WEP '12, Day 59 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis Ep. 2

As usual, this analysis assumes you've already watched the second episode of Amazing Race 20.  Those of you who haven't are encouraged to watch it at CBS.com.  SPOILERS follow.

Most every leg of the race starts with the teams leaving from a Pit Stop.  Usually it's after twelve hours of rest, though occasionally you see twenty four or even thirty six hour gaps.  What that means, though, is that if you arrived during the day, you'll be leaving at night, usually very late at night.  For instance, Blonde Rachel and Dave arrived at the end of last leg at 2:46 pm, and are thus leaving at 2:46 am, which is a pain in the ass vis a vis trying to get anything done.

That's by design, though.  You see, the primary mechanism that the Race uses to keep teams from getting huge leads and thereby killing all the drama in the Race is called "bunching."  That occurs when the lead teams run into something that forces them to sit around and wait, which allows the trailing teams to catch up.  There are two types of bunching.  One is Travel Bunching, where the teams have to fly somewhere but the next flight is hours away, so that while they're sitting around waiting to board, the trailers catch up and with everyone on the same plane, the race is reset to zero when they land.  That happens most often at airports, but it can work for any type of transportation, including boats and trains.

The second type of bunching is Hours of Operation Bunching.  That's where the location or activity that's next for the teams doesn't open for a few hours, so the leaders get to watch their lead vanish one team at a time.  That's what happens in this one, as everyone catches up before the local courier arrives at dawn to hand out the next clue.

It also renders moot the full list of departure times that I jotted down as they appeared on screen, but there was still some interesting data to mine there.  For instance the top three teams were separated by all of three minutes, and that the gap between the lead plane and the second plane seems to have been about two hours.  Also that the Twins either got lost or were really bad at making empanadas, because there where nearly an hour behind the next team, Ralph and Vanessa.  Guess there's some missing drama there.

Speaking of screen time, one way you can guess which teams are going to be in it for a while versus the ones that are going out soon is that the more screen time you get in the early episodes, the more likely you are to get flushed out early.  Meanwhile, if you get short shrift, it tends to suggest you'll be there near the end.  So, since they only got Misa and Maiya for one episode, the producers tended to show as much as them as they could.  Considering that the Twins seem to have lost a whole hour in there somewhere and no one felt it was worth it to show us how, I'm guessing that the Twins will be around into the later stages of the Race.

Anyway, the teams head out into a Detour, the choice between two tasks.  One of the ways I tend to keep myself involved in events is to try and guess which one is the better choice.  In this case the choice was between setting up a solar oven and boiling some water with it, and collecting wood and clay then hauling it a mile on donkey-back and then making a fire.  Normally you should try to avoid gathering tasks, since you never want to be at the mercy of random chance to find something the way Misa and Maiya were in the first episode.  However, in this case you weren't searching for a single hidden object, you were just gathering stuff off the ground, so I thought that the fire task was the better bet.

Oddly, only Team Border Patrol agreed with me.  Everyone else did the solar oven.  And it turned out that I was right, since the Border Patrol guys managed to get lost and lose 20 minutes and still ended up in second place!  the big sticking point was in how long it took for the pots to boil, with some teams standing around for as much as 45 minutes waiting for the sun to do its job.

The next step was to take a bus eighteen hours to Buenos Aries.  Blond Rachel and Dave, Red Rachel and Brandon, Team Border Patrol, and Bopper and Mark all make the first bus.  The second bus has the Clowns, the Jersey Shore Boys, the Twins, and Ralph and Vanessa.  Finally, Team DEA and Kerri and Stacy make it to the last bus.  These last two are fretting because it seems all but certain that one of them will be eliminated.  But then random fate takes a stab at the second bus by somehow breaking a window on that bus, putting all four teams there in a competition for the bottom.

Now I've said in the past that one of the things I enjoy about the Race is that you can't get voted off the island.  You win or lose based on when you arrive at the mat, no more and no less.  But that isn't entirely true.  After all, there is the once or twice per race U-Turn which you can use to screw another team.  But there is another social element to the Race as well...how willing other teams are to help you out or team up with you.  Team DEA has that clearly in mind.  They've gone undercover as kindergarten teachers, since they're afraid that revealing their DEA skills will make other teams more likely to U-Turn them or not help them out.

The social element comes to the forefront in  Buenos Aries.  The final task, a Roadblock which means only one teammate can participate, involves figuring out the average weight of a corral of cattle during a cattle auction.  So you have to count the number of cows, catch the total weight of the corral during the auctioneer's pitch, then successfully do the division all while various bidders yell out numbers.   It's not an easy task, especially for frazzled and sleep deprived racers, so many of the teams end up working together.  But who to work with?  Blonde Rachel and one of the Border Patrol guys end up working together, but purposely exclude Red Rachel because Brandon had purportedly ripped a out of Team Border Patrol's hands during the pile up with the courier.  Mark watches Red Rachel self-destruct during the task and shows mercy, basically handing her the answer to the problem.  That doesn't make Red feel any better, though, as she continues to implode on he cab ride over to the Pit Stop.  Clearly the pair from Big Brother are going to be a high drama team.  Here's hoping they implode right out of the Race.

The middle two teams, still believing that they're fighting for last place, didn't cooperate at all, which only makes sense.  That leads to Kerri and Stacy ending up team number five, and Team DEA getting the Phil Fake-out where he pretends they've been eliminated, then reveals that the other teams had bus problems and they're still alive.

That leaves us with the remaining four teams screwed by the bus problem.  By the way, how does a window of a bus suddenly shatter?  Did someone take a shot at the bus or something?  Anyway, there's a little more math teamwork that ends up leaving Dave of the Clowns in the dust, and he and Cherie are duly eliminated.  That at least frees me from having to distinguish between the two Daves on the show.  It was also nice to get some validation on another [b]Suvivibility: Low[/b] team going out early.  Now if we can just get Kerri and Stacy out next, I'll really look prophetic.

Episode two standings:

1st - Blonde Rachel and Dave
2nd - JJ and Art (Border Patrol)
3rd - Bopper and Mark
4th - Red Rachel and Brendon 
5th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins) 
6th - Nary and Jamie (DEA) 
7th - Vanessa and Ralph
8th - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)
9th - Eliott and Andrew (Twins) 
OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns) 
OUT - Misa and Maiya

Dead Team Obituary: Dave and Cherie

As I said, I'd rated this team as a low survivability team, primarily because I figured that they'd fall too far behind in a grueling physical task.  As it turned out, it was bad luck with the bus and Dave's poor math skills that did them in.  Who knew?

Something that I've noticed is that the show tends to try and slip in something inspirational about a team right before they go out.  It's like they've got this story about a team that hasn't got a good context as far as the Race itself goes, but since this is the last time we'll see this team, they might as well throw it in.  That's how we learned that Dave had beaten cancer twice, which made me even more suspicious than usual about their chances when I heard Dave relate the tale early in the episode. 

