Things that make you go "Arrr!"

Yo ho ho. My friends and I have become addicted to a trading card game. Now before you picture a bunch of grown men throwing around Pokemon cards, or worse yet, sitting in mom's basement playing Magic the Gathering. We found the game Pirates.

The trading cards are like credit cards that have been laser cut. You punch pieces out of the cards and use the pieces to build boats. Those are your playing pieces. Now with your freshly constructed armada, you attempt to either decimate your opponent, or get all the gold.

This game is from the brilliant mind of James Ernest of Cheap Ass Games. On the top of my list of talented game designers. If you still haven't looked at his site, you should.

This thing appeals to the paper model maker in me. But it also appeals to the game guy in me because each card pack has everything that you need to play the game. So in theory you could just buy one $4 pack and if you don't like the game, never play it again. Or just leave it at the one pack and play it over and over. Oooor you could be like me and my friends and seek out every pack that the company has ever made. Sorry, is my geek showing?

If you would like to know more, check out the Wizkids Pirates! site.

Cheapass Games

Yes I know, "Two posts in a month? Unheard of!"
Cheapass Games Double Secret Website has some very cool stuff for the game player in you. If you look carefully, you will find stuff for the paper geek in you. Card games, board games, dice games, you name it. I especially like the company's mission statement:

Cheapass Games: We Make the Rules.
We here at Cheapass Games are aware of two basic facts about games: they cost too much, and they are at some level all the same.
If you ignore the clever shapes they come in, the cheap little plastic pawns are an interchangeable part of most of the board games in your house. So are the dice, the money, the counters, the pencils, and just about every other random spare part. These generic bits and pieces can account for as much as 75% of a game's production cost, and that cost gets handed to you.
If you had your choice, you'd probably invest a little bit of money in one good set of gaming paraphernalia instead of twenty crappy ones, and then just buy the new part of every "new" game. Yet most companies insist on selling you the whole package every time; it's like bundling a can opener with a can of beans.
Cheapass Games come with the bare essentials: boards, cards, and rulebooks. If you need anything else, we'll tell you. And it's probably something you can scrounge from a game you already own, or buy at a hobby store for less than "they" are charging you for it. Heck, if you need to, you can even buy the parts from us.
And once you've assembled your collection of generic small parts, you can use them for every new Cheapass Game. We've standardized our designs so your gaming toolbox will last. If that sounds pretty good, page through our website and check out all the cool things Cheapass Games has to offer you.

The games are dirt cheap. He even has some orderware games available. This is a wonderful concept. It is like shareware, but if you download the game and like it, he asks that you order a game off the retail site. Wonderful idea.

I also noticed that there hasn't been any activity on the site since August of last year. So let's get some more activity on the site and get it active again.

Urgent New Post- "America's Got Talent Fraud!"

Yes it's been ages since I posted to my blog. Mea Culpa. However I had to post this in the hopes to pass this around.
I believe America's got talent is NOT a true reality TV show!!! They have fabricated drama by way of "contestant tragedies" in the final episodes. The guy who calls himself "Ivan the Urban Action Figure" was either paid to take a dive or perpetrated a fraud on the producers. I'm leaning to the former. To add gravitas to their mediocre "Selection Process" episode, Ivan supposedly fell and and knocked himself unconscious.
But in watching the fall, myself and other circus veterans cry Bullshit. The fall he took is called a toothpick. It is a back fall where you roll up onto your head and keep your body stiff (arms at your sides), you pause at the top and then flop over to your stomach. Ivan does it beautifully.

When he dives into the chairs, at no time does he hit his head. He uses his hands and forearms to move chairs and break his fall as he rotates to his back. And with what's left of his forward momentum, he rolls up into a textbook example of a toothpick. The show claims that during this dangerous stunt he was knocked unconscious. If he was out cold, he wouldn't have rolled over to his back while falling through the chairs to set up the toothpick. The stiff-as-a-board landing that follows is just icing on the fake.

It's bad enough that the media ghouls they have judging the contest insult hardworking entertainers by pretending that a fat Hispanic drag queen or a Bollywood lipsynch hack are worth a million bucks and a leading spot in a show. Equally as bad is that all they are doing is lining it up so that Simon Cowell gets a new recording artist.

Now they insult the performers further to think that they have to fabricate drama, as if their real-life struggles aren't interesting enough. It works for the Olympics.

I believe fraud number two for the night was the singer who had to go back to his cruise ship to perform or his boss would fire him. Firstly, the dressing room he was in was empty and clean. Not possible. If it were a working dressing room there would be makeup boxes, costume pieces, pictures of family tucked into the mirrors, in short, evidence that there were people who used that room for the show on the boat. Second, if you are a singer on a cruise ship, you don't run around during the day in what looks like a ship's porter uniform. And third, if he left that day and the boat had pulled out, how did the TV crew get there? Once more I cry Bullshit.

I have friends and acquaintances who have appeared on this show. Do I think they should headline a show? Just one out of the five, and even then I have reservations. Do I think that they are all hardworking professionals who deserve respect and not to be insulted by those responsible for the show. A resounding yes. Their stories on how they got to where they were are just as interesting and drama filled as any scripted crap they can come up with.

The unfortunate thing is that my regular readership is about three. I need to find a way to get this out. Any Ideas?

To view the fall for yourself, here's the Youtube link.