits of green fat along the way. Late Garruk's Companions were great picks and I moved into Red as I got a fifth pick lightning bolt. What was in that pack I do not know but never one to look a gift horse in the mouth I took it and went into red. To be honest my draft felt like I was almost picking random cards. Random cards that I liked but I didn't expect the deck to be any good.
What was ironic about the top 8 was that apart from Conor everyone I played managed to make top 8. I'd like to think that's down to my near perfect OP but I don't want to brag about that, the deck was the one that did the work.
What I ended up with was a messy mesh of Green, Red and Blue.
3x Island
9x Forest
6x Mountain
1x Birds of Paradise
2x Garruk's Companion
2x Augury Owl
1x Awakener Druid
1x Manic Vandal
1x Brindle Boar
1x Giant Spider
1x Canyon Minotaur
1x Vulshok Beserker
1x Azure Drake
1x Garruk's Packleader
1x Yavimaya Wurm
1x Earth Servant
3x Cultivate
1x Lava Axe
1x Thunder Strike
1x Lightning Bolt
1x Unsummon
1x Volcanic Strength
As you can see it's not too great and whilst it was never a problem on the day there is little point having scry mechanics from cards such as Augury Owls when you are running multiple deck-shuffling Cultivates. I ran 41 cards for some strange reason and I possibly could have ran the Jace's Ingenuity but I thought it would be stretching myself thin. I'll have to learn to draft this for nationals, no doubt.
First game I come up against the father of the guy that came top of the Swiss after beating me. Seemed like a very intelligent man, a lecturer of English in the states apparently. Had a lot of respect for Lancaster University too. Good to know I didn't go to a useless hole after all. He was a little burned out by this point and had been surprised to make the top 8. He said his sealed deck was better than he played it and he hadn't drafted in years. Anyway, Game one I cultivate and play Garruk's Packmaster, followed by Yavimaya Wurm and Canyon Minotaur. He's playing R/W and his board is mostly made up of smaller critters, I quickly overrun him with the fatties and we go to game two. Game two seems like a pretty sure for me as I've built up an arsenal of big creatures again but he declares "If I get a land on my turn this could get interesting" and I point out he'd need to pop his terramorphic expanse on my end step so his basic isn't tapped the turn he needs it. Thanking me for my advice and chuckling about his oversight he does so, shuffles and draws his land. Boom. The board is wiped after he casts the new Wildfire: Destructive Force. Now if I had sacrificed the right lands I might still have stood a shot of taking the game but I sacrificed down to a forest and a mountain thinking that I wouldn't hit any more blue spells. Unfortunately the next card I drew was Azure Drake which would have been a perfect counter to the Silvercoat Lion he dropped the next turn. My six points of life total quickly disappeared and we went to game three. This game was going pretty much like the first game until Platinum Angel was cast on the other side of the table. With an Azure Drake and a Giant Spider under my control he wasn't attacking with his angel. I used Garruk's Packmaster and the multitude of power 3 or greater creatures in my deck to cycle through and grab the answer to the angel. Slapping a volcanic strength on Yavimaya Wurm meant that with a couple of swings, his life total was in the negative. Casting Manic Vandal got rid of that "Opponents can't win the game" clause pretty well.
With a shake of a hand it was onto a much quicker round two.
At this point I was dangerously close to being late for work and I decided I was going to feign ignorance as to when my shift was supposed to start and show up an hour late. Due to the fact it was the weekend of the twelfth and a ridiculous heavy bout of rain there were very few customers about. DJ was also trying to avoid being late for his bingo calling job so we shook hands shuffled and drew.
Game one consisted of me casting an early cultivate, following up with a Vulshok Beserker and a Canyon Minotaur consecutively. DJ also had to answer my Awakener Druid with a Bee Sting. I soon slapped a volcanic strength on the minotaur and went to town, ending the game with a Lava Axe. Game two went much the same though this time I'm playing Packmaster on turn 4. DJ answers this by attacking with the very gay looking Prized Unicorn, utilizing the allure ability and employing a Giant Growth to dispatch the Packmaster. I was slightly sad about this - Packmaster is an absolute beast of a card and I think will define
DJ tries to race with a Shiv's Embrace on an Ember Hauler but I Unsummon the Goblin in response to the aura. Minotaur + Volcanic Strength combo materializes and Lava Axe fixes the remaining five points after three swings of the minotaur. DJ goes to work and the final is on.
For the third match I'm paired up against the same guy who was on twelve at the end of the swiss. Before we play we agree to split the boosters with the winner getting the remaining booster, the t-shirt and pre-release champion title. Again he's playing U/B so there won't be any easy victories with Volcanic Strength. In fact for me there would be no victories at all. First game I kept an awful hand. At that point I couldn't really give a damn, I could hardly be bothered mulliganing. In the second game I create some problems with fat creatures such as Yavimaya Wurm and spend a turn Lava Axing with no other relevant plays. My big creatures quickly become irrelevant as he develops his board with two Azure Drakes. He also clones his Captivating Vampire and begins amassing an army of minions. As soon as he hits five that's pretty much game over, I scoop and he reveals a Doom Blade and an Unsummon. I was pretty happy with the shared booster pile and I get ready for work, looking like a sexy bastard in a white shirt black tie combo.
Moral of the story: U/B is pretty good in M11 limited and try and open a good sealed pool.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Q-Con 2010
Now that I've discussed being a geek, I want to discuss the motherload of geekdom: Q-Con. As a friend described it, Dorkcentral.
For one weekend every year, Queen's Dragonslayers put on the UK's most highly attended gaming convention in Queen's Student Union. If you're wondering what a games convention is. Sadly it's not a showcase of the biggest and best new games. It's sort of more of a meet up for people to play all sorts of computer games, roleplaying games, card games and board games. Where traders come to sell their wares and for the best in the country to come and battle it out in Street Fighter IV or Call of Duty tournaments. Whilst I've been playing computer games since I got my master system at the age of five, I opted not to get involved. The reasons are two fold: firstly I'm a terrible loser. Ask any of my friends and they will tell you that I will scream and howl at the set or slam my controller into the ground if I lose. Playing games I've never played before against people that are just far too good is not something I want to get involved in, not in public anyway. Second of all I could not be bothered joining queues for any length of time.
Despite these queues there are scores of people that will show up for a crack at being king of Super Smash Brothers. This event has got so big that in order to go you need to pre-book your tickets several months in advance otherwise you can't even get in. Whilst I wasn't keen enough on going to fork out £20 ahead of time, I was lucky enough to be playing Magic on a Thursday night in my favourite gaming store on a night that two free passes were available to whoever was taking part in a minor event.
Having to work Friday night meant that I landed at the event on Saturday afternoon. The turn out was pretty impressive if not worrying. As I make the point in my last post, I'm a dice rolling, card drawing geek. I've wikipedia-ed my way through obscure comic book character's backgrounds multiple times and go on forums to discuss whether or not Thor could beat Superman. However my level of geekiness pales in comparison to many of those that attend Q-Con.
Like most major conventions of this kind there's a huge number of people who come dressed in all sorts of ridiculous costumes. Ever wanted to get dressed up as Solid Snake? Go to Q-Con. Have a thing for fourteen year olds dressed as Sailor Moon, well then you're in paedophile paradise.
That is one of the major problems with any convention. There are generally three types of people that should not wear provocative clothing. The first group are those who have a ridiculously high BMI. Morbidly obese people wearing skimpy clothing is not a good thing. The second group and it's for a very similar reason is the chronically androgynous. If it's completely impossible to tell your gender then it's probably not a good look. The third group are thirteen year old girls. Even if they are well developed for I should not be given an eyeful of a barely pubescent girl's rack. Police sirens are blaring in my head as soon as I so much as catch a glimpse. Don't get me wrong, if I was fourteen again I'd probably have absolutely loved it. I would have been turning my baseball cap backwards all over the place, quite happy to play the Ash Ketchum to some girl's Misty but there was just a tad too much Elf queen business going on. I'm all for cracking grass on the pitch and old enough to bleed puns but jail is a place middle class white boys like me do not survive.
Perhaps also I've become too much of a norm to be seen in costume for anything that doesn't involve alcohol or narcotics. I'm telling you though, I reckon going to some event where it involves dressing like an orc, camping in a forest and drinking buckfast for two days sounds brilliant. What could be more fun than wearing armour and throwing rocks yelling lightning bolt whenever you're blootered.
Having arrived at 1 PM, my first port of call was playing Magic the Gathering. If you've never heard of it, Magic the Gathering is a collectable card game akin to a grown up pokemon. My magic playing friend Niall and I explained it to a group of friends not in the know in a few sentences:
Me: You have twenty life. I have twenty life. I've got to reduce you to zero before you reduce me to zero.
Niall: And how do you do this?
Me: With a sixty card deck.
If only I had caught on camera Niall's description of the game, I don't think anything will ever be as impressive as his declaration to a group of people who are either drunk or off their tree on acid that
"You.. are a planeswalker"
He then elaborated to those there that that meant casting spells, summoning creatures and doing battle in the multiverse. Kind of mind blowing whilst one is tripping balls.
