Umbral Echoes Blog

Well I’m sitting in the food court by the DragonCon hotels right now, with their craptastic/spastic WiFi connection (but it’s free, so I guess I can’t complain too much). Got checked in to the room early to get one close to the ground floor — Marriott room 312 for anyone reading this who’s going to the con.

Pictures (and possibly video, since Dave has a shiny new HD video cam) shall be forthcoming. I can only hope that DragonCon lives up to GenCon’s dicebagging glory.

In other news, the Bagwells have been staying with us this week, which has been awesome. I’ve missed ya, you Gumby-lookin’ bastard. I fully expect you to bring back some terrorist bone fragments from Iraq. And I really wish I could roleplay with Christy more — that was always a blast. Stupid time being spread so thin.

The smell of food is making me hungry again, so it’s time for second dinner now.

My favorite sushi place in the whole world is a little place called Sushi Yoko in Doraville.  It looks pretty ghetto from the outside, and I only went there on the advice of a friend.  I took my friend Bagwell with me, and upon entering, we were the only two Westerners in there.  Naturally, we felt a little out of place.  Until, that is, a long-haired obviously-American dude came in, at which point we rejoiced.  And then saw that he was holding a little half-Japanese girl by the hand, and then heard him speaking what seemed to be fluent Japanese on his cellphone.

Anyway, this place has the best sushi I’ve ever had, and it’s very reasonably priced, too.  It’s next to a Japanese market called Tomato.  Well, apparently Tomato recently decided to paint the walls leading to their place with happy little tomato figures.  Except this one rather stuck out.  You can draw your own conclusions.

Here’s a video of a firedancing chick at the White Wolf/CCP party at GenCon last weekend:

I shit you not.  It’s officially called Bat’s Day, and it happens every year.

Warning: gamer post ahead.  Feel free to ignore this if you’re not into RPGs. Continue Reading »

It’s been a busy few days.  Last week we went to Kirstie’s grandmother’s funeral, which was sad.  But it was also a really well-done service; the preacher asked the family some questions about Lois’s life and got some stories to use during the service.  Kirstie’s grandfather was very strong throughout it all — it seemed like he knew she was in a better place, and he was actually sort of happy about that.
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Went to see The Bourne Ultimatum last night with Grem and Missy, courtesy of Sam who is the manager at the Phipp’s Plaza AMC. It’s always awesome to have a friend that can get you free movie passes. The theater was sold to capacity, and unfortunately we had to sit in the 2nd to front row, over to the right. Not the greatest viewing angle. This will come back in a few moments. Also, the air conditioning was broken. So imagine, if you will, a theater with every seat filled, feeling like a sauna, and trying to watch a screen from a viewpoint that causes it to appear distorted.

The movie started off pretty strong. Cool action, lots of spy stuff. Some cool fighing. Reminiscent of the other Bourne movies, but done even better in my opinion. Well, after the first few scenes, I started getting nauseas. I soon realized why (in addition to the vantage point and heat): the camerawork.

I think they were going for the gritty, in-the-middle-of-the-action feeling with the shaky camera, panning around and zooming in and out randomly. After just a few minutes, I figured out their secret: they found an epileptic monkey, strapped a camera to its right hand, and had trained it follow the action. The one thing they didn’t account for is that the epileptic monkey was also a compulsive masturbator. Because seriously, I swear this movie was filmed by an epileptic, masturbating monkey with a camera strapped to its hand.

Needless to say, I spent much of the movie with my eyes closed to avoid losing my dinner. But the movie was good. I think.

First of all, an apology for dropping off the face of the earth.  Explanation forthcoming.

Last weekend there was a White Wolf cookout, which ended up as a party at Mike Tinney’s house.  Well, some of us got there early, and there was a set of boxing gloves… so we decided to punch each other while we waited for Mike to arrive and let us in.  The only issue was that there were 2 boxing gloves, not 4.  So one person got to be a righty, and one person a lefty.  So I fought some with The Swede, being nice and giving him the right glove.  It was fun times… well except when he decided to punch me several times as we were breaking up from a clench and my guard was down.

Cary’s welcoming party was the next day,  and more people showed up to that than I expected.  That’s the thing with my friends down here — instead of saying they’ll come and not showing up, they say they probably can’t make it, and then do come.  We had some drinks, hung out, and watched Borat.  Which, for anyone who still hasn’t seen it, is incredibly awesome.

Then on… Wednesday, I think it was (I’ve lost track of days), at work we did a database merger for which we’ve been preparing for about 7 months.  This involved staying at work until 11:30pm, coming home only to work more until 2:30am, catching a few hours of sleep, then going in to work on it some more the next morning.  And a few days of publishers being like, “OMGWTF?!?!  Things have changed!  Change is BAD!!!”  With a few refreshing instances of, “You guys are doing great — this has gone more smoothly than I expected it would.”