Your Opinion Is Wrong™

Yeah, I bought Command And Conquer 3 not too long ago. This was while I was meeting Craig at Ashfield, we were going to go to Lucas' surprise birthday party (he's 25ish now!) that night.

The conversation leading to the purchase of the game went (more or less) thusly:

Me: 'Yeah, I'm heading over to Ashfield now...shouldn't be too long'
Craig: 'Cool. Oh, and I just bought C&C3'
Me: 'WHAT?!?! That's been released?'
Craig: 'Yeah, it looks awesome'
Me: 'OK, when I get to Ashfield, I'll be heading up to EB to buy a copy'

I'm quite the C&C fanboy.

And I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into modern home-computing and finally bought and installed a DVD drive in my PC (only because I learned that C&C required a DVD drive to run). The game's been a bit of fun so far, although it seems to be very much about building masses and masses of units and just hurling them at the opponent. Given the vast amount of resources of most maps, and the ability to gather said resources very quickly, a CPU-choking army can be massed within a few minutes, so it makes any intricate tactical maneuvering redundant and impractical.

Lucas' party thing went alright. Lucas was right about getting a group from salesforce organised for anything: It's like herding cats. Despite the turnout, fun was had by all. Ashleigh did the usual thing of getting the day the event was on correctly memorised, but the wrong week. We ended up calling her and bullying her into coming halfway through, so there was one potential no-show that ended up showing.

I'm officially putting my minimal D&D knowledge and experience to use, and can now officially claim to be a nerd (up until now, it's just been tall talk): I'm in a D&D group. It involves having to take time out of every second weekend, meeting with like-minded nerds and argue about whether each possible injury caused by misusing a crossbow can be represented by rolling an eight-sided die.

My character, so far, if Tiefling bard. Like me, he wanna be a muso. Bards usually are seen carrying an instrument, usually something smallish and practical for the adventuring lifestyle, like a lute or something. When it came time to decide on what instrument by dude would be lugging around on his travels, I could only think of one thing:

An upright bloody bass.

Just because nobody else was doing it. Well, it's not entirely an upright bass, it's a 6-ft eight-stringed instrument with a reinforced neck which doubles as a +1 Halberd-ish sort of thing that I got specially made for me. I would have picked a grand-piano, had a character in our party been willing to carry it for me. No such luck.

It looks like my character is almost certain to become the party's leader by default, on account of the high charisma rating (I know that Craig's ninja-mantis dude is an ugly sonovabitch and Damo is making a character that's basically a humanoid rock that carries a sword. All that guy's going to be doing is walking around making rock-puns and innuendo at every opportunity, which'll be great around the kids). Needless to say, these guys don't have a focus on charisma, or any abilities that could be considered 'social'. And, let's face it - Bards are lame until you realise that there's almost always a hole left in a given party (lack of theiving abilities, lack of spellcasting etc.), which Bards inevitably are able to fill. With any luck, I'll find myself useful on occasion.

It's also very likely to be the last week I'm working at PC Tools, too. Enough said about that for now, as this is being typed out on one of their computers and being sent over their connection, if for no other reason...