Whilst most of us players don't really pay too much attention about the storyline or the fantasy theme, enjoying more the thrill of the chess meets poker mechanics which the game provides. Seeing as it engages both the mathematical parts of your brain, your ability to think startegically and read people, it's one of the hardest games in the world to get good at. A professional scene does exist, with some players having earned several million dollars playing. Whilst there's a lot more money playing poker (and indeed many of the top magic players are poker geniuses), I find magic a heck of a lot more fun. I like going head to head with another player in a battle of wits exercise. One of the game's tag lines is:
In here there is no twitch, no reflex that can save you from the power of my mind.
Whilst there is a huge luck element of the game, with experince you get better and better at learning how to play around bad luck and utilizing your good luck.
No surprises then that I say that the first thing I did at 1 PM on Saturday was sit down to play in a Magic the Gathering tournament. The prize: a shit ton of cards and three byes (automatic match wins) in a big tournament in Goteborg (Sweden) where there's a real chance of making money or making it on to the pro circuit where the money is obscene.
Whilst I'm certainly not fantastic at the game I'd say I'm a little bit above average and there was a relatively low turn out for the event. This was in part due to a lot of magic players neglecting Q-Con or through pig ignorance. Those that turned up tended to be a little bit rusty in their understanding of the game - they hadn't played in a while or not quite as much as me. This gave me a fairly distinct advantage since I've been playing online like crazy recently, spending far too much money on imaginary cards. This meant that over the course of four and a half hours I managed to take the three byes and should hopefully be heading to Sweden.
At this point I'm going to tell you how I did it but there's absolutely no point for anyone to read after this point. Back in the old days, I called this the "Fuck off non-magic players section" or FONMP. This isn't out of rudeness in fact it's out of respect for those that don't play. I just don't want to be wasting your time with gobledeegook.
*** FONMP SECTION BEGINS ***
Okay so the format was ROE sealed. In the six boosters popped, I got very few bombs. It was quite tempting to play black because of Nirkhama Revenant as was it tempting to play blue for Sphynx of Magosi and Corralheim commander. Unfortunately out of the playble blue and black, I was still seven cards short of a sealed deck. That meant I was running off a base of green and white commons and uncommons with a splash of black for double vendetta.
Deck list
8 Forest
7 Plains
2 Swamp
Joraga Treespeaker
Bramblesnap
Lone Missionary
Beastbreaker of Bala Ged
Aura Gnarlid
Daggerback Basilisk
Dawnglare Invoker
Wildheart Invoker
Ondu Giant
Stomper Cub
Totem Guide Hartebeest
Artisan of Kozilek
Guard Duty
2x Vendetta
Smite
Puncturing Light
2x Growth Spasm
Repel the Darkness
Survival Cache
Boar Umbra
Mammoth Umbra
Yeap, classic G/W stompy.
Matchups
Decky - G/B
For some reason Decky isn't too big a fan of this format, despite the fact he won a pre-release. We have a fairly good match, blowing up each other's creatures and getting big digs in with Beastbreaker of Bala Ged. Ultimately it comes down to Dawnglare Invoker and an umbra on it.
Brock
Actually called Gavin Carville, he's had the nickname Brock since he was about 14 for having a Brock Lesnar stature to him (or at least for his age)since then.
I can't really remember what Brock's deck consisted of but I go 2-0 against him in pretty much the same fashion as Decky - Dawnglare Invoker + umbra = win. Brock and I played a casual game three that went backwards and forwards for sometime. Having to deal with his early level up creatures meant I was seeing all his big eldrazi dudes come out to play. We both called it a day as the third round was about to begin.
Cubby
Ian Walker has been playing the game off and on since the dawn of time. When he does well he does great but his being in London for the last year has meant he hasn't had the same amount of time to devote to the game and probably wasn't at his best. In the first game he makes the unfortunate misplay of attacking into my bramblesnap with his unlevelled zulaport enforcer, failing to realize I can tap the bramblesnap to pump itself. He tries to take it back but being the dick I am, I don't let it netting me some card advantage and avoiding a possibly heinous threat mid game. The second game saw Magic's luck element was playing out big time in the second game. For the first five or six turns I generally ramped with growth spasm and played stomper cubs using them for creature trades. I got out artisan of kozilek early and was able to swing for the win. If Cubby had drawn his second forest he'd have played Haze Frog, dropped a vengevine on his turn and ended the game in devastating fashion for me.
During that break, Cubby and I went to get some food so I chomped on a nice fat chicken salad roll. Dems some good eatins.
Matt Leebody
Again Matt Leebody is great whenever he plays a lot but he hasn't had that much time for the game as of recent. His G/B deck was packing some nice punches - Consume the Meek had been taking games off a number of people whilst Mull Daya Channellers was a fairly constant annoyance. Double Boar Umbra was also a constant threat with his black levellers to which I had little answer to except creature trade, tap down with repel the darkness and guard duty so I could stall out to the good old Dawnglare Invoker + Umbra finish. Vendetta was pretty cute in this match up for the 2 for 1s it was providing with his green creatures whilst the umbras were on the stack. He takes a game off me as I fail to deal with zulaport enforcer swinging as a 5/5 with fear. At this point we could have ID-d into the top 4 but we were both playing for high standings on the swiss.
Top 4
Alan J Warnock
Alan regularly impresses me with his ability in pretty much any card game. At 15 he shows promise way beyond his years, I often find him a tough match up, despite the fact I play way more magic than he does. Whilst I don't play Yu-gi-oh myself (I'm not -that- sad!), I hear he cleans up all the time. I believed his deck to be absolutely bonkers, as he popped Gideon Jura, Sarkhan the Mad and Consuming Vapors and he offers me the bye for this match if I give him four of my boosters. This is as much as I want to say I've won a GPT than to get the byes but we play it out anyway. The first game his deck graps out on him and I'm generally winning with a card he doesn't see as a win condition - Beastbreaker of Bala Ged. After taking some hefty swings he's forced to dump some removal at it leaving nothing around to deal with Dawnglare Invoker. The second game he acts like a jackass, deliberaltely making misplays in order to wind me up - sticking lust for war on aura gnlarid and sacking eldrazi spawn during my upkeep for no reason. Whether or not his hand was crap or he was playing bad from the start I'm not so sure but he sarcastically ran about declaring me the champion for the rest of the day. All in good humour I think but a degree of sportsmanship could be learned.
Matt Leebody (again)
I face up against Matt again. He's not too worried about getting the Byes and I'm not about to be blackmailed into parting with the remaining three boosters I got for being top of the swiss. I'm quite happy to keep them for draft. He's not too worried about either the byes or the boosters at this point he's playing for pride and fun which he gets out of this match in spades. After a fairly resounding win for me in the first game, I think I'm about to take the second. Turn 9 he swings with his ulamog crusher into my boar umbra'd and mammoth umbra'd up bramblesnap. I tap two creatures to make it a 9/9 thinking he'd made a mistake in casting it in the first place. On the block he momentous falls to sac his big guy then induce dispairs revealing some high cost eldrazi to make sure the bramblesnap goes down like a sack of shit, netting himself a 3 for one in the process. My loss of tempo, his life gain and card draw means I don't stand a chance of finishing him. The third game I take a nice 8 life off him from beastbreaker of bala ged but the game slows as I have to deal with boar umbra'd creatures. They almost kill me around turn five, turn six but I play lone missionary and survival cache which ends up netting me two cards over its resolution and the rebound. With him having fatties on the table and me having a multitude of chump blockers out means that we're both biding our time until we have a good opportunity in some more fat or a removal piece. I eventually draw repel the darkness and swing with enough creatures to seal his fate big time. We both agreed we'd played some great games and that was the stuff feature matches were made of.
*** FONMP SECTION OVER ***
Having taken the GPT I take a break, have drink a couple of pints of Guiness and head to work for an 8 o'clock start. The next day I'm back on the scene for a bit of multiplayer madness, a nice big lunch at Springsteens with some of the magic players and after that caught a bit of the England match.
Speaking of which GO ON THE KRAUTS!
During our meal at Springsteens we were being informed by a friendly waiter what the scores were for the match and about the disallowed goal which we felt would be something that England would whine about for years to come if it was the goal that mattered. Thankfully it didn't.
We returned just in time for the second half, got ourselves a couple of pints and admire the slaughter put on by the White shirts. With Q-Con winding down, I went home to a nice big fillet steak and stayed in to watch some TV. All in all a good weekend even if I had to work whenever everybody else was partying.
Now that I've discussed being a geek, I want to discuss the motherload of geekdom: Q-Con. As a friend described it, Dorkcentral.
For one weekend every year, Queen's Dragonslayers put on the UK's most highly attended gaming convention in Queen's Student Union. If you're wondering what a games convention is. Sadly it's not a showcase of the biggest and best new games. It's sort of more of a meet up for people to play all sorts of computer games, roleplaying games, card games and board games. Where traders come to sell their wares and for the best in the country to come and battle it out in Street Fighter IV or Call of Duty tournaments. Whilst I've been playing computer games since I got my master system at the age of five, I opted not to get involved. The reasons are two fold: firstly I'm a terrible loser. Ask any of my friends and they will tell you that I will scream and howl at the set or slam my controller into the ground if I lose. Playing games I've never played before against people that are just far too good is not something I want to get involved in, not in public anyway. Second of all I could not be bothered joining queues for any length of time.
