Wanna Play?

My 5-year-old and I play Battleship from time to time. The game is pretty popular at his school, so the kids play a lot. As a result, since it is one of those games where you can only be just so good at, there is about an even chance either of us will win, and the matches are always close. 

I taught him that with games like this it is important to know your opponent. Are you playing the kind of person that likes things nice and neat? Do they like patterns? Do they tend to stay away from the edges? Do they tend to guess certain rows or columns more or less than others, so it makes sense to cluster your ships?  And always, always listen out for the slightest of pauses before someone says "miss", because that means you probably hit right next to a ship and your opponent is mentally double-checking the coordinates. 

“Play the man, not the board”, style of thing. 

A few weeks ago, I called out A-1 as my first shot and got a hit. On a whim, for my next shot I called out J-10. Also a hit. I said "You know, dude, I am pretty sure I know where all your ships are." He said "Seriously?" I said "You have one boat in each corner and the last one is in the very middle of the ocean."  His eyes got huge but, to his credit, he said nothing. His mother, sitting behind him on a chair, looked up from what she was reading, glanced at his board, and went back to browsing the web. I proceeded to obliterate his fleet, missing only a few times. Only one boat remained and I started my hunt around the middle of the board. 

Miss upon miss upon miss... After about 20 consecutive splashes, unbombed real-estate was getting pretty scarce and three of my boats were sitting on the bottom of the sea. I knew - knew - I was right about his pattern.  There was simply no way I was wrong. I must have sounded frustrated because the wife looked up at his board again and said "Honey, he moved a boat."

I looked up at him and he nodded at me.  His face was blank but his eyes clearly held the question "How much trouble am I in?"  

"You know that's cheating, right?"  Another nod. 

I let the moment hang for about five seconds and calmly said "Don't do that again. Especially don't do that at school."  

“Yes, sir.  I won't... and I don't, " was his reply. He meant it.

"Ok," I said, pausing again. "Your turn."  

It took me a few shots but I finally found and sunk the sub nestled neatly in its new home on the J row where he knew I would never, ever look.

You might wonder why I chose to continue the game. After all, isn't cheating an immediate forfeit?  Isn't cheating bad and wrong?  Shouldn't you always be honest?  Sure, but that's just a first-order approximation of how the real world works.  Grown-ups know this.

Also, let’s look at it from his point of view.  His opponent knew where all his ships were and told him so.  Since he knows that second only to the rule "Don't be a bully" is the commandment "Don't be a quitter", there was nothing he could do to prevent a loss... legally.  The chips were grossly stacked against him, and he didn't whine or complain or fuss. There were two paths - one with a guaranteed loss paved with honor and the other with only a probable loss paved with moral dubiousness. 

Look… I am not trying to say this kindergartner wracked his tiny little soul wrestling with the implications of some sort of Cornelian dilemma or some weird jazz like that. He’s five. He was going 45 in a 35 zone (so to speak), got nailed, and paid the fine.  

Is it something to be worried about? No.  It would be if he was proud about it.  It would be if he thought it was a big joke.  It would be if he cried about it.  It would be if he pouted and said it wasn’t fair.  It would be if he said he never wanted anything to do with the game again.  Instead, after the final shot was fired, he said “Play again?”

I smiled.  “Sure, buddy, let’s do it.”

The next game I got lucky and hit five times along the C row.  “I didn’t sink the aircraft carrier?” I asked.  

Long pause.  “No… but you sank the 2-boat”.

“Oh,” I said, thinking I had stumbled into one of those weird instances where ships are lined up just right and you half-sink one before moving unknowingly onto another. The wife again glanced up, looked at the board, leaned closer to it, frowned, then looked at me.

I looked at her and then at him.  He turned the board around and showed me the pic you see in the upper left of this post.  “I was… I was using the 2-boat as, you know, a shield.”

Sigh.  Maybe taking him to see Ender’s Game wasn’t such a great idea after all…

Anyway, like I said, that was a couple of weeks ago and we have had many other games since then.  As I finish writing this, he just challenged me to yet another rematch (I won the last one a few days ago), so I gotta jet.  

Wish me luck.

Hey, Thanks!

Thank you for my wife and child.

Thank you for cold weather and a warm house.

Thank you for motivation.

Thank you for whiskey.

Thank you for laughter.

Thank you for apple pies.

Thank you for the smell of sawdust.

Thank you for power chords.

Thank you for the sound of dry leaves under my boots.

