OMG! Game store in Thunder Bay!

Hm, so I guess I'll nerd it up on my blog since I'm at a loss of other nerdy things to do at the moment.

Last Saturday I went to a concert with my mom at my old high school whose theme was video games. Even though I was well aware that I'd be subject to the usual high school concert conditions (babies crying, uncomfortable seating, idiot high school kids hamming it up), I couldn't turn down video game music. About half the songs were from Final Fantasy games, and unfortunately about half of those were from the FFs I haven't played (8, 10-2, 11, and 12). Among the songs I recognized were the generic Zelda and Mario medleys, "To Zanarkand" (FF10), "Aeris' Theme" (FF7), "Red Wings" (FF4) and the Pokemon theme.

Accompanying the Zelda medley was the worst choreographed fight between a guy dressed up as Link and some girl with a scythe (can anyone identify this character? I don't think Ganon(dorf) ever used a scythe). Actually wait, I take that back. "Choreographed" implies that they knew ahead of time what they were doing. What I saw must have been impromptu. Props to that guy for having a good Link costume. I'll finish this topic with ten words: hot high school girls dressed up as video game charcters. Yeah. I know it's wrong too. Wrong and awesome.

I've heard of a few good games lately, one of which is called Cash'n'Guns. Unfortunately, the game seems to not have been picked up by an American publisher and thus can be difficult to find. For some reason (and I really can't remember why I thought to do this), I had the bright idea of constructing the game myself and printing off a copy of the official rules. After some forum research, I found a program that lets you create custom decks (called nanDECK; if you ever need to to create a simple deck for anything, take a look). I also have used Cool Text extensively in the card design. I'm accumulating different guns as they come to me from dollar stores (I'm up to three, I need six).

Before making components for that game, I decided to make a more permanent deck for werewolf. After a little tinkering with card sizes, I've gotten to a finished product. I printed a front side and back side, used an old playing card between them for stiffness and threw them all in a clear plastic card sleeve. Normal printer paper is 20lb, I bought and used 28lb; I suggest using at least 65lb (card stock) if you are going to print a front and back and use a sleeve, otherwise shoot for 110lb if you dont' plan on using a sleeve. Two 28lb sheets are for too flimsy (these are the sorts of things you learn when you feed your nerdy habits).

I went the extra mile and constructed a tuckbox for the deck as well. It was inredibly easy considering I made a friggin' tuckbox on my first try. I used 65lb paper for this which is the heaviest I could find in the house. It's not too bad, but I might track down some 110lb paper for any I make in the future (I likely will; they're very nice looking and an upgrade from elastics).

I went to the Bookshelf (factoid: the website of the Bookshelf is www.thunderbay.com. The city's website is www.thunderbay.ca) today to track down clear plastic card sleeves. I could get 200 on eBay shipped for $5, but I figured it would be cheaper to find some locally. When I parked, I looked for a sign that said "parking for Bookshelf customers". What I saw was "Parking for Gameshelf customers". I looked up at the store next to the Bookshelf. There was no sign, but the door was open. I peered inside, and saw a girl behind a till, a lot of empty space, and a few stands set up with board games. Yes that's right my friends: Thunder Bay is getting a (dedicated) game store! They're not officially open until next weekend (or so they told me), but they sold me my card sleeves. I looked around at the stuff they had set up, but I (stupidly) didn't take note of any of the prices for comparison puposes. I did happen to look at Hive which has caught my attention lately. It had a marked price of under thirty dollars. J&J has their copies marked at $27, so if the rest of their stock has similarly comparable prices, they'll get a lot of my patronage.

Before I found out about the Game Shelf, I figured out a nice little plan to acquire games cheaply. Thought Hammer comes highly recommended on BGG, for good reason. With the Canadian dollar doing as well as it is (or is the US dollar just doing poorly?), it is much cheaper to place an order at TH and get it shipped (free if the purchase is over $125) to Ryden's (a store just across the border that handles packages) which is only about an hour drive away from Thunder Bay. I'd still have to pay some form of taxes crossing the border, but even if I have to pay some sort of fees on top of PST/GST, it would have to be extremely high to not make it worth my while. The prices at TH really are amazing.

Pictures follow:

My werewolf deck, with tuckbox in the background (yeah, I even added some "colour text" to all the role cards).


My table in all its glory (well, not all of it. I obviously don't have the legs folded out at the moment).


A close-up of one of the corners. Isn't that exposed wood rail just breathtaking?

Listening to... Iced Earth - Wolf (I've listened to this song about a dozen times in the last few days)
Link of the moment... My new TV drama fix

My computer's veins once again course with electricity

Yeah, I'm back home. Of course, I have oodles of info to burn through, but not much of it is fresh on my mind.

The trip home was pretty excruciating. I couldn't sleep very well the night before, since I was sleeping on the couch. We got up at 7 and were on the road at about 7:30. Things were going fine until just after the border. We took the wrong highway and started heading towards Detroit. It's a simple mistake to make, trust me. That detour set us back what must have been a little over an hour. Driving was pretty quick through Michigan though, aside from some rain that slowed us down.

A late dinner got us leaving Sault Ste. Marie at about 6PM, much later than we should have been. The real problems arose when it started getting dark out. After passing through Wawa, we saw a lot of moose, and if you hit a moose on the highway, it has a better chance of surviving than you do. So, the rest of the night, we had to drive pretty slowly and at full attention to avoid impending death. We had some issues with gas, too, as we had a really hard time finding a gas station open at night. We rolled into my driveway at about 1:45, making it an 18 hour trip.