Despite these queues there are scores of people that will show up for a crack at being king of Super Smash Brothers. This event has got so big that in order to go you need to pre-book your tickets several months in advance otherwise you can't even get in. Whilst I wasn't keen enough on going to fork out £20 ahead of time, I was lucky enough to be playing Magic on a Thursday night in my favourite gaming store on a night that two free passes were available to whoever was taking part in a minor event.
Having to work Friday night meant that I landed at the event on Saturday afternoon. The turn out was pretty impressive if not worrying. As I make the point in my last post, I'm a dice rolling, card drawing geek. I've wikipedia-ed my way through obscure comic book character's backgrounds multiple times and go on forums to discuss whether or not Thor could beat Superman. However my level of geekiness pales in comparison to many of those that attend Q-Con.
Like most major conventions of this kind there's a huge number of people who come dressed in all sorts of ridiculous costumes. Ever wanted to get dressed up as Solid Snake? Go to Q-Con. Have a thing for fourteen year olds dressed as Sailor Moon, well then you're in paedophile paradise.
That is one of the major problems with any convention. There are generally three types of people that should not wear provocative clothing. The first group are those who have a ridiculously high BMI. Morbidly obese people wearing skimpy clothing is not a good thing. The second group and it's for a very similar reason is the chronically androgynous. If it's completely impossible to tell your gender then it's probably not a good look. The third group are thirteen year old girls. Even if they are well developed for I should not be given an eyeful of a barely pubescent girl's rack. Police sirens are blaring in my head as soon as I so much as catch a glimpse. Don't get me wrong, if I was fourteen again I'd probably have absolutely loved it. I would have been turning my baseball cap backwards all over the place, quite happy to play the Ash Ketchum to some girl's Misty but there was just a tad too much Elf queen business going on. I'm all for cracking grass on the pitch and old enough to bleed puns but jail is a place middle class white boys like me do not survive.
Perhaps also I've become too much of a norm to be seen in costume for anything that doesn't involve alcohol or narcotics. I'm telling you though, I reckon going to some event where it involves dressing like an orc, camping in a forest and drinking buckfast for two days sounds brilliant. What could be more fun than wearing armour and throwing rocks yelling lightning bolt whenever you're blootered.
Having arrived at 1 PM, my first port of call was playing Magic the Gathering. If you've never heard of it, Magic the Gathering is a collectable card game akin to a grown up pokemon. My magic playing friend Niall and I explained it to a group of friends not in the know in a few sentences:
Me: You have twenty life. I have twenty life. I've got to reduce you to zero before you reduce me to zero.
Niall: And how do you do this?
Me: With a sixty card deck.
If only I had caught on camera Niall's description of the game, I don't think anything will ever be as impressive as his declaration to a group of people who are either drunk or off their tree on acid that
"You.. are a planeswalker"
He then elaborated to those there that that meant casting spells, summoning creatures and doing battle in the multiverse. Kind of mind blowing whilst one is tripping balls.
Whilst most of us players don't really pay too much attention about the storyline or the fantasy theme, enjoying more the thrill of the chess meets poker mechanics which the game provides. Seeing as it engages both the mathematical parts of your brain, your ability to think startegically and read people, it's one of the hardest games in the world to get good at. A professional scene does exist, with some players having earned several million dollars playing. Whilst there's a lot more money playing poker (and indeed many of the top magic players are poker geniuses), I find magic a heck of a lot more fun. I like going head to head with another player in a battle of wits exercise. One of the game's tag lines is:
In here there is no twitch, no reflex that can save you from the power of my mind.
Whilst there is a huge luck element of the game, with experince you get better and better at learning how to play around bad luck and utilizing your good luck.
No surprises then that I say that the first thing I did at 1 PM on Saturday was sit down to play in a Magic the Gathering tournament. The prize: a shit ton of cards and three byes (automatic match wins) in a big tournament in Goteborg (Sweden) where there's a real chance of making money or making it on to the pro circuit where the money is obscene.
Whilst I'm certainly not fantastic at the game I'd say I'm a little bit above average and there was a relatively low turn out for the event. This was in part due to a lot of magic players neglecting Q-Con or through pig ignorance. Those that turned up tended to be a little bit rusty in their understanding of the game - they hadn't played in a while or not quite as much as me. This gave me a fairly distinct advantage since I've been playing online like crazy recently, spending far too much money on imaginary cards. This meant that over the course of four and a half hours I managed to take the three byes and should hopefully be heading to Sweden.
At this point I'm going to tell you how I did it but there's absolutely no point for anyone to read after this point. Back in the old days, I called this the "Fuck off non-magic players section" or FONMP. This isn't out of rudeness in fact it's out of respect for those that don't play. I just don't want to be wasting your time with gobledeegook.
*** FONMP SECTION BEGINS ***
Okay so the format was ROE sealed. In the six boosters popped, I got very few bombs. It was quite tempting to play black because of Nirkhama Revenant as was it tempting to play blue for Sphynx of Magosi and Corralheim commander. Unfortunately out of the playble blue and black, I was still seven cards short of a sealed deck. That meant I was running off a base of green and white commons and uncommons with a splash of black for double vendetta.
Deck list
8 Forest
7 Plains
2 Swamp
Joraga Treespeaker
Bramblesnap
Lone Missionary
Beastbreaker of Bala Ged
Aura Gnarlid
Daggerback Basilisk
Dawnglare Invoker
Wildheart Invoker
Ondu Giant
Stomper Cub
Totem Guide Hartebeest
Artisan of Kozilek
Guard Duty
2x Vendetta
Smite
Puncturing Light
2x Growth Spasm
Repel the Darkness
Survival Cache
Boar Umbra
Mammoth Umbra
Yeap, classic G/W stompy.
Matchups
Decky - G/B
For some reason Decky isn't too big a fan of this format, despite the fact he won a pre-release. We have a fairly good match, blowing up each other's creatures and getting big digs in with Beastbreaker of Bala Ged. Ultimately it comes down to Dawnglare Invoker and an umbra on it.
Brock
Actually called Gavin Carville, he's had the nickname Brock since he was about 14 for having a Brock Lesnar stature to him (or at least for his age)since then.
I can't really remember what Brock's deck consisted of but I go 2-0 against him in pretty much the same fashion as Decky - Dawnglare Invoker + umbra = win. Brock and I played a casual game three that went backwards and forwards for sometime. Having to deal with his early level up creatures meant I was seeing all his big eldrazi dudes come out to play. We both called it a day as the third round was about to begin.
Cubby
Ian Walker has been playing the game off and on since the dawn of time. When he does well he does great but his being in London for the last year has meant he hasn't had the same amount of time to devote to the game and probably wasn't at his best. In the first game he makes the unfortunate misplay of attacking into my bramblesnap with his unlevelled zulaport enforcer, failing to realize I can tap the bramblesnap to pump itself. He tries to take it back but being the dick I am, I don't let it netting me some card advantage and avoiding a possibly heinous threat mid game. The second game saw Magic's luck element was playing out big time in the second game. For the first five or six turns I generally ramped with growth spasm and played stomper cubs using them for creature trades. I got out artisan of kozilek early and was able to swing for the win. If Cubby had drawn his second forest he'd have played Haze Frog, dropped a vengevine on his turn and ended the game in devastating fashion for me.
During that break, Cubby and I went to get some food so I chomped on a nice fat chicken salad roll. Dems some good eatins.
Matt Leebody
Again Matt Leebody is great whenever he plays a lot but he hasn't had that much time for the game as of recent. His G/B deck was packing some nice punches - Consume the Meek had been taking games off a number of people whilst Mull Daya Channellers was a fairly constant annoyance. Double Boar Umbra was also a constant threat with his black levellers to which I had little answer to except creature trade, tap down with repel the darkness and guard duty so I could stall out to the good old Dawnglare Invoker + Umbra finish. Vendetta was pretty cute in this match up for the 2 for 1s it was providing with his green creatures whilst the umbras were on the stack. He takes a game off me as I fail to deal with zulaport enforcer swinging as a 5/5 with fear. At this point we could have ID-d into the top 4 but we were both playing for high standings on the swiss.
Top 4
Alan J Warnock
Alan regularly impresses me with his ability in pretty much any card game. At 15 he shows promise way beyond his years, I often find him a tough match up, despite the fact I play way more magic than he does. Whilst I don't play Yu-gi-oh myself (I'm not -that- sad!), I hear he cleans up all the time. I believed his deck to be absolutely bonkers, as he popped Gideon Jura, Sarkhan the Mad and Consuming Vapors and he offers me the bye for this match if I give him four of my boosters. This is as much as I want to say I've won a GPT than to get the byes but we play it out anyway. The first game his deck graps out on him and I'm generally winning with a card he doesn't see as a win condition - Beastbreaker of Bala Ged. After taking some hefty swings he's forced to dump some removal at it leaving nothing around to deal with Dawnglare Invoker. The second game he acts like a jackass, deliberaltely making misplays in order to wind me up - sticking lust for war on aura gnlarid and sacking eldrazi spawn during my upkeep for no reason. Whether or not his hand was crap or he was playing bad from the start I'm not so sure but he sarcastically ran about declaring me the champion for the rest of the day. All in good humour I think but a degree of sportsmanship could be learned.
