Natalie.ayerdis

Judge Brett Kavanaugh (Matt Damon) takes questions from Senators Chuck Grassley (Alex Moffat), Dianne Feinstein (Cecily Strong), Amy Klobuchar (Rachel Dratch), Thom Tillis (Mikey Day), Cory Booker (Chris Redd), John Kennedy (Kyle Mooney), Sheldon Whitehouse (Pete Davidson), Lindsey Graham (Kate McKinnon) and prosecutor Rachel Mitchell (Aidy Bryant)...(Read...)

It is true that one Christmas my older brother asked for, and got, a sort of more complicated alternative to the Big Wheel called the Green Machine.  

It is also true that the same Christmas I got what we ended up calling the Batman Machine, which was mechanically identical to the Green Machine, but Batman themed. It was, objectively, better in every way, but Mark specifically asked for a Green Machine, so that’s what he got, while I accidentally got to be Batman.

Our younger brother got no Machine, because he was a toddler. Though, in a sense, he ended up getting both of them, because we’d both outgrown ours by time he was old enough to use them. That argument didn’t seem to make him feel better at the time. That’s the problem with toddlers. They lack foresight.

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The idea of murderers organizing into a political movement and holding rallies seemed more far-fetched at the time.

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These Star Trek Wireless Vulcan Earbuds are hilariously awesome, from thinkgeek!"So you don’t HAVE to listen to LL Cool J while wearing these, but we’re just sayin’. Maybe use these Spock-ear earbuds to jam to some Vulcan lute or take a call. Or perhaps their inspiration will help you tap into some of that Vulcan cool when you’re on the phone with your cable company (if you still have one of those… ours brings us the Interwebs). They come with 3 sizes of silicone eartips, and you can use them for 4-5 hours on a single charge (depending on the volume). We’re going to wear ours when we go running, because watching people do a double-take is fun."..(Read...)

Okay, I want to tell this story, but I need to be careful about what I say, and how I say it.

I had a coworker at one of the Disney locations I worked who referred to himself, in the third person, as “The Maverick.” Literally. He would enter a room and say, “Uh oh! Here comes the Maverick!”

I may have mentioned here that I don’t have a lot of faith in my own memory as far as dates, times, and important tasks go. Sci-Fi movies, dialog from The Simpsons, and times I’ve been insulted, those I remember for life. I need to write everything else down. So, I always carried a notebook with me at work, and would jot down notes as needed.

One day, The Maverick saw me writing down a reminder about something and confronted me about it. It seems at his previous location, in one of the theme parks, his coworkers had taken detailed notes of his “activities,” creating a paper trail that led to his being given the choice of either transferring out of that specific area, or being terminated.

I can’t say what he was doing wrong without getting into a lot more detail than I can here, but I can tell you that he was NOT endangering anybody’s safety, management was right to threaten to fire him, and the guests who complained were all from the same racial background. I know all this because he told me what he did, proudly, still utterly convinced that he was right.

Stories like this are why I believe, deep in my heart, that in any line of work where the jobs are filled by human beings, there will be a certain number of them who are incompetent or deranged enough to be a problem, but not quite enough to have been fired yet. We tend to overestimate the numbers of these problem people, because they’re the ones we hear about, either in amusing anecdotes, or on the evening news.

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This is one of the meanest comics I wrote. I also like it more than most. I do want to make it clear that all of the insults are aimed at Jenkins, not his girlfriend or their unborn child. Making fun of either of them would be unconscionable, in my opinion. The child didn’t do anything wrong, and while the girlfriend made one bad decision (getting in a relationship with Jenkins), I’m sure she’s already suffered for it.

Note from Missy: If this were written today, I’d probably ask Scott to name the baby “Burdyn” instead (or “Burdynne” for a girl), since that seems to be the way the last 8 years have taken us.

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I believe that the best way to act after you’ve told a joke is to act like there was no joke, whether the joke was successful or not. If the joke didn’t work, no amount of explaining the premise or pressing your audience to “lighten up” will save it; and if the joke worked, making a face, laughing at your own wit, or reminding people what a  great joke you just told will only kill whatever laugh and positive feelings you might have created.

This is just an opinion.

The opinion of a man who is sitting here writing about a series of jokes he came up with nearly a decade ago, thus ignoring his own advice.

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I wrote this after spending eight hours working closely with a coworker who was blasted on cold meds. It was a pain doing a major portion of her work, but the fun of watching her spend the day groggily insisting that the medication wasn’t having any effect on her more than made up for it.

Note from Missy: The last line in the first panel just made me LOL; I’m so glad Scott gave it to me. Scott didn’t hear me LOL, though, because he’s wearing his VR helmet and headphones, playing Star Trek: Bridge Crew.  That particular punchline writes itself.

