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Kaladesh

Wednesday, September 28th, 2016

I went to the prerelease for the latest MTG set Kaladesh this past weekend. I’ve been to dozens of these over the last eight years and have blogged many so you know the drill.

Kaladesh is an artifact-heavy set that takes place in a sort of ‘Indian steampunk’ world. It’s a wonderful set both in design and the way it plays, with oodles of fun cards that work well with each other.

There were many players (about 40) and there were four rounds of play. As has been the trend the last year or so, the tourney was very casual and you won boosters according to your games won. In the end I won two and placed somewhere in the top third.

My deck was green and white, and when it won did so mostly due to this pair of cards:

The artifact is seriously powerful, and generated me tokens every round while pumping up my other creatures. If I got it out with a +1/+1 on a card, I usually won.

The set includes a new vehicle artifact type, but I included none in my deck. They are powerful though, and were difficult to deal with when played against me. The guy that ultimately won the tournament was lucky with his card pool and played a deck based around vehicles.

For me the measure of an MTG card – and an expansion – is in the answer to “do I want to build decks around this”? This is why Kaladesh succeeds, because it has many such cards. These two for instance…

That first one seems made for my life gain deck, and the second just cries out to be abused 🙂

So my verdict is: a great set with cards that are fun to play. Doing just that this past weekend may have been the most fun I’ve ever had at a prerelease.

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In Brighton

Saturday, August 27th, 2016

A few weeks ago, when we were in Brighton, I visited a stamp shop. As in stamp collecting, a hobby so nerdy that even I hesitate to discuss my ‘collection’.

I bought these first day covers:

Several animal-themed ones and one each commemorating the marriages of Charles and Andrew.

The guy that ran the tiny hole-in-the-wall store was very friendly, almost a bit too much so, and went out of his way try to find stuff I wanted. Since I was there on a lark, and only purchasing decades-old 50p first-day covers I was bemused by this.

Once I decided what I wanted he told me to take them for free! This was a bit weird so I insisted he take at least £1 – which he did – before he then went into a tale.

He said when he was young someone did something nice for him without expectation of repayment or any other obligation and he wanted to do the same for us. He then gave us these:

They are (so-called) Cinderella stamps, issued by St Moritz in 1940 to commemorate the Helsinki Olympics. Cinderella means they’re not real stamps (never authorized or used for postage) but they are still of interest to collectors. There were four colours in total; he gave us two each of three of them.

He was proud of them, and gave the gift sincerely. We waited for the catch that never came, until we realized he was simply a friendly old man that probably was cheered up by us stopping in that day. He didn’t claim the stamps were worth much (on eBay right now the 6 are maybe $15 total) but said if we sold them when we are his age we may make some money 🙂

Of course I’ll keep them forever. And for just as long I’ll remember that friendly old guy in Brighton that gave me these curious 75+ year old ‘stamps’!

Posted in Miscellaneous, Otaku | 1 Comment »

Ten Things I Saw At The Fair

Sunday, August 21st, 2016

I went to the Altamont Fair the other day. I’ve been many times, but may have skipped it last year. I went alone, but had a lot of fun!

The rides were incredible. They seem to have contracted with a new amusement company and there were more, better and newer rides than I have seen before.

I wanted to go on all of them, but chickened out since I knew it would give me motion sickness. I spent some time watching them though, and did ride the Ferris wheel and two ghost houses:

They were silly and not scary, but gave me a chuckle 🙂

Those are two of the winning scarecrows in the scarecrow contest. The theme was ‘music’. Can you guess who they are?

Admission to the fair included the circus, which was entertaining and surprisingly long (over an hour). I saw trapeze artistes, a globe of death, many jugglers, performing horses, and this guy ‘The Master Of Balance’. That’s a tower of about ten chairs he had made, and from my great seat he looked to be quite nervous.

It was a very hot day and inside the circus tent was almost 100F! I imagine my body temperature rose to life-threatening levels as I watched the extremely cute hula hoop girl 😉

I’m sure you already recognized him, but this remarkably lifelike statue is of Phineas Barnum and stands in the circus museum. I spent quite some time reading the historical material on display.

Cute birds! The chick in the yellow dress was only a week old! I felt bad for the livestock since even the abundant fans did little to alleviate the heat.

Speaking of livestock the goat dress-up contest was very amusing. My favourite was this pair (‘the twins’). Note the little goat shoes!

Topical art, in the ‘under 8’ category. This is Slimer from Ghostbusters, and is indeed a terrifying portrayal!

Last but not least I watched a fascinating sheep-shearing demonstration.

The guy doing the cutting used hand shears and hand-cranked as you can see above. He went into near academic detail about the process and I learned so much I now believe it’s fair to call me a sheep-shearing expert myself. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments 😉

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Brexit

Friday, August 12th, 2016

Today we did a bunch of shopping, finishing the souvenir buying. We’ve got some tacky stuff; look forward to it 🙂

I spent a decent time writing postcards today since I had many stamps left (and postcards to write). Incredibly I seem to have sent 55 in total this trip, costing (including postage) over US$100! That’s a little crazy, but I hope you like them.

Tomorrow we’ll head home. I’ll probably take a week or so off the blog, but the next post may again be about this trip, or rather about an unusual thing that happened to us in Brighton last week…

Posted in Miscellaneous, Trip | Comments Closed

Margate

Thursday, August 11th, 2016

Many, many years ago I read a horror novel set in Margate. I don’t remember what it was called, but I never forgot the town. Today, on a very comfy high speed train, we visited this fading seaside resort.

When we arrived a light rain had ended and it was still and cold. The beach was massive and flat and the tide was out.

It was quite remarkable how much land was revealed with the tide out. During our stay it only came in a little bit, so we never saw (for instance) these moored boats actually floating!

We had a few sights we wanted to see in Margate, but one in particular stood above all the others. About ten minutes walk from the shore we came upon this unassuming place:

We walked in, paid £4 apiece, and walked down some dark stairs into the earth to find ourselves here:

It’s called The Shell Grotto, and is an unusual underground grotto with 4.6 million shells plastered into the walls and ceilings.

It’s a mysterious place which was accidentally discovered in 1835 during an excavation. There are no records of the place before it was discovered and it is unknown who made it or when.

The grotto has been on public exhibit for 170 years, and visitors are free to form their own opinions. Is it a religious place? Artistic? Just a whimsy? Analysis of the plaster and carbon dating of the shells has been inconsistent.

Whatever it is (a temple to Dagon!) it was a remarkable place to visit and alone made the trip to Margate worthwhile.

That’s a single gherkin, which KLS ordered at a fish’n’chip restaurant. It cost £0.50 and despite being much bigger tastes the same as those in Oz. Delicious!

The boardwalk at Margate has a bunch of arcades, most of which have those coin-pusher machines. This one used 2p coins, paid out bootleg Pokemon mini-figures and tickets that I redeemed for a bootleg R2-D2 toy. It only cost £7 but was a lot of fun 🙂

There’s also an amusement park (Dreamland) with a bunch of good rides. Sadly the (only) roller coaster was closed, else we would have ridden it.

Margate was great. The train trip was fun, the weather great, and the sights worth seeing. It’s best years may be behind it, and we’ll never return, but we’re glad we went.