Matt Leebody (again)
I face up against Matt again. He's not too worried about getting the Byes and I'm not about to be blackmailed into parting with the remaining three boosters I got for being top of the swiss. I'm quite happy to keep them for draft. He's not too worried about either the byes or the boosters at this point he's playing for pride and fun which he gets out of this match in spades. After a fairly resounding win for me in the first game, I think I'm about to take the second. Turn 9 he swings with his ulamog crusher into my boar umbra'd and mammoth umbra'd up bramblesnap. I tap two creatures to make it a 9/9 thinking he'd made a mistake in casting it in the first place. On the block he momentous falls to sac his big guy then induce dispairs revealing some high cost eldrazi to make sure the bramblesnap goes down like a sack of shit, netting himself a 3 for one in the process. My loss of tempo, his life gain and card draw means I don't stand a chance of finishing him. The third game I take a nice 8 life off him from beastbreaker of bala ged but the game slows as I have to deal with boar umbra'd creatures. They almost kill me around turn five, turn six but I play lone missionary and survival cache which ends up netting me two cards over its resolution and the rebound. With him having fatties on the table and me having a multitude of chump blockers out means that we're both biding our time until we have a good opportunity in some more fat or a removal piece. I eventually draw repel the darkness and swing with enough creatures to seal his fate big time. We both agreed we'd played some great games and that was the stuff feature matches were made of.
*** FONMP SECTION OVER ***
Having taken the GPT I take a break, have drink a couple of pints of Guiness and head to work for an 8 o'clock start. The next day I'm back on the scene for a bit of multiplayer madness, a nice big lunch at Springsteens with some of the magic players and after that caught a bit of the England match.
Speaking of which GO ON THE KRAUTS!
During our meal at Springsteens we were being informed by a friendly waiter what the scores were for the match and about the disallowed goal which we felt would be something that England would whine about for years to come if it was the goal that mattered. Thankfully it didn't.
We returned just in time for the second half, got ourselves a couple of pints and admire the slaughter put on by the White shirts. With Q-Con winding down, I went home to a nice big fillet steak and stayed in to watch some TV. All in all a good weekend even if I had to work whenever everybody else was partying.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
On being a geek
There's a debate thats existed for sometime about the differences between a nerd and a geek. To be honest, I'm not quite sure which is which. From what I gather, the nerd is supposed to the super intelligent, estudious type that has pseudo (or in some cases full blown) aspergers syndrome like symptoms. This is your scientist type that gets hired by NASA to design a new satellite or your computer programmer genius. Geeks on the other hand are the Star Trek/Star Wars loving roleplayer that spends too many hours on Halo. Of course the two often mix and match, hence the characters we see in shows like the Big Bang theory end up being both.
Recently, it kind of became cool to be a geek. With Superhero films, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter taking off in the 00s, women got as sucked into a pop culture that was usually aimed at men. Whilst perhaps the majority of women would have boy band members, sport stars or actors as pin ups, all traditionally "buff" and well put together, another proportion of women have began to take interest in the geek. Stars like Adam Brody of The O.C. fame and Tobey Maguire are now seen as attractive and a lot of niche hobbies such as playing computer games, reading comics, watching Star Trek and roleplaying (okay maybe not just yet) have become more acceptable. Indeed a lot of it can be tied with the growth of indie music and the amount of time the Average Joe spends on the internet these days.
As a geek I appreciate this big time. I've been a card carrying geek since I was a kid. From the ages of 10-13 I was playing Warhammer and reading comics. Between 12 and fifteen I was regularly roleplaying and I (in true geek fashion)elected myself president of a magic the gathering club at school. Whether my lack of athleticism as a teenager encouraged this behaviour the behaviour encouraged the lack of athleticism I do not know but back then I had no interest in doing anything physical that wasn't sword fighting with latex swords or backyard wrestling. Whilst this geekiness caused some scorn to be dished out by peers throught those pubescent years, I furthered the level of this scorn in my immaturity by adopting the belief I was the victim and almost promoted that idea by saying and doing things that would have me ridiculed. When I initially started this blog when I was 17 and letting people know about it, I knew full well I was going to be laughed at by about half the school, a self sabotaging part of myself almost wanting this to happen whilst the better part of me grew angry about this outcast status I had brought upon myself, trying to act as if I didn't spend my Saturday afternoons tapping forests for green mana in the back of a dusty old comic shop.
Nowadays I don't have to do that. I can freely admit that whilst I write this I'm watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (though I don't have a clue what's going on) and not worry that I'm going to end up a social reject. Perhaps this is due to wisdom and confidence coming over time and age but I find it funny though how the fears of the past leave their mark upon the human psyche and also how as a member of the white middle class I've never had to be too concerned about my survival but can spend hours fretting about my social acceptance.
If I could go back in time to when I was worrying about how I could be seen as "cool" or whinging about the fact I wasn't, I'd tell myself that the truly cool are those that don't give a shit about how they are viewed. Even if this geek chic culture dies I'll not ashamed of my "uncool" hobbies. I've learned that these hobbies can be a source of intrigue about your character. Although these days my geekiness lies mainly with playing Magic the Gathering, spending too much time on the internet/playing computer games and hanging about with the crowds that do these best, I've learned I can make these seem interesting to other people with colourful explanation, confidence and passion. Some of the most successful, social and interesting people I know are geeks who aren't afraid to play a grown up version of pokemon cards whilst supping a pint. And whilst I've never played geeky games to enhance my pulling potential, I'll never fear that I won't be getting laid for being a geek.
Apart from being superheroes what have Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Batman and Ghost Rider got in common? I've pulled girls wearing t-shirts of them. Shame I couldn't do that when I was 16..
Next time: Q-Con 2010 review
There's a debate thats existed for sometime about the differences between a nerd and a geek. To be honest, I'm not quite sure which is which. From what I gather, the nerd is supposed to the super intelligent, estudious type that has pseudo (or in some cases full blown) aspergers syndrome like symptoms. This is your scientist type that gets hired by NASA to design a new satellite or your computer programmer genius. Geeks on the other hand are the Star Trek/Star Wars loving roleplayer that spends too many hours on Halo. Of course the two often mix and match, hence the characters we see in shows like the Big Bang theory end up being both.
Recently, it kind of became cool to be a geek. With Superhero films, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter taking off in the 00s, women got as sucked into a pop culture that was usually aimed at men. Whilst perhaps the majority of women would have boy band members, sport stars or actors as pin ups, all traditionally "buff" and well put together, another proportion of women have began to take interest in the geek. Stars like Adam Brody of The O.C. fame and Tobey Maguire are now seen as attractive and a lot of niche hobbies such as playing computer games, reading comics, watching Star Trek and roleplaying (okay maybe not just yet) have become more acceptable. Indeed a lot of it can be tied with the growth of indie music and the amount of time the Average Joe spends on the internet these days.
As a geek I appreciate this big time. I've been a card carrying geek since I was a kid. From the ages of 10-13 I was playing Warhammer and reading comics. Between 12 and fifteen I was regularly roleplaying and I (in true geek fashion)elected myself president of a magic the gathering club at school. Whether my lack of athleticism as a teenager encouraged this behaviour the behaviour encouraged the lack of athleticism I do not know but back then I had no interest in doing anything physical that wasn't sword fighting with latex swords or backyard wrestling. Whilst this geekiness caused some scorn to be dished out by peers throught those pubescent years, I furthered the level of this scorn in my immaturity by adopting the belief I was the victim and almost promoted that idea by saying and doing things that would have me ridiculed. When I initially started this blog when I was 17 and letting people know about it, I knew full well I was going to be laughed at by about half the school, a self sabotaging part of myself almost wanting this to happen whilst the better part of me grew angry about this outcast status I had brought upon myself, trying to act as if I didn't spend my Saturday afternoons tapping forests for green mana in the back of a dusty old comic shop.
Nowadays I don't have to do that. I can freely admit that whilst I write this I'm watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (though I don't have a clue what's going on) and not worry that I'm going to end up a social reject. Perhaps this is due to wisdom and confidence coming over time and age but I find it funny though how the fears of the past leave their mark upon the human psyche and also how as a member of the white middle class I've never had to be too concerned about my survival but can spend hours fretting about my social acceptance.
If I could go back in time to when I was worrying about how I could be seen as "cool" or whinging about the fact I wasn't, I'd tell myself that the truly cool are those that don't give a shit about how they are viewed. Even if this geek chic culture dies I'll not ashamed of my "uncool" hobbies. I've learned that these hobbies can be a source of intrigue about your character. Although these days my geekiness lies mainly with playing Magic the Gathering, spending too much time on the internet/playing computer games and hanging about with the crowds that do these best, I've learned I can make these seem interesting to other people with colourful explanation, confidence and passion. Some of the most successful, social and interesting people I know are geeks who aren't afraid to play a grown up version of pokemon cards whilst supping a pint. And whilst I've never played geeky games to enhance my pulling potential, I'll never fear that I won't be getting laid for being a geek.
Apart from being superheroes what have Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Batman and Ghost Rider got in common? I've pulled girls wearing t-shirts of them. Shame I couldn't do that when I was 16..