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For most of the time we’ve been married, Missy and I have referred to beef meatballs as “beefmeat balls.” I don’t remember who started it, but I’m 99.9% sure it was me. It sounds like the kind of thing I’d come up with. That might come off as bragging, but believe me, it’s not.

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Will Ferrell and Joel McHale join curator Aram Moshayedi for a tour of “Stories of Almost Everyone.” On view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, January 26–May 6, 2018...(Read...)

If I were the boss of an office somewhere, I’d have an employee of the month, but it would be sarcastic. They’d get a tiny little plaque, their picture hung in one of the bathroom stalls, and the exclusive use of the parking spot farthest from the front door.

Nobody works for me, so I am my own employee of the month, every month. And, yes, I do still mean that sarcastically.

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The Princess Bride is full of great band names! Shrieking Eels, Montoya, Too Many Spaniards, Fezzik, Iocane, The More Deadly Poisons, R.O.U.S., Fire Swamp, Lightning Sand, Count Rugen, Six-Fingered Man, Pirate Ship Revenge, The Sound of Ultimate Suffering, Humiliations Galore, To Blathe, Mostly Dead, A Little Alive, That Blessed Arrangement, To the Pain. These are just the ones I’m coming up with off the top of my head.

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I love Tillamook Medium Cheddar. It is the Cadillac of cheese. My father and I see eye to eye on this issue, and almost nothing else.

We visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory (In Tillamook, Oregon) at least four times when I was a kid. They had fantastic ice cream as well! We’d get a campsite in nearby Netarts, Oregon and go crabbing. If you’ve never been crabbing on the Oregon coast, it involves renting a terrifying little boat and going out into the terrifying, choppy, lead-gray water, and hauling up cages full of terrifying live crabs, which you take back to the shore and cook in a terrifying giant cauldron of boiling water and seaweed.

To a child with my temperament, the cheese factory was a welcome relief.

When this comic ran the first time, I got a nice gift basket from the Tillamook Cheese Factory. It was one of the proudest days of my life. That is not an exaggeration, and no, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

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I worked in a place where almost everybody brought their lunch from home and ate it in the breakroom. One time, we had a potluck. I observed that the only thing that made the potluck different from a normal day was that we were sharing our food. That didn’t add to the festive mood.

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Once, long, long ago when I was in high school, I was riding in my older brother’s car when it broke down miles from the nearest town. He didn’t seem surprised, as he knew the water pump was going bad.

I asked him why he hadn’t replaced it before he drove us out, miles from the nearest town. A reasonable question, I think.

He explained that he tried to, but that the replacement water pump he bought didn’t fit because it had an extra water filter built in that interfered with part of the suspension. This was a fine example of a reply that answered the question without addressing the underlying issue.

Anyway, he took the new water pump, which still didn’t fit but which he had not yet returned to the auto parts store, and pounded on it with a hammer until it did fit. Of course, it also leaked like a lawn sprinkler. So, he coated the pump with a thick layer of shoe goo.

We laugh, but it got us home and didn’t leak a drop!

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In the time since I made this comic, shark week has expanded. One can now find shark-related programming on other channels during Shark Week, including episodes of Shark Tank.

I wouldn’t mind seeing what would happen if the producers released a live sea lion into the Shark Tank. I’m betting O’Leary would offer it a royalty deal.

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Here’s a board for the holidays, from Donald X. and LastFootnote.

A Darth Vader Christmas tree by Imgur user ggkthnx...(Read...)

I think the problem isn’t that our role models are unrealistic, so much as who we pick to be our unrealistic role models. Looking back now, I see that most of the fictional characters I was presented with as role models were men who were really good at fighting, and at saving the semi-helpless women to whom they were attracted.

That’s not great, but it is better than what girls got for role models, which was women who were really good at being attractive and imploring the boys’ role models to save them.

Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood could have bucked that trend. They at least had other interests beyond fighting and being attractive. He was a professor and a scientist. She was a small business owner and a successful competitive drinker.

Of course, as a Hollywood film hero, Indiana Jones needed to have a different girlfriend every movie. He moved on to a squeamish damsel and a backstabbing Nazi, fine role models both!

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If the producers of the Ocean’s movies are looking for people to help write any future sequels, please consider this comic my job application.

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This comic was, of course, written for humorous purposes, and doesn’t really reflect my opinions about how men and women process their emotions.

In reality, I think the only real difference between how men and women handle their emotions is that women have to process several emotions men don’t. For example, women have to deal with the emotions created when men constantly accuse them of being overly emotional. This, sometimes makes women angry, which the man in question points to as proof, making her even angrier, resulting in an escalating chain reaction that will eventually end with women finally deposing us in a violent revolution, while their male victims shout things like, “What?!” “Calm down!” and “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

And I, for one, welcome our new feminine overlords. I remind them that some men are on the record as “getting it,” having, for example, said positive things about women in the commentaries posted with reruns of their web comics.

