Last Friday I read some really sad news on a friend’s Facebook page. One of my heroes, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (birth name, Roderick Toombs) passed away in his sleep at the age of 61. If there’s ever any way to go, I’d say that would be the way. There’s no pain, you just don’t wake up.

When Dusty Rhodes passed away a few weeks ago, I talked about how he wasn’t one of my favorite wrestlers, but I still wanted to pay tribute to the man who had done so much for the wrestling business that I have drawn so much enjoyment from watching. Roddy, on the other hand, WAS one of my favorites. Actually, he was my all-time favorite wrestler. No celebrity death, outside of Charles Schulz’s has hit me as hard as his. Of course I’m going to talk about him.

I started watching wrestling in the summer of 1986. In those first few weeks, Roddy Piper returned to the ring after a short absence. In wrestling parlance, he was a babyface, or good guy. He vowed he could beat his opponent with one hand tied behind his back…and then proceeded to do exactly that. His cocky bravado made me an instant fan. Little did I know that a few months prior, before his absence, he was one of the most reviled heels (bad guys) in the industry. I suppose I was introduced to him at just the right time. In those days, I pretty much followed the script. I liked the good guys and hated the bad guys. If I had first seen Roddy at the height of his run as a bad guy, who knows if I would have liked him as much when he turned. As it was, when I went back and watched some of the older tapes (I rented every wrestling tape I could find at the local video stores), I was already such a huge fan that I could only marvel at how good he was at being a bad guy and it made me like him all the more.

Piper had only been back for a few months when he announced his imminent retirement from wrestling. His final match would come at Wrestlemania III against “Adorable” Adrian Adonis. After that, he was leaving for Hollywood to try his hand at acting. I was sad, because back then I believed that when someone retired, they’d stay retired. I later found out that in many cases, including Hot Rod’s, retirement is fleeting. A little over two years later in fact, the WWF announced an upcoming house show in the Montreal Forum. The main event was scheduled to be Randy “Macho Man” Savage against…”Rowdy” Roddy Piper? How could that be?! Well really, the hows and whys weren’t really all that important. The fact was, this would possibly be my only chance to ever see Roddy Piper live. So we went and sat three or four rows from ring side. Really great seats actually. And I enjoyed every minute of it. Incidentally, this marks the one and only time I ever went to the Forum.

As it turns out, Piper never really hit it big in Hollywood. He filmed a couple of B movies and returned to the ring shortly after the house show in Montreal (one of his many returns actually). He did wrestle in Montreal again, but I never got to go back to see him. To be honest, as much of a fan as I am of Roddy as a wrestler, I didn’t really bite for his movies or television work. I love They Live and I wish the pilot for Tag Team (which starred Roddy and Jesse “The Body” Ventura as banned wrestlers who end up going through police academy to become cops) would have been picked up by ABC, but that’s mostly it. It’s selfish, but I would have much preferred if he’d stayed in the WWF.

For all the years that I watched him on television, Roddy was a good guy. He had entertaining feuds with amongst others, his former bodyguard, “Cowboy” Bob Orton, “Ravishing” Rick Rude and the Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase, but he never really reached the main event level that he had known as a bad guy, which is a shame. I feel money was left on the table in not giving him a championship run at the height of his heel run. The heat he could have generated parading around with the belt would have been unbelievable. He would have inevitably lost it back to Hulk Hogan but the crowd would have erupted like never before. While he didn’t really need to be involved in the title hunt to be over with the crowd, he certainly would have done great business. Part of that is on Roddy though, as I later found out.

As so many others did, Roddy left the WWF for WCW in the nineties. I wasn’t a big fan of WCW and I don’t know that Roddy enjoyed himself during his time there. He didn’t have that same zing. While he popped back up in WWE now and then, his days as a full-time wrestling talent were over after his run in WCW.

A few years back I bought and read Roddy’s autobiography. It was a real eye-opener and not in the best of ways. I discovered that my hero had his demons and wasn’t always the nicest or best guy in the world. He partied hard and being somewhat straight edge myself, that bothered me. The shine came off the penny so to speak. But really, nobody’s perfect (I certainly am not) and it wouldn’t have been right to condemn a man who had brought so much enjoyment to my life for succumbing to weakness. I made peace with it and decided to just enjoy his work.

Montreal Comic Con makes a point of inviting professional wrestlers every year. In the years that I’ve attended Sergeant Slaughter, “The Model” Rick Martel, Kevin Nash, Bret “Hitman” Hart, Mick Foley, Hulk Hogan, Lita, Trish Stratus and Chris Jericho have all been guests. For that reason, I held hope that someday they’d be able to lure ol’ Hot Rod to attend. Sadly, that will never happen now.