Next time: Q-Con 2010 review
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Ultimate Fighting Championship
If you haven't at least heard of the UFC you've probably been living under a rock. Started in the mid 90s as a spectacle for comparing martial arts against each other, the UFC has gradually developed into a bit of a phenomena across the world by spawning a sport in its own right; Mixed Martial Arts. MMA pits two fighters against each other in a cage who must win in three five minute rounds by knock out, technical knock out, submission or judge's decision. There are some rules mind, these are all fouls:
1. Butting with the head.
2. Eye gouging of any kind.
3. Biting.
4. Hair pulling.
5. Fish hooking.
6. Groin attacks of any kind.
7. Putting a finger into any orifice or into any cut or laceration on an opponent.
8. Small joint manipulation.
9. Striking to the spine or the back of the head.
10. Striking downward using the point of the elbow.
11. Throat strikes of any kind, including, without limitation, grabbing the trachea.
12. Clawing, pinching or twisting the flesh.
13. Grabbing the clavicle.
14. Kicking the head of a grounded opponent.
15. Kneeing the head of a grounded opponent.
16. Stomping a grounded opponent.
17. Kicking to the kidney with the heel.
18. Spiking an opponent to the canvas on his head or neck.
19. Throwing an opponent out of the ring or fenced area.
20. Holding the shorts or gloves of an opponent.
21. Spitting at an opponent.
22. Engaging in an unsportsmanlike conduct that causes an injury to an opponent.
23. Holding the ropes or the fence.
24. Using abusive language in the ring or fenced area.
25. Attacking an opponent on or during the break.
26. Attacking an opponent who is under the care of the referee.
27. Attacking an opponent after the bell has sounded the end of the period of unarmed combat.
28. Flagrantly disregarding the instructions of the referee.
29. Timidity, including, without limitation, avoiding contact with an opponent, intentionally or consistently dropping the mouthpiece or faking an injury.
30. Interference by the corner.
31. Throwing in the towel during competition.
Even with the rules present, the sport ends up looking completely brutal from a casual spectator's view for Ground and Pound being allowed; a fighter can attack an opponent who has already been knocked off their feet by a strike or kick or rugby tackle-like take down.
In its defence, ground and pound either leads to a quick knock out or by a referee calling Technical Knock out from a multitude of undefended punches. A quick out is probably much better for your brain than fifteen rounds of being punched by a big black guy wearing 16 OZ gloves.
So why do I like the UFC? Well the show is presented kind of like WWE for big boys. Instead of yelling our support for some loud mouthed American redneck roid lover, we're crossing our fingers for some quiet spoken Brazillian like karate expert Lyoto Machida or Muay Thai superstar Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. Instead of looking for the power bomb finish, we're egging on two technically gifted athletes who place punches right inside the pocket or put a perfect rear naked choke on their opponent. For those that understand it, ground game isn't always boring - we're looking for that perfect moment when someone finds just the right moment and technique to inflict punishment on their opponent. Of course two half naked men hugging each other looks just a little gay, which puts a lot of people off but once you are comfortable in knowing they're actually trying to hurt each other by a means other than buggery or by giving their opponent a hicky you might appreciate it more.
Another great thing about UFC Is that it's always on at silly o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That means you can either stay up drinking and watching it or you can streamed the day after in order to provide entertainment when one has a raging hangover.
In my next post I'm going to talk the upcoming UFC fight and the status of the light heavyweight division.
If you haven't at least heard of the UFC you've probably been living under a rock. Started in the mid 90s as a spectacle for comparing martial arts against each other, the UFC has gradually developed into a bit of a phenomena across the world by spawning a sport in its own right; Mixed Martial Arts. MMA pits two fighters against each other in a cage who must win in three five minute rounds by knock out, technical knock out, submission or judge's decision. There are some rules mind, these are all fouls:
1. Butting with the head.
2. Eye gouging of any kind.
3. Biting.
4. Hair pulling.
5. Fish hooking.
6. Groin attacks of any kind.
7. Putting a finger into any orifice or into any cut or laceration on an opponent.
8. Small joint manipulation.
9. Striking to the spine or the back of the head.
10. Striking downward using the point of the elbow.
11. Throat strikes of any kind, including, without limitation, grabbing the trachea.
12. Clawing, pinching or twisting the flesh.
13. Grabbing the clavicle.
14. Kicking the head of a grounded opponent.
15. Kneeing the head of a grounded opponent.
16. Stomping a grounded opponent.
17. Kicking to the kidney with the heel.
18. Spiking an opponent to the canvas on his head or neck.
19. Throwing an opponent out of the ring or fenced area.
20. Holding the shorts or gloves of an opponent.
21. Spitting at an opponent.
22. Engaging in an unsportsmanlike conduct that causes an injury to an opponent.
23. Holding the ropes or the fence.
24. Using abusive language in the ring or fenced area.
25. Attacking an opponent on or during the break.
26. Attacking an opponent who is under the care of the referee.
27. Attacking an opponent after the bell has sounded the end of the period of unarmed combat.
28. Flagrantly disregarding the instructions of the referee.
29. Timidity, including, without limitation, avoiding contact with an opponent, intentionally or consistently dropping the mouthpiece or faking an injury.
30. Interference by the corner.
31. Throwing in the towel during competition.
Even with the rules present, the sport ends up looking completely brutal from a casual spectator's view for Ground and Pound being allowed; a fighter can attack an opponent who has already been knocked off their feet by a strike or kick or rugby tackle-like take down.
In its defence, ground and pound either leads to a quick knock out or by a referee calling Technical Knock out from a multitude of undefended punches. A quick out is probably much better for your brain than fifteen rounds of being punched by a big black guy wearing 16 OZ gloves.
So why do I like the UFC? Well the show is presented kind of like WWE for big boys. Instead of yelling our support for some loud mouthed American redneck roid lover, we're crossing our fingers for some quiet spoken Brazillian like karate expert Lyoto Machida or Muay Thai superstar Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. Instead of looking for the power bomb finish, we're egging on two technically gifted athletes who place punches right inside the pocket or put a perfect rear naked choke on their opponent. For those that understand it, ground game isn't always boring - we're looking for that perfect moment when someone finds just the right moment and technique to inflict punishment on their opponent. Of course two half naked men hugging each other looks just a little gay, which puts a lot of people off but once you are comfortable in knowing they're actually trying to hurt each other by a means other than buggery or by giving their opponent a hicky you might appreciate it more.
Another great thing about UFC Is that it's always on at silly o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That means you can either stay up drinking and watching it or you can streamed the day after in order to provide entertainment when one has a raging hangover.
In my next post I'm going to talk the upcoming UFC fight and the status of the light heavyweight division.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Clash of the Titans
A brief(ish) note on my moving reviewing system
At the minute when I review films they are only movies in the cinema. The rating I give to a movie in the cinema refers to the cinema viewing experience. By that I mean that some films were made to be big screen blockbusters and when done right they can be truly entertaining. Sometimes one of these films is so cheesy they are good. Other films were never meant in that fashion and are good because they utilize good film making technique. Michael Bay's Transformers was a terrible film; cheesy writing, mediocre acting and a paper-thin plot but yet if you watch it in the cinema guzzling down a gallon of carbonated suagar water and tossing high quantities of e-numbers into your mouth, you can break the nasty spell of a hangover pretty successfully.
Obviously this means that a rating I would give to a movie is not the same as I would give to a piece of good film. The original Terminator is in many ways groundbreaking. The use of suspense, fear and action are brilliant. It's a film I can watch multiple times over. The fourth film in the franchise, Terminator Salvation is nothing special. There is nothing new about it. Christian Bale plays Batman.. sorry, himself - an angry young Welsh man who yells at people on set with a husky voice. That doesn't mean it isn't a half decent download-from-piratebay-get-high-and-watch-on-a-midweek-night movie. It just can't compare. I might rate them 4 stars each based on the viewing experience I had at the time but they may still mean different things.
Again, if I were reviewing DVDs, the rating system would be entirely different. A DVD has to have longevity, replay value, excellent film craftsmanship. I've got to want to spend money and space on my shelf for it to be worth it. For that reason City of God gets ***** whilst Bad Boys II gets **. If I went to the cinema to see either of them, the scores might be swapped. That being said Cidade de Deus will always be a treat. With no more confusing mumble to get through, here's my review of Clash of the Titans.
--
Movie Conditions: One joint smoked between three people, pick n' mix to the balls, pain meds to handle the circumcision (more on that in a later post), film was in 3D
Synopsis: Greek legend Perseus seeks revenge for the demise of his family at the hands of the dark God Hades and must go on an epic quest with a band of warriors who must stop the Kraken before it destroys Argost (the Greek city, not the catalogue based retail chain)
First off if you're looking for depth, look elsewhere. Just as Avatar was Ferngully in Space (or Ocarina of Time meets the Matrix), this is Gladiator meets Hercules. Yes, I am well aware that it is a remake of a 1981 film, but I never saw that so I prefer to draw comparisons from films I actually have seen. You kind of know what to expect with this kind of film. It's very much of the fantasy genre. You already know the soundtrack - dramatic bassy strings and the occasional clash of cymbal when somebody swings a sword. It's no Lord of the Rings - it's more like like live action Heroquest. If that reference is too early 90s for you then it's God of War the movie. If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, roll some percentile dice and you've found out pretty much the monsters the characters end up fighting.
