Haymaker them in their Turducken!

Sadly, no turducken this year.

My mother-in-law came over early this morning to get started on the feast. Their oven has a few years on ours (maybe 15 or more) so she was very impressed with the speed and accuracy of our oven, and we'll probably be having Thanksgiving at our place rather than theirs in the years to come. We had decided to have it at our place rather than theirs in the first place due to the general difficulty of transporting and storing the baby during the day.

Amanda and I also went to see my mom, and my brother's in town. For a while near the end of the day Miranda had both of her uncles playing with her. It was pretty great.

Claim her in her Amerigroup!

So, I had an interview today for a temp position for Amerigroup, which is an insurance company. They're sending out a bunch of information to Nevada and they're putting together people to field those calls. I think I impressed. It's pretty much the same thing that I was doing at EDS, just Health and Welfare and not Defined Benefits. Blah-dee-blah. Jargon, jargon.

Capsize him in his fish mouth!

Ok, the title thing has already gotten ridiculous. But, like all geniuses I will suffer for my art.

I made pancakes this morning. Pancakes for breakfast is quickly becoming a mote of happiness in my household as they're yummy, easy to make, but still require a bit of work which makes me feel that I've accomplished something. I gave Miranda a few small bits, which she enjoyed and I'm looking forward to having a three-person breakfast.

I got a call today from one of the temp agencies I'm involved with and they have a job lined up for me. It'll just be a 5-week job answering phones for Amerigroup. I'm hardly excited about it, but I'm looking forward to working again. Just some sort of paycheck. I've worked two days since the beginning of August. We're doing ok, but we're one minor misfortune from being hobos. Well, maybe not, but still.

Speaking of Miranda, she's doing quite-well-thanks-for-asking. We're planning on getting Christmas pictures of her taken soon, maybe next week. My mother had planned to do it last month, but obviously couldn't thanks to the accident. We have a dress and hat picked out, and plan on picking up tights and shoes pretty soon. Maybe this weekend.

Shea let me borrow Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth for Xbox... One? Classic? Origional Flavor? Anyway, I own the PC version of it, but didn't get far because it played like I was trying to push the main character through molasses. The XBox version is already much more responsive and I look forward to witnessing Jack Walters spiral into insanity.

Speaking of Call of Chthulu, it's terribly unfortunate that Chaosium has, though the CoC role-playing game and Arham Horror has cemented the form of Lovecraft's creatures. His descriptions of the various entities went into the bizzare and upserd because they were meant to be beyond description. His descriptions were meant to be a gist. A "kinda-sorta" but instead we're subjected to a winged cucumber with a starfish for a head. While I have enjoyed the various games built around ol' H.P.'s work, a Yithian is a stupid thing to behold.

Punch him in the neck!

I'm not sure if all of my blog posts will involve "Violent act vs. part of body" but it would be neat if I could keep it up.

This particular title comes from this evening's Shadowrun session, wherein my Troll attempted to do precisely that. It was unfortunately the only thing my character was able to do before the mage and mystic killed everyone. Let me explain... no there is too much: Let me sum up. My team, or rather the team that I am with (played by Bahie, Shea, Marcus, and Dave respectively) have been hired to protect a pop star named Maria Mercurial, who has been threatened by the Yakuza. We had been hiding out in a safehouse, some of us off doing a few errands: My Troll, Slabber, was out buying Maria a change of clothes. The safehouse was swarmed suddenly by Yakuza and I wasn't able to make it there until the very end, when I suddenly lumbered into the building and punched a guy in the neck. Then that was that. He's pretty amazing with his hands, but Godly with an Assault Rifle, which I haven't been able to have at the right time. Maybe next time.

Shoot 'em in the head!

There are an awful lot of types of Zombies. There are those that are just meat sacks that can be taken out through just physical abuse: Beat them with a crowbar until they stop moving. Then there are those that can only be "killed" with severe damage to the brain, which are my personal favorite and the one's that you see more often. Then the last, and the most severe, are the one's whose parts can continue to move independently of the whole: lopped off arms keep flailing and only through major body-wide trauma can the whole be stopped. True unstoppable zombies.

But I think that's enough about the living dead for today.

Shea came over with his Wii yesterday. I had never actually even touched a Wii till then, and the whole experience was ultimately enjoyable. We played Smash Bros. Brawl, an "On-Rails" shooter like Virtua Cop or House of the Dead called Ghost... Something. It was actually pretty terrible, but the Wii-mote worked very well as a zapper. There was another game, a side scroller shooter (or "Shmup") where you can stick destroyed ships to your own at random angles and what-not. I quickly lost myself behind Shea's contraption which took up almost half of the screen. Suddenly I was a dead and we moved onto something else.

We played though Aegis Wing, which was fun. It seemed like we got an Achievement after every level, which we laughed about. I would like to play it with 4 people sometime.

I was glad he came over. An afternoon of video games is a great way to pep yourself up and Shea's a good guy.

Gotta start somewhere, might as well be with the undead

I've been playing the Left 4 Dead demo a lot this past fortnight (short for fourteen nights, in case you didn't know). Ideally, I'd be saying, "I've been playing Left 4 Dead a lot this past several days" but alas I've been severely unemployed for the past... Christ, four months so the $60 retail on the game plus the $10 for one, $20 for three, or $50 for twelve months of XBox Live Gold that is a requirement for this kind of game is just simply beyond my capacity. I mean, I could drop the month, but then it's no eating. Shame I'm not a zombie, there's food everywhere. Speaking of which: playing the demo has gotten me thinking about Zombies.

Most of the media I consume is associated with them. Or at least involves them in some way. Or, if they don't involve Zombies specifically, then it's about the lifeless trying to destroy the living. There are undead in Diablo 2, which I play very often and just about every screenshot I see of Diablo 3 displays either a zombie or an animated skeleton or a GodDamned WALL of Zombies. I almost wrote just "skeleton" there, but I realized that most people may or should just think of the boney remains of a human corpse, completely inanimate and unassuming. Assuming that there is something unassuming about the skeleton and this isn't an episode of Bones. The definition attached to the word "Skeleton" in my brain is two-fold, 1. The boney remains, blah, blah, blah and 2. the animated skeleton of a once-living thing that means, usually, to do harm to the living. Think Jason and the Argonauts and Army of Darkness.

Actually, don't think Army of Darkness, I honestly don't like it that much. Evil Dead II, which your average freshman in college geek has not seen, but will spout unsubstantiated bullsh*t about how cool/awesome AoD is/was. While I appreciated some aspects of what went down (the fudging of the incantation, and a few of the lines) it just doesn't stand up as a horror or as a comedy to ED2.

Also, I think one of most underappreciated lines in Ghostbusters is when Janine answers the door when the police are dropping off Louis/Vinz Clortho and she asks deadpan, "Picking up or dropping off". I'm not sure exactly why I find it so amusing, probably because she seems so bored asking it and it insinuates a number of amusing interactions with the local law enforcement.

So, in a Zombie Apocalypse scenario, what happens after? Do they just wander around, trying to fill a need that cannot be sated? Maybe they turn on each other. They were once human afterall. I've got some ideas, but I think I'm going to keep them close to the vest for the moment.

Also, I fucking hated 28 Days Later. And Shaun of the Dead. There, I said it.