Thank you for time.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Rocksmith 2014 Update

I had a miserable Rocksmith night last night. I wasn't hitting anything cleanly and the software had the nerve to objectively score me accordingly. What if I was, like, really, really trying my bestest? Doesn't that count for something?  Can I at least get a hug, Ubisoft?  

Fine.

Overall, things are going ok. I'm not going to do a full on review of this software. There are lots of folks out there doing that already with a lot more care and detail than I would put into it.  Check out Gallagher's Rocksmith Journey blog (link in sidebar) for some great info on the title. I stumbled across his site when, after a particularly spectacular failure during a Master Mode attempt of Blitzkrieg Bop I could have sworn I actually got "booed". 

Hey, I couldn't blame them for booing me - they paid good money to see me rock out and instead I alternate between staring stupidly into the middle distance and beating out chords that only have an incidental association with the song I was playing. I didn't know if the sound I was hearing was just general "large crowd milling about" noise or actual displeasure, and this guy's blog was one of the few places out there that directly said that booing was a possibility.  If the booing is real, I'm cool with that. Anything beats the original Rocksmith crowd response to a blown song during a gig - five thousand dopplegangers silently swaying and just staring at you with their dead eyes... (shudder).

Anyway, check out his blog. It's good stuff. 

Some notes from my recent experience with Rocksmith 2014:

• Jeebus, Ubisoft, what is the deal with demanding I cycle through twelve hundred effects pedals? I realize you are proud of the width and depth of this part of the code, but, by making each one a mission... Well, you are coming across as desperate and a little "Smell the Glass”.
• I have no idea what the software wants me to do to "Use rack gear". I am using it. I played with the sliders, depopulated all the pedals, put in four rack units (trying all kinds in different orders), saved and reloaded, etc... Nothing seems to work - I might just be missing something. 
• The arcade games in general are awesome. Whoever wrote the dialogue for the damsel/scientist in distress and evil bad guy in Return to Castle Chordead deserves some kind of design award cuz that stuff is straight up gold!
• I hope their next update deals with the process for moving between tunings that significantly change the mechanical loading on the guitar neck (E standard to Eb drop Db, say). I am finding my Ibenez needs to be put through the RS tuning process three times before the stresses equalize enough to the point where the song acknowledges the notes are being played correctly during a song. Adding one more sequential check on each of the six strings after the last string is “tuned” would go a long way to making sure the first couple are not way out.
• I also hope there is a way to save multiple set lists for Free Play mode.  It would be nice to be able to quickly jump to a pre-set group of slow and simple stuff to get my confidence back after right arm and left wrist go numb after too many old-guy attempts at Blink-182 songs or whatever. 
• Please, Microsoft or Ubisoft or whoever, you have to quit it with the Kinect "Feeling tired or sore?" messages. I am perfectly capable of determining my own break times. If it’s a legal thing that has to stay if the Kinect is on, make it smaller and give us the option of where on the screen it pops up.

Hmm… Perhaps I should have spaced out those last two bullets a bit…

I have tons of tunes I have not touched yet. I think I am just going to hit the songs that Rocksmith recommends for a while and see where that takes me instead of trying to “master” any more right now.

Also, I have not tried anything yet with the bass, so I don't know yet what that's like. Looking forward to it though.  More later.

I Must Not Laugh. I Must Not Laugh.

I got through changing the various air filters around the house to discover that our five-year-old had just finished creating a birthday card for his grandfather, who he calls Papa:

He was so damn proud of this kite drawing but he said, oddly shyly, "I don't think I spelled Papa right and that top part is in pen".  I helped him get a marker and made the correction to that word as well as I could.

He was happy, and I left the other stuff alone.

He Drinks a Whiskey Drink

You know that Irish friend of mine I talk about sometimes?  The one with the big family and the appreciation for fine booze? Says "Begorrah" a lot and carries a shillelagh?  Likes to craft well-written insult letters at Christmas?

Yeah. Him. 

To thank him for introducing me to the wide world of whiskey, and to congratulate him for completing (against all odds) yet another orbit around the sun, I got him a bottle of Scotch. I never tried the one I gave him (Glenkinchie 12) myself so I told him I was basically just using him as a Guinea pig to see if I would like it or not. 

He didn't seem to mind.  

He was nice enough to write up a review. I corrected the child-like spelling, shored up the grammar as best I could, removed all the curse words, and expunged all of the overt threats toward local politicians. Even after doing all that, it's still pretty long. Here it is:

It has been some time since I indulged in whiskey, my tastes vacillate on different spirits as we have discussed, but this is a very enjoyable vintage, if I may use that term.  My experience may be unique to me, but as one must at time get past the initial tannic taste of wine in order to enjoy the more subtle notes of the vintage, so to with whiskey must one get past some of the peaty taste.  Again, my personal experience.  Yours may vary.     

