Has anyone ever played this? I went to Southpoint mall for my semimonthly look around, buy nothing trip and I stopped in the hobby store to look at the models and remote control vehicles. In the back of the store they had a tournament going on like they do every time I have ever been in there. To tell you the truth I know nothing about the game at all, it’s played with cards and to me seems like an updated version of Dungeons and Dragons, except you need to be constantly be buying new decks of cards for shit tons of money to be able to keep playing. Nothing against having a hobby or anything but looking back there was extremely creepy. It’s like the whole game is just a big cover for a NAMBLA dating service or something. If I was a parent I don’t think I would allow my child to play that game if I actually went in there and saw who they were playing it with. It was just about the creepiest thing I have ever seen. It looked like a bunch of 45 year old real life Comic Book Guys smiling and chatting up a bunch of 8 year old boys. I almost took a picture with the camera phone to illustrate what I’m talking about but after thinking about it I thought it would be creepier to be the guy taking pictures of the guys chatting up the little boys. I’m sure some weird Magic the Gathering grand wizard will find this post and send me angry messages about how I don’t know what I’m talking about. My response… Why are you seriously playing a competitive game against a child? For the challenge of it? Is it because you have money and can win because you can buy the right cards and the child can’t because they can’t afford it? I just don’t see the purpose. I don’t get it.
They had some sort of arts festival going on there in the mall parking lot that I gave a quick look at as well. Lots of eclectic people in little tents selling their wares for too much money. Well a lot of it was neat stuff but way out of the price range I was willing to pay. Some of the glass works were especially nice but at $175 for a glob of glass the size of my fist… well it was just too much money. I also liked a lot of the drawings and paintings that people had.
I finally broke down and bought an iPod today. That means that the fad is over and it’s all downhill from here since I’m always last on the bandwagon. It’s not like I think that an iPod is the best mp3 player or anything, it’s just that it’s pretty much the defacto standard out there and there’s tons of accessories for it. That’s basically what I was looking for. I want to be able to throw it in a dock and play it through my stereo and control it using my fancy universal remote. I also needed something that could hold my entire audio collection which right now is right at 40 gigs. I ended up going with a black refurbished 80gig and a cheap black dock so it matches the stereo system. They lowered the price on it since they came out with some new models. I was going to get one of the new model ones but I was doing some reading and saw that they broke compatibility with 3rd party software and you can only use iTunes with them so that sealed the deal for me. I despise iTunes and use MediaMonkey since it works better when you have a lot of music and audio to sort through.
The triathlon is this Sunday… I’m not ready at all. I’ve been sick with some nagging throat and chest thing for a couple weeks now and haven’t been training. I worked out Monday before my 14 hour shift and it knocked me on my ass all day Tuesday because I was so tired. Then yesterday I couldn’t sleep because I slept too much on Tuesday. That’s what I don’t like about working nights. I cant get my body in sync like you can when you sleep at night and work during the day. I’m constantly fighting it, and it sucks. Anyway judging by the results of last year’s race and my estimated running time we are going to come in not quite dead last overall… but pretty close. I will almost certainly be dead last in the running part. I don’t think running is for me. I think from now on I’ll stick to 5k’s tops to save my knees and arches of my feet and do more of the low impact stuff like the cross country ski machine to get my heart rate up.
A new iPod huh? If you need anything to fill up the 80gigs, my life is about 128mb, you can have it. Oh and don’t die trying to win that race. Glory is overrated, especially when your dead.
The glory is all in the t-shirt my friend. A year from now no one will remember that I took dead last, all they will see is the kick ass neon orange “participant” t-shirt.