Given that they managed to leave the show with clown walks and cartwheels, I have to admire Dave and Cherie for sticking to their roots.  Of course, if they'd been more interesting during the Race rather than as they left it, maybe I'd feel bad about their leaving.

WEP '12, Day 58 - Old Republic Log XXIII

While I should probably do my next Amazing Race analysis, the problem is that I haven't seen the episode yet...I was, as noted, watching the Oscars.  And since we did have a Kessel Midnight Runners guild run tonight, I might as well catch up on the Old Republic Log.

Of course, with Morgan out away in the wilds of San Francisco this week, and Paul long since having left the game, the three of us that remained weren't going to be able to do a Flashpoint on our own unless we added a random stranger to the mix, and no one was that enthused about that plan.  Since I'd been running Tasia for the last couple of weeks and both Matt and Luke wanted to use their Imperial characters, we went Dark for the night.

That put us at Tasia, my Healer spec'ed Sith Sorceress, Vyrace, Luke's DPS Bounty Hunter Mercenary, and Mal'Drak, Matt's DPS Sith Marauder.  For the fourth spot I broke out Tasia's companion, Khem'val, who took on the Tanking duties.

Which reminds me, we need to either find or have Morgan create a fourth Imperial character so we can get an Imperial guild going.  Not that guilds actually DO much at this point, but it makes organization a bit easier.

Anyway, after an interminable forty five minutes or so getting everyone in the same place and giving Matt and Luke enough cash for them to go to Tatooine and get speeder bikes, we finally got going on a couple of Heroics on Nar Shadaa.  Problem was, the first one was a Heroic 2+ that was way below Tasia's level.  It worked great for Vyrace and Mal'Drak, but doing the whole thing only earned Tasia five experience points.  Being so overleveled did make it a breeze, especially since you could activate sliced Imperial droids along the way and get yourself some heavy firepower backup.

The second Heroic was a 4+ that Tasia could get some benefit out of, and indeed turning in the final quest brought her to level 29.  That one included one of those multiple stage quest objectives.  So we started out having to blow up organ crates, then steal neurotoxin, then use the neurotoxin to poison some cyber-implants, then finally track down and murder the boss of the place.  There were only a handful of social points in the whole thing, and it really just felt like a beefed up version of a regular zone quest.

Still, the character shuffle did lead to us each playing a different role.  Between my Static Shield, the Heal Over Time Rejuvenation that buffs my other heals, and my big heal Dark Infusion that Rejuvenation makes go as fast as my Dark Heal, Tasia can keep people up pretty darn well.  I'm too busy switching from heal to heal to do more than the occasional crowd control on offense, mind you, but Vyrace and Mal'drak have got the killing down just fine.  Khem'val, since he's only a Companion, couldn't hold aggro the way a real Tank would have, so I was healing a lot, especially in the larger group battles.  The boss battles, on the other hand, were pretty damn easy, letting me slip in a few Damage Over Time attacks as well.  In fact there was only one death all night long, and that was Khem'val.  The actual players rarely got below half health.

Indeed, I'm beginning to think that while the Trooper/Bounty Hunter is great with all the area effect and raged attack powers, the Counselor/Inquisitor lines may be better healers.  Tasia has three ways to either protect your health or heal it with an instant cast ability, which is huge, and then can use one of those instants to make the biggest heal go off in 1.5 seconds!  It's rare that any enemy can overwhelm that kind of healing, and overall I was pleased with Tasia's performance tonight.

Next week, we hope to have Morgan back so we can roll through Maelstrom Prison, the other half of the story that began on Taral V last week.  Maelstrom is rated at level 35, and both Kelynn and Visa are that level, with Dae'wan at level 36.  Pretty much regardless of where Shahistasa is, since the last time I saw her she was 33, we should be able to at least give the Maelstrom a reasonable try.

Oh, and to conclude, here's the orange gear that I got for finishing off the Heroic 4+.  The headband is fine, and much better than the stupid lekkuless mask, but I've got serious quibbles with the shoulderpads on the robe.  How does she get into cars or through doors with those things on?

Kelynn, Level 35 Vanguard, Republic Fleet

Tasia, Level 29 Sith Sorceress, Nar Shadaa

Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant

Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

WEP '12, Day 57 - Oscar Madness

I haven't got the patience to watch all of the Oscars, but I did pop in and out to catch the opening montage, the Cirque de Soleil performance, and most of the big awards.  Most years, I don't even do that much, but I have some fake money on the results through Hollywood Stock Exchange.  The idea was that you could "buy" various possible Oscar winners, and if you held them until today, any of the ones that you get correct are de-listed at HSX 25, while all the ones you got wrong de-list at zero.

That means by guessing three correctly, Best Picture (The Artist), Director (The Artist again), and Best Original Screenplay (Midnight in Paris), and since I had the maximum of 20,000 shares in each, I'll get HSX 500,000.  Since I bought all my shares for all nine categories for less than HSX 100,000, it represents a very nice return on investment, but I can't help but regret that I could have done much better with better guessing.

Granted, I only saw one of the Best Picture nominees this year, the aforementioned Midnight in Paris, and even that one I only saw last night and my picks for the HSX had been made weeks before, but even so I could have done better.

Much like with sports betting, I end up following my heart to much.  I know that the Bears aren't all that good, but I want to bet on them anyway.  Of the films with Best Actor nods, I've only seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, so I bank on Gary Oldman winning, when I should pick the guy from The Artist, based on the hype.

I guess I'm just nostalgic like that.

Anyway, having not seen many of the movies being rewarded tonight, I can't really comment on whether anyone actually got robbed tonight, but I can say that having The Artist, a silent film win the 84th Oscars would be pretty ironic in a "going full circle" kind of way that if the world really does end in 2012*, for the last Oscars to honor the kind of films that won in the first one.


* = World will not end.  Do not quit job or unload long term stocks unless that was what you were going to do anyway.

WEP '12, Day 56 - Cookie Bars

Right, so I've been playing around with a cookie bar recipe that's worked out reasonably well for me.  It goes like this:

1 Cup Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Baking Powder
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
1/8 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1/2 Cup Chopper Pecans
1/3 Cup Butter
1 Cup Packed Brown Sugar
1 Egg
1 Tablespoon Vanilla Extract
1 Cup Milk Chocolate Chips
1/3 Cup Coconut (Optional)

Preheat the Oven to 350 degrees.
Sift the Flour.  Add the Baking Powder, Baking Soda and Salt, and sift again.  Add the Pecans and mix well.

Melt the Butter in a saucepan.  Add the sugar and melt them together.  Add the Vanilla and Beaten Egg and mix well.