Note from Missy: I’ll put in a word with my cohorts about sparing you.

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Sadly, it’s all true. That’s how I proposed, that’s how we got married, and that’s how we announced it to my family.

For the record, when my father and his wife at the time got their card, their first comment was, “Geez, Scott. You’ve gotten so fat, I didn’t recognize you in that picture.”

What I’m saying is that we Meyers aren’t an emotionally demonstrative bunch.

Note from Missy: It’s been over 20 years, but this is how I remember the proposal: We were walking by the shop window, looked at the rings, and I said, “Hey, that ring we were thinking about is on sale.” Then we both shrugged and were kind of like, “You wanna?”  So really, either way, TOTES ROMANTIC.

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Captain Kirk was a terrible fist fighter. I can’t think of a single time Kirk ever singlehandedly beat someone into submission with his fists. He always had other crewmen, or Spock was there to hit them with the Vulcan nerve pinch. Maybe ending an episode with the captain just punching an alien in the face until they cried uncle wasn’t deemed heroic enough.

It has always struck me that in Star Trek (and now on The Orville, A TOTALLY DIFFERENT AND DISTINCT SHOW!!!) humans are the most feeble, least ferocious sentient creatures in the galaxy. Except maybe for the Ferengi. I dunno. They do have those sharp little teeth.

On Star Trek: Discovery, there’s a creature who they state many times is from a prey species. He talks at length about how his people can sense death, and live in constant fear. Well, it turns out he can also crush a communicator with his bare hands.

If Star Trek were realistic, humans would not be in command of all the Federation ships. Their primary jobs would be as an emergency source of protein.

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You may think the commercial I suggest is stupid, and you’d be right, but that doesn’t mean nobody’d do it, or that it wouldn’t work. Ever since the debut of Juicy Juice and its slogan, “Juicy Juice is the Juiciest Juice,” all bets have been off.

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Tabletop games are a wonderful way to bring people together. Any time you read about why people play board games or RPGs in a world where you can play video games you hear many of the same reasons. Board games are tacticle, they’re social, and they physically bring people together. Given that, it’s surprising that so few games actually make that physicality a part of the game. They exist in space, but they don’t necessarily use that space.

All tabletop games have some sort of physical component. Cards, chits, and little plastic pieces spill out from our boxes ready to be pushed around a table. However, at the end of the day all they do is mark things. You could replace Ticket to Ride’s trains with plastic cubes or bits of construction paper and still play the game. While the rise in board game apps is great, it often shows that a game doesn’t need to be a physical product. I can enjoy Suburbia’s clever systems from my couch. While I do miss out on the social engagement, the game isn’t providing that.

There is no problem with this; I absolutely play board games to meet up and hang out with friends in the real world. I’m a fan of games with high-quality components or impressive miniatures. However, I love when a game makes its physicality necessary to the game experience. There are games that would not work the same if played with cubes or turned into pixels. Take Yogi for example – that silly picture below with my gangly arms splayed all over the Gen Con floor is the result of a game that has you draw cards and hold them in ever more difficult positions against your body. These games engage with the space they occupy, and are not all just flick-based dexterity games, though I love those too; the picture at the top of the page is Cube Quest. Your dice are miniatures and you launch them across the table with the flick of a finger.

When I interviewed Rob Daviau about Fireball Island he used the phrase “toyetic quality” to describe games that are more than a system of rules writ in cardboard. They are games you play and also playthings you manipulate. I think few games express this better than Rhino Hero by HABA. It is a bit like reverse-Jenga. Players take turns adding floors to an unstable building, often moving the eponymous Rhinoceros Superhero from floor to floor. It’s a game that makes your heart race. The tower will sway as you add floors or even with the air currents in the room. A light bump of the table causes everyone to gasp and when the tower comes crashing down it’s a moment of disappointment and mirth.

Speaking of Jenga, I’d be remiss not to mention Dread. This is a horror-RPG that uses a Jenga tower to create one of the most suspenseful and tense experiences in RPGs. When characters in a game of Dread need to do something dangerous the player has to pull a block from the tower. The tense emotion of the character is replicated in the player by forcing them to interact with the real tower and the effects of that tension make the test harder. As your heart races your hands shake. You hold your breath and try to pull the block. As the tower tumbles your heart drops with it because you know it spells doom for your character.

