Rolling Ahead

September looks to be a busy month for me, so I'm going to put as much planning as I can into the two stories I have to do before I write them. I might even make them into a two-parter depending on where the narrative takes me. The second story is going to begin with a flashback to unseen events regardless. I haven't finished the concept art completely in terms of coloring, but I should probably get some different colored pencils in order to do it. I'm out of a certain color, and bold variations of the colors of the rainbow are called for on the first cover. Additionally, I may just decide to lump all the stories in each series into one volume, so it's possible I'll have to make new covers for them or just pick an existing one from each.

I finished watching the second team's run in Trial of the Take, in which Wil Wheaton rolled a natural 20 and then rolled low for most of the rest of the time (the crit was for an insight check). The chat is in the habit of sending real weapons to the cast, most recently a wrist-mounted flamethrower (which uses flashpaper) for Tiberius (Orion), much to everyone's horror. Once again, Taliesin's reaction was priceless, especially when the note went on to promise a version of his gun for him. "Oh my f*cking God, we're going to die."

I saw some slides of parts of the script for the Power Rangers movie, and I didn't like what I saw. It's not that it's bad per se, but it just doesn't ring true for the characters. It would work with original characters, but these just aren't the Rangers I grew up with. It suffers from the same problem as Teen Titans Go!, that the people making it are just cashing in on the nostalgia value rather than producing all original characters for their warped fantasies.

Back from Vacation

Vacation was about everything I could have hoped for. I took a dozen pictures and did a lot of walking. I also started working on the cover concept art for the stories I'm working on (which I'll probably have to put on hold again while I write two more stories next month). The best thing I ate on vacation was a Greek omelet at a place called The Omelet Factory. The funniest thing I watched on TV that I don't usually have time for was Drunk History on Comedy Central. The only thing I regret doing is not eating anything with blueberries since that's what Maine is known for besides lobsters, but I keep having to remind myself that I don't even like blueberries that much. There also wasn't a flat surface I could roller blade on safely since the sidewalk near the inn was under construction and the streets were crowded; the inn was on a hill so I couldn't do much in the parking lot either.

I take back what I said earlier about not being excited for Hetalia. The last couple of episodes have been great and I can't wait for the dub to come out (I'll find a way to watch it). They'll probably make a Frozen reference when Sweden crosses the frozen ocean to beat up Denmark, and if they make a reference to the TGWTG reviewers in the episode with Molossia that'd be awesome too. My favorite micronation character is still Wy because she's adorable. I also liked the scenes with Britain and America in the Sahara, especially when they got caught because of Britain's tea time (at least it wasn't due to America's stupidity this time).

Getting Caught Up

Almost caught up with Critical Role, just the second team's quest to go. You could create a drinking game out of watching each episode, such as every time Laura says they're all going to die or when Taliesin face-palms and so on. The antics of late have been nothing short of astounding, as have the rolls (many with back-to-back ones and twenties). For instance, Liam rolled a one, setting off a trap, but rolled well enough not to take any damage while the rest of his companions did. Later, he told Matt to eat a bag of dicks and pretended to slit his throat; that sounds worse than it actually was. Of course, Sam harmonizing with the background music is a treat for the ears as well.

On Brad's recommendation, I went back to Subway and got a small bag of the Southern Biscuits and Gravy. At first it tasted like something you would get at Popeye's, but it really is a great breakfast snack. I also hope this one wins.

I'm going on vacation for the next few days, so it's a good thing I finished this month's story plus two hub articles I'd been holding out on. I even went back and did a successful continuity sweep. Unfortunately, I have lost a couple followers both on Hubpages and YouTube, like I knew would happen because it's me. Just a typical end to a typical week in my everyday life.

Got My Laptop Back

I finally got my laptop back and am finishing up putting things back together since they had to save all of my files and reset it. I don't remember all the pages I'd bookmarked but I think I got all the important ones back. Hopefully everything will be back to normal, or as normal as it can be now. It's still not the same, but I'm not yet sure if it's better or worse. At least it's working and not locked. Anyway, I've got a vacation coming up and I'm really looking forward to some down time. It's halfway through the month and I'm halfway through the story I scheduled myself to write. Maybe I've set my sights too high with everything I want to accomplish before or during vacation, but hopefully I will come out of it feeling pretty happy.

The F part of Tales of Graces F felt like someone's fan fiction. They easily could have done without it, but it had some good ideas. Even though I thought it was stupid at first, I was a little disappointed when Pascal and Hubert didn't quite get together in the end.

