New Week

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Sep 222014
 

Hey folks! It’s a new week so it’s a new blog! I’m feeling a whole lot better than where I was at last Monday which is nice. It’s probably the gaming.

As some of you may be aware, every second Saturday is my gaming night. This past weekend, we got together to play Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon. It was my second experience playing the game and though it went better than the first (where we were wiped out within the first twenty minutes) I still can’t say it’s a great game. Basically I feel like it just condenses D&D down to monster fights, but without any tension from an underlying story. At least that was the case for the introductory scenario we played, which consisted of “Kill 12 monsters to win”. I suppose I’d have to give it a try with one of the real scenarios, but the gameplay just wasn’t exciting enough for me. My rating of 5.5 out of 10 still stands. On the boardgamegeek.com scale, that’s above “Average game, slightly boring. Take it or leave it.” but below “OK game. Some fun or challenge at least. Will play sporadically if in the right mood.”

We did win the scenario this time around and did it in a timely fashion so we had time to try my newest acquisition Smash-up which I enjoyed a great deal more. It’s a competitive card game of mashing up two genres, like Pirates and Robots or Cyborg Apes and Wizards to destroy bases for points. Each genre has its own play style and the fun is in discovering how your choices pair up with one another. I had an Ancient Ones (from Cthulhu) and Robots against Christian who had Tricksters and Wizards, Danny who had Cyborg Apes and Zombies and Mike who had Aliens and…I’m drawing a blank. Anyway, Mike ran away with the victory really quickly but we had a fun time trying it out. If it hadn’t been so late we probably would have played another game or two. I rated it a 7.5 out of 10, though that could change with a few more plays. That would be above “Good game. Usually willing to play” and below “Very good game. I like to play. Probably I’ll suggest it and will never turn a game.”

Other than that I started drawing Year 4 of the Funnies over the weekend. That’s another milestone for me. Felt really good. Actually, I finished the second strip of Year 4 today after work since I took a lot of Saturday off to play Disney Infinity and for game night.

That’s about all for this week. The new television season is upon us and I apparently have WAY too many shows to watch. Have to get started on that. Have a good week folks!

Montreal Comiccon 2014 – A Retrospective in Words

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Sep 152014
 

For those wondering about the title, I posted a retrospective in photos on my personal Facebook page (not the Age of Animus Facebook page). There was a lot of editing to be done to get them all up there. But now they’re there.

But what did I think of the Con?

In a word, disappointing. I must mention before going on, that I was not as excited for Comiccon this year as I have been in years past. Did my lack of enthusiasm paint my experience or was my lack of enthusiasm justified by the lackluster experience? I don’t know for sure. I’d say it was a mixture of both. Still, you may be well-advised to steer clear of this week’s blog, because it’s not really positive.

While I give full props to the volunteers who worked to keep the con running as smoothly as possible, the overall experience still felt a little less organized compared to last year where I felt everything went off wonderfully. Something as simple as putting up a sign telling me where I CAN enter the building (because the obvious doors are being blocked by grumpy security staff), or NOT yelling in my ear when I’m clearly already heading in the direction you’re herding me towards like cattle…oh yeah and NOT TRYING TO HERD ME LIKE CATTLE!

The VIP experience was NOT worth it this time around. I feel I could have had the same experience at the Deluxe level and saved $100. The VIP privileges turned out to apply to most of the things I wasn’t interested in and less so for the ones I was, so I ended up waiting in line a good amount of time anyway.

There was a lot of downtime during the Con for me. That is, there were large stretches of time where I felt I had nothing to do but wander around aimlessly…alone. There were panels and Q&As scheduled throughout the weekend, but the panels didn’t appeal and the Q&As weren’t as plentiful as they could have been considering the number of celebrities on hand since they grouped the celebrities together a lot.

This is not to say I had a terrible time at the Con. There were some high points: Stephen Amell, Billy Boyd and Brent Spiner are awesome! Karl Urban told a great story about his first day of shooting at the reactor for Star Trek Into Darkness. I didn’t know what to expect from Katee Sackhoff and Tricia Helford, but they delivered a solid panel as well. Levar Burton was inspiring and I could just listen to Michael Dorn’s voice for hours. Note these were all panel-related and accounted for 5 hours out of about 25 hours of con-going time. In between there just felt like a whole lot of nothing. I’d have had a much more interesting time if there’d been more of it!

