Sousa

I demand in the first session that someone has to solve a puzzle, blindfolded, while jumping over a twenty foot pit....while being chased by a mongoose. Problem. You're starting at level 1, and all mongeese in my campaign setting are demigods at least. For those who are already interested, anything from any D&D book is fine with me approval. I prefer stuff from Wizards specifically, but if you've got something else in mind, I'm down. For newbies, we can do one of two things: either I can come up with some stock characters for you all, or I can work with you on AIM/MSN sometime. Either way's cool with me.

For me? It's really not possible to put the time back much, unfortunately. I don't like to play when my wife is home, since she and I don't see each other a whole lot, and D&D requires the lion's share of my attention if I'm GMing. Sorry. As for campaign setting, I have my own original one that I use, since I don't have the time or the resources to commit to an Eberron or a Forgotten Realms and find it much easier to improvise things if I'm not tied to a specific world. I had a bad experience in an Eberron campaign once when a guy who knew the campaign setting kept correcting the DM on stupid, asinine shit--and I'm talking about shit along the lines of the spelling of names. It got pretty heated. That's one of the reasons why I'm not a fan of specific ready-made settings. What specifically that setting will entail will depend a lot on where we start; it's a big world, with lots to do and lots of undefined space. And naturally, any newbies are welcome. I'll be tailoring the campaign specifically with new people in mind, without a lot of crazy complex shit at first. It should be pretty easy to get on board.

You're on central time, right? 10 pm central (11 pm EST for me) is actually perfect, because that's when my wife leaves for work. And I've only really run D&D before, with some light and poorly done White Wolf stuff (Aberrant), so D&D 3.5 Edition would probably work best. It's not too hard to pick up; like I told you earlier, there are a lot of little rules, but you generally only deal with them one at a time. If you want the absolute easiest RPG, we could do Risus (Google it), but that's only going to get you mildly acquainted with it at best. I'll work on setting something up with more specifics when I'm not at work. >_<

If GM is Game Master, I'm hoping Sousa will do it. I'd love to do it, but you'll have to bear with my schedule. I work full-time, and I have two kids. Saturday, Sunday, or Monday nights (later rather than earlier) work best, which might make it difficult for some of the Brits to get involved, unfortunately. But if that's fine, I think I could throw something together.

I know jack shit about basketball, but on the other hand, no matter how many of these brackets I enter, I can never seem to get last place. Let's see how I do this year. Drake vs. Wisconsin in the finals, baby!

1. Beast (seriously, Beast is fucking cool) 2. Spider-Man 3. The Thing 4. Rogue 5. Iron Man

Yo.

Mulan is another one, but looking over the list of Disney animated movies, that's really about it.

1. The Velvet Underground 2. Chuck Berry 3. The Beatles 4. Led Zeppelin 5. Howlin' Wolf (look him up... all of you cats who list the Rolling Stones best pay yer damn respects!) 6. The Pixies 7. B.B. King 8. David Bowie 9. Hüsker Dü 10. The Ramones

This is Spinal Tap has been criminally underpimped in recent years. It seems to slip under a lot of people's radars, but it's a fantastic movie.

I think I might have something wrong with my brain, because whatever Oasis is doing to impress the fuck out of everyone else in the world hasn't worked on me. They are as overrated a band as I've ever heard--generic, vanilla, and boring.

Rita Heyworth, man. My God.