I can’t really think of a good way to close this entry other than to say that as much as anybody can love a person they’ve never met and only watched on television, I loved Roddy Piper. I watched quite a few Youtube videos of him over the weekend. With so much of his wrestling career available to be watched online, I’ll enjoy his work for years to come. I’ll still miss him though.

Hello and how are ya? It’s time for me to do that blog thing! So let’s blog it up!

So anybody who visits the site on a regular basis will note that there were no updates on Wednesday through Friday. That’s because when I woke up on Wednesday morning my computer was unresponsive. I tried rebooting and my screen just said it wasn’t getting a signal. I wasn’t sure if the problem was the monitor, the RGB cable or the computer itself. By plugging my laptop (more on that later) into the monitor I was able to see that both it and the cable were functional. That meant there was something wrong with my computer.  After work, I checked into things further and it looks like the fan on my integrated mother board/graphics card stopped working and the thing overheated and burned out. There was no coming back from this one. Joy.

On Wednesday evening, I set things up with Fab to go computer shopping over the weekend. On Thursday I went back to work and when I got home I had to experience life without a computer for the first time in years. Let me tell you, it wasn’t fun. I realized then how dependent I am on my computer for my entertainment.

On Thursday, I figured that I would just plays games and watch Youtube videos on my smart phone. Good plan. Only without a computer for my router to be plugged into, I wasn’t using my wi-fi, I was unwittingly using my phone data plan. Half of one episode of Tabletop on Youtube later I got a warning that I’d gone through 90% of my monthly limit. The limit which had reset that very day. So 31 days without being able to access the interwebz on my phone. Joy again.

On Friday, I had a flash…my laptop! Maybe if I plugged the router into it, I’d be able to get my wi-fi up and running, or at the very least, just compute on the laptop. Well wouldn’t you know that the laptop which had worked the previous morning no longer recognized that it had a hard drive. That was two dead computers in 24 hours. Did I say joy?

Years ago (2002 or so), when I was still into editing anime music videos, I bought an iMac because I thought it would be better for working on those videos. In one of life’s ironies, I ended up dropping the hobby shortly thereafter so my iMac has been mostly inactive for the past 10+ years. But these were desperate times. I plugged the router into it, turned it on and hoped for the best. And it worked! Huzzah! Only my iMac still runs on MacOS 9, which isn’t at at all optimized for internet use. I fiddled around a bit with it, but decided it wasn’t worth it. However, the good news was that with a computer for the router plugged in, I had my Wi-Fi back!

So I played a lot of HearthStone on my phone until Saturday when Fab I and I went to Best Buy to shop for a new computer. First things first, I bought a USB hard-drive enclosure for the hard drive from my dead desktop so I’d be able to recover all my personal files (and fulfill my need for an external hard drive) I then found a new desktop within my price range that was decent for my needs and brought it home, fully ready to set everything up and get back to a computerized life…Yeah there was another hurdle.

In a cost-cutting measure for the model I bought, Acer disabled the RGB port. That meant I had a computer and a monitor but no way to connect the two together. No problem! I just needed to run out and get an HDMI cable. So I biked out to Giant Tiger and purchased said cable…only to realize that my monitor didn’t support HDMI, only RGB and DVI (I really should have checked that before leaving). So back out I went. I knew from my previous visit that Giant Tiger didn’t have any DVI cables, so I went to my usual port-in-a-storm, Dépanneur Martel. They’ve got everything there: Food, gardening supplies, hardware supplies, and a variety of other things, including cables and adapters. I was able to find an HDMI to DVI cable and finally I was able to hook my computer up to my monitor. Success!

What came next was the tedious work of downloading and installing all the software I had on my old computer. I worked at that off and on from Saturday to today when I finally got Manga Studio Ex 4 and Photoshop Elements 8 up and running. I’m now back to how I was set up last Tuesday only on a stronger computer that doesn’t overheat when I watch Youtube videos and play computer games. All in all, I’m ahead except monetarily.

I’ve decided that rather than post everything that was supposed to go up last Wednesday through Friday, I’m going to treat things as though I took a one week vacation even though I managed to get all my usual drawing done. I will resume posting new material where I left off on Wednesday. In doing this, I’ll create a fourth buffer week of material. It’s the reward I’m giving myself for getting through this ordeal.

The forecast for tomorrow isn’t looking good. That means the Weird Al concert is in jeopardy. Neither Fab nor I are interested in making a trek to Montreal to have the concert rained out. We’ll be making our final decision tomorrow afternoon. We’ll see how that goes.

