Fantasy Football - Epic Matchups

This will probably only appeal to about 12 people out there - those in my fantasy football league, where I am steamrolling to the playoffs. All that stands in my way is......my brother.

Two pictures are worth a million long, smack-talking rants in the forums.

IDIOTIC CRIME OF THE MONTH - "E" For Effort

Here's our third "lucky" contestant for the title of IDIOTIC CRIME OF THE MONTH!!!!

This is another beautiful memory brought to us by the magic of alcohol (I have a Sprecher Abbey Trippel right now, but no spray paint in sight so I should be ok). At 4am, cops noticed a man spray painting the middle of a lane on one of the main streets leading into downtown. He dropped the spray paint and ran inside when he saw them. He answered when the police knocked, and they told him he would be charged for cleaning up the street, and since he reeked of alcohol, would also be arrested for public intoxication if he came back out that night. So obviously he stayed inside, and the story is over.

BUT WAIT!!!!! At 6am, the cops swung back by, and the guy was back out finishing his spray paint masterpiece on the street. As promised, he was arrested for public intoxication and property damage. Obviously this man was a true artist. What was the artistic vision he had, that he absolutely HAD to share with the world, even if it meant arrest, fines, or worse?

Crime of the Month Candidate - The PITA PISSER

It's about time the Arby's masterbator got some competition for IDIOTIC CRIME OF THE MONTH!!!! Again, suspect is innocent until an extremely small amount of work proves him/her guilty...

After an evening of drinking, our gentleman decides to stop at the Pita Pit for a bite to eat (I should thank him for choosing that particular place, it made writing the title so easy). We may never know how much he drank, but it was enough that he forgot 20+ years of potty training. The guy just casually started pissing in the middle of the kitchen area as staff looked on in shock. They called the cops, who fortunately caught him, so we could hear this gem of a statement:

“I regret my actions. They were stupid and not well thought out. I feel sorry for the actions.”

 So, he thought it out a little bit, but just not quite enough to make it work?
BONUS: I guess in an effort to be as thorough as possible, or add some length to the short article, the paper mentioned several times that the police noticed that he smelled of zesty Italian salad dressing, apparantly a key piece of evidence in this case.

Killing Time on the Internet

Let's face it - visiting this blog will not help make you a productive member of society. Knowing this, your only options are to kneel in your closet while giving yourself 200 lashes and begging for forgiveness, or to accept the fact and kill even more precious time reading about MY favorite sites to spend time on. These are the places that get at least weekly visits from me. Now that I don't have cable, I rely on these places to burn my brain to a well-entertained lump of mush.

OK, my $100,000 should start arriving....right about......NOW!!!!

My wife picked up the book Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income from the library for me the other day. Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett team up to tell you the tricks of the trade that will make you lots of money. First of course, start a blog and get thousands of people to read it daily. I don't think it's really that applicable to Bagalagalaga right now, but there were a few interesting parts.

In the introduction, the author stresses that you really, really, REALLY should not rely on your blog as your sole source of income unless you are already seeing returns that justify it. Basically, don't quit your day job to start a money making blog, since it took this guy a year and a half before he could even consider it equal to a bad part time job in income.

It's all technical stuff until waaaaaaaaay at the end, when you get Chapter 10, which is called "Creating Something Worthwhile". This is also the shortest chapter. I thought the "posting stuff people want to see" concept would be a little more important, but apparantly I'm wrong, and that's why I am stuck with a $98,752 blog instead of a $100,000 blog  :)

Crime of the Month - Too Excited About Arby's!!!

Here's an entry for June's version of......IDIOTIC CRIME OF THE MONTH!!!!!!!!!!!! It's already on my deviant art profile, since yesterday night when I finally finished coloring it, Blogger wouldn't let me log in.

Simulated Interview For a Job at DC Comics

I had the typical career goals as an adolescent - pro sports, comic book artist, maybe some job where people inexplicably pay me to play great new video games. For comics, I was sure that if I could draw the main character perfectly (as in, just like in certain panels in the comics), then I'd be set and would basically be the guy drawing Batman comics. Now, I have a little more realistic view of how it would have gone when I showed up with my "perfect" Batman art looking for a job at DC....

Just flipping through an old Legends of the Dark Knight, there were about 30 unique people, 13 settings, and like 50 facial expressions/emotions to convey. In addition, I never did really master drawing Batman (see above), so I guess it's time to get practicing again....