Gates McFadden and Jonathan Frakes were fun, but they also showed up an hour (McFadden) and a half-hour (Frakes) late for their autograph signings with no sign as to why. That detracts from my score for them. People pay a fair deal of money to see them. It’d be nice if they made an effort to be on time. Maybe there were issues preventing them from doing so (Michael Dorn was held up by customs and Patrick Stewart’s flight was delayed) but TELL US!

I didn’t cosplay this year. I’ve dabbled and it didn’t stick. That said, my friends all seem to love it. It saddens me that it’s not a passion I can share with them. They have a lot of fun doing it. I’d rather be attending panels though (that was true when I was in costume as well).

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the friends that provided a few bright spots in what was a less than stellar con for me: Jen, Rock, Frank and Melanie and of course Fab and Lyne who made the whole trip possible.

That said, I think that unless they announce some stellar guest (I’m thinking in the order of Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Roddy Piper, Michael Donovan, Nathan Fillion or any of the cast of Firefly I have yet to meet) that gets me excited to attend (and hopefully doesn’t cancel) or unless I finally manage to do something for Age of Animus that will give me some sense of fulfillment, I’m thinking my Comiccon days may be behind me.

Comiccon is Coming!

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Sep 082014
 

Hey there folks. It’s blog time. I had a topic all prepped for this week’s installment, but it was kind of a downer, so I’ve decided to drop it. This entry is therefore gonna be really short.

Montreal Comiccon is already less than a week away! I just finished drawing the last strip I needed to maintain my three week lead through next weekend. As of right now I’m actually four weeks ahead. In one of those nice coincidences, it was also the last strip of Year Three of the Funnies. I’ll talk more about that in a few weeks.

I’m not quite as excited for Comiccon this year actually. I kept hoping for a last minute addition to the lineup that would knock my socks off. No such luck thus far. At least I can look forward to completing my Next Generation autograph collection and meeting Arrow himself, Stephen Amell. I’m going to see if I can get my Arrow mash-ups printed up for signing/giving to Stephen.

Okay, I warned you all this blog entry was gonna be short. I can’t think of anything else to write so I’m calling it. Have a good week all! I should have some tales of Comiccon for you all next Monday!

 

Labouring on Labour Day

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Sep 012014
 

Greetings Animusians! I hope everybody enjoyed their Labour Day. I spent my Labour Day weekend, except for Sunday, drawing. Montreal Comiccon is in two weeks and I need that weekend’s material done before I leave since I obviously won’t have any time to draw while attending the convention. On Friday, I drew two flashbacks. On Saturday I drew two mash-ups. Sunday I took it easy (more on that later). Today I drew my normal weekend allotment of two strips. I’ll need to draw an extra two strips over the course of the next two weeks along with my normal workload next weekend and it’ll be all set.

But what did I do Sunday? (See I’m getting back to that!) I played Disney Infinity which I finally picked up on Saturday. As you all know, I’m a huge Skylanders fan. When Disney Infinity was announced, I was intrigued, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest in a set of figurines for another game. The lineup of characters they announced for the first game didn’t excite me either. So I passed on it. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I saw some of what’s in store for Disney Infinity 2.0 which will feature Marvel superheroes (including the Guardians of the Galaxy which is awesome) and some of what I believe are more classic Disney characters (including my favorite, Donald Duck). I don’t think I’ll be able to resist that one so I figured I might as well catch up on the first and at least get the characters I’m interested in.

So how’s the game? Well it’s different. A lot of it seems focused on allowing players to create their own worlds a la Minecraft though with a distinctive Disney flavour in the Toybox mode. While that may be fun, it’s not what I would call a game anymore than I would call creating Pelaria a game. All of what I would actually classify as a game is a means to acquiring the tools and materials required to fuel your creations.