Pour warm Sugar/Butter Mix into Flour bowl.  Mix.

While still warm, mix in 2/3 Cup of chocolate chips.  Stir until chops are melted and mixture has a brown color.

Mix in coconut (Optional)

Pour mixture into pre-greased 9 x 9 pan.

Sprinkle remaining 1/3 Cup Chocolate Chips over the top.

Bake for 20-25 minutes.

You can double the recipe by doing it in a 9 x 18 pan.

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And there you have it.  Everyone seems to love these, and I do too.  Enjoy!

WEP '12, Day 55 - A Sweep and a Miss

I find myself deluged by TV that I want to watch but have no time for.  In fact, let's look at the shows that I'd like to be watching.

Top Shot is the History Channel competitive shooting show that I should have covered in my Competitive TV Series but flat out forgot.  Top Shot goes for a pseudo-Survivor style contest where the contestants are split into two teams.  There's a challenge, and then the team that lost the challenge votes to lose a member.  The main differences are that all the challenges are about marksmanship in one way or another, and that when you're voting you end up voting for two people, and then those tow have a one on one challenge and the loser of that one goes home.  Really, you watch Top Shot for the shooting and the competition, not the crappy Survivor style team politics.

I already did cover Top Chef last month.  You can get the details here.  The only thing that sucks is that I've missed the last two episodes, including the finale, so now I'm dodging spoilers while trying to find time for a couple of On Demand hours back to back.  Luckily, Top Chef isn't nearly as hard to avoid as, say, Doctor Who is, so I don't know who's won it quite yet.

And then there's Celebrity Apprentice, the show that The Donald decided was more important to him than a run at the Presidency.  That whole campaigning thing would have disrupted the show's shooting schedule, you see.  Like The Mole before it, The Apprentice has decided to ham it up with B and C grade celebrities over the last few seasons.  And, for the most part, I've been ignoring it since the last "real" season.  Though, arguably, the only season Trump actually took seriously was the first one.

The problem this year is that both George Takei and Penn Gillete are on Celebrity Apprentice.  And I'm a fan of both those men.  So I'd like to watch the thing, at least until they're both off the show, but I just haven't internalized the show to the point that it ever occurs to me to watch it, except in retrospect.  And then it is, by definition, too late.  Though, of course, I'm sure there are On Demand and Internet options.

So there you have it.  Three shows that I'd like to watch but I'm not.  Maybe I'll find some time for them...and maybe you can as well.

WEP '12, Day 54 - Real Time World War II

I recently discovered the Real Time World War II Twitter feed. It's an interesting experiment where-in the author relates the events of the war as if they were happening in real time.  It started last August 31st, conflating 1939 with 2011, and Tweeted the deception operation the Germans used to justify the war, then started in with the invasion of Poland.

As of today, we're on February 23rd, 1940, in what's called "The Phony War" period.  Most of the fighting right now is between the Soviet Union and Finland, with the Russians having invaded after signing a non-aggression pact with Germany.  It's instructive to note that the Russians were nearly as aggressive as the Germans in the early stages of the war, up to and including using various Communist elements in Britain and France to try to encourage the Allies to surrender or at least go to the negotiating table with Hitler!  That's pretty funny considering that in a year and a half, those same Communists would be demanding an immediate invasion of Europe by the British to save the very Soviet Union that was trying to undermine them earlier!

If I have a quibble with the feed, its that it only focuses on events in Europe.  The Chinese and Japanese had been fighting it out since July of 1937, but there's no coverage of it.  Japan's massive commitment to the war in China was a huge factor in its inability to defend the territories it conquered in 1941 and '42, and the fact that there were so many troops involved on the mainland was much more important than the Battle of Coral Sea in keeping the Japanese out of Australia.  Not only that, but the American embargo of war material to Japan in 1941, especially oil and rubber, was the main reason the Japanese attacked the USA in the first place.  Without those materials, the Japanese couldn't sustain the war in China, and rather than give up years of hard won territory, the Japanese went to war with the USA to try and take the material they needed.  I'm concerned that if these matters aren't at least touched on, it will perpetuate the myth that the Japanese just woke up one morning and decided to bomb Pearl Harbor.  It wasn't like that, and the gradual descent into war between the USA and Japan is one of the more interesting aspects of the early war period.

Not to mention that there were battles and sieges just as dramatic as the ones in Poland and Finland happening in China at the same time.  Those soldiers deserve their share of recognition too.  What made it a "World War" was the fact that the fighting happened all around the world, not just in Europe.

For all that, I'll keep reading it as it comes out.  In many ways, it reminds me of World War I: The Experiences of an English Soldier, albeit with greater scope and less depth.  That blog was a recreation of World War I through the eyes of an Englishman through the letters he mailed back home over the length of the war.  It's pretty much concluded now, but remains a good read regardless.

On a less serious note, Real Time World War II also very similar to Inner Sphere News Flash, which is counting down the days until Mechwarrior Online debuts by putting out daily news updates from the Battletech universe, where 2012 is 3049.  Since MWO is supposed to keep up the same one real life day = one in game day once the game goes live, ISNF is just getting players ready for the pace of the game.  Still pretty interesting, though.

As far as Real Time World War II goes, one thing that it does provide is a degree of perspective.  It's popular in military history circles to say that the economic factors against the Axis made victory impossible.  The thing that view leaves out is that we only know this with near perfect information about the production information of each side, information that wasn't available until after the war, and for the Soviet figures, not until way after the war.  The people making the decisions at the time only had limited and often misleading or flat out wrong data to make those decisions with.  As early as September 1939, there were French officials who were calling for a negotiated peace.  By October, Mussolini was suggesting a peace conference with himself as the chair.  Had different people been in charge, the war might have sputtered to a halt with the dissolution of Poland.  Had there been someone besides Churchill in charge in the fall of 1940, maybe the United Kingdom would have made a separate peace after the Fall of France.

Seeing the events laid out day by day makes it easier to get into the mindset of the people and leaders of the time.  Rather than a big data dump, you feel the campaigns developing over time, and I like that.  It's a new perspective on the war, and that's hard to find 66 years and change after it ended.  If you've got a Twitter feed, you could do much worse than to add Real Time World War II to it.

WEP '12, Day 53 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 1

This is my Amazing Race Analysis.  As the season goes along, I'll talk about the show and what happened, and compare the events here to what I've seen in previous Races.  Naturally, this will involve Spoilers.  Anything after the title card is a Spoiler Zone, so be warned.  My original look at The Amazing Race can be found here, and my breakdown of the teams here.  