Animation - A Boy and His Blob

Watch the Magical Moving Pictures at deviantArt

Gave Flash another try, and now that I know deviantArt is a good place to post swfs for free, it can be shared with the universe (for about 9 minutes until 500 other submissions push it into oblivion). This one is kind of like a storyboard, it's just 50 drawings moved and scaled around to tell the story; it winds up looking more like a comic strip that moves for you so your eyes don't get worn out scanning back and forth at different panels. It took a few hours to make this one, so I can't imagine doing a full blown hand-drawn cartoon this long yet.

Another Beast Born of Photoshop's Fuzzy Brush

Behold the Snaggle-Toothed Ragamuffin!

The Fugly Little Caterpillar

Drawing this fuzzy little guy consisted of:

3 strokes of grass

1 stroke of colored fuzz

2 eyes

Photoshop brushes are pretty sweet!

Special Sauce

Here's my latest comic, as often as I read them I guess it's surprising I've never tried to do a whole 6 panel strip before. I've been reading a couple graphic novels lately like The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Fun House by Alison Bechdel where they write some of their experiences. Experience like homosexual experimentations, hard drugs, and pooping their pants. My story is a little tamer, it's based on a sandwich place I worked at in college, but if you want to assume the characters are having homosexual encounters, doing hard drugs, and pooping their pants behind the scenes, it will make it a little edgier.

Sketch Blogs

From surfing other blogger sites and people's submissions for Illustration Friday, I've come across a lot of blogs devoted to sketches from artists of all ages and skill levels. Some pro artists blow you away with top quality stuff and a few sketches. But in general, there are two kinds of entries in sketch blogs.......

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The Great Artist Who Is Ashamed of Their "Crappy" Art

Crime of the Month!!!!!

I live in a relatively small, college town, where most people would say "nothing much ever happens here". But lately the crime blotter in the local paper has been full of wacky, borderline retarded crimes instead of the usual 50 "minors caught with alcohol" offenses. It's only the 12th of May, but there are already some solid contenders for the coveted title of......"MOST RETARDED CRIME OF THE MONTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
There are a couple that are actually really tragic, like some deaths where the murderer only got 5 years in prison, but these 3 crimes were selected for MOST RETARDED CRIME OF THE MONTH based on the following criteria:
1) In the end, no one died
2) The perpetrators made one or more absolutely retarded decisions to get themselves in big time trouble.
And here are the nominees......I don't mean to judge before the courts have had their say, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty and all that, but I will be referring to the alleged perpetrators as "Bad Persons 1, 2, and 3".

The Taco-Matic 9000

Well, since this one is a still a bit unfinished, I'm going to just send my finger-eating monster to Monday Artday for the "favorite food" challenge. It's got all the basic parts there, but it needs a little shading or metallic texture on the surfaces of the contraption, stuff like big fans, lights and dials, and of course, a heavenly glow surrounding each delicious taco.

Midnight Snack

Monday Artday is fully operational again, and one of the word challenges is "Favorite Food", so I whipped up this little guy and his favorite food. I admit I didn't try to make the blanket look folded at all, folds still blow my mind. I actually have another idea brewing, a mundane food prepared in a much more interesting way. If I can't get that one done on time, then this little critter will find a home on Monday Artday.

Reload the Cocoon

Another version of the Illustration Friday topic "Cocoon", since looking back at the original version, it just looked too sloppy and blurred. Last time around, I was trying to use transparency to make the cocoon look thick, slimy, and translucent. This time I just used different tools to draw solid shapes and then filled in a little detail, and I like it much better. Also more eyes = better art.

Another Completely Original Wallpaper

.....well, at least I decided on the original combinations of colors and the pattern for these obviously copyrighted long tongued dinosaurs. My son caught me playing Yoshi's Island, and he is absolutely hooked with the concept of a dinosaur that eats creatures, turns them into eggs, and spits them at stuff while looking for giant keys and flowers. Too bad he doesn't have quite the coordination to play it himself yet, but he will watch me play a stage, run to mom, and tell her all about the chomper flowers and the special doors.