To be fair, there are adventures inspired by Disney movies to play through, but you can only use the characters from those particular movies in them. This is disappointing because not every movie/show theme included in the game has an adventure based on it, especially since the characters I was MOST interested in (Mickey, Wreck-it Ralph and Jack Skellington) were the ones with no adventures to play in. Honestly, who was clamoring to play a Lone Ranger adventure? This all means that a good number of characters are only playable in mini-games and in the Toybox and honestly, while you’re building your Toybox it doesn’t really matter which character you’re playing.

Note this is all based on a few hours’ play. I’ll see how things develop as I go along. I will say that the figurines are outstanding.

I prefer the ability to use any character I want at any time like in Skylanders. Imagine if Disney had gone with a Kingdom Hearts-style story where everybody can cross over into the various worlds. That would have been awesome! Leave the Toybox feature in, just give me a GAME to play along with it.

On Sunday night I went to see The Expendables 3. Now I’ve never been a big fan of 80s action movies, but for some reason, the idea of taking all these 80s action stars who never would have collaborated with one another when they were at their hottest and putting then all in one movie was interesting enough that I went to see the first Expendables movie and it was entertaining enough that I went to see the second so why not the third? None of these movies reinvented the wheel, but they’re decent enough turn-off-your-brain-explosiony romps.

So that’s the skinny on my weekend. Tomorrow it’s back to work. Have a good week everybody! Remember there’s a new mash-up theme starting on Wednesday!

Well Yay Me!

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Aug 252014
 

I started working at my current job in 1999. I was hired as a seasonal employee meaning that I only was only supposed to work during certain months of the year (theoretically anywhere between 4 and 12 months). Well, a series of fortunate events made it so that out of my first ten years, I worked a total of nine years and three months, which all things considered was outstanding. After ten years, management was finally able to officially offer me a full-time position to work year-round. The main thing that changed was that I no longer had to worry if my contract was going to get renewed right away every few months or if I’d have to spend some time at home collecting employment insurance. That made 2009 a good year. I celebrated with much spending of money.

Last year I signed a contract for a permanent promotion to the level of job I was doing in the months where I wasn’t working as a resource officer which was at an even higher level. This meant that at most, I could only drop one job level instead of two when needs were lower. That made 2013 a good year as well. I celebrated by smiling. I was happy, but to be honest, the first full-time position meant more because it provided me with security. This time, all I got was to keep the salary I was already making most of the time anyway.

For the past several years I’ve been filling in during the summer as a resource officer, which means that when there are technical questions on how things are supposed to be carried out in our department, I’m one of the people you come to see. I’d have loved to do it full time, but the need for a substitute (which is what I was) was really only there during the summer time.

This year a full-time resource officer position opened up when one of the full-timers took her retirement. Opportunity!

I was unusually stressed while preparing for the interview. It’s probably the most nervous I’ve ever been over something work-related. I’m pretty confident in my abilities to get my work done so I’ve never stressed out over it. But now, the job I’d been coveting for years was finally within my reach. I just had to beat out a dozen or so other hopefuls for it. It could be some time before another opportunity arose (it turns out there’s likely to be another opportunity within the next year as another resource officer is retiring).

The interview went really well. We had to wait for the results to be validated and made official. In the meantime I and two other employees were given interim contracts for the summer, the length of mine made it look like I was the candidate most likely to get the full-time job. That was back in May.

A week and a half ago I was made a formal offer to work as a resource officer full-time which I accepted. The last step required before I could sign was to allow the other employees still up for the job an opportunity to request a review of my nomination. Nobody intended to do so, but officially management still had to wait for the request period to be over, which was on Saturday.

Knowing how eager I was to sign my contract, my boss (successfully) pushed for the paperwork to be filled out as soon as possible. And so it is with much happiness that I can announce that I signed my full-time contract today. Yay me! I will celebrate with some more smiling…and maybe a nice night out over the weekend. 2014 has turned out to be a good year too. Jobwise I’m officially where I want to be.

But what about Animus news? Nothing really to report. My continued employment guarantees that I should be able to continue with the site at my current level of involvement for the foreseeable future. Other than that, well I finally posted a Print ‘n’ Colour gallery for the Krull mash-ups. I’ve got a number of other finished mash-up themes waiting for a similar treatment. I should be doling one out each week for the next few weeks. Be sure to upload pictures of your finished coloured pieces on the Age of Animus Facebook page!

That’s all for this week folks! Have a good week!

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