That's partly because the characters are pretty much the same throughout the film. There's a benevolent princess that cares for the people and is wiser than her God angering parents, there's the warriors out of 300 who thankfully have decided to get dressed this time round, then there's some Turkish guys who go around hunting beasts and make kebabs. As for the Gods, Liam Neeson does his "I'm so wise and shiny" bit and the bad guy may as well have been referred to as "He who must not be named" Fucking Voldemort.
From what you've read, I may not sound too enthusiastic about the film but that's because there's nothing about this film that will blow you away. Once it gets over the slow start it ends up being damned good fun.
I like sword and sorcerey tales and this film gives one with gusto and solid pace. Character development is not long and drawn out; you get about three lines of backstory to each face and that's it. You're not looked upon to identify with the characters. There's no complex message about the nature of morality hidden in some dispute between Smeagol and the hobits's's's and you can't relly apply the religious themes of the film to real life. It's just Star Wars in AncieNT Greece with Chewbacca made out of wood.
My one bit of advice about this is that unlike Avatar seeing this film in 3D has no benefit to your viewing experience. In fact at times I felt that it made the film look more 2D. Ever seen one of those Christmas cards where the background is on the card itself then other stuff is stuck onto the foreground to make it look 3D. That's what this film looks like in 3D sometimes. It's as if you can see the projection of the blue screen background then there's moving pieces of paper. You can see the edge of people in a way.
I'm gonna give it a decent 3 and a half muffs out of 5.
In my next blog entry I'm going to talk more about that crazy operation of mine, show you some VLOGs and maybe review Kick Ass (which actually just plain kicks ass).
A brief(ish) note on my moving reviewing system
At the minute when I review films they are only movies in the cinema. The rating I give to a movie in the cinema refers to the cinema viewing experience. By that I mean that some films were made to be big screen blockbusters and when done right they can be truly entertaining. Sometimes one of these films is so cheesy they are good. Other films were never meant in that fashion and are good because they utilize good film making technique. Michael Bay's Transformers was a terrible film; cheesy writing, mediocre acting and a paper-thin plot but yet if you watch it in the cinema guzzling down a gallon of carbonated suagar water and tossing high quantities of e-numbers into your mouth, you can break the nasty spell of a hangover pretty successfully.
Obviously this means that a rating I would give to a movie is not the same as I would give to a piece of good film. The original Terminator is in many ways groundbreaking. The use of suspense, fear and action are brilliant. It's a film I can watch multiple times over. The fourth film in the franchise, Terminator Salvation is nothing special. There is nothing new about it. Christian Bale plays Batman.. sorry, himself - an angry young Welsh man who yells at people on set with a husky voice. That doesn't mean it isn't a half decent download-from-piratebay-get-high-and-watch-on-a-midweek-night movie. It just can't compare. I might rate them 4 stars each based on the viewing experience I had at the time but they may still mean different things.
Again, if I were reviewing DVDs, the rating system would be entirely different. A DVD has to have longevity, replay value, excellent film craftsmanship. I've got to want to spend money and space on my shelf for it to be worth it. For that reason City of God gets ***** whilst Bad Boys II gets **. If I went to the cinema to see either of them, the scores might be swapped. That being said Cidade de Deus will always be a treat. With no more confusing mumble to get through, here's my review of Clash of the Titans.
--
Movie Conditions: One joint smoked between three people, pick n' mix to the balls, pain meds to handle the circumcision (more on that in a later post), film was in 3D
Synopsis: Greek legend Perseus seeks revenge for the demise of his family at the hands of the dark God Hades and must go on an epic quest with a band of warriors who must stop the Kraken before it destroys Argost (the Greek city, not the catalogue based retail chain)
First off if you're looking for depth, look elsewhere. Just as Avatar was Ferngully in Space (or Ocarina of Time meets the Matrix), this is Gladiator meets Hercules. Yes, I am well aware that it is a remake of a 1981 film, but I never saw that so I prefer to draw comparisons from films I actually have seen. You kind of know what to expect with this kind of film. It's very much of the fantasy genre. You already know the soundtrack - dramatic bassy strings and the occasional clash of cymbal when somebody swings a sword. It's no Lord of the Rings - it's more like like live action Heroquest. If that reference is too early 90s for you then it's God of War the movie. If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, roll some percentile dice and you've found out pretty much the monsters the characters end up fighting.
That's partly because the characters are pretty much the same throughout the film. There's a benevolent princess that cares for the people and is wiser than her God angering parents, there's the warriors out of 300 who thankfully have decided to get dressed this time round, then there's some Turkish guys who go around hunting beasts and make kebabs. As for the Gods, Liam Neeson does his "I'm so wise and shiny" bit and the bad guy may as well have been referred to as "He who must not be named" Fucking Voldemort.
From what you've read, I may not sound too enthusiastic about the film but that's because there's nothing about this film that will blow you away. Once it gets over the slow start it ends up being damned good fun.
I like sword and sorcerey tales and this film gives one with gusto and solid pace. Character development is not long and drawn out; you get about three lines of backstory to each face and that's it. You're not looked upon to identify with the characters. There's no complex message about the nature of morality hidden in some dispute between Smeagol and the hobits's's's and you can't relly apply the religious themes of the film to real life. It's just Star Wars in AncieNT Greece with Chewbacca made out of wood.
My one bit of advice about this is that unlike Avatar seeing this film in 3D has no benefit to your viewing experience. In fact at times I felt that it made the film look more 2D. Ever seen one of those Christmas cards where the background is on the card itself then other stuff is stuck onto the foreground to make it look 3D. That's what this film looks like in 3D sometimes. It's as if you can see the projection of the blue screen background then there's moving pieces of paper. You can see the edge of people in a way.
I'm gonna give it a decent 3 and a half muffs out of 5.
In my next blog entry I'm going to talk more about that crazy operation of mine, show you some VLOGs and maybe review Kick Ass (which actually just plain kicks ass).
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Stop faffing, just write
Currently listening to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShN16Rs4GU
“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
- Stanley Kubrick
In the early 90s, Sportswear giant Nike ran a massive advertising campaign on the back of the slogan 'Just do it'.
As corporate as it is, this simple but effective phrase has a motivational appeal that could applied to just about everything - in the Nike sense, saying "fuck it, I will go for a run" (and thereby buying sportswear) to the Vattican "don't use condoms", its psychological appeal holds a lot of value. I could easily write an essay on how good this campaign was, or even how just how good this phrase is in general. Ever liked the idea of doing something but made up reasons why you shouldn't or "can't". Are you the type of person that talks themselves out of their goals easily? Then don't self-analyse too much; just do it.
That's what's taken me to write again. Having nothing worth writing about is hardly an excuse for me to fall out of practice. I'm going to fire off on herbally-encouraged tangents, with the whole "Just do it" as a kind of theme fitting somewhere in there.
I was walking through the centre of Belfast the other day and kept seeing white stickers stuck on lamp posts, traffic lights and railings with a website address on them. It wasn't the first time I've seen these stickers but it was the first time I could be bothered making a note of the url to check later. If you want it, it's
www.duderay.blogspot.com
Another Belfast blogger, the type of guy that writes a brief few paragraphs more or less daily on what he's done in his life. A lot of people find that shit boring.
"Why would I want to read what happened in somebody else's life when I could be living my own"
But to a lot of people that's popular. Soaps are hardly popular for the amazing acting appeal of its stars. Good looks might generate interest in an audience but the thing that sells soaps most is the fact you can watch it and turn off. The predominantly female audiences can get absorbed in some absolute mush about poorly developed fictional characters who have so much more excitement than the viewer does but that vague sense of the real world so we can kind of relate to the charcters.
Now you can try and argue otherwise. You might say:
"Oh but Hollyoaks deals with real life issues, like drugs!"
But face it, Hollyoaks deal's with real life issues with as much depth as a vole's vagina.
From what I gather what I've read of Duderay's blog, most of the stuff seems to involve either shoplifting or being on the dole. I could sit here and mock the guy's pitiful attempts to live life at the max but I get this cold feeling that the writer isn't some West Belfast spide but some vaguely artistic bum still living in a student gaff and unable to find a worthwhile job. Somebody who isn't going to settle for some call centre bullshit like I have and would rather stay at home spending the dole and housing benefit on rent, bags of grass and tins of baked beans to fuel the all night halo sessions. In fact he's probably someone I know.
Now don't worry, I'm not adocating a life of living off the government, I'm just not going to judge you for it if that's what you want to do. Sometimes doing no job is better than doing a job that you hate because for most of us there is only so much crap you can take.
I did my fair share of being on the dole in the Summer. For the first Summer in three years I wasn't able to grab a job straight away. I didn't have the hook ups and due to the recession there wasn't such a superfluous supply of jobs. Recruitment agencies for a while didn't get you signed up because unlike previous years where they were crying out for just about anybody, they had to be selective. I had to admit I had the odd adventure on the dole.