Also I added a little color to the Toaster wallpaper about 5 seconds after posting it last week, this is the version that's actually gracing my desktop

Illustration Friday Cocoon - Ain't No Butterfly

Here's something big and nasty that may pop out of a big, nasty cocoon. I was inspired to do a sickly green scum cocoon by the old classic "Gremlins", that movie scared the crap out of me decades ago. Unfortunetly, my attempt at drawing one from memory wound up like this:

Brave Little Toaster Wallpaper

Decided to make this wallpaper to further feed my older son's recent addiction to the Brave Little Toaster. I like the original movie which involves a cute quest as the abandoned appliances try to find their owner. But my kid prefers the sequel where the appliances use the help of a rat to recover their master's deleted veterinary thesis by finding one replacement vacuum tube for a supercomputer that then magically reconnects all its broken wires and simultaneously stopping an evil plot to sell animals to Tartarus Laboratories. I admit that Tartarus Labs is pretty funny if you're up with Greek mythology, but otherwise the sequel is not very good. There's another one where they go to Mars; I guess I'm being a little picky if I will put up with living lamps and toasters but think it's "too unrealistic" that they are abducted to Mars....
Eventually I'll have one with a hodge-podge of characters from Winnie the Pooh to Curious George.

Redness

So very scary.

If You Stab a Piece of Wood, It Turns Into This....

Quite a while ago I got a whittling tool, just a handle with a couple replaceable blades on it, and a bunch of small blocks of basswood. I carved up a few of them, one wound up looking like a piece of wood that had some corners hacked off (not shown), one became the little black and red twisted tower thing, and the other became a noble beaver.

Why do bad video games happen to good people?

A conversation about old NES games got me nostalgic enough to fire up my trusty emulator, NESticle. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying old classics like Kirby's Adventure or Double Dragon II, I thought "now that I'm older and wiser, I wonder if Dragon's Lair is any easier?"

It's still impossible. I tried downloading windows media encoder so I could capture video of me playing the ROM, I thought it would be funny to show how many things can kill you on the very first screen, but my review would be pretty damn short since I can only make it about 4 SCREEN LENGTHS into this platform game...plus I couldn't get it to work.

The main problem was that Dragon's Lair in the arcade was popular because it had amazing animation by guru Don Bluth (Secret of NIMH, American Tail, Land Before Time). That fails miserably on an 8-bit system. On games like Mario, you can make him duck in one frame, almost as soon as you hit the button. In Dragon's Lair, the hero Dirk takes 5 or 6 frames to slowly get on his knees once you hit down. The same problem occurs for attacking, jumping, and even turning around, meaning that even though the enemies are slow as shit, you just CANNOT respond in time to do anything unless you memorize it.

Luckily for me, there is already a pretty funny youtube video of some guy bitching about this game.

Illustration Friday - Rescue

Here's a rescue maneuver that anyone living with toddlers should know how to perform. Even if you know it was flushed before the keys went in, there's still psychological damage from having to reach wrist deep into that toilet. Personally, I've fished for toothbrushes more often than keys though.
And now thanks to my genius, if you were scanning Illustration Friday you got to enjoy two thumbnails of this pic since I posted just the link to the picture the first time, and there's no undoing it - my shame will be forever recorded in the I.F. archives.

Rock On, Arctic Monkeys!

I knew I couldn't miss Monday Artday's word of the week "Monkey", so I whipped up this fellow inspired by the band "Arctic Monkeys", who I've been listening to a lot lately. Looking at it now it seems I've forgotten his guitar strap, so if you were hoping for an accurate depiction of a monkey playing bass I hope you're not too disappointed. But I'm happy with the furry little rocker, I guess I'm in a good mood since I didn't have to inhale any acidic gasses at work today. And finally, a list of some of my favorite monkeys of all time:

#5 - Grape Ape

#4 - Gleek or Glook or something, the one from Superfriends

#3  - Curious George

#2 - The one I saw at a Russian circus riding a horse and throwing a ball, while wearing a cute and practical monkey diaper

#1 - Mr. Teeny

Illustration Friday - Expired

Haven't done the old draw n' scan in a while, but here's a new one for Illustration Friday, drawn in pen with a tiny bit of color from Photoshop. What I learned while doing this one is:
1) Should practice drawing noses
2) Should practice drawing hair
3) While cross-hatching adds volume to milk jug shapes, it may make a person look like Two-Face.

Defunct Collectible Card Games Review - Star Wars CCG

 Finally we know what a Womp Rat looks like!

 Decipher's Star Wars CCG expanded to the point where every character, ship, creature, location, object, or spoken word in the original trilogy was on a card somewhere. The Phantom Menace expansion came out and had everyone enjoying Darth Maul and Qui-Gon, but then apparantly Decipher could or would not continue their liscencing agreement and this great game abruptly died.