Episode one of Season 20 served to introduce this race's cast, which we discussed last time, but was also a leg in its own right.  Normally there are certain rituals to the first episode.  For instance, Phil introduces each team one by one, then they all line up or are in a big arc, Phil reminds the audience what the basic rules are since frankly, if a team has gotten to the starting line and doesn't know they're in a race for a million dollars, telling them now won't save them.  Then he does a variation of his usual send-off: "The world is waiting...travel safe....go!"   And they're off.

In the early Races, the first clue was sitting on your backpack and told you a location in a foreign country to travel to.  It would also say that there would be three flights out at different times, and it was first come, first serve.  That tended to spread the teams out in the early going so that the producers could focus on only a few teams at a time.  It also meant that the first team eliminated was inevitably from the last plane in, so the early teams were battling for position while the last few teams were battling for survival.

Over the last couple of Races, though, they've added an intermediary step where you have to complete a challenge at the starting line before you get that first clue.  The problem is, the initial challenge is a luck thing, not a skill thing.  In this case you had to pull down balloons over a vineyard to find the ones that held clues.  There were eleven clues and a hundred balloons, so the last team to find a balloon, Misa and Maiya ended up wasting two hours looking for the damn thing, but that wasn't enough to keep them off the last plane, so it makes you wonder what the point of it was in the first place.  Especially since they skipped all the airport and travel stuff and cut from Misa and Maiya finally getting their clue to the teams from the first (of only two this time) plane getting going.

They make it to Santa Barbara, Argentina, which was cute since the Race started in Santa Barbara, California, and get to the first Roadblock.  That means you pick one teammate to do the task and the other to watch.  Since the destination was a small airport, it was pretty easy to guess that the task would probably involve exiting an airplane in flight, so pretty much everyone put the more adventurous partner up for the task and made sure to not pick the team members who are scared of heights.  Which was then that they discover that it's a flipped task.  The non-participating teammate has to skydive, while the active one has to follow a map to find them.  And, despite some hand-wringing, everyone gets out of the plane and to the ground easily, since it's a tandem jump.

Let me take a moment to note something here.  Never, in any of the Races I have seen, has any contestant ever failed to complete one of the various scary tasks, like bungee jumping, ziplining, or skydiving.  And yet, every time they show one of those tasks they always go to commercial on someone saying something like "I can't do it!"  And then, every single damn time, we get back from commercial and said person can do it after all, and away they go out the airplane.  They've been pulling the "will they or won't they" editing since the very first Race, and the answer is always "of course they will, dumbass...there's a million bucks on the line!"  I'm tired of the gimmick.  Unless someone actually chickens out, I wish they'd cut that trick out of their playbook.

Anyway, while the exiting the plane part was easy for everyone, the partners driving by map to find them wasn't as simple for everyone.  In fact, two teams in the second group had problems.  Joey "Fitness" of the Jersey Boys can't drive stick, so his progress was slow.  Meanwhile, Maiya manages to drive off the road and get her SUV stuck, requiring some random passersby to save her by winching her vehicle out.  It turns out that one big mistake is worse than Joey "Fitness'" driving misadventures, so Misa and Maiya are the last teams to arrive at the next challenge.

Said challenge was to watch a pair of chefs make two types of empanadas, then to make sixty of each type yourself.  The sneaky part was that the meat empanadas and the veggie empanadas had to be folded closed in different ways.  If you didn't notice that, you could waste a lot of time doing half of your empanadas wrong.  Which is precisely what Team Border Patrol members Art and JJ do.  Even though they'd arrived at the challenge first, they ended up coming in third, while getting lapped by Blonde Rachel and Dave, who arrive first and get the coveted Express Pass, and Brendon and Red Rachel, who come in second.

The show itself is pretty unconcerned with the remaining teams, choosing instead to focus on the drama of the bottom-feeders, the Jersey Boys and Misa and Maiya.  Misa and Maiya actually get the task done first, despite arriving last.  But, having made the poor decision to leave their bags in the car they lose time running back to get them and then, in the most inexplicable Racing moment I've ever seen, manage to get out behind the building and within line of sight of Phil...at which point, they turned around and went back inside!  According to the post leg interview, they somehow managed to not see Phil, despite him being right there!

Well, fail that badly, and karma will strike you down.  Before Misa and Maiya manage to work their way back to where Phil is, the Jersey Boys finish their empanadas and aren't struck blind by panic, see Phil, and come in tenth.  Which is a tragedy, because I don't care for them, and was hoping the designated Doomed Hot Girl Team would be able to last at least until the second episode.  But it was not to be.

So, after episode one, here are the standings:

1st - Blonde Rachel and Dave

2nd - Red Rachel and Brendon

3rd - JJ and Art (Border Patrol)

4th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)

5th - Vanessa and Ralph

6th - Eliott and Andrew (Twins)

7th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins) 

8th - Dave and Cherie (Clowns)

9th - Bopper and Mark 

10th - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)

OUT - Misa and Maiya

Dead Team Obituary: Misa and Maiya 

I hate to say it, but that was one of the worst performances over the course of a single leg that I've ever seen.  Fine, being last out of the vineyard was probably just bad luck.  Once they were the last ones left, they'd have to find the one clue out of a hundred balloons.  And it didn't even really hurt them, since they were still on the same plane as four other teams.  But driving off the road and getting your car stuck?  Leaving your bags in the car?  Finding your way to the Pit Stop and then turning around?  And since they only lost by a matter of minutes, correcting even one of those mistakes, especially the last one, would have kept them in the Race!

Rarely has a team self-destructed so completely, and usually when you see such failures it's well into the Race whre Killer Fatigue starts to set in and people start making stupid mistakes because they're no longer thinking clearly.  But this was in the very first leg!  You shouldn't be that tired yet!  Especially for a young and fit team.  There's really no excuse for that.  

Alas, the Doomed Hot Girls Team proved to be exceptionally doomed in record fashion.  

WEP '12, Day 52 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 0

The twentieth season of The Amazing Race started last Sunday, and as I mentioned back during my Competitive Television series, I'm watching it.  So I thought I'd add my thoughts about what's going on in the Race so far.  Naturally, this will involve Spoilers, though I'm only talking about the teams themselves today.  The big Spoilers will start in tomorrow's post about the first episode itself.

Indeed, if you'd like to watch the episode in question, feel free to drop by the CBS website...you can watch the episodes there.  I'd also like to point you to the Wikipedia page which has an excellent breakdown of the history and mechanics of the show.  It makes for a great reference if you're unfamiliar with the show.

SPOILERS for Episode 1 follow.

The world is waiting...for SPOILERS!

The first episode of a large cast reality show like this is always tough.  First of all you've got to introduce the mechanics of the show to first time viewers, but you've also got to introduce all the contestants, and make the episode interesting enough that people come back next week!  It's a tall order, indeed.

From a veteran viewer's perspective, there are a couple of different things I'm looking at.  I'm looking at likability of the teams, which generally determines how much I'm rooting for them, and there's survivability, which indicates what I think of their chances to actually win the Race.