I have never purchased any whiskey this aged for myself, so this is my first experience with anything of this caliber.  The color is much lighter than I am use to and my palate for whiskey may be more limited than my palate for wine.  To use the buzz terms, the peat taste is not as strong as other whiskey or blends have had and I think actually adds to the overall enjoyment of this whiskey.   This has a very light, crisp finish and I taste slight sweetness and oak flavors that play well together.

I think you or anyone interested in what the finer whiskeys can taste like would enjoy this. 

Ok, ok, we get it, there, James William Bottomtooth III... You like it.   My God... Two paragraphs for one lousy drink? Pfft. We don't have time for that jazz:

Here's what I thought of the ones I've tried so far:

The Belvenie (12) - Man, that's good.

Jameson Special Reserve (12) - The commercials don’t lie.

Gentleman Jack - Smoooooooth.

Dewar’s White Label - What the… What the hell is this?

Dewar’s (12) - Ok.  That’s more like it.

The Glenlivit (12) - TBD.  Tonight, AAMOF.

And that's how you do an Internet review in 2013, Junior.

[Drops mike. Saunters offstage.]

What Was That? H Major?

Many months ago I pre-ordered Rocksmith 2014 and excitedly awaited its release date. That Tuesday finally came and I raced over to the store, eagerly picked up my copy, raced home, placed it on the entertainment center and immediately got busy with other things (chasing squirrels, mainly) for two weeks.

I know, I know... Weak. 

I finally put it in, did all the life-support things that need to be done like download updates and transfer the old version's songs to the new version, put new batteries in the controller, and got down to business.  

Whoa. Way different game. More training tool than game, really, but it is a significant improvement over the last one, which I loved. 

It is, though, a little unnerving to see phrases slowly vanish as Master Mode is entered and more than once I have found myself stupidly staring at the screen robotically waiting to be commanded to play the next notes when I should just be following along. There I am, cleaning my fingernails with my pick thinking to myself "Huh... I sure have been standing here a while... I thought for sure the music started by now... Hmm, I wonder why the word MISS is popping up all over the fretbo... OH [insert various expletives here for pretty much the remainder of the song and several minutes afterwards]!!!!"

A few days ago my wife told me our five-year-old said "When I grow up I want to be a rock star like my dad."  

This worries me.  A lot.  

See, that indicates that not only does he have no clue whatsoever what the term "rock star" means, I would be willing to wager that he has no idea what the words "want", "be", "like", or "my dad" mean, either!  I need to have a word with his teacher to make sure he didn't hit his head on the playground at school and now he's gone all "mambo dogface to the banana patch" or something. I'm pretty sure he's not deaf...  Maybe she left out that he said it with Olympic-level sarcasm dripping from every syllable complete with air quotes and eye-rolling and that they both had a good chuckle afterwards. 

Yep.  That’s probably it. 

I love the new "Session Mode" where you get to jam with a virtual band of pretty much whatever style you choose. The band members will attempt to pace your playing and fill in behind you. Now, I think I sound awesome, but I can't help feeling like I am the one and only thing holding these guys back from making it big. Sometimes I can hear them quietly talking to each other when I put the guitar down to go get a drink or something:

Me: Whoo! Great set, guys! I'll be right back!

Guy 1: Oh. My. God. That was awful... I knew I never should have joined a band called "SnowUrchin and the Horribly Mangled Pentatonics". 

Guy 2: Totally. I mean, are we ever gonna play, like, actual songs or are we just gonna try to match his ever-changing, near-random tempo, key, and volume for hours on end?

Guy 3: I don't know how much more of this I can take. I would have left long ago if I wasn't shackled to the floor like this.

Guy 1: How long have we been here, anyway?

Guy 2: Uh, guys... You know something?  I don't think we survived that fiery bus crash after all...

Guy 3: Shhh! Here he comes!

Me: Surprise! Rice Krispie treats for everyone! What do you say we do just one more hour?! And a one and a two...

The voice recognition through the Kinect is very good and the game understands a huge number of words and phrases that make navigating the interface a breeze. It's pretty sensitive, though, so I have spend a lot of time pantomiming to my wife and kid to "please for the love of God go somewhere else to talk why did you turn on the Roomba, the washer, the dryer, the dishwasher, and the downstairs TV all at once and will you both please stop repeatedly chucking the Hungry Hungry Hippos game down the stairs I can't play with all that racket going on ". Now, it's tough to wordlessly express all that but, I think I nail it succinctly by waving... 