Sure I had some good times; barbeques in meadows, road accidents, hardcore drug raves but at the end of the day a lot of time was spent in the house looking for jobs and watching day time television. Somehow I got it inside my head that it would be more constructive to spend the time working, so I ended up taking the first jobs I was offered. This started with sporadic kitchen porter work. This wasn't too bad if a kitchen had craic, or eye candy but the majority of the kitchens I worked in didn't have a fun environment. They were the type of people that said "Works not meant to be fun" and lived by it.
I can't stand that kind of mentality. You spend around a third of your life working from the moment you start working to the day you die. That's a heck of a lot of time not to be enjoying yourself. What if you hate it and have to take the bitterness from doing it home. That's no way to live.
Thats why I'm glad I did the next temp job: Late night stock replenisher in Sainsburys. Basically for two weeks I stacked shelves between the hours of 22:00 and 08:00 (10 pm and 8 am to those too spastic to understand 24 hour clock - yes, they do exist!). Why was this a good job? Well partly this was because I got a taste for being a night person for a while, because there was temp staff you could have a laugh with and thirdly because the job wasn't one where you were under some sort of strict time constraint to get things done. I mean on some nights I worked by plumbs off, merely because with a little help from my 4th gen iPod I'd tuned my brain into the Prodigy and aggressive but (in my head) stylish shelf stacking dealt with a vicious hangover that was caused from the Saturday night/Sunday morning drinking sessions. On top of that the pay was good and I had two of my friends signed up to the agency working alongside me on the second week of the job, meaning we could have bread fights and just general banter. The full time staff came to love us as we were friendly, knew where everything belonged and spoke the same language. It got to the point where I had a sitcom writen in my head about the place.
It'd be called the temp staff.
Those two weeks were basically the opening weeks of a new Sainsburys branch up West Belfast (where Curlys used to be) and the excitement it had attracted was far more than expected. People showed up in droves to buy their edible produce from a British supermarket chain in the middle of Nationalist territory. Go figure, as American teenagers might put it. So the agencies called in loads of us and paid us a tidy £7.00-£7.50 an hour (depending on agency) plus holiday hours to do the overnight shift. By loads of us I mean a huge mix of people. There were your dependable Eastern European workers, who take any job and do it well, to your undependable East Belfast smick who spends most of the time skiving playing with his phone in the cubicle. Then you had some semi-retired folks who were doing this and that here and there to save for Christmas. You had students girls who just bumbled around working at a slow but steady speed. It was just a place of funny interactions and alcohol drank from thermoflasks on 3:30 AM lunch breaks. Those were a fun two weeks. I even asked a girl out sober at like 6 in the morning. Though she kind of thought I was asking her and her friends out for sociable drinks. Ahhh dear. My romantic shapings were for naught.
About a week after the temp staff were no longer needed I decided I'd quiz the recruitment agencies again. Upon asking, Brook Street gave me an outbound courtesy call job in my old call centre. It'd be easy. Montonous in that I had to ring a bare minimum of 30 people an hour to ask if they'd received their furniture, but still easy enough. I almost got fired from doing it about three times in the first month because it was that easy I believed I could afford to fuck around. I had to talk the boss into not firing me on the first hour because I was doing dumb accents. Imagine Borat ringing you at 10:30 AM asking you had you received your bed from Dreams and making sure it was "Very nice!" or some wierdo from Cork (Southern Ireland, where they say tirty tree). Then a few times I was late, scruffy, hungover, making personal calls for twenty minutes at the time.. Yet they liked me so much they decided when that work dried up they would take me on to customer service. Back in my old job.
Now I could deal with this job if they kept it simple. They kept it Customer Service, in which you're taking an average between 60-90 calls a day. Yet they couldn't do that, they had to add more and more skill sets on. So within 4 months my work load had exceeded the quota'd 90 calls to 150. That's non-stop calls on a temp staff wage. I'm a graduate, we're supposed to aspire to something a little more than £6 an hour to mentally shovel a company's shit all day. That's what customer service is for the most part, menial little tasks to keep customers happy and the company look good but peddling the company line all the while. So if a customer has incurred four years compound interest at a rate of 29.8% APR or not given the customer to change the Direct Debit Date to some system issue, you just had to tell them straight "Sorry Mrs Peasoup but I cannot do this, therefore you incur a £30 charge". The average call is someone ringing up to pay the bill. Each time they pay by credit card its 4% of the payment and £3 for debit card. I'd be fuming if I had to pay £3 to pay a bill, it's like Ryanair who just plain take the piss by slapping £20 onto your ticket because it suits them on a whim. I said just do it whenever I took the job, now I'm saying "Just do it" to quit.
Because I'm not enjoying it and there are other things in my life I have to deal with and what I've gained from doing that job has been slight. Despite living in the parents house I've saved a measily £800 from working since September. Apart from allowing me to meet some characters (more about them at a later date), there were only two things worth keeping that job for.
The first one is I was able to stay home and do stuff around the house when my parents need me most. Don't give yourself a chance to regret this in later life. If you have family that need help, at least be around them, do a little here and there. Try and absorb their loneliness in dark times. I don't want to get into anymore about it, so I won't. Here's the second thing:
Developing hobbies. If a job is a waste of your time, talent and soul then it becomes very easy to spend your money drinking and having other hobbys to forget you're spending that third of your life in hell.
So I found a couple of destressing hobbies, one was trading card gaming, which I can get into more depth later but the main one I shall give you an overview of the other; Muay Thai.
Muay Thai if you haven't heard about it is otherwise known as Thai boxing. The deadly art of 8 limbs consists of punches, kicks, elbow strikes, knees and clinching. Its history dates hundreds of years back but it has continued to evolve over time, incorporating elements of Western boxing alongside the traditional style Muay Boran still used by the Thai army. It's used brutally in Mixed Martial Arts tournaments such as the UFC and is this decades physical craze. Early 00s you had Parkour/Free Running, late 00s/early 10s is all about fighting again.
I mean check this guy out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZkgcwn42I
That's Anderson Silva. Look at the headkicks, look at the clinches and the knees. That's what I'm learning to do. In terms of "Just Do It", Muay Thai is what I drag my hungover ass to after work on a Monday afteroon. The thing that allows me to put the undiluted rage built up over 8 hours in the debt factory into a punch bag and leave me fresh enough to go to Monday club.
I'd video myself training, but I think its better to leave that to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7gPoU8TFcE
I am Fighter is huge in Norn Iron because it not only mocks the MMA craze (on that note, as someone who trains in muay thai, there is nothing I enjoy more than kicking the guy wearing a t-shirt with Chuck Liddell's face on it right in the ribs) but does a brilliant send up of less than smart Ballymena folks. The main character "Barry the Blender" Henderson is played by Colin Geddis, who on one of his previous videos delivered the Kubrick quote I have at the beginning.
As film students they figured they can make a viral video more influentual than a dog humping a teddy bear and in a way it has. Whilst I'm sure millions have people may have seen stupid shit like dogs trying to hump legs its not going to be as culturally defining as I AM FIGHTER.
I remember when Norn Irish sitcom "Give My Head Peace" before they went into seven seasons of the same crap. Back then they had two really entertaining seasons. Everyone in Northern Ireland quoted the show on a day to day basis, or made reference to it in some respect. It's the same for I Am Fighter. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, we really don't care. If anything that strengthens our local cultural identity - it's something we all share in common. Which is why I might say it in irony but secretly mean it..
RA-RA-WHADDABOUTCHE?!
Anyway, the place I'm going with this is that I still intend on making some viral videos. Maybe 5-10 minute pieces but I'd be looking for a crew to help me put them together. Anyone interested, please feel free to comment on this post. In an entirely non-sexual way, lets just do it.
In the next posted expect a review of Clash of the Titans and my first few attempts at making videos with an exceedingly shite webcam.
Currently listening to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShN16Rs4GU
“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
- Stanley Kubrick
In the early 90s, Sportswear giant Nike ran a massive advertising campaign on the back of the slogan 'Just do it'.
As corporate as it is, this simple but effective phrase has a motivational appeal that could applied to just about everything - in the Nike sense, saying "fuck it, I will go for a run" (and thereby buying sportswear) to the Vattican "don't use condoms", its psychological appeal holds a lot of value. I could easily write an essay on how good this campaign was, or even how just how good this phrase is in general. Ever liked the idea of doing something but made up reasons why you shouldn't or "can't". Are you the type of person that talks themselves out of their goals easily? Then don't self-analyse too much; just do it.
That's what's taken me to write again. Having nothing worth writing about is hardly an excuse for me to fall out of practice. I'm going to fire off on herbally-encouraged tangents, with the whole "Just do it" as a kind of theme fitting somewhere in there.
I was walking through the centre of Belfast the other day and kept seeing white stickers stuck on lamp posts, traffic lights and railings with a website address on them. It wasn't the first time I've seen these stickers but it was the first time I could be bothered making a note of the url to check later. If you want it, it's
www.duderay.blogspot.com
Another Belfast blogger, the type of guy that writes a brief few paragraphs more or less daily on what he's done in his life. A lot of people find that shit boring.
"Why would I want to read what happened in somebody else's life when I could be living my own"
But to a lot of people that's popular. Soaps are hardly popular for the amazing acting appeal of its stars. Good looks might generate interest in an audience but the thing that sells soaps most is the fact you can watch it and turn off. The predominantly female audiences can get absorbed in some absolute mush about poorly developed fictional characters who have so much more excitement than the viewer does but that vague sense of the real world so we can kind of relate to the charcters.