Y'all don't need to post enormous screen-stretching pictures of the boxes of every obscure game you played--we get the idea. Now here's a tale for you: when I was young, I was Pentecostal like my parents, and they made every effort to keep us involved in church. One of those ways, of course, involved video games, and as those of us who were Christian children in the late 80's and early 90's will tell you, there was no better source of family-friendly Christian entertainment than Wisdom Tree. Bible Adventures is probably the most well-known of these games, and it featured three games in one, all of which were... moderately entertaining. Noah's Ark had you gathering animals to put on the ark, literally holding them over your head, which led to really strange moments when Noah would drop a cow, a bull, and two horses because a monkey had chucked a coconut at him. The infamous Baby Moses game had you rescuing Baby Moses from the Egyptians... or, more often than not, chucking the little bastard into the Red Sea. And David & Goliath was a lie, because 95% of the game was spent gathering sheep until the very last level, where you spent two hours trying to kill Goliath's nigh-invincible shield-bearer before offing the champion of the Philistine army in one hit. And then there was the more obscure Exodus. This game was on drugs. You played as Moses and were trying to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land. You did so by going through strange maze-like levels trying to collect giant manna jars while avoiding Pharaoh's sorcerers and soldiers who were out to fuck your shit up. You shot W's at your enemies that sometimes did things and sometimes didn't. There were also all kinds of little quirks. Even though you were moving from what looked like an overhead view, items would fall--anything from manna to golden calves to boulders. If they were "stacked" too high, they would fall. And if you were in the way, you would die. Weird shit would happen, too--you could drop exploding staffs (not in the Bible), you could shoot your W's at golden calves and blow them up (also not in the Bible), and weird bits of expanding mud would try to kill you along with expanding... straw, and if they combined they made bricks (semi-Biblical)... and if you blew up the bricks you got manna (what!?). The only thing really Biblical about it were the questions between the level, but by the time you played three times you had them all memorized. And despite this game being a trip to Egypt with Moses, the music in the background? Father Abraham. Over and over and over and over and over...

But doesn't that idea sort of fall apart when, for example, American Beauty receives significantly more votes than Superbad but gets 0% of the attention, presumably because you know more about Star Wars and could think of more interesting things to say?

If Ghostbusters isn't in the top ten, then we as a community have failed. Just sayin'.

"You like that? It's my Animality." -Nightwolf Oh god, I can't believe I remember that shitty movie! ...I think I'll go watch it again. "Who took out Sindel?" "I did. After she blasted you, I snuck up behind her." Bear in mind, the "sneaking up behind" bit happened off camera. Raiden fought three irrelevant ninjas, and all we saw was an unconscious Sindel. That movie is so fucking good. Oh, also, the best explanation ever for a sequel. Sonya: "I thought we'd closed the portal!" Raiden: "That which is closed can also be opened again!"

Another one during a better movie. In Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock says, roughly 400 times, "The power of the sun in the palm of my hand." I know the line makes sense in the context of the movie, but was anybody else expecting one of his robo-tentacles to reach for a bottle of Sunny D at that point, or was it just me? Oh, speaking of Spider-Man, I can't forget this gem from the first one. Aunt May's kneeling and reciting the Lord's Prayer: "And lead us not into temptation, but--" GREEN GOBLIN CRASHES DOWN THE WALL GUYS! "--BUT DELIVER US FROM..." "FINISH IT!" "DELIVER US FROM..." "FINISH IT!" "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIL!" Loved that scene. So over-the-top it was ridiculous.

I hate you so much for beating me to that joke. But yeah, Madonna is overrated.

From Mortal Kombat Annihilation: "This dude's tryin' to merge the two dimensions, and y'all wanna check out his CRIB!?" -Jax, a.k.a. one of the American Gladiators, a.k.a. HEY LOOK IT'S A BLACK ONE GUYS This may be my favorite bad line ever. It's a ridiculous thing to say, and the poor guy says it so poorly, that... yeah.

Previous winners: "YEAH BABY YEEEEEEEEEAH!" "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" "French-fried puhtaters, mmmhmmm." "SAY HELLO TO MY LEEDLE FRIEND!" "I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKIN' SNAKES ON THIS MOTHERFUCKIN' PLANE!" Very prestigious. Billy Bob Thorton actually cried.

Best Achievement in Sepia-Coloring the Sky?

Those are some of the best names for pro wrestlers that I've ever seen. Matterhorn Decker is so tough. How tough is he? Apparently, he decks mountains. Also, Cobra Bloody Joe looks a bit like black Rico.