Miscellaneous Updates

I live in Chicago.

It would seem almost, if not all of, the local, hell, the state wide stores known as Borders are closing. Numerous massive sales. I held off on most things but when it starts getting to be 80-90 off, then even I get weak. See, I already do a lot of shopping at Half-Priced books and often use the old $1 rack to buy things. Of course I also shop here and there and everywhere when I see a sale and as long as the book is in decent shape if I'm keeping it or just readable shape if I'm tossing it, I'm not too picky about things.

Right now one of my friends is running a 4e game. I'm 5th level playing a gensai wizard who specializes in fire and lightning. Ironically enough, I didn't make the character. After my dwarf warpriest died, one of my friends allowed me to use his old character because he'd moved on to a warlock hexblade. He's way into making characters and is a hella a min-maxer so I didn't mind.

In terms of Appendix N, I'm reading two books right now. One of them Prince of Wolves. It's used the second person form of fiction several times and I'm not a huge fan of that. It's also not 'grabbing' me which is a damn shame because I love some D&D popcorn fiction. I might have a few bits to snag for the blog but as it's a 'car' book, a book I only read while waiting for someone else in the car, it may take a while.

The second book I'm working on is Throught Stone and Sea by Barb and J. C. Hendee. It's the second series in the Noble Dead and to be honest, I'm not thrilled with it either. It's better than the previous book. Maybe it took the author a book to get the characters or maybe I'm just enjoying the exploration of the dwarf culture in this setting but it's going better. However, I still prefer the other main characters from the previous series. I find this group... whinny and uninteresting. I find the setting interesting and worth reading though so I'm trudging onward.

In terms of painting, I finally picked up a brush again. Between having the flu, my friend dying out of the blue and just a general sense of enui, I haven't really felt the urge to do so. Tom at Black Sun Games actually had some new miniatures in and I picked up a pack of lizard men and some Flames of War primer and gave it a go. I think I may have trashed it with a dip in the Army Painter strong tone because it was way too thick and I had to spend more time slopping it off than I probably would've saved by just painting the damn things. We'll see. It takes some time to dry off.

For the old postings in the A to Z Challenge, it has certainly gotten in the way of my initial intention of the blog; that of posting on things I'm reading/watching/etc... but not by as much as I feared and well, it's almost over already. When it is, maybe I'll go into some of the stuff like Casshern Sins, an anime I managed to watch all the way through on Nextflix or some of the really bad monster movies.

Tomorrow I'll get back to the ole A to Z challenge with the letter P. Unfortuantely for me, I screwed up where my initial inspiration was for my subject matter, but I've got a few back ups to support the utility of my choosen word for the day.