My arms... 

And...

Wait a gosh darn minute.  You don't think they're...

[Pause.  Head shake.] Naaaaah...

Well, anyway, I gotta go. These songs ain't gonna mutilate themselves, you know. And a one and a two...

Rook Update

Last November I got an email from someone who found an item I left in a Geocache a month earlier.  They told me that they planned on turning it into a Travel Bug and sending it on a “tour of the castles of Europe”.  Time passed and I didn’t hear anything else about it.  

So it goes…

A few days ago, I got this email:

Hey SnowUrchin,

I forgot to send this to you. My sister turned your carved wooden castle into a TB. It's already in Germany, I believe. http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?tracker=TB56TVF

I hope you will find amusement out of its journey. :)

Take Care, Friend!

Kael & Kuntame

Awesome!  Thanks for the update, guys!  It’s on its way!

It’s current goal is to “see as many Scottish castles as possible”.  You will need to have (or create) a Geocaching account to view the map in the link above (basic accounts are free), but here is a list of places it has been since I dropped it off:

• Hampton, Virginia
• Washington, DC
• 2.8 Miles ENE of Cascade-Fairwood, WA
• 3.9 Miles WNW of Snoqualmie Pass, WA
• Seattle, WA
• Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

So far, it has traveled 5,063.3 miles since it was turned into a trackable item in Washington State.

Please join me in wishing the little guy well on its journey!  Godspeed, little castle!

[P.S. I am still looking for a Geocacher in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia to take the Geocache I made off my hands and put it to good use - it's just gathering dust in my garage.  If you know of someone, let me know...]

Sweating to the Ubis

What do you mean "Time doesn't just stop because you haven't posted anything in a while"?  Sigh. Fine. This is a post about a whale. No! This is a post about playing video games. 

I am still using Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 for my morning routines. Since June 29th, I have used the software 74 times (roughly every other day), and I have done 2,531 crunches, 3,083 push-ups, and burned 13,928 calories (probably 20% more than that, like I've mentioned before). I am on track to make my goal of becoming a "brown belt" (15k calories) by Thanksgiving. Well, the phrases "on track" and "my goal" are a little strong, since it implies a concerted effort and a can-do attitude, possibly accompanied by montage footage of me smirking at and crossing off dates on a calendar while the theme song from Karate Kid plays in the background.  Nah.  The numbers just happen to add up that way. 

After the brown belt level is the black belt level which you reach at a whopping 50000 calories. At the rate at which I am being scored it would take me another full year to hit this mark (200 scored calories an hour every other day)! Wow.  Beyond that, there are one, two, and three star levels that go up to an incredible 250,000 calories.  That last one, folks, would take me until the year 2020 to reach. 

And yet a quick web search shows that there are lots and lots of people out there with this very achievement. Since the game was released a little over two years ago, that must mean that there are people out there that use the software every single day for at least 100 minutes a day! These are some motivated people, right? Well, maybe some are. But, like with everything else, there's an exploit, a cheat, or "one weird trick" to get you there.

It turns out that the number of calories burned are calculated using the player's body weight, height, and age, (estimated BMI... meh, makes sense), in addition to the type of exercise being done (aerobic or non-aerobic). By setting the weight to max (about 400 lbs), height to minimum (2 feet, I think) and age to minimum you max out this rate of burn. Now, if you carefully roll a desk chair in front of the camera, start a Run the World exercise, drape a blanket over the chair to disguise its shape, and slowly back away out of the range of the camera, you can apparently trick the game into thinking you are still there. You will not move on the screen, of course, but the calorie counter will tick up steadily, reaching the achievement in days instead of years. 

Neat. Utterly pointless, but neat nonetheless.  

Don't get me wrong: the achievements have their place and I like getting the in-game badges. As a matter of fact I have all of the badges and certificates you can get in the game at this calorie level without buying DLC, dancing, or pretending you are a tree (yoga).  Since I won't be going after any of those and the calorie counter occasionally freezes, I just use the pre- and post-workout sweat drenched-ness of my shirt as my main metric for how I am doing. [Editor’s Note: Actually, thanks to my new Uplay account via Rocksmith 2014, I now have access to three more routines in this game that I didn’t before, so that’s three more badges.]

