Bloodbowl, and DOOM

I played a bunch more bloodbowl and I seem to be getting worse at it somehow. Last night my chaos team scored a total of zero touchdowns in two games (losing one 0-1, the other 0-2) and managed to get out-bashed by skaven of all things. This is entirely in line with how all my games have been going for like a week. Do the dice hate me? Or am I doing something wrong? Well, the second game I *did* get robbed of one touchdown by a 'foul appearance' check followed by two critical failures on a rerolled dodge, and another by tripping and falling in the endzone. Oh, and one of the opponent's TD's happened after a one-die block to push his thrower off the field got attacker down twice. But... really... I had some pretty good luck in other areas that game, so I'm leery of saying 'waaah I'm so unlucky!'

OTOH I look at my 1330 TV team which has, like, two guys with block, one guy with kick, and one guy with +agi. Somehow, the opposing team has a level four player with guard, block, mighty blow, and stand firm. @.@ And a +str guy. And at least two other people with multiple skills. Something's wrong here.

I did manage to beat Rowyn with goblins against her orcs. Because she was so unlucky that I managed to actually score once, and then stall her for a 1-0 win. It's like her fourth game ever, though, so... yeah.

The DOOM:

• The apartment manager has a vague notice saying that there's a 'work order' they need to do in my bathroom that they couldn't complete, and that I need to 'bleach the shower surround and bath'. If I take surround as a noun, I can turn that into an English sentence, but FUCKING HELL WOMAN JUST TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE TRYING TO DO AND WHAT IS WRONG IS THAT SO HARD? I already cleaned the whole freaking bathroom *twice* so you obviously want something specific.
• Very confusing notice from the licensing bureau. I need emissions testing and... a new license plate? Which for some reason I'm getting charged $20 for three times on your 'how much do you pay' worksheet?
• And at work I'm trying to get all this damned branching crap sorted out so that I can start working and it's just not going anywhere. Also, simultaneously, I need to pack up the office to move to another building. Also, I got scheduled for two interviews. GOD I hate interviews.

Okay, that's pretty weak doom but it's enough to make me feel doomed. Unresolved things that I may or may not be able to do something about but I don't know what do that pretty easily.

Oh right, the other thing I wanted to talk about besides doom

Saturday was my birthday. Now, it isn't that I'm mad at people for not remembering (I've been encouraging that) but having my brother in law drag me out to Seattle to help him move a pinball table 50 feet (which somehow took four hours) was a bit much. Especially when I-99 was closed that day and the huskies had a game so traffice was so ridiculously bad that it took me an hour and half to get there. I started out taking I-5 but it was backed up down to Seatac so I got off on the first exit and circled around the lake on 405 and then 520 instead. x.x

Most of moving the pinball machine was getting an in-depth explanation of every little tiny detail of the pinball machine from the person who was selling it. That started out being somewhat interesting, then got somewhat boring, then I went upstairs to talk to my sister and her kids because... pinball. Not my thing.

Afterwards they took me out to dinner at a newish restaurant that served mediocre noodles. Which is kind of a shame because their appetizers were OMG awesome -- they had an okonomiyaki with this weird sawdust-like fluff all over it and some sliced ginger to add more weirdness to the taste, and nice and spicy gyoza. Pricy stuff, though -- the noodles were more reasonably priced for what you got if you ignored their utterly standard noodleness.

The most *interseting* part of the day was getting to play around with a Kinect before the pinball guy showed up. It looks like it actually works as advertised, with a few caveats. First, you need to move furniture -- you need room in front of the TV to stand up and jump around. Quite a bit of room. There is no way I could have one in my apartment. And the pointer interface (you actually point) is a bit shaky and wasn't well calibrated to where I was actually pointing.

That said, remember those commercials for the Wii where it had people jumping around and exercizing, but in real life you sort of sit on the couch and listlessly wave the controller a bit? The Kinect makes you actually jump around. The games I saw all had an avatar of you on the screen, and actually jumping was sort of the 'A button to jump' equivalent. It was *really impressive*. It recognized different people, automatically logged people on and off, snapped pictures to apply patterns to things, all the stuff they did in the demo that you wouldn't really believe would work in real life actually worked.

There was a breakout game that I think everyone's seen demos of where you had to wave your arms and legs around wildly to block the balls, and a river rafting game that was sort of like Sonic the Hedgehog in that it was about bouncing the raft (by jumping up and down on it) to high ramps to collect coins 'pins', and if you missed you'd end up back in the water which was like the lame loser very lowest route in a StH game. Those were fun. There was also a game where you had to dodge around barriers while standing in a mine cart that was less fun, probably because it was harder and I kept getting hit.

...the downside is, you really need to jump around. Which might severely limit the amount of time you can spend playing any of the games to the amount of time that you can jump around before getting tired. I think I might have played them all for a total of fifteen minutes, MAYBE, and that was getting close to my limit. @.@