Now you can try and argue otherwise. You might say:
"Oh but Hollyoaks deals with real life issues, like drugs!"
But face it, Hollyoaks deal's with real life issues with as much depth as a vole's vagina.
From what I gather what I've read of Duderay's blog, most of the stuff seems to involve either shoplifting or being on the dole. I could sit here and mock the guy's pitiful attempts to live life at the max but I get this cold feeling that the writer isn't some West Belfast spide but some vaguely artistic bum still living in a student gaff and unable to find a worthwhile job. Somebody who isn't going to settle for some call centre bullshit like I have and would rather stay at home spending the dole and housing benefit on rent, bags of grass and tins of baked beans to fuel the all night halo sessions. In fact he's probably someone I know.
Now don't worry, I'm not adocating a life of living off the government, I'm just not going to judge you for it if that's what you want to do. Sometimes doing no job is better than doing a job that you hate because for most of us there is only so much crap you can take.
I did my fair share of being on the dole in the Summer. For the first Summer in three years I wasn't able to grab a job straight away. I didn't have the hook ups and due to the recession there wasn't such a superfluous supply of jobs. Recruitment agencies for a while didn't get you signed up because unlike previous years where they were crying out for just about anybody, they had to be selective. I had to admit I had the odd adventure on the dole.
Sure I had some good times; barbeques in meadows, road accidents, hardcore drug raves but at the end of the day a lot of time was spent in the house looking for jobs and watching day time television. Somehow I got it inside my head that it would be more constructive to spend the time working, so I ended up taking the first jobs I was offered. This started with sporadic kitchen porter work. This wasn't too bad if a kitchen had craic, or eye candy but the majority of the kitchens I worked in didn't have a fun environment. They were the type of people that said "Works not meant to be fun" and lived by it.
I can't stand that kind of mentality. You spend around a third of your life working from the moment you start working to the day you die. That's a heck of a lot of time not to be enjoying yourself. What if you hate it and have to take the bitterness from doing it home. That's no way to live.
Thats why I'm glad I did the next temp job: Late night stock replenisher in Sainsburys. Basically for two weeks I stacked shelves between the hours of 22:00 and 08:00 (10 pm and 8 am to those too spastic to understand 24 hour clock - yes, they do exist!). Why was this a good job? Well partly this was because I got a taste for being a night person for a while, because there was temp staff you could have a laugh with and thirdly because the job wasn't one where you were under some sort of strict time constraint to get things done. I mean on some nights I worked by plumbs off, merely because with a little help from my 4th gen iPod I'd tuned my brain into the Prodigy and aggressive but (in my head) stylish shelf stacking dealt with a vicious hangover that was caused from the Saturday night/Sunday morning drinking sessions. On top of that the pay was good and I had two of my friends signed up to the agency working alongside me on the second week of the job, meaning we could have bread fights and just general banter. The full time staff came to love us as we were friendly, knew where everything belonged and spoke the same language. It got to the point where I had a sitcom writen in my head about the place.
It'd be called the temp staff.
Those two weeks were basically the opening weeks of a new Sainsburys branch up West Belfast (where Curlys used to be) and the excitement it had attracted was far more than expected. People showed up in droves to buy their edible produce from a British supermarket chain in the middle of Nationalist territory. Go figure, as American teenagers might put it. So the agencies called in loads of us and paid us a tidy £7.00-£7.50 an hour (depending on agency) plus holiday hours to do the overnight shift. By loads of us I mean a huge mix of people. There were your dependable Eastern European workers, who take any job and do it well, to your undependable East Belfast smick who spends most of the time skiving playing with his phone in the cubicle. Then you had some semi-retired folks who were doing this and that here and there to save for Christmas. You had students girls who just bumbled around working at a slow but steady speed. It was just a place of funny interactions and alcohol drank from thermoflasks on 3:30 AM lunch breaks. Those were a fun two weeks. I even asked a girl out sober at like 6 in the morning. Though she kind of thought I was asking her and her friends out for sociable drinks. Ahhh dear. My romantic shapings were for naught.
About a week after the temp staff were no longer needed I decided I'd quiz the recruitment agencies again. Upon asking, Brook Street gave me an outbound courtesy call job in my old call centre. It'd be easy. Montonous in that I had to ring a bare minimum of 30 people an hour to ask if they'd received their furniture, but still easy enough. I almost got fired from doing it about three times in the first month because it was that easy I believed I could afford to fuck around. I had to talk the boss into not firing me on the first hour because I was doing dumb accents. Imagine Borat ringing you at 10:30 AM asking you had you received your bed from Dreams and making sure it was "Very nice!" or some wierdo from Cork (Southern Ireland, where they say tirty tree). Then a few times I was late, scruffy, hungover, making personal calls for twenty minutes at the time.. Yet they liked me so much they decided when that work dried up they would take me on to customer service. Back in my old job.
Now I could deal with this job if they kept it simple. They kept it Customer Service, in which you're taking an average between 60-90 calls a day. Yet they couldn't do that, they had to add more and more skill sets on. So within 4 months my work load had exceeded the quota'd 90 calls to 150. That's non-stop calls on a temp staff wage. I'm a graduate, we're supposed to aspire to something a little more than £6 an hour to mentally shovel a company's shit all day. That's what customer service is for the most part, menial little tasks to keep customers happy and the company look good but peddling the company line all the while. So if a customer has incurred four years compound interest at a rate of 29.8% APR or not given the customer to change the Direct Debit Date to some system issue, you just had to tell them straight "Sorry Mrs Peasoup but I cannot do this, therefore you incur a £30 charge". The average call is someone ringing up to pay the bill. Each time they pay by credit card its 4% of the payment and £3 for debit card. I'd be fuming if I had to pay £3 to pay a bill, it's like Ryanair who just plain take the piss by slapping £20 onto your ticket because it suits them on a whim. I said just do it whenever I took the job, now I'm saying "Just do it" to quit.
Because I'm not enjoying it and there are other things in my life I have to deal with and what I've gained from doing that job has been slight. Despite living in the parents house I've saved a measily £800 from working since September. Apart from allowing me to meet some characters (more about them at a later date), there were only two things worth keeping that job for.
The first one is I was able to stay home and do stuff around the house when my parents need me most. Don't give yourself a chance to regret this in later life. If you have family that need help, at least be around them, do a little here and there. Try and absorb their loneliness in dark times. I don't want to get into anymore about it, so I won't. Here's the second thing:
Developing hobbies. If a job is a waste of your time, talent and soul then it becomes very easy to spend your money drinking and having other hobbys to forget you're spending that third of your life in hell.
So I found a couple of destressing hobbies, one was trading card gaming, which I can get into more depth later but the main one I shall give you an overview of the other; Muay Thai.
Muay Thai if you haven't heard about it is otherwise known as Thai boxing. The deadly art of 8 limbs consists of punches, kicks, elbow strikes, knees and clinching. Its history dates hundreds of years back but it has continued to evolve over time, incorporating elements of Western boxing alongside the traditional style Muay Boran still used by the Thai army. It's used brutally in Mixed Martial Arts tournaments such as the UFC and is this decades physical craze. Early 00s you had Parkour/Free Running, late 00s/early 10s is all about fighting again.
I mean check this guy out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZkgcwn42I
That's Anderson Silva. Look at the headkicks, look at the clinches and the knees. That's what I'm learning to do. In terms of "Just Do It", Muay Thai is what I drag my hungover ass to after work on a Monday afteroon. The thing that allows me to put the undiluted rage built up over 8 hours in the debt factory into a punch bag and leave me fresh enough to go to Monday club.
I'd video myself training, but I think its better to leave that to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7gPoU8TFcE
I am Fighter is huge in Norn Iron because it not only mocks the MMA craze (on that note, as someone who trains in muay thai, there is nothing I enjoy more than kicking the guy wearing a t-shirt with Chuck Liddell's face on it right in the ribs) but does a brilliant send up of less than smart Ballymena folks. The main character "Barry the Blender" Henderson is played by Colin Geddis, who on one of his previous videos delivered the Kubrick quote I have at the beginning.
As film students they figured they can make a viral video more influentual than a dog humping a teddy bear and in a way it has. Whilst I'm sure millions have people may have seen stupid shit like dogs trying to hump legs its not going to be as culturally defining as I AM FIGHTER.
I remember when Norn Irish sitcom "Give My Head Peace" before they went into seven seasons of the same crap. Back then they had two really entertaining seasons. Everyone in Northern Ireland quoted the show on a day to day basis, or made reference to it in some respect. It's the same for I Am Fighter. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, we really don't care. If anything that strengthens our local cultural identity - it's something we all share in common. Which is why I might say it in irony but secretly mean it..
RA-RA-WHADDABOUTCHE?!
Anyway, the place I'm going with this is that I still intend on making some viral videos. Maybe 5-10 minute pieces but I'd be looking for a crew to help me put them together. Anyone interested, please feel free to comment on this post. In an entirely non-sexual way, lets just do it.
In the next posted expect a review of Clash of the Titans and my first few attempts at making videos with an exceedingly shite webcam.