The Ogres Defeat the Chaos Dwarves

The Ogres remain undefeated as they earn their fourth victory this season.  This time, the wretched Chaos Dwarves taste the bitter gall of defeat.  Victory, however, came at a price as one of the Ogres was killed during the game.  It’s going to be difficult saving up enough gold to buy a replacement with the team’s spiraling expenses.

The Ogres’ first loss is predicted for next week when they play against the seasoned Lizardmen team.  Fast teams have always been a weakness for the Ogres, and with one of the Ogres’ major players out of the game permanently, things are not looking good.

The Ogres are 3-0

Last Saturday the Ogres defeated the Vampire team in a 2-1 victory. The opponent was a little more challenging than the previous two teams. A key move was taking out the 400,000 gp Star Player Count Luthor Von Drackenborg — hired as an inducement to get the beginner Vampire team to play verses the veteran Ogres — early in the game.

The Ogres Win Again

Another victory for the Ogres! This time I paid for it.  I played against the Chaos team, who injured one of my Ogres — my one ST 6 Ogre now has a MV of only 4. Ugh. And this in the first action of the first turn of the game! And my team’s apothecary rolled the exact same result on his healing check! Grrr…

However, revenge came swiftly for the Ogres. Before the first half was over the Ogres had killed three Chaos players! Three! Two of the deaths were prevented by the Chaos apothecaries, but it was still pretty amazing to have so many kills in a game. Even one kill in a game is rare.

Here are a couple of photos from the game. Unfortunately, most of the Chaos players are unpainted, and my Snotlings are still only half-done:

The Ogres Are Back!

I’ve brought my Ogre team back out of semi-retirement and am playing them in the second season of my buddy’s new BloodBowl league. My first game was against the humans, and the Ogres crushed them with a 2-0 final score.

Since my returning team was playing against a newly formed team, my opponents received over a million gold pieces worth of inducements, which made things a little more challenging for me. However, an early game touchback and some lucky die rolls saw me to victory.

Sadly, one of my snotlings was killed during the game — the first kill of the season.

TRON 2 Bootleg Trailer!!!

Woah! It looks like the Tron sequel is real! And here’s a bootleg trailer recorded at Comic-Con 081. And Jeff Bridges is in it!!! This looks awesome!

Personal Forums! Woohoo!

Huzzah! I’ve got my computer hosting my own personal forums!

Early this morning, before work, I installed an Apache HTTP Server 2.2 on my machine, enabling me to serve up web pages over the internet. It was pretty easy for someone with my level of familiarity with computers to install and set up. I was hosting a test web page in no time!

Then I installed the PHP 5.2.6 module for Apache 2.2, which allows my computer to run PHP scripts which are necessary for fancy web-based programs like bulletin boards. This pretty much set itself up for me.

After that I installed MySQL 5.0, a database server. This is needed to store posts people make on my forums.

I installed the MySQL extension for PHP so that PHP-based scripts could access the database. This was a little tricky, but I managed to get it working after remembering that I had to modify the Apache server configuration file to also load the new extension.

Lastly I installed the forum software, configured it, and blammo! Done!

So far I haven’t actually created any proper topics and such for my forums, but I plan on using it to record discussions for some programming ideas with friends.  But it’s pretty cool to have it all up and running from nothing in such a short period of time!

Steampunk Star Wars Customs

Check out some neat, hyper-technological Victorian-era custom Star Wars action figures at Sillof’s Workshop. Very nice!

I like the little tuft of steam coming out of the smokestack on the R2 unit.

This guy has made a lot of other custom stuff, too. The Gaslight Justice League features DC comic superheroes in a late 19th century style. And the Star Wars: 1942 Biker Scout is great!

Wrath of the Lich King Now in Beta

The next expansion to World of Warcraft — named Wrath of the Lich King — is now in Beta. This means it’s likely to be released by Christmas! MMO-Champion.com has tons of information on the upcoming changes.

Looks like Xenomech will be coming out of Stasis in a few months.

Yo, Joe! Wave Nine!

I just got the entire 9th wave of GI Joe figs (on US cards) and the first non-exclusive wave of vehicles from my local collectibles/comic shop Galaxy Comics. Jeremy, the proprietor, gave me a call this morning, letting me new GI Joe stuff was in, and I went over there after work, thinking I would probably be flipping through a bunch of old figures, looking for a few US ones I am still missing from the two past recent waves.

But when I arrived — lo and behold — it was all new! Even the two “filler” figures in the box were ones from old waves that I was missing (each wave typically consists of six new guys, but they send them in boxes of eight, filling the space with figures from previous waves). I offered to buy them all plus the four new vehicles on the spot. Bye-bye spending money for the rest of the month.

This is one of the best waves with such figures as Barbecue, Ninja-Ku, Snow Serpent, and the greates GI Joe action figure ever…

The Battle Android Trooper!

The B.A.T. was my favorite GI Joe action figure when I was a kid. As if being a cool looking robot soldier wasn’t enough: he had four interchangeable hands! The new mold has all the same features as the old one save for an actual recessed chest cavity instead of a holographic sticker.

Cobra always had the coolest guys!

Recipe: Perfect Roasted Almonds

Perfect Roasted Almonds

Ingredients:

• One bag of raw, unblanched almonds (approx 250g).

Directions

1. Preheat conventional oven to 325°F.
2. Spread almonds evenly on a baking pan. You don’t want the pile of almonds in the pan to be more than one almond deep.
3. Roast almonds in oven for one hour.
4. Remove almonds and let them cool.
5. Eat almonds.

These directions should provide you with deliciously roasted almonds that you can add as a flavor accent to brownies and such, or just to eat as a great, healthy snack!