Oh, yeah, I think I figured out the reason for the freezes. My old hypothesis was that if you scored very near but not quite 100% on a routine, are told that the routine was "perfect" or "flawless" (due to rounding I guess), AND the next routine had a different target heart rate, the likelihood of a lock-up was pretty high, and there wasn't anything you could do except wait for the software to fix itself.  I am pretty sure now that is wrong. 

My new guess is that sometimes, due to limitations in the Kinect or some sort of software bug the program will "lose you" for a split second and not report it audibly like it does when you walk off camera ("Hey, where did you go?" or "Ok, we'll continue when come back" or whatever)  When this glitch happens, it sets a switch in the code to a calorie burn rate of zero per second. This burn rate switch is not reset to the correct value until you "come back", but, since you never actually left in the first place (your stylized image is still there, and the game never saw you leave), you can't "come back", causing the next several sets of exercises to report zero calories earned. Most of the time, this eventually fixes itself but I don't have a good feel for how. Maybe the glitch happens again, acting as some sort of “reset”.

I do have a simple fix, though, which has worked out ok when I notice the counter has frozen. The fix also seems to take care of the times when the software simply refuses to believe that you are "sideways, facing the same way as your coach", regardless of how many times you curse and scream things along the lines of "I AM SIDEWAYS! I LITERALLY CAN'T GET MORE SIDEWAYS THAN THIS!  THIS IS THE MAXIMUM EXTENT OF MY SIDEWAYS-NESS! SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!".

After the current set is done I walk off camera and wait a couple of seconds for the PAUSE screen to come up.  When I resume the game, the software has re-acquired me properly and the calories once again are counted as they should be. I have not needed to do this more than once during a session, and it only takes a moment, so it's not that big of a hassle and I don't stand around cooling off when I should be exercising. Of course, this does not work with the Boot Camp classes since you don't get breaks; you would have to walk off in the middle of a set, making the whole point of doing the class at all a little weak...  It's a little disheartening to see your eight-minute Boot Camp effort has earned you only 11 calories (the same number you would burn by sitting quietly, according to WolframAlpha), but, hey, nothing's perfect.

There are rumors of Santa bringing a Wii U, but it doesn't sound like the exercise stuff there is any great step up from the stuff on the original Wii.  Since I won’t be getting a new Xbox until after what I am sure will be known as “The Great Xbox One Privacy Scandal of 2014” has been sorted out my options are a little limited.

So… Will I continue on with this software indefinitely?  No.  I like it a lot, but I will probably switch back and forth between this one and the Nike+ one after I hit the Brown Belt level, since there aren't any other good options available.

Hmm…  I wonder how many calories double-tapping in Rocksmith 2014 burns…

Borenta? Sure, Fine... Borenta.

Well it’s now November and I feel the need to throw some stuff together for a post.  Let's start with an unreasonably long post about Halloween projects. 

Every year, as soon as the first leaves begin to fall from the trees and pumpkins begin appearing on peoples' front porches, the boy begins vibrating with excitement and chatting non-stop about Halloween.   It’s not the anticipation of gobs of candy so much or really even the trick-or-treating itself. For him it's always been about the costumes and all the crazy jazz hanging in the stores and all over people's houses. 

I, however, hate Halloween.

Wait... That's a little strong. What I mean to say is that it's a hassle I could do without.  A nuisance. A pointless disruption of my day to day routine.  A made-up holiday where hipsters embrace the chance to out-vague-meme each other via outlandishly ironic dress (well, slightly more than is usual anyway) while hordes of children stomp all over your freshly aerated and seeded yard all night looking for a handout and...

Wait... That's much worse. Let's rein it in a little.  

What I really mean to say is that I have always been ambivalent about it. In the past my interest has been mainly to watch the roads a little more carefully that night so I don't have to waste time dislodging too many Dora the Explorers from the wheel wells of my truck before I head off to work the next morning. 

But the boy's attitude is contagious and now October 31st is something we look forward to together.  He has been a giraffe, a pirate, Buzz Lightyear, Batman, an astronaut, and, this year, a ninja. The first couple of times he went out, I didn't have to dress up. It wasn't until he started asking me what I was gonna be that my hand was "forced".  Until this year I made do with a five dollar wig and a white lab coat, but more on that in a bit - I have to cure my itch to segue a little. 