This year's teams are as follows (names given according to the picture, so first name is the person on the left):

Blonde Rachel and Dave

In an improbable bit of casting there are two Rachels racing this season.  Hopefully one team or the other will go out soon, preferably the team with the other Rachel in it, so that I can quit having to distinguish between them.  This early on there hasn't been enough screen time for either team to really get a good feel for them, so I'm resorting to distinguishing them by hair color.

Dave's chopper pilot for the Army, while Blonde Rachel is in administration for hospitals.  They're married, and that usually (but not always) is better for your team's chances than merely being a couple.  You'd tend to think that since Dave's been away at war, that would apply more stress to their relationship than a few weeks on the road would, so from a relationship standpoint they should do well.  Physically, they seem in good shape which is important both for winning sprints and for surviving the grueling later legs.  They also seem pretty on the ball which keeps you from getting lost and helps when trying to figure out what's the best flight to take.  Survivibility: High.

They've been pretty friendly to the other teams and haven't displayed the kind of jerky behavior that gets one villain status on the show, so I'm giving them Likability: High.

Bopper and Mark

Best friends from Kentucky, Mark and Bopper are refreshingly honest about why they're on the Race.  It's not the bullshit that you get from other teams about "seeing the world" or "testing the strength of our relationship."  Nope, Bopper and Mark want the money.  Bopper's seven year old daughter has some kind of health problem, and a one in eleven chance at half a million dollars seems like the best odds they could come up with to get that kind of cash quickly.  That puts them on a semi-heroic level and increases my desire to root for them.  Of course, the downside of it is if, as is likely, they eventually get eliminated, that failure will be that much more poignant because of the sick little girl factor.  Likability: High.

Unusually, there's no designated Old Team on Amazing Race 20.  Ever since Dave & Margerita in the very first Amazing Race there's almost always been one team that was in their fifties or sixties.  Granted, those teams usually wiped out by mid-season because of endurance problems, but they were usually included.  Not this time.  This time, Mark checks in as the oldest Racer at 45.  It's hard to say how smart they are or aren't since they really didn't get much screen time, but I'm going to ding them for maybe running out of gas in the late stages of the Race.  Survivability: Medium.

Nary and Jamie

Virtually every season there's a hot girl team.  Usually they're introduced while frolicking in bikinis.  And virtually every season, said hot girl team is one of the first teams gone, since they lack much in the way of skills, smarts, or endurance.  I've even seen teams that lacked all three!  Surprisingly enough, though, Nary and Jamie aren't that team.  No, they're DEA agents instead.  So rather than watching them frolic, you see them stalking through a firing range with M-16s.  Which is a pity, as I do enjoy a good frolic, but does make Nary and Jamie much more interesting than just another hot girl team would have been.  That said, they didn't get much screen time in the first episode so it's hard to judge their personalities just yet.  But I'll give them the attractive to me bonus points and bump them to Likability: High.  Your mileage may vary, of course.

As far as performance goes, they're DEA agents in their early thirties.  They're in shape and I'm going to assume the DEA training includes things like map reading, basic navigation, and the like, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them in the final three racing to the end.  Survivibility: High.

Brendon and Red Rachel

Brendon and Red Rachel are engaged.  That's a bad idea on the Race, because, unlike most married couples, an engaged couple may not have been through truly difficult times together yet.  Ever since the tragic tale of Lenny and Karyn in Amazing Race 1, it's almost received truth that being on the Race without a strong relationship can break that relationship.  Lenny and Karyn were the first, but they were not the last.  That said, though, there is another factor.  You see, Brendon and Red Rachel were contestants on one of CBS' other reality shows, Big Brother.  In fact, Red Rachel won the season she was on.  Personally, I hate that.  She's already got a pile of cash and some pseudo-celebrity because of Big Brother, why does she need to be taking up a spot on The Amazing Race too?  And can you think of a worse scenario than Brendon and Rachel winning to add to their cash pile while Bopper's little girl gets nothing?  I hate the practice, I hate the idea, and that hate makes Brendon and Red Rachel the first team I'm actively rooting against.  Likability: Low.

However, they have both survived a reality show.  Red Rachel even won one.  That means that things that can fluster newer teams like constant camera exposure and the pace of shooting day in and day out are things this pair have already learned to deal with.  And pretty often, the transfers from other shows do rather well for just those reasons.  Thus I am sadly force to rate them as Survivibilty: High.

Joey "Fitness" and Danny

Right.  These guys.  They're self proclaimed "Guidos" who met on the Jersey Shore.  I can see why they chose to play themselves up that way, as it almost certainly helped them get on the show in the first place, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.  Call me shallow for disliking them because of their gimmick, but it's not like I've got much else to judge them on so far.  Likability: Low.

Traditionally teams made up of two young men have done pretty well.  Teams that fit that description won the first two Races, and six of the eighteen that it was possible for them to win.  (Amazing Race 8 was the ill-advised "family edition" that included teams of four parents and children.)  On the other hand, the Jersey Boys don't seem all that bright, and you need to be smart to progress very far.  I'll call it a cautious Survivibility: Medium.

Misa and Maiya

Misa and Maiya are sisters of Japanese descent from San Diego, seem to be friendly and cheerful, and look pretty good in bikinis.  That all works for me.  Likability: High.

However, do you remember what I said about the doomed hot girl team?  This is that team.  I appreciate that they had the Asian-American team as the cheesecake as a nod towards racial equality, but that doesn't change the fact that almost always if they show you cavorting in a bikini, you aren't making it all the way around the world.  It was some decent cavorting, at least.  Survivibility: Low.

Dave and Cherie

Another gimmick team like the Jersey Boys, this is a couple of married professional clowns.  I honestly haven't got much in the way of a feel for them yet, either positive or negative.  Maybe they're funny when not under stress, but through one episode they weren't really standing out for me one way or the other.  Likability: Medium.

That said, they're both in their forties like Bopper and Mike, and they appear to be more out of shape than the Kentucky Boys too.  I'm guessing they won't make it all that far.  Survivbility: Low

Elliot and Andrew

Unlike Misa and Maiya who seem to have gone out of their way to dress similarly and wear their hair similarly to make it as hard as possible to figure out who's who as they run past the camera, twins Elliot and Andrew had the decency to wear their hair different lengths.  Elliot's a musician and Andrew plays professional soccer.  Didn't see much of them and don't have much of an opinion on them as people yet.  Likability: Medium.

Twins who are both in good shape?  That's a pretty solid basis for a team in my book.  Survivibility: High. 