So  that’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.

Hello Joe (and those of you not named Joe)! Welcome back! Let’s get to some bloggy goodness.

I’m on the last day of my first four day weekend of the summer. It’s been really nice. I almost forgot to write a blog today, that’s how relaxed I am. I think I’m ready for a three-day work week. I’d better be since that starts tomorrow, right? Anyhoo!

I got some gaming in this weekend. On Thursday, my mom, my niece, a 12 year old girl my mom was babysitting and I sat around the table for a game night. We played Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, Wazabi, Bugs & Co., King of Tokyo and Takenoko. Quite the docket isn’t it? These are all short games so we managed to play them all in about three and a half hours.

Bugs & Co. is a memory game where everybody is quickly flipping over tiles to try to find as many threes of a kind as possible. Once a player thinks they’ve done as best they can, they grab a trophy and stop. When all trophies are grabbed, the game continues for ten more seconds, allowing the last player to try to complete their hand. Each three of a kind is worth 3 points, each tile which was not part of a three of a kind is worth -1 point and the trophy is worth the points printed on it. It’s a cute game aimed at younger folk. For folk like me with terrible short term memory, it’s what it is. I did manage to win the first game of it (it plays in roughly five minutes) and lost the next three.

Takenoko is a great game where players lay tiles and move a farmer around to grow bamboo and a panda around to eat bamboo. There are objectives, worth varying amounts of points, to complete based on these three principles. Once one player has completed the allotted number of objectives (determined by the number of players) that player gets the Emperor bonus card worth two points and everybody gets one final turn. The player with the most points wins. It looks great and is great for families.

The other three games are games my mom and I played before. I got to try them with more players and I will say that King of Tokyo is WAY better with four players than it was with two.  Ticket to Ride is more challenging as well. Wazabi plays about the same though there are more options when you play with more than two players.

On Saturday, I tried playing the computer version of Ticket to Ride (the original board game) and I was pleased that it was light enough that my computer didn’t overheat and I was able to play with no problems. (I need to get a new computer one of these days).

On Sunday, I tried playing the solo-variant of Marvel Legendary. It plays pretty smoothly. I used a randomizer app to pick the scenario, mastermind, villains and heroes. I ended up playing a bystander rescue mission with Magneto as the Mastermind leading the Spider-Foes and some Maggia goons against Rogue, Nightcrawler and Jean Gray. This was a great combo. The mission was such that we couldn’t attack Magneto unless we had rescued a number of bystanders equal to or greater than the number of scheme twists. Jean Grey is great with bystanders and on turns where I couldn’t recruit the card I wanted or attack a villain, I could use Nightcrawler’s teleport ability to save his cards until the next round. I breezed through the mission several times and never got over halfway through the scheme twists. I’ll have to try a few more games with different scenarios and heroes to see if solo play is worth it.

On Sunday night I went to see Dragao, which is a play based on the second installment of the Amos Daragon series (which was written by a Shawinigan author). I have two friends who are extras in the play so I got free tickets to the dress rehearsal. The play was okay. Amos Daragon is a very derivative story aimed at a younger audience. I feel the acrobatic sequences incorporated into the play were inferior to the ones from the first play. The production quality was very good. They were able to reuse a number of set pieces from the first play which therefore allowed them to really go all out for the new stuff. If I could walk through the sets and just look at everything up close, I think I’d get about as much enjoyment as I did from the actual play. It’s ninety minutes long and there were some sequences that really needed to be trimmed down. By the time we reached the final sequence, I was more than ready for it to be over. The tickets are really pricy and there’s no way I would have paid money out of my own pocket to see it (I knew that from the first play though).

Today I played Disney Infinity 2.0 since I found it at 50% off the original price at Best Buy and finally picked it up. The Marvel scenario included in the base set was fun but short (I already completed it). I’m not into the Toybox feature of Infinity so that means to be able to play anything else, I need to invest in the other adventure packs. That’s still where I have my greatest disconnect with Infinity compared to Skylanders. In Skylanders, while there is definitely an advantage to buying more figures, I don’t feel like I’m getting gypped out of the game play if I don’t buy more. There are just certain areas I can’t access. In Infinity, if you don’t buy those adventure sets, you’re really limited in your play options if the Toybox doesn’t appeal to you. Also, if I spend money to buy figures, it’d be nice to be able to play with them everywhere in the game. My interest is in the gameplay in the adventure sets and each set is limited to about a quarter of the figures available. The other figures are locked out. Not the best investment let me tell you.

Okay, so that’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.