Saaga

Sorry for the long absence, but I’ve been pretty busy. As Steve’s mentioned, we’ve moved into a new apartment. It’s a really nice apartment in a good location, but before we moved we had to do lots of painting and then we had to pack everything up and move it and unpack it all. Steve was on school holidays for most of the time (thank goodness or the painting would have taken forever), but I was working full-time, so had quite a bit on my plate.

Here is a floorplan of the new place:

Don’t have any photos yet, but they’ll come shortly.

The new neighbourhood is not as ‘nice’ as the previous one. More multicultural and interesting. If the old suburb was kind of like Crows Nest, then this one is kind of like Surry Hills. We are only one stop away from the main station, or a seven minute walk, so can’t complain about that!

So we’ve almost finished unpacking, but it always seems to take ages to unpack the last one or two boxes. Unfortunately, I think we need to go to Ikea again and get some more book shelves. We’ve managed to acquire so much stuff in one year….

I have had a great deal of exposure to super heroes this past week or two and it has all been by coincidence.

1. Derek left for his first long stint in the USA, but before he went, he rapped up the story we were playing in his super hero game. It was a great game. We achieved our objectives and had a laugh and are now ready for the next story when he comes back at Christmas time. The unfortunate part is that one of our players is moving to the US in a week or so and another has just moved to Switzerland, so we have to build a new gaming group.

2. A club in the high school asked me to be their patron teacher. It turned out to be the role playing society and as of next week I will be taking over running the games for them. I can’t believe I am being paid to run an RPG*. Anyway they want to play a super hero game, so I thought about the significant games I have played in the genre;
• ‘Champions’ is great. It’s very complex and can handle absolutely anything you throw at it, as long as it is all done during character generation. The failing is that I have never known Champions to be flexible once the characters are made.
• ‘Marvel’ (the new dice less one) is absolutely fantastic, but after six months we managed to start breaking the combat system. I can only imagine what six or seven young nerd prodigies would do to the game in the same time frame. *shudder*
• ‘Heroes unlimited’ is great because it is quick and easy to create a character and play. I always felt that in the super hero games I have played, that I had more control in this system. Possibly it’s because I had a lot more experience with it and one of the best long term games I played in used it.
So I have ordered the second edition of the rules and one of the updates on EBay and they should be here by the start of next week. I am ever so slightly excited.

3. My friend Colin ‘the knife’ Gallagher, lent me a DVD of a TV series I had never heard of before. ‘The 4400’. Now I’m hooked. It’s a bit like the x-files, but involves the people having been returned by their abductors. The secret agents then go around and check up on the returnees to make sure they are not in weird meta-human generated trouble. The reason that this is part of Super Hero week is that whoever abducted them, returned many of them with super powers.

4. Last night for no apparent reason, Alex decided that we should go to the movies and see Superman Returns. I was looking forward to it because I love the genre to bits, but I have to say I came out a little disappointed. It didn’t suck like many reviews have said, but it really didn’t do anything great either.
Overall I found it a little dull and about 20 minutes too long.
I would have liked to see Supes go up against some super powered villains, giant robots or aliens, rather than someone that is going to rely on Kryptonite once again.
I suppose it’s because Superman can do so much and there is very little that can challenge him, that they use Kryptonite to combat him…constantly. It is often considered poor writing to give a character something and then constantly take it away so that he can partake of an interesting story. Just like Jango Fett in the crappy Star Wars movies; he has a jet pack, but in every fight it gets trashed so that he can’t use it.
So next time, let’s have some imaginative writing (like in the comics) to make a Superman movie great like it should be: Either that or rename him ‘Pretty good man’.

*Nothing to do with grenades Dad.

We have moved into our new house, but because we have to rely on Deutsche Telekom to get our internet up and running, it might be some time before we are able to post regularly. I am not going to rant about how hopeless Deutsche Telekom are, because I already wrote one (if you want to read it, you will find it in the Archive for August the 26th last year) and I’m sure Alex will want to vent about it, so I’ll leave it to her.
Our new place is in Oberbilk, and while we have a Ubahn 194 steps (my steps) from our front door, we are also only 7 minutes walk from the Hauptbahnhof. Moving was the regular size pain in the arse, but luckily we got help from a bunch of our friends.*

*Thankyou to Knifey boy, Kirkulon, Timmerang, Chuck the Trojan, Horst from Forst and Mulia the Hun.

Last night we went to Dortmund to see Tex Perkins and Tim Rogers do their guitar thing. It was pretty damn good and I even got heckled by Tex. The pair seem to sing largely about the ‘tragedy’ that is their lives and they do it well…it must suck to be a rock star. If I was naming the tour, I would have called it ‘Tim and Tex’, but that’s because I like Tim Rogers more. In fact, it appears that I like him enough to irritate him, by screaming out ‘Berlin Chair’ at the top of my Pilsenered lungs during a break between songs. His derisive glare passed over me as he searched Sauron-esquely for the one who dared debase his perfectly spontaneous evening, but luckily I wasn’t wearing the ring, so he forgot about it and went about his business.
It’s called a world tour, which I thought was interesting, considering that almost half the gigs on the list are to be held in Australia and the gig we were at reminded me of a school disco. It was seriously in a community hall, the kind where the boys learn to box on a Wednesday from 4-6 pm.

This write up has been far harsher than I originally intended, but I will leave it because I am to lazy to delete it. I have to say that the gig was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Tex’s raw vocals were perfectly complimented by the more vulnerable sounding Tim and at the expense of sounding like a wanking music journo; it did feel like they had really put part of themselves into the writing of the lyrics….Unlike the support band.
Beggars fortune were the band before the main act and while they weren’t terrible, they were really not offering anything interesting. It was like some evil genius got the Spin Doctors, shaved them, ruined their posture and gave them all beer guts. It was all very archetypal; the guitarist was musically very good, but visually kind of dull, the lead singer was quite the showman, but he seemed the kind of guy you would tell to piss off, after having chat with him over a few drinks. The bass player was weird, but it seemed put on, like he’d watched one too many Red Hot Chilli Peppers video and then, as usual, I have no memory of the drummer.

In other news we are moving house and I am sick of renovating and packing.

When I was a child, mum used to take us to the dentist at least twice a year for check ups. Unfortunately because our dentist had a heroin addiction, he would always recommend further work to pay for his habit, so it was more like four or five times a year that we had our faces prised open to receive pain and suction. I would have to say that while I no longer fear the dentist, I am certainly reluctant to have any unnecessary contact with one.
Again unfortunately, I have been having tooth pain, so after ignoring it for the required amount of time, I went in and while he couldn’t find anything wrong with me he did manage to make two further appointments; the last of which was today.
It was just a tooth cleaning or so I thought, but what I didn’t factor in was that it was a tooth cleaning done by a German. It was a daunting prospect and the reality was made no easier by the amount of metal appliances she used. There were more hooks in motion than at a pirate prosthetics convention.
My teeth are now clean and if they know what’s good for them, they will stay that way.