THE GAME: One person plays a light side deck, the other plays a dark side deck and you switch after each game. Decks are exactly 60 cards, because the goal is to totally deplete the other guys deck (drain all their Force in Star Wars talk). The most enjoyable way to do this is of course to slaughter the other guy in a battle, but you can also slowly drain a deck just by having characters on sites where your opponent doesn't. Also adding to the challenge is whenever you draw cards or use disposable interrupts, you are actually also depleting your deck and getting closer to losing if you're not careful.

CONS: It's the most complex CCG I've reviewed by far. Cards tend to contain paragraphs worth of effects instead of simple stuff like "add +1 to some skill". It takes a while to figure out the fighting system, where you are firing weapons, comparing power, "drawing destiny" if you're allowed to, and then deciding which characters have to die and if any additional Force needs to be lost. The game is loaded with complicated rare interrupts and effects which are only useful under very specific conditions, such as "if Han and Chewie are in a battle together". There's even the game-within-the-game of Sabbacc; I don't even recall when or if it's mentioned in the movies, but if someone plays a Sabbacc card you'd better break out the rulebook and figure out what the hell is going on.

Interrupts with 2 or 3 very different uses, characters with lots of conditional powers, and most of all Sabbacc make it a little complicated to play 

EPIC EVENTS: Depending on your point of view, Epic Events could fall under either "why it's fun" or "cons". It's cool that you can blow up the Death Star, blow up a planet with the Death Star, blow up the Endor shield generator, or train Luke on Dagobah like in the movies. However it takes a lot of cards and a hell of a lot of planning and luck to actually accomplish them. Doing so normally gives you some good bonuses, but it's much easier to just play huge characters and ships and beat the crap out of the other guy.

WHY IT'S FUN: Star Wars + CCG = nerd heaven. It's fun when you finally figure out how to string together combos of all the crazy effects rather than just deploying all the main characters you can get your hands on. It's challenging to make a balanced deck that can attack and defend both the land and outer space locations. It's fun to pull out some alien that was on-screen in the movie for 1/8 of a second who winds up being as good as a Jedi in the CCG. It's even fun to try Epic Events and fail horribly.

MEMORABLE GAMEPLAY: Luke's Aunt and Uncle successfully kill Vader for invading their moisture farm. Vader misses a generic Rebel Soldier with his lightsaber twice. Sending Leia to the Rancor. All this and more, in the (sadly defunct) Star Wars CCG!!!

WHAT THE HELL? While it's intended to have Yoda train the Dagobah expansion Luke, you could technically have Luke's uncle train a Jawa in the Jedi arts.

Monday Artday - Invisible

The word challenge was "invisible" - glass is sometimes invisible to some unfortunate birds. One time one slammed the huge window door in our basement and stood out there totally stunned while my dogs went nuts trying to claw their way outside to get it. So far I've experienced 3 bird on window collisions in my day.

Defunct Collectible Card Games Review - DOOMTOWN

THE GAME: Doomtown is the CCG based on the “Deadlands” world, which is full of cowboys and grotesque abominations in about equal numbers. You have a bunch of cowboys/freaks. The other guy has a bunch of cowboys/freaks. While you can win in the obvious way of wiping out the other guy’s entire crew, you can actually win without ever starting a fight as long as you earn more control points than the other guy has influence. All the characters are moving around Doomtown which you create with location cards, so you have to outmaneuver your opponent.

THE CARDS: They contain some of the most unique game lingo of any CCG, for example: Pay 2 Ghost Rock and boot a dude at a strike to call out a posse.

MEMORABLE GAMEPLAY: The Grim Reaper gets suited up with a New Hat and Blue Jeans, and rides off to a shootout on his Penny Farthing.

WHY IT’S FUN: The card art is great! Most items, characters, and events have funny effects and flavor text. Battles between characters are resolved by drawing poker hands, with other cards letting you draw more than 5 or discard more to make monster hands like 5 aces or the ultimate “Dead Man’s Hand”. But if it’s not a legal poker hand, your opponent might get the last laugh by playing a Cheatin’ card and turning the tables on you! 