I hope that we made Hugh's trip a memorable one. It certainly was fun having him around. We hit up Kakabeka, and he even went up Mt. McKay. We went to Scuttlebutt's and the Brown Street Station (where I met up with Sheena and Veebs, among others). And, of course, some general hang outage.

I've had this real nasty cough for about a week. It's hard to describe, but it's the kind of cough where when you cough, you don't feel any better and so you have to keep coughing. It's been keeping me up at nights and waking me up at all hours. I really can't wait to get rid of it so I can do some real relaxing. I bought a big jug of orange juice, so maybe that will expedite the process.

I bought a Wii! It's given me some good times. Wii Sports is still amazing, but I'm still waiting for some decent games to come my way. I think once some copies of Super Paper Mario hit eBay, I'll scoop one up. Of all the Miis that are populating my system at the moment, Hugh's is most true to reality, while my own is probably in second. Beyond those, I can't seem to make anyone else look that good.

Well, I'm getting tired. Time for point form updates!
-I bought a Wavebird from Cash Converters today
-Apples to Apples went over well with my friends, once again
-I'm going to buy Megaman X Collection tomorrow
-I got a blister from rocking out on my drums; I sounded pretty good
-I'm going to host a games night next Tuesday; I'm hoping to get enough people for a good game of Werewolf
-Heroes on Monday was awesome
-I'm going to see Spiderman 3 this Friday
-I've still got lots of cleaning and sorting to do

Listening to... Orgy - Social Enemies
Link of the moment... Oh, Sam Raimi, is there anything you can't do?

Kevin J in Thunder Bay

Well I'm home. The trip home was more hell than usual. As I said earlier, I decided to stay up all night to get ready for my 5:45 pickup, but unfortunately I wasn't nearly as insomnia-induced as I usually am, so I had a pretty hard time staying up. During the drive to the airport, and the entire flight home, I just wanted to die. When I got home, I slept for six hours, then played Chrono Cross for a while.

I seem to have made a grave miscalculation. I forgot just how much of my time at home is spent playing video games. I only brought back a handful of games with me, thinking that I'd only play them when I have nothing better to do. Unfortunately, CC has its hooks in me and I'll probably be done in a week. I brought Dragon Quest 8, but my (old) PS2 won't play it. It takes upwards of a minute between screens, rendering the game unplayable.

When I first popped in CC, it wouldn't load, despite it being one of my few non-pirated games. I looked online for help, and cleaning the laser with rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip got CC working (though it offerend no help for DQ8).

Only one of my marks is in so far. I got 88 in databases, which I suppose is higher than I thought I'd get. Our group in ENGL119 got 87 on the final project...I don't know if that's just the written part, or the document and presentation. It will account for either 20% or 30% of my final mark. I don't really know where my final mark will sit, though I predict about 80. I have high expaectations for CS234, no less than 90.

Bringing my Zen was definitely smart, since I have no music on this computer. It's good to drum along to as well. I wish I had a DVD burner here to I could take advantage of Video Network's one dollar movie rentals.

Things are hard to get used to the first few days when I get back to Thunder Bay. The kitchen, the stove, the tv channels, the tv remote...lots of little things.

Well I should *try* to get to sleep. I am going to try to get up at 9 and go for breakfast with Adam.

Listening to... The Killers - Smile like you mean it
Link of the moment... One of the only other games I brought home with me

I'm just saying, the first thing I'd think wouldn't be "hey, I should spit on my wiener"

Ho hum. Things are a bit stagnant around here. I should have thought ahead and brought a PC game home to play. I downloaded a few demos, but this computer is a bit too dated to play them.

I had people over the other night. Sheena, Chanel, Grant, Martine, Christina, Adam, John and Julie. I rented 40 Year Old Virgin, but most people had seen it, and Martine had rented Brokeback Mountain, so we watched that instead. Good movie, but it was a bit too deep for me. Nice to watch them on my nice tv and surround sound system (the thunder was so loud!). After that, everyone was too tired to stick around, so the night ended relatively early.

Earlier that day, I went with John and Julie around some of the sights around Thunder Bay. We went for breakfast at the Hoito. She had her first taste of Finnish pancakes, and John and I got the deeeelicious hot turkey sandwich. We noticed some well dressed men come in, and then realized that one of them was none other than the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty.

Afterwards, we went to Eagle Canyon, which houses Canada's longest suspension footbridge. I'll tell ya...not the best place to go on a windy day for anyone afraid of heights. My legs were rather wobbly when we got off. After that, it was a short hop to Ouimet Canyon. Unfortunately, the park is not yet open, so we had to walk 3Km uphill to get to the canyon. That was intensely exhausting and time consuming. We saw the canyon, I threw a few coins off, and then we made the trek back.

Well, I have all my marks back. I got 80 in Real Analysis, which is likely more than I deserve, but about what I was hoping to get. After going into the Linear Optimization exam with a 70 in the class, I walked out with an 86! Much better than I thought. Group Theory is the big shocker: I knew I did well on the exam, but I never expected to get a 98! That lets my average rest at 87 for this term, and conveniently enough, my cumulative average is also exactly 87.

Well, enough gloating...I'm going to go get some lunch.

Listening to... Snapcase - First Word
Link of the moment... Maybe grad studies @ home are the way to go?