Kneel Before Me, HTML!

Eyes slideways, spud. With my incredible HTML skills, I've added a new Links section to the sidebar. And it is a testament to my geekiness how excited I was about doing it. You'd have thought I delivered the reborn Baby Jesus instead of just editing some HTML in a template.

(Hey, you know how I like to link to things a lot? Well, searching for a link for that last paragraph, I typed "Baby Jesus" into Google, and got this. WARNING: It's pretty messed up, even by my standards, but the fact that it's the very first result is absolutely hilarious. I love/hate the internet.)

Two of the links on the new sidebar are to sites I've never linked to in the ISB. The first one is Fark, which I consider to be an actual weblog, in that it's an ever-changing list of strange, amusing, or otherwise interesting links. Sadly, it's where I get most of my news.

The second is to Chad's Blue Ribbon Blog™, the official blog of First Prize Comics! I'm really glad we've got Chad on the whole blogging train, at least for the time being. He's one of my favorite people, and he's responsible for getting me a job at the shop. And brother, is he full of ideas, something I am supremely jealous of. The guy has a twelve-part Nick Fury story that's pretty fantastic just percolating in the back of his head somewhere. Me? I made a resolution to write something every month, and here we are halfway through January and I've done nothing but a blog post whining about bad comics. Chad's great, and you'll all love his comics.

Unfortunately for the readers of this humble blog, however, today was pretty boring. I'm getting over my cold, but the lethargy that comes with not being able to breathe through the nose was weighing heavily upon my brow. By the end of the day, Ben and I were reduced to playing hangman on the backs of sale flyers, and I was so desperate to have something to do that I kept adding body parts to the poor victim.

One event of note, though. Early on in the day, about 11:15 or so, these two men (that'll be important later) came into the store. They were from a new tax service and offered us discounted, well, tax services. They even gave us a complimentary box of Krispy Kreme donuts and a stack of coupons to give to our customers. Now, these are accountants who are trying to get us to trust them with our money. So what do they decide to go with? Costumes. One, who didn't talk at all, was dressed as Uncle Sam, with a floppy cloth top hat and a beige plad polo shirt that completely ran counter to the look I assume he was going for. The other guy, the one who did all the talking, was dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Green velvet toga, foam crown, box of donuts, the whole nine yards.

At lunch, Ben and I thought about their plan and decided they should come by every day. I wanted them to just be in random-ass costumes, you know, "For all your tax needs, the Pirate and the French Maid" or "April 15 is just around the corner--trust Monkey and Spider-Man to get you a refund!" But Ben wanted them to stick with a theme and just do different mascots every day ("The Proletariat and the Bear have the best accounting services west of Stalingrad!")

Still, they gave us donuts, which was awesome. They can wear whatever they want, as long as they're handing me Krispy Kreme while they wear it.

Another thing that broke the tedium was a new game that I bought, Gloom. It was designed by Keith Baker (creator of the sweet Eberron D&D campaign setting) and features an innovative system. It's a card game where you take control of a family and attempt to give them the most horrible lives you can until you finally kill them off, adding up Pathos Points to determine the winner at the end. You can even play happy events on your opponent's cards to better his characters' lives! The game itself uses transparent, plastic cards stacked upon each other so that the modifiers from different cards can come through or be overlapped by new ones. It's a novel system that's been applied to a fun Series Of Unfortunate Events type of style for an amusing game experience that encourages you to tell a story and explain the mishaps that befall your characters. It's really neat, and it's published by Atlas Games, the same people who re-released Dungeoneer. It retails for about 20 bucks, and after playing several games with Tug today, I can reccomend it.

So that's all for today. Tune in tomorrow for this week's edition of the Warren Report, where I actually admit that I made a mistake! And could Scott make another appearance?! Be here in 24!

And as a completely random sidenote, I love getting comments on my blog. It gives the illusion of a wider readership, and I'm pleased as punch that for the past week, everything I've written has got a reaction out of someone (except the picture of Ming, which you were all probably cowering in fear of). Thanks for taking the time, and as Brandon would say, Holla Back!