I saw at the store that they've taken all the slightly burned Cheez-Its and turned them into a variety called "tanned." I almost bought them but I wasn't going to eat a whole box of only burned Cheez-Its; I only like them popping up occasionally, but now that probably means the regular boxes should be free of burned ones, right?

Salt

Alpha and Omega Family Vacation - the fifth installment, and they're still not done. There's gonna be at least three more of these things. Why?! Anyway, this one opens and closes on a lot of idle chatter, the kind you'd encounter on any family road trip movie except this family isn't trapped in a car on the highway. I haven't seen any of the National Lampoon Vacation movies, but I thought it would be something like that. It wasn't, as the problem of humans hunting wolves for relocation purposes returns but under different circumstances. Rather than repopulation, they make it sound like the wolves are hunting all the caribou, but the wolves think the humans have driven the caribou away due to deforestation. However, that's an argument for another day, as the movie then becomes about the family of wolves evading the non-lethal hunters (which is specified several times) with the help of some of their friends rather than a vacation, though they eventually get to their destination. This is also fairly skippable, as it's the equivalent of a clip show episode with several flashbacks to the previous movies, including redubbed and reanimated clips from the first movie. Don't buy this unless you're into painful puns, outdated references, and quite possibly hate your children. Some of the writing is clever but overall it's pretty cringeworthy. The worst thing they did was split up the librarian and biker couple from the first movie. The librarian's in this one, and she's pretty awesome when she lets the wolves go free. Why couldn't the biker guy have been there too? Their relationship was symbolic of opposites attracting which made it okay for an alpha and an omega to be together!

Christopher Lloyd voices a character in the new King's Quest game. Based on that and what I'd mentioned before, I still think he would be a decent replacement for Leonard Nimoy as Master Xehanort. Unfortunately, the new King's Quest comes at the expense of Homestuck, and that's not okay, even if the deadlines for the game and the comic keep getting pushed back. There's been some debate as to whether or not Frozen should appear in Kingdom Hearts III, but I couldn't really care less. If we're getting mostly new worlds, we're getting new worlds and that's that. However, one world we can all agree should never be in Kingdom Hearts is Arcadia Bay from Life Is Strange (a Square Enix game). Or maybe I'm just salty after what happened in the most recent episode. My suspicions were correct, though - Mr. Jefferson is the ringmaster of the dark carnival.

Out of the eight main characters of Drawn Together, my favorite is definitely Foxxy Love. Not only is she voiced by Cree Summer, but most of the time she is the voice of reason. Toot is my second favorite because Tara Strong had a blast voicing her and she's got a great attitude when she's not being a self-destructive bitch. Ling Ling is third because he's an adorable murder machine like the abridged version of Pikachu. Xandir got bumped to fourth (swapping with Toot) because he became a caricature of himself as time went on. He was at his best when he was just being himself and having to put up with Captain Hero's nonsense.

Subway had personal sized bags of the Do Us A Flavor chips for once, so I decided to try Truffle Fries since it's the only one that's potato based in the first place. They were pretty good and resembled the picture on the bag.

Disagreeable

I still don't have my laptop back, but I'm posting this from my home computer since I came back to pay bills and whatnot today.
 
It may not be Vexen's fault that he comes across as being disagreeable - he was probably designed that way. Since he's number four, he was probably doomed from the very beginning; the fact that he was the first to die practically confirms it. Superstition finds its way into everything, and the number four in Japan is no exception. Four, or shi, represents death, bad luck, and overall negativity in that culture. It certainly doesn't justify calling him a loser, but I suppose that people deal with their superstitions in different ways.

A member of one of the D&D groups I'm part of posted a link to Geek and Sundry's Critical Role. I started watching it because I like Laura, Travis, Ashley, and Sam, and I was just becoming familiarized with Matt and Liam. Out of the other three I'm getting to see/hear for the first time, I have a soft spot for Taliesin. Because the characters I play as closely resemble Ashley's and Marisha's, I pay more attention to what they do, but I love everyone. My favorite quotes that I've heard so far are Sam's "No! Motherf*cker, miss!" and Laura's "You lost our flying carpet, you unconscious bastard!" At one point someone said they needed a child leash for Travis' character, to which I can relate because members of both my parties often charge in and get themselves killed just like he does, and it's my job to keep them alive. Hence my rant on how hard it is to be a cleric that I posted to HubPages. I received some backlash for it, as if I had implied that other classes don't have problems (particularly warriors). As mentioned earlier, I'm dealing with the type of people who just run headlong into situations without backup and just expect me to have unlimited heal spells.