Kerri and Stacy

Thirty year old cousins from Mississippi, Kerry and Stacy didn't leave much of an impression on me.  Part of that was because they ran a perfectly serviceable leg without any major mishaps or feats of brilliance.  They seem pleasant enough, so I don't dislike them, but neither did they really win me over.  Likability: Medium.

Traditionally, though, all women teams have not done well.  In fact, there has only been one all female winning team, and that was on Amazing Race 18: Unfinished Business where popular losers from previous seasons came back for a second try at the Race.  So when Kisha and Jen won, it was something they'd had some idea of what they were getting into.  I'm not sure that Kerri and Stacy have that here, so until I see more of them I'm going with the numbers.  Survivbility: Low.

Vanessa and Ralph

I'll be honest, until I saw their pictures on the website, I hadn't remembered that Vanessa and Ralph were even on the show!  Couples are the most common team format, and there are several every year.  So many, in fact, that they start to blend together after a time.  For me, Vanessa and Ralph have vanished into the same morass that most other couples have.  Maybe they'll do something to distinguish themselves later, but for now Likability: Medium.

I should note, however, that while young men teams dominated the early years of the Race, recently it's mostly been about various couples.  So a team like Vanessa and Ralph perfectly fits the model of the kind of team that has won for the last few years, so I have to say Survivibilty: High.

Art and JJ

A couple of Border Patrol agents rounds out this year's cast, making it the highest percentage of people working for the government with guns this show's ever had.  Honestly, Art and JJ struck me as a couple of meatballs, which is fine after a fashion, but not very endearing overall.  Likability: Medium

On one hand they've got Border Patrol skills, which have to have some benefit while travelling.  On the other hand they the third team in their forties, trying to out run people a decade younger than them some of whom have similar training.  Put it all together and I say Survivibilty: Medium.

So those are our teams for Amazing Race 20.  Come back tomorrow for my analysis of the actual events of the first episode!

WEP '12, Day 51 - Old Republic Log XXII

In retrospect, I should have waited to do my Old Republic Log until after tonight's guild run, because I can't sit on this story for very long.

So we're doing the Taral V Flashpoint that we failed at last week.  We've already bounced off the optional boss three times, and declared failure on that score.  However, since everyone's higher level than they were before, those were the only wipes we'd encountered.  Until the end boss, that is.  We wiped on him trying three different tactics.  Finally, we decided on the fourth try to quit being fancy and try it straight the way we did the first failed time.  We got into it...and like ten seconds in, he dropped me.

Morgan called for a retreat and though Luke died on the way out, Morgan and Matt kept running...all the way to the entrance of the final bunker.  Since the boss himself is a slow mover, they actually managed to hold out until both Luke and I had resurrected, transitioned back into the Flashpoint, and arrived at...the start of the bunker!  Just in time to take on the half dead boss and finish him long before his equally slow moving reinforcement droids managed to walk the length of the complex to catch us!

I sincerely doubt that was how the fight was supposed to play out.  Indeed, we all agreed that it was weapons grade bullshit to win like that, but since none of us were at all interested in having to go back and do Taral V three times in three weeks, we let it stand.

Here's to bullshit!

Today's portrait, like Kelynn's last one, comes to you because I'm happy with her basic gear and don't really plan to change it anytime soon.  And the only change that has happened was her getting a nice belt with glowy bits on it, and the default picture that I use for the portraits doesn't show the belt slot.  So instead, I've gotten my hands on "The Republic Dancer" outfit, available for purchase from the Security Key Vendor.

Well, what the heck.  Kelynn's technically on leave, so if she'd like to work on her tan, who can begrudge her that, right?

Kelynn, Level 35 Vanguard, Republic Fleet

Tasia, Level 25 Sith Sorceress, Imperial Fleet

Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant

Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

WEP '12, Day 50 - Old Republic Log XXI

Not that anyone cares, or even should, but we're doing another double episode day as I spent most of yesterday in Wisconsin for my nephew's baptism.


Today we'll be discussing the Sith Inquisitor Nar Shadaa storyline that I managed to complete over the weekend.  Not that I'd much further to go since Log XX was done at level 24 with Nar Shadaa 3/4 complete.  Since then, I've finished off the rest of the planet as well as taken a little side jaunt to Korriban and made it to level 25.

Mechanically, there's not much to comment on.  Level 25 brought with it the usual minute advancements in combat power and access to speeder bikes.  Of course, I haven't got the requisite 48,000 credits required to actually buy said bike just yet, but my experience with Kelynn showed that all you need to do is quit crafting and don't buy anything else for a couple of levels, and you'll earn the cash you need for your bike.  Until then, we walk.

So, on to the Spoiler section, after the portrait as usual.

Kelynn, Level 35 Vanguard, Republic Fleet
Tasia, Level 25 Sith Sorceress, Tatooine
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant
Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

The glittering jewel of the Hutts conceals SPOILERS in its shadowy depths.

The Screaming Blades have many secrets.  Some of them are SPOILERS.

After arriving on Nar Shadaa in search of the fourth part of the artifact of Tulak Hord, you discover that said MacGuffin is in the hands of a renegade Sith named Lord Paladius who runs a cult in one of the bad parts of town.  Since he'd ignored your master when she asked him nicely for the artifact, you're there to ask him not so nicely. So you go about stealing his cult out from under him.

That's actually pretty fun.  Granted you're mostly doing the same things you normally do, but there's actually a branching mission structure where you can be peaceful or violent about your takeover, which was pretty interesting.  In the end, you do have to beat down Paladius to get the artifact from him, and you can choose to kill him or spare him at your discretion.  Despite being a Light Side character I went with kill, since he'd betrayed me once before, so there was no reason to suspect that he'd be any  more trustworthy in the future.

Then the ghost of Lord Kallig tells you that your master is planning to betray you and suggests that you retrieve his old mask from a Sith on Korriban.  Which I did, and now I'm looking for the next artifact chunk on Tatooine.

All well and good, but there are a few hiccups along the way.  For one thing, in the final battle against Lord Paladius, he uses the artifact piece he's got to drain you of Force energy.  This is shown when you try to shock him in the conversation and nothing happens.  "Let us resolve this matter with our lightsabers!" he declares.  Except that when the fight itself happens, my Force powers work just fine and he goes down to the same Force Lightning barrage that everyone else does.  Seems like a bug.

The ones that bothers me more, though, are the ones with the Korriban side jaunt.  For one thing, when I get into the SIth's chamber, he's got a couple of apprentices with him.  When I initiate the fight in conversation there's an animation of them both igniting their lightsabers at the same time the Lord himself does.  It's pretty cool.  Except that when the fight actually starts, they vanish...and not a stealth vanish or something.  They're simply not there and do not participate in the fight at all.  It was pretty jarring.

