For my fourth acrylic painting ever I think it turned out OK. If you went back in time to watch me at age 12 paint my fourth miniature ever I think you would agree that the acrylics progress has been much faster. I think the miniature turned out so bad that I just dunked it in turpentine and started over.

(click for full size)

The painting is out of Jerry Yarnell’s Painting Basics. Yarnell is along the same lines as Bob Ross. Mostly landscapes, some seascapes. Nothing super-interesting but he covers a lot of fundamental techniques. I’m not half bad at script lining and dry brushing. I need to work on keeping edges soft, especially in the sky.

Still, his palette is a little too purple for my tastes. It might be time to move on soon.

There are a lot of pictures in my head that I want to paint but I’m not good enough to paint them yet.

The only time that blogging was truly fun for me was back in 2001-2003 on livejournal. That ran its course and fizzled out in due time. These days those posts look fairly strange to me but not strange in a bad way. Some of them read like they’re very forced and some read like they’re very calculated but many manage to be very entertaining in their own way. My LJ friends list is still semi-intact but the vast majority no longer post or read on LJ. I’d very much like to have fun blogging again but it’s hard to imagine how that will play out.

Over the weekend I finished Fallout 3. I think it is a game that deserves a place in my top 10 of all time list. It may not be top 5 material because the denouement was…lacking. The Brotherhood of Steel does all the heavy lifting in the prelude to the endgame which is lackluster in and of itself. Still, I loved the game for its bleakness. 2008 has been a bleak year on a national, international, and personal level and I found that picking through society’s ruins in Fallout 3 was a welcome distraction. The game’s dark humor and campy sci-fi elements keep it from being a digital version of The Road.

Case in point there’s an encounter in the game where you meet some scavengers who ask you if you’re looking for a place called Oasis. If you say “yes” then they try to kill you because they don’t want anyone else beating them to it. I ended their foolish attempt with two shotgun blasts. Five minutes later I was being attacked by a Lost-in-Space-looking robot with a human brain in a jar as a CPU. From vaguely disturbing to laughable. Excellent.

Fallout 3 was a gaming milestone for another reason but that reason has to be saved for a future post.   

If you’re a true gamer, on the other hand, you hopefully have come to realize that Monopoly is a piece of shit. It’s ONLY good as an entry-level game to tech children how to count money, negotiate trades, and plan strategy.

I define gamer as someone who has more than just a casual interest in games and gaming. If you’ve heard of Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, or Axis and Allies then you’re probably a gamer (or maybe you just live with one*)

So, without further yapping, here’s why Monopoly is a horse-shit game

• Players who lose are eliminated one by one. As soon as one person is eliminated your “family game night” is ruined because the first loser has an hour or two to kill while everyone else enjoys a board game. This fact introduces a whole realm of “sympathy gaming” to the mix in which players will make trades to their own detriment to help someone stay in the game. The game makes you feel like an asshole if you play to win. That sucks.
• Two players are too few and 5-6 players border on too many. This is true for most board games but a 6 player game of Monopoly can be a god-awful grind if none of the players have a clear advantage. In a 2-player game the players just take turns rolling dice for 3 hours until someone quits.
• In Monopoly there’s a substantial late-game penalty for advancing around the board. Once you have your properties built up and you’re collecting rents there’s no longer any reason for you to be passing “Go.” In fact, the more you move around the board the more likely you are to land on other peoples’ properties and pay them rent. The outcome of this is that “Go to Jail” becomes desirable late in the game because it allows you to skip 3 turns. It’s safe to say that the late-game advantage of Jail outweighs the early-game penalty (in other words Jail=good. That sucks.)
• Once the players have established their properties the gameplay is little more than each player taking turns rolling dice and moving cards and money around until someone has a string of bad luck and loses. This happens at the END of the game when players are weary from a long game and need the extra excitement. Contrast this with Settlers of Catan which starts off a little slow, picks up in the middle, and can be a nail-biting race to the finish.
• House rules designed to fix some of the game’s problems often end up breaking the game even more. “Free Parking” bonuses dump money into the game, resulting in a longer game, for example. On the other hand I always liked the house rule which says that jailed players cannot collect rent. Of course, most households don’t use that rule because it makes the game much harder.

If your kids are nearing the age when they’re able to play games that require strategy, do them a favor and get rid of Monopoly after they’ve gotten the hang of it. Buy them a copy of the aforementioned Settlers of Catan or Caylus, take the time to learn the slightly more complex (but highly polished) rules and give thanks that you’re going to avoid years of moving around and around and around in circles on family game night.

*I just put that line in there to piss my girlfriend off. She’s a gamer too but she might not admit it!

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They might have gotten their heads blown off. We take undead crisis management seriously in these parts.

I think it’s better to just stay in town and relax.

Have a good weekend, meatbags.

I’m quite happy with and appreciative of the handful of new readers who come here and read my nonsense each week. I could get more if I applied myself, I suppose.

It reminds me of society’s current approach to energy consumption…simple, irrational, cheap, and a total mess.

There was this one week in 3rd grade where we had a tough spelling test. Me and two other guys found books in the library with one of the tough spelling words printed on the cover or the spine. We left the books under our chairs during the test so the others could use them as a secret cheat sheet during the test. As I recall, it worked like a charm. I couldn’t remember how to spell “America” so I peeked at one of the books and got the answer.

As we pushed through to Junior High an interesting thing happened. While the teachers in elementary school had generally been young, bright-eyed, optimistic young women; the teachers in Junior High were embittered, apathetic, tired old shells of their former selves (there were some good ones in there but not many.) The school was undersized and overcrowded. It was dirty and uncomfortable. Parts of it had a mold problem. Some classes were held in mobile homes behind the school. It sucked to attend school there so I can only imagine how much it sucked to teach there. Many of the teachers had embraced a concept called “peer evaluation” in which we would switch papers with the person next to us and grade their work (usually it was homework such as grammar or spelling worksheets.) For the first time ever, the smart kids could help the dumb kids cheat and get away with it. I probably bumped my friend’s grade up by an entire letter that year on spelling tests alone (yes, they actually let us peer-grade spelling tests.) Alternatively, when I happened to grade the work of a kid I didn’t like I made sure to carefully mark every little mistake and accurately report the right score.

At the time we figured that the teachers didn’t know what we were up to. Now I realize that they probably did know. They just plain didn’t care. So much cheating went on at that Junior High that it produced a Freshman class in High School that could cheat like nobody’s business.

More stories from my shitty Junior High later this week…I’ve got a story about science class that still makes me cringe to this day.

I’m taking the day off to watch the ball game and go camping.