While those two examples are simple, games that use their physicality don’t have to be. Flick ‘em Up uses physical space to tell western stories. The upcoming Dead of Winter edition uses a tower to tumble zombies out onto the board. The random bounce of weighted plastic zombies allows the game to simulate the random-yet-focused movement of an undead horde. There is plenty of flicking, but you’re still playing a strategic game. Limited actions slather dramatic tension on every flick like camouflaging zombie guts. A limited inventory and secret personal objectives make teamwork necessary but nervewracking.  Other miniatures games even instruct you to bend down to see what your miniature can “see” to determine line of sight. These effects don’t have the same impact when translated digitally.

There’s a reason people stop and stare when you play Cthulhu Wars at a convention and it’s not because a player’s brow is furrowed in strategy. Sandy Petersen has said that part of the inspiration for the giant miniatures was the huge plastic dinosaurs he played with as a kid. There is a literal and figurative weight that these Elder Gods carry to the table. While some gamers may reject the notion that our board games are toys I see no reason why they can’t be both. There is no kinetic element to Cthulhu Wars but it uses physical space to no less impact.

I don’t want to just to play games I want to play with games. I want my tokens and pieces to be more than just markers. If games are going to be physical in nature let them have a physical nature. Let’s let our games be toys and bring toys into our games. I’m happy to enjoy a game of systems and rules but I can’t promise I won’t be building towers out of my pieces, wondering what would happen if I began hurling them across the table.

What toys would you love to see in a game? What is your favorite dexterity game? Tell us in the comments! And don’t forget to check out Game the Game on Geek & Sundry Live every Wednesday at 4PM PT to stay in the loop of the coolest games on the tabletop! 

Image Credits: Rafael Cordero

In addition to Geek & Sundry, Raf Cordero writes for Miniature Market’s The Review Corner and co-hosts the gaming podcast Ding & Dent. Chat with him on Twitter @captainraffi.

As a Jonathan Coulton fan, I cannot endorse Glee.

When it first started, I was of two minds about the show. I liked its message of empowerment for the disenfranchised and nerdy, but I disliked the fact that the show suggested that the key to finding acceptance was through singing and dancing. I’d have preferred it if they had highlighted the method I used to find my niche: sarcasm and ironic detachment. They could have called the show Snark.

Note from Missy: I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the same Note from Missy I left when this comic first ran, but: you can tell that Scott makes up some of this dialog, because I totally know Sy Snootles’ name.

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Joop the talking orangutan was a real idea the creators of Lost threw around. They were joking at the time, but I think some shows should seriously consider using him.

The idea was that if the show had been cancelled after one season they would have been leaving the viewers with a ton of unanswered questions. They figured, since they were canceled anyway, why not end the final episode with an explanation. The last scene of the last episode would have been a nice desk with a map of the island on the wall behind it, and sitting at the desk there would have been a talking orangutan who would say, “Hello. My name is Joop,” then explain all of the mysteries of the island.

If I were the producer of . . . oh, let’s say House of Cards, I would seriously consider releasing a video starring Joop, explaining what would have happened in the final season of the show if the character Frank Underwood had been involved, which it appears, at this point, he will not be.

Or, here’s another idea. They could recast the part of Frank Underwood with George Clooney, then have people keep going on and on about how good Frank’s looking lately.

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I think I’ve shared this opinion before, but I feel strongly enough about it that I’m fine with repeating myself.

In the Star Wars prequels, there was prophecy that “the one” would “bring balance to the force.” Then Liam Neeson brought in a kid he thought was “the one.” At that point, there was a small army of Jedi using the Force for good, and, like, one guy using it for evil, and they weren’t even sure he existed. How does nobody look at that situation and not realize that if the kid’s going to “bring balance,” he will have to be the most evil bastard in the galaxy?

Yoda should have diced Anakin like an onion while shouting, “Sorry, I am. Safe, we must play it.”

Note from Missy: Ooh, I remember this comic because of the spelling. If you ever needed an example of how the English language is kind of a dick, look at how “prophecy” is a noun, and “prophesy” is a verb. Because that isn’t going to trip anyone up, right?

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If you buy a quality item, it will last. I wrote this comic seven years ago, and I still have that steel ruler. I can see it right now, sticking out of the organizer on Missy’s desk.

Okay, I don’t have it, but I have access to it, and that’s just as good. That’s what Missy tells me, at least. I’m not going to argue. She might hit me with the steel ruler.

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Sony just released the second sneak peek at Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, an upcoming 2017 adventure film that's a sequel to the classic 1995 film, Jumanji. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas, and Jack Black, comes to theaters on December 22nd, 2017."In the brand new adventure Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the tables are turned as four teenagers in detention are sucked into the world of Jumanji. When they discover an old video game console with a game they’ve never heard of, they are immediately thrust into the game’s jungle setting, into the bodies of their avatars, played by Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan. What they discover is that you don’t just play Jumanji –Jumanji plays you. They’ll have to go on the most dangerous adventure of their lives, or they’ll be stuck in the game forever."..(Read...)