Defunct Collectible Card Games Review - Marvel/DC Overpower

I had plenty of friends who played collectible card games, and most of them also liked the X-men and Spiderman and superheroes in general, but for some reason I was the only one that liked both of them enough to get some Overpower cards. The Marvel version of Overpower came out first, and I was a little dissappointed that when I opened a starter, about 2/3 of the cards were similar to this:

I mean, it's got Spiderman punching the crap out of some VCR thief (this was the 90's), but other than that it doesn't have any more info on it than a 2 of clubs. This is a "Power Card", the most basic way to do damage in the game. Fortunetly there are some cooler cards as well. I have never used the few mechanics that were introduced after the first DC Overpower expansion, such as location cards, or Image Overpower (with Spawn, WitchBlade, etc.), so they aren't in here.

THE GAME: You've got 4 hero/villain characters, the other guy has 4 hero/villain characters. Beat them all into submission.
EASE OF PLAY: It is remarkably simple compared to other CCGs I've played - if you have a character with a certain energy/fighting/strength/intellect stat, they can play a power card with a value up to that level and try to damage the opponent's characters. To defend, you do the same thing, play a card equal or higher in number to your opponent's to block it. If any character takes 20 damage or at least one hit from 3 different categories (En/F/Str/Int) they are knocked out and your one reserve character takes their place.
A LITTLE MORE COMPLEXITY: Well, if you had all characters with an "8" stat in some category and the other player didn't, you could just play "8" attacks all the time and win, right? The only catch is when you draw your hand, you must discard any duplicate power cards (regardless of type), so you can only have one "8" in your hand on any given turn. There's also "Training" and "Teamwork" cards, which add value to your power cards if certain conditions are met. Universe cards, which represent chucking a tree or hot dog cart or using a death ray, also add to card's power. Finally there are character specific Special Cards that are the best part of the game and usually influence it the most.
The most unique part of the game is you have a seperate stack of 7 cards called the missions; they have cool art but they might as well be tokens since there is nothing different about any of them. Each turn, you bet a number of cards depending on how strong your hand is, and if you do more damage than your opponent, you "complete missions" and they lose missions. You can also win the game by completing all 7 missions, but if you bet over two missions, your opponent gets to draw extra cards to help balance it out.
CONS: The Special Cards are cool because they represent specific characters powers, like Superman's heat vision, Wolverine's regeneration, or The Penguins penguins. The problem of course is if you open a booster pack and you find that half the cards are totally worthless at the time because you don't have the characters to go with them. From a booster box of DC Overpower I got after the game was dead, I got 13 characters with at least 4 Specials to go with them, 3 characters with only 2-3 Specials which wouldn't be worth using, and 40-50 Specials with no character to use them.
WHAT THE HELL? Superman isn't Strength level 8, and his energy level of 7 is the same as the Metropolis special crimes unit.

WHY IT'S FUN: Betting on hands usually makes games more interesting. Every card is full of our beloved comic superheroes, and it is really easy to play. Deck making is pretty simple, but you can't rely too much on one character's Specials because once he's knocked out, they're worthless; also too many copies of anything will lead to lots of duplicate discarding. If you don't mind (or cover up) the different card backs, DC and Marvel Overpower are completely compatible.

Defunct Collectible Card Games Review - 7th Sea

When I can get a starter deck of a zany CCG for $1, it's hard to resist. I haven't dug out 7th Sea in a loooong time, but I have two decks just in case someone comes over, wants to play, and forgot their discontinued-10-years-ago cards.

THE GAME: You've got a Captain, the other guy has a Captain. Go kill their Captain. All this takes place on 5 Sea cards (always the same seas and layout), and your whole crew is on your ship which is unique to your Captain and his faction. To power up your crew, you can add attachments like Mr. Briggs the parrot (sacrifice him to save your crew) or the cheap cutlass (breaks after one use). You can also place adventures, then move to and complete them for additional bonuses.  If you're in the same sea as an enemy, you can attack with cannon fire or attempt to board and duel.

EASE OF PLAY: Pretty straightforward after seeing a turn or two played out. Every character card seems complicated, with at least 6 numbers and 3 big letters, but the use is quite simple: if you need to do some feat of sailing like moving the ship, it costs sailing points, so look at the number by the sail icon on your characters cards and "tack" (tap in Magic lingo) enough to pay the cost. The boarding battles involve playing any card out of your hand, and the letters on the side determine what type of attack you're trying, like a slash or punch. The opponent gets a chance to counter if they have the right card, making it so a puny rower can beat a Captain with luck, although it probably won't kill him.

WHAT THE HELL?: "Laerdom" and "Glamour" are important traits crewmen can have.

