Category Archives: Crossposted

Some Pokémon Go Fan-Art

The embarrassing thing is not that Pokémon Go is the most exercise I’ve had in a year, nor that I still haven’t figured out how to dodge during a raid battle.

The embarrassing thing is that I’ve been playing for three weeks, and I only came up with this today.

Apologies to Niantic, Jim Henson, and all those Valor and Instinct players who find their new affiliation unpleasant.


Note: For those of you who keep track of this kind of thing, the idea hit me around 11am. I put off doing anything about it until 12:10pm. Reference art took about two minutes to locate. Rendering took about 30 minutes. It’s ink and Copic on Deleter manga board.

Watch Me Play D&D Tonight!

Tonight (Tuesday, June 4th, 2019) at 7pm (9pm EDT) I’ll be a guest player at the Typecast RPG table. That link leads to their Twitch stream, so you’ll be able to watch live as I make a half-orc of myself.

The game is run by Dan Wells, and the three core players are Charlie Holmberg, Mari Murdock, and Brian McClellan. The setting is a D&D 5 home-brew featuring magical flying cities and other stuff I still need to read up on.

I really do need to read up, because tonight I’m playing a half-orc bard, a traveling scholar who does bounty hunting on the side. It would be pretty embarrassing if I didn’t know at least some of the lore of the place. Especially if the occasion calls for me to set some of it to song during battle.

Here’s the Typecast RPG home page, and for good measure another link to the Typecast RPG Twitch stream.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but it neither surprised me nor disappointed me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, so I guess what I was expecting was a Godzilla movie with lots of monsters in it.

The show stealers for me were Mothra, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Aisha Hinds. All three were so compelling on-screen it was hard to pay attention to what the other actors were getting up to. You might take issue with Mothra being grouped with “actors,” but the film’s credits very clearly listed Mothra as being played by “herself.”

My only two¹ complaints were that King Ghidorah seemed less realistically-rendered than the other monsters, and the orchestral score fell a bit short of the utter brilliance delivered by Alexandre Desplat in the 2014 Godzilla film. YMMV, of course.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters clears my Threshold of Awesome, and will definitely be going in the Blu-ray collection as soon as it releases.


¹ Okay, I suppose I have a third complaint, which is that the movie didn’t have enough Kong in it, but since we’re getting a Kong vs. Godzilla movie in 2020 that complaint falls into the category of “I am impatient,” and it can’t fairly be levied against this film, which already had plenty of monsters in it.

MTHFR and Avocado Toast

I got my genes scanned, and we found cool things. For starters, we found that we could get my genes scanned by using FedEx to send a Q-tip to a laboratory. The 21st century has its problems, for sure, but it’s really, really cool, too.

MTHFR looks like an abbreviation for something impolite. It isn’t—not unless you think words like methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase are impolite. The salient point here is that the MTHFR gene, which codes for the production of that methylwhatsit folate stuff, is not working quite right for me. Most folks can get the vitamin B12 they need from folic acid supplements. I don’t do very well at turning folic acid into usable B12 folate, so I either need to go back to nature and eat lots of leafy greens, or I need some special folate supplements.

Did you know that avocados have lots of B12 in them? And I like them a lot more than I like kale.

We found other things, including a strong indication that my current antidepressant, bupropion (Wellbutrin), isn’t the best choice for me. Over the next few weeks we’ll be changing my meds, feeding me some methylfolate supplements, and putting more avocados in my diet.

Probably not on toast, though.