What was worse, though, was the mask.  The game knows Tasia is a Twi'lek.  When I tried to claim the mask from the Sith guy and said that it was my inheritance because I was descended from Lord Kallig, his response was: "A Twi'lek slave inheriting a Sith artifact?  The only thing you'll be inheriting is a slave collar!"

So why is it that when I put on Kallig's mask, I look like this?

Seriously, it was bad enough when they pulled that shit with the ghost of Lord Kallig back on Dromund Kas.  At least then, I could fanwank the idea that maybe Kallig himself had been a human or pureblood Sith and that Tasia was descended from a Twi'lek lover or something.  But what the hell am I supposed to here?  Say that Tasia cut her lekku off, which contains a good chunk of her brain mind you, just to wear the mask?  Because there's no way in hell she's fitting them under that thing.  And if she did and those boxy things are cybernetic implants that replace the lost brain functions or some such, why is it the lekku spring back out when I take the damn thing off?

It's just sloppy, and it breaks immersion for me that they couldn't be bothered to make any kind of allowance for one of the most popular races out there.  Since the mask is a plot item and an orange piece of gear to boot, I've just gone ahead and set my head slot to off, so that I get the mechanical benefit without having to explain how I got de-Twi'leked to people.  

But it's still bitterly disappointing that Bioware could be so slapdash about this.

WEP '12, Day 49 - Elvis, Bogey, Marilyn, and Dean

I've got this print near my desk:

It's one of several parodies of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks painting, seen here:

The thing that gets me isn't that it's a parody.  After all, this painting is easy to parody.  Characters ranging from the Peanuts gang to Santa Claus and his reindeer have been in that diner.

No, what's always made me wonder is why are those for actors are always portrayed together?  I've seen those four put together in art all over the place.  Granted its usually in casual restaurants that like to hag kitsch on the walls, but still.  It's always those four.  Never with any other American icons.  Do a quick Google Image Search for "dean bogey elvis marilyn" and see how many pictures you get of them dancing, eating, or playing pool.  

It's not like they were really contemporaries, though.  Dean and Bogart were both dead before either Monroe's or Elvis' careers really took off.  None of them even performed with each other, as far as my research can tell.  Granted, said research was limited to perusals of Google, IMDB, and Wikipedia, but even so you'd think there'd have been one film at least.

And yet, there they are, locked together as a group from here into eternity.  

About the only thing I can figure is that they were all very popular in their eras, and yet, so were a lot of people.  So were Sinatra, and Wayne, and Stewart, and Brando.  So were Grable, and Mansfield, and Taylor, for that matter.

So why Bogie, Elvis, Marilyn, and Dean?

WEP '12, Day 48 - Old Republic Log XX

With Kelynn on vacation on Carrick Station, I returned to Tasia after a few weeks.  Part of the reason I'd backed off my Sith Sorceress was because I'd tried to start my Class Quest on Nar Shadaa and gotten wiped out twice in a row.  That was pretty disheartening, and since I needed to power level Kelyenn to catch up with the rest of the Midnight Runners anyway, I left Tasia pondering her failure for a time.

When I came back, I noticed a world quest available, so I went off and did that instead.  That got me up to level 22, and when I went back to try that stalled Class Quest again, I prevailed.  I also came to realize that while my technique of focusing mostly on shielding and healing my Companion works fine when confronted by a boss, it actually isn't a very good idea against multiple enemies.  So now I've developed two combat routines, one heal based for single powerful enemies, and one aggressive lightning based one for groups where its more important to thin their numbers before they can overwhelm Kham Val.

What's interesting is the degree to which the Sorceress is all about crowd control.  Lacking the numerous area effect powers that are the best part of the Trooper's repertoire, the Sorceress is forced to rely more on disabling enemies with several stunning and slowing powers.  That actually works pretty well, even against groups, because I can Force Whirlwind one enemy out of my way, then use my various lightning powers, some of which also stun, to eliminate a second enemy while Khem massacres the one or two guys who remain.  Finally we team up to kill the whirlwind victim quickly to end the fight.

Meanwhile, in boss fights I tap a couple of Damage Over Time abilities, then re-shield and heal Khem, then maybe throw in a Force Lightning or something, then more heals, and so on.  It's slower, but more sure, since Khem rarely goes below half health when I'm working it that way.

I've almost got the Nar Shadaa Class Quest worked out, and indeed, have gotten Tasia a couple of levels more, so I'll do a story spoiler section once I've got that next chunk done.

Kelynn, Level 35 Vanguard, Republic Fleet
Tasia, Level 24 Sith Sorceress, Imperial Fleet
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant
Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

WEP '12, Day 47 - Twain on the Internet

I've recently subscribed via RSS to Letters of Note,  a website that republishes famous and interesting letters from over the years.  Today's was by Mark Twain, where he discussed his view on why print interviews are inherently worthless.  It's a short read, so you should probably just go have a look for yourself here.

Got it read?  Great.  Let's carry on.

The funny thing about this letter is that I can recall expressing many of the same feelings about the internet.  I can even remember the situation.  I was driving Ryan to the airport in '98 or '99 or so, and we were discussing the existence of smileys.  My point was that appending an appropriate smiley was simply an attempt to add, however primitively, some vestige of emotional content to what would otherwise be unexpressed.

It turns out that Mark Twain said it better one hundred and ten years earlier.

Though the recent proliferation of audio and video communication mitigates matters somewhat, the fact is that for the most part the internet is a written medium.  Be it Facebook Wall, Tweets, forum posts, articles, or blogs, most of the information we get from people online is still text.  And, as Twain said, whil text is awesome at expressing raw data, it falls down hard in conveying emotions in all bu the broadest of strokes.

So the next time you're about to blow your stack over an insulting forum reply or think someone's an idiot or evil because of something that's being quoted to you over the 'net, try to recall what old Sam Clemens warned you about a hundred and twenty five years ago.

WEP '12, Day 46 - I Can't Write in Third Person

I spent hours yesterday trying to get my story to work from a third person limited perspective and I got maybe half a page in, and that half page wasn't very good.

Today, I scrapped the whole thing and started over, this time in first person.  And the words flowed.    Possibly it's because I write these posts all in first person, and thus, have been getting much more practice in it.  The complication, of course, is that I'll have to work extra hard to make sure my characters develop a unique voice beyond my normal writing style.

I'll also have to see if I can thread the line between not putting in enough detail on one hand and becoming pedantic on the other.  Since my story is set in a world I've been developing for nearly twenty years now, I know a lot about how it works.  The temptation to make it less a story and more an encyclopedia entry is one I'll have to watch.

Writing in manuscript format is pretty interesting, but since it was a format developed for typewriters to allow for maximum readability and the ability to add in commentary and corrections, I can see why it's popular, even if it'd be less useful for an e-book submission if I wanted to go that way.