What is the story with the outlandish budgets and resources that seem to be available to what appear to be average people and high schools on TV and in movies, especially when it comes to dances and holiday parties?  You tell me you are a struggling… idunno… whatever working part time in a doughnut shop to make ends meet between gigs and you can afford to rent or (straight-up own!) an actual metal full sized suit of armor?  How long, exactly, did your likewise broke and comically unambitious and inept roomie spend "in the chair" that morning having a team of FX specialists expertly apply zombie makeup to such perfection that his own daughter doesn't recognize him as one of the chaperones later that evening at the school's Halloween dance until the touching all-is-forgiven scene late in the third act?  And how is it that this very same public school (where the students and faculty alike shrug their shoulders and crack wise about the rat and roach infested cafeteria) can afford to constantly throw these humungous extravaganzas with laser light shows, fog machines, tens of thousands of balloons, and bands that people have actually heard of?  And is that... Is that a freaking Ferris Wheel?  Jeebus, how many charity car washes did it take to cover the rent and liability insurance on that thing?!

Ok. Done now. The point is I try to keep it cheap and simple, but this year the boy wanted to turn the yard into some sort of Disney World-esque sideshow complete with animatronic creatures that rise from their shallow graves in the front yard to "scare and chase people". 

"Chase people?", I asked. 

"Yeah!  Wouldn't that be cool?" "You are a good builder," he added, smoothly. 

"Um, thank you. What would they do after they chased them?"

Pause. "What?", he asked, puzzled that I had a follow-up question, I guess. 

"Well, let's say they chased the people then caught them. What would happen next?" (I, like others, have the same problem with the first Terminator movie, really. I mean, what.. He offs Sarah Connor then just stands there for a few decades? Gets a job, takes up golf?)

Other than to say "I guess they would just go back or shut off", (neither option available to a Terminator, btw) he didn't really have a plan for that. I told him it would wreck the lawn and I didn't have all the parts I needed in the garage anyway so maybe we could just make a graveyard or something instead. 

He said "Awesome."

Tombstones are easy. Some plywood, a few quick cuts on the table saw and the band saw, some sanding to smooth out the edges and there you go. I had enough material on hand to make six. The boy used a paint roller (his first time!) to coat the wood grey. A couple of layers later and we were ready to "engrave" them. 

He wanted his three (the vampire one, the skeleton one, and the spider one) to say something "cool".  I made a "connect the dots" out of the words he wanted and gave him a Sharpie and told him to get to it. When he was done I traced his words with black paint and added some serifs to spook up the font a notch. In the end I felt his choices needed a little editorializing so I added some of my own stuff at the bottom of each of his.

 I chose to keep mine simple (93% bored, 6% lazy, 4% hand crampy, and 2% busy with other things).

I think I told you about my kid's predilection for feature creep while we are in the middle of a project. The feature he wanted added this time was a sign that pointed at the tombstones that said "BEWARE OF ZOMBIES". But it had to look old and broken. I said ok. I happened to have some old, broken, and warped pieces of barnwood around the place so no worries there. A recovered piece of the easel from the painting project we did made a good stake. Poof. Done. 

Since this year he was going as a ninja, what could be a better idea than to have your parent walk around with you in an equally hard-to-see-at-night costume?  Nothing I could think of, so this year I went as the Grim Reaper. The costume itself is pretty well made and is light and comfortable to boot.  A thin black veil completely hid my face, and vinyl skeleton gloves completed the ensemble.     

The only downside was the toy-like 3 foot plastic scythe it could come with as an optional accessory.   Pfft. Weak. How is a scythe "optional", anyway? There is a fine line between "stalking menacingly through the neighborhood in a cloak woven from the fabric of oblivion itself" and "prancing merrily from house to house decked out in a fancy new burqa" and that fine line is clearly scratched into the earth with the tip of a freakin' scythe. 

Well, I suppose the vinyl skeleton gloves help differentiate the two a bit... Still, though, the little plastic dealie was not going to cut it (literally or figuratively), so time to build. 

A couple of poplar dowels and a thin piece of plyboard was really all I needed. I rough cut the “blade” on the bandsaw and I made it less sliver-y and less eye-pokey on the sander. After cutting a notch into the upper portion of the handle with the table saw and gluing together the pieces, I used a series of stains to give it an aged look and sealed it with spar poly. The blade was painted silver and slotted into place. Done - a proper faux six-foot gardening tool of doom.  

And of course there were the pumpkins.  The pumpkin seeds I make are chock full of every nutrient you could possibly need… assuming you are primarily constructed of sodium and chlorine.  They rock.

That’s about it for now.  I have some stuff to say about the new Rocksmith game, that exercise game I am using in the mornings, and another project I am working on but this post has gotten way too long. 

More later.