WHY IT'S FUN: Characters and effects are a good mix of badass and funny (see "Blows up in Your Face" in the picture).  The gameplay is fun and simple,  it's fairly quick to build up a good size crew and then you can go for the kill. Wish I had a few more Captains and ships: right now all I have is two sets of Sea Dogs.

A Mystic for Monday Artday

Here's my Mystic for Monday Artday this week, colored in Photoshop over a very loose and cartoony pencil drawing.

Defunct Collectible Card Games Review - Lord of the Rings TCG

I've been getting reinvolved in the beloved nerd pass-time of collectible card games lately. For Christmas I signed up for Magic Online, since I hadn't used my stack of real life cards in forever. It's pretty fun to be able to play whenever you want, even if you have to start over. And if you're willing to pay 30 cents for a picture of a dragon with some typing on it printed on a piece of cardboard, it's not that much of a stretch to pay 30 cents for a digital picture of a dragon that you can use to play online. Then today at Dollar Tree, where we normally get the kids some balloons or something cheap as we pass by, I saw a pile of Lord of the Rings boosters and had to get some. I only had a few starter decks and maybe 5 boosters from a few years ago, but I was willing to give it another try and write this DEFUNCT CCG REVIEW.

It's a "defunct CCG" because expansions have stopped, and Decipher, the company that made the game, are done with it, are shutting down servers for the online version this summer, and the website has tons of broken links to stuff like card lists and the rulebook.

THE GAME: Your deck consists of half "good guy" (Frodo and his many Hobbit, Dwarf, and Elf friends) and "bad guy" (anyone uglier than a dwarf) halves. The goal is just like the movie - get the Ring from the Shire to Mt. Doom, only this path is represented by 9 lands that you move your characters across. On your turn, you play cards to protect your Ring-bearer and try to move him further along the path. Your opponent responds with evil minions and events to try and kill the Ring-bearer. If you survive your turn, you switch places and you get to send minions to kill the other guy's Ring-bearer as they move. There are of course plenty of weapons, armor, and special effects to help both sides, but it's possible that you'll get stuck with a hand full of Hobbits or other good guy stuff when you need orcs. It seems you're more likely to win by killing your opponent rather than actually guiding your fellowship to the end.

EASE OF PLAY: From the cards I have, I can say it's fairly easy to learn how to play a starter deck, but my few boosters haven't added much to their effectiveness; if your rare card from a booster pack is an event or possession based around a character you don't have, you're S.O.L. on that one. The complete rule book was only around 20 pages vs the 169 of the Magic rulebook.

CONS: The card art is still frames from the movie, so some of the art looks blurry if it was from a scene with fast moving CG characters. A lot of the common cards just don't look that impressive.I haven't played it a lot so I don't know how tough it is build a really competitive deck.

 WHY IT'S FUN: I'll give almost anything related to Lord of the Rings a chance since it is one of my favorite book series ever. There are multiple versions of each main character, like Frodo, Gandalf, Gimli, etc., of differing rarity, so it's easy to get several of your favorite characters to use in a deck. It's like you're totally switching games every time your turn ends and you switch from Ring-protecting to Hobbit slaughtering.Worth trying out if you can find some starter decks for cheap.

Summing up 2009

Here's my experience with the long gone year 2009:

Game I wasted the most time playing: Plants vs. Zombies, it is so simple to set up a few plants that spit vegetables to kill the army of zany zombies, but the mini-games and endless survival kept me playing this for months. Also, I finally completely potty-trained my son using Plants vs. Zombies as a reward for dropping a deuce!
Best book I read: The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen was surprisingly good, a novel following a kid who is invited to give a talk at the Smithsonian based on a series of famous illustrations he did. Of course it's one of those "they never realized he was just a kid" type stories, but this one is full of margin illustrations that supplement the story, more novels should have pictures!
Best song I downloaded: Mississippi Queen by Mountain, an old old song that still really gets stuck in my head.
Best beer I drank in '09: Bell's Special Double Cream Stout is as special, as creamy, as double, and as stout as it claims.
Most common activity at 8:30 pm: Vacuuming up Cheerios. Yup, it was exciting.

Christmas at Grandma's House

Back from two weeks of hanging out at both sets of grandparent's houses. The comic above, titled "Christmas at Grandma's House" sums up the results of our trip, only we had two kids in the car swimming in the sea of presents. We brought clothes for a week, snacks, and about 10 presents for 10 people, most of which were the size of a DVD, and got about 4 garbage bags full of toys. The panels were originally side by side but that doesn't look good in a blog.