Overall, I've made a little progress: three pages out of the maximum twenty I'm allowed.  If I can keep that up, I should be done by next week, and then have another week or so for editing and revision.  That's not a lot of time, but it'll have to do.

WEP '12, Day 45 - Old Republic Log XIX

We hit Taral V last night.  The result?  Failure.  Everything had been going fine until the final section.  Taral V feels like you're adventuring outdoors for the most part.  You've got a primary objective, some secondary ones, and even a sequence of staged objectives where you kill wildlife, then kill Imperials, then hack security terminals, then finally kill off a side boss, the base commander.  There's another sequence where you blow up research stations, after which you can use a terminal to blow up a couple of the sentry guns protecting the final boss.

Unfortunately, the last three bosses, including the base commander, are stone cold bastards.  There's a giant robot with near instant kill missiles that you have to avoid.  We eventually got past him, but then there was the Sith Lord optional boss who could Force Storm and pull everyone in then blast the shit outta them.  We lost to him a few times then opted out of the option.  Finally the big boss hits like a truck, has sentry guns, and halfway through calls in some guards to help him out.  It was a pain, and we were all tired and frustrated by the time we got to him, so we called it a night after our fourth defeat.

By comparison, the early bosses, one a guy and his giant cats, the other another guy and his tamed monster, went down on the first try each.  Probably we need more levels to take out the big guys, which is annoying, but what can you do?  We also discovered that the three Flashpoints we thought we were going to do are really two Flashpoints.  The Jedi Prisoner Flashpoint only exists to give you some story elements before sending you straight into Taral V.  Why the need to call it something else and make us think there's an extra Republic Flashpoint, I've no idea.

I finished Alderaan, and put the finishing touches on chapter one of the Trooper story, which is pretty cool. I'll talk about Alderaan in the customary spoiler section after the portrait.  Speaking of which, it occurred to me that I've got a couple of non-combat outfits that Kelynn can wear.  I'll start with the first one I picked up, a Coruscant High Society Dress....

Kelynn, Level 35 Vanguard, Republic Fleet
Tasia, Level 21 Sith Sorceress, Balmora
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant
Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

It is a time of civil war...and SPOILERS.

SPOILERS for the rightful Queen of Alderaan!

No, despite the silly outfit, you don't end up being the Queen of Alderaan.  The dress does look pretty royal, though.  Anyway, Alderaan is all about the Alderaanian Civil War.  Obviously, as a Trooper, I'm also there to hunt down the traitor Gearbox, but that's actually pretty easy.  Three missions, none of them very hard, and bam, one blown to hell traitor.  However, since Garza also ordered me to help the Republic's mission to Alderaan, I spent a hell of a lot more time saving House Organa, putting a beatdown on their rival houses, and, eventually, deposing the usurper and restoring the Alderaanian throne.  

After all that, I got word from base where to finally find Tavus, stormed his Star Destroyer, and captured him.  Oddly enough, there was no Light Side/Dark Side to whether or not to execute him, so I kept him alive for interrogation purposes.  After which, Garza gave me some time off!  I can start the next chapter by holo-calling the boss, but until then, I can do what I want.  And since Kelynn Vashe (having just earned her Legacy title) is now level 35 and ready for the next two guild runs as is, I'm just going to let her relax on Carrick Station.  Maybe I'll play Tasia or Leanra for awhile instead.  

WEP '12, Day 44 - The Clarion Call

I'm going to try some self-social engineering.  The idea here is to try and force myself to do something through perceived peer pressure.  It has more or less worked with this blog.  Excepting last weekend's burp due to illness, I've gone forty four days in a row posting here.  The fact that I know that there are something on the order of six to ten people who read this everyday is what gets me to write here day in and day out.  Granted, not everything that's written on the blog is good per say, some of it is pretty pro forma, especially the posts that pop out at two in the morning when I'm dog tired.  Last night's Chicago Bulls post, I'm looking at you.  Nevertheless, forty four posts in forty four days ain't a bad start.

There's this thing called the Clarion West Writer's Workshop.  It's a six week writer's boot camp, with each week taught by a different established author in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  One of said instructors is George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame.  So if I can manage to attend that, it'll be a pretty big deal.  The first step is applying, and said application requires 4,000 to 7,500 words of genre fiction by midnight of March 1st.  Well, technically, it's twenty to thirty pages of manuscript which boils down to around that number of words, but you get the idea.  I'm not satisfied by anything I've got on hand, though,   So I'm going to try writing a new short story over the next two weeks for my application.

What does that mean to you, loyal reader?  Well here's the plan.  I'm going to be writing my story in a Google Doc.  I'll grant access to the Doc to anyone who contacts me and provides the email address they want to use for access purposes.  Use whatever contact method you're comfortable with, be it email (jng2058 at yahoo.com), Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.   Hell, you could even leave a comment here, if that's your pleasure.  I'm not configured for carrier pigeons, though.

I'm not going to put the story up on the blog.  That counts as "publishing" it, and if the thing's any good, I may try to make some money off it.  Granting limited access to some readers/editors is just fine, though.

If you have comments on the story, feel free to leave them here, or in the comments of future Clarion Call posts that I may put up.  And I shouldn't have to say, but will for formality's sake, don't edit the Google Doc itself please!

So that's the idea.  If even only a couple of you read the story as it goes up, that should encourage me to keep writing the damn thing, painful as it may be to have my writing process out on display.  but I'd really like to have those six weeks in Seattle, and this is the first step towards that goal.

Let's see how it goes!

WEP '12, Day 43 - Chicago Bulls 2011-12

I watched the Bulls lose to the Celtics this afternoon.  For all that it was a loss, I wasn't too discouraged by the outcome.  After all, it was the last game of a nine game road trip, and the Bulls were down their single best player.

No, what I took away from it was the fact that despite being exhausted and short a star, the Bulls managed to hang in until the very end, and  with a little better shooting and decision making in the final minute could have gone to overtime or even won the game straight up.

What it means, then, is that even without Derrick Rose on hand, the Bulls are actually a pretty good team.  Unfortunately, "pretty good" only gets you a couple of rounds into the playoffs.  You need to be great to win it all, and with Rose on the bench, the Bulls just can't make it to greatness.

So despite tonight's close loss and the Roseless Bulls' easy win Friday night against the hapless Charlotte Bobcats, it comes down to what we already knew....the Bulls will go as far as Derrick Rose can take them.  And if by playoff time he doesn't come back from his back injury, or even is kind of  hampered by it, the Bulls will make the playoffs but won't be able to win it all.

Rose is that important.  Which means that I approve of coach Tom Thibideau keeping Rose out of the game.  Losing regular season games is less important than winning in the playoffs, so doing whatever he can to preserve Derrick for June is fine by me.  Just win enough without him to get in to the playoffs and I won't complain at all if we don't see Derrick until the tournament starts.