Month: January 2010
Worldwake
Pre-releases are the second most grueling Magic tournaments behind GPs which are the modern judging analog to working in a coal mine. I slept 9 hours the day before, arrived at the station early and well dressed and received odd stares from those seeing me a scion of the Romanovs with my ushanka, gloves, and dark slacks. The Convention center was crawling with Autoshow people and I assumed my day was going to suck as multi-event security is best described as Kafkaesque. There’s a single entrance to what would be three different events requiring Autoshow security to go at us each time. I landed in the security line, waiting for my chance to employ a combination of supplication and excuse fabrication I now incorrectly call bullshido to avoid a pat-down, when the clouds parted and something amazing happened: I was reviewed by a competent security person.
Him: Ticket please.
Me: I’m here for the Gray Matter Conventions event.
Him: Hm… So you don’t have an Autoshow Ticket. How many of you are there going to be?
Me: A few hundred, but we’ll be going in and out a bit.
Him: Okay, go through… wait. If I have to do this for everyone that’s going to your event, that could take ages.
Me: Yes, it could take a while.
Him: How about we unlock a door past the security station. *shouting* If you’re here for the card jaun, come over here.
30 or 40 of my pasty white card-slinging brethren left the line, emancipated from the tyranny of mini-metal detectors. My people were free. Later when I met up with the rest of the staff we all shared the story of “Tyrell, the Competent Security Guard”. He will be venerated in song.
Age Before Competence
The Worldwake Pre-release is tomorrow and the questions have started. Most involved the new mechanic called “multi-kicker” and the seemingly odd wording of some cards.  Normally I walk the player through the thought process of how the mechanic works to help the player reach the appropriate conclusion. This tends to be somewhat trying but the results save me many questions later. I met my match tonight when a player having seen my normal method preempted my attempts at a guiding explanation with “I’m old, tell me how to play the card”.
Well then.
Age Honesty
Boy Scout events invariably result in repeated trips to Wal-mart. While waiting in line to purchase 30 pounds of rope I saw the following sign:
"40" vs. 18
The age eighteen is properly represented as 18 yet forty is represented as “40”. I wonder if this a sop to women who’ve turned 29 11 times.
Magic Purple Monkey Dishwasher
The shelf immediately to the right of my computer desk represents roughly 90% of my net worth.  With roughly 4 of every card printed from Alpha to Zendikar (that’s chronological not alphabetical) with some glaring exceptions of Arabian Nights, Torment, and Homelands, I’ve been filtering out some excesses that I could sell to buy some burn-time when I’m unemployed.  I purchased someone’s collection this past summer that I’m now dismantling and word of such has gotten around. Today, I received a Facebook message of roughly the following:
“Hey, heard you’re unemployed and selling your collection for gas money. I’ll cut you a break on buy prices.”
What? I did some homework and it turns out the whisper-down-the-lane-style transfer went as such:
Me–>Person #1: I’m selling some cards I got from other people’s collections to fund a trip after I get unemployed.
Person #1–>Person #2: Terry’s selling some stuff from his collection to pay for gas for a trip after he’s unemployed.
Person #2–>Person #3: Terry’s selling his collection to pay for stuff when he’s unemployed.
Person #3–>Person #4: Terry’s unemployed and selling his collection.
False Chew-Out
My productivity has been… below average over the last few days. I encountered some roadblocks that I’ve not had the capacity to tackle in a meaningful way and I just finished a tech project that also made it appear that I was suddenly doing nothing. My boss saw me sitting listlessly reading the forums for a software tool we used and said “I need to talk to you about something later.” Crippling existential dread would probably be the appropriate descriptor to the response I have to such statements. I know I’m being fired in two months, but still, I’d rather go gracefully. I quickly went through the checklist of things I could do right now that my boss could reasonably ask me if I’ve completed and over two hours knocked off three of them. Later, he returned called me into his office and asked the following:
Him: Terry, there’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up with you for a while but just haven’t known how to approach it.
Me: Yes?
Him: Well, to put it bluntly, my mouse sucks. Do you have a recommendation for one?
Me: Yes, the Logitech G500.
Him: *checks Amazon* That looks like it’ll do perfectly. Your usefulness never seems to end.
Text Replacement
Text replacement is a standard technology on mobile devices. Â Each dictionary combines common spelling errors with contact names and some logic based on what keys are near other keys. Â I enjoy cursing, so I got around fuck turning into duck and shit turning into shirt by adding fuck shit as a contact. Â Joe has an Android device which goes the extra step where okie turns into pliers. Â So, if you ever get a message with the text of pliers dokie, you know why.
On my first phone, attempts to type cool were replaced with book and I think the following phrase will pop up to confound future linguists. Â “That’s ducking book, pliers dokie”.
Plagiarism Makes Work
Putting together the paper Bucktail is the most annoying single OA task I do during the year. I receive insufficient content and have to start fabricating expanding on other people’s work and checking factual accuracy out the wazoo. We blow hundreds of dollars in postage, paper, and printing and I have only so many pieces of useless Scout/OA trivia in me to align spaces. My most recent problem was that I had to kill a page on the back of a form. I won’t put useful content there so, in a bolt of inspiration, I went through old Bucktails and found a word find from yesteryear. Everything was fine except that the name of the then lodge adviser was a target. Luckily, the current lodge adviser’s name has the same number of letters so I just swapped the two… until I realized that some of the crossing words may break, so I had to solve the word search to check. I hope we never issue a lodge history cryptogram.
Getting to the Bottom of Dog Health
My dog Max had two tumors removed from his haunches three years ago and we’ve been checking for returns regularly. Over the last year my dad’s been noting the growth of a large… something near where Max’s legs meet his body.  We took him to the vet and my dad asked me to interpret the results:
Dad: Doctor said Max had “excess fat in his subcutaneous tissue”. What do we do about it?
Me: Feed him less and have him get more exercise.
Dad: What’s that going to do about a tumor?
Me: It’s not a tumor.
Dad: Certainly sounds like it.
Me: Dad, the vet’s telling us that Max has a fat ass.
Dad: Oh.
Discovering Salad Again
Homemade salads have eluded me for years. I’d buy a head of iceberg lettuce, some appropriate other pieces and attempt to create a salad. I recognize that salad is simply a glorified way of getting dressing into one’s body but found the repulsive power of lettuce an impediment. In a flash of midnight inspiration, I realized that the fact that the lettuce was iceberg lettuce was the problem. Romaine and I appeared to have always gotten along, so I moved onto the next phase of Operation: Salad 2010 Background: I’ve found the best New Year Resolutions I make to be the ones of the nature “I will try this”. Some have led to life changes, others simply a ticked checkbox. One of my 15 or so items for 2010 was “make my Caesar salad”. I purchased the appropriate pieces and not quite willing to make my own dressing, started with a protosalad of romaine lettuce and Newman’s Own Caesar Salad dressing. I added dressing, checked for coverage, added more, checked again, added more, and I think I hit the right amount of dressing. I reachedthe bottom of the salad bowl and found a kiddie pool’s worth of salad dressing. I then went through 3 more bowls of salad to go through the dressing.
I tried again today and anticipated the dressing trap, used about 1/2 as much, which still resulted in an excess of dressing. I like Ranch dressing as I know when I’ve hit my target, but I can’t differentiate between freshly washed Romaine lettuce and dressing. This may be a rare genetic/social deficiency like my inability to identify antecedents. On the plus side, I’ve gone through two heads of Romaine lettuce trying to master what probably comes to humans naturally. I haven’t been this regular in a while.