London, Tabletop, Kitten Jr.

Hoo boy, what a week it has been! Can you believe that in the six years I've been living here we never had a chance to go to London? And it sure wasn't for lack of trying! Whenever I bring it up, people would tell me I may as well ask for somebody to mug me, which would leave me in every way as broke and disappointed. Turns out London is actually relatively affordable if you do it right.

The most difficult part was getting there without spending our entire allowance on travel tickets. I tried to book train tickets online to save some money, but the cheapest ones started somewhere around 40 Quid (per person, single trip!) and went all the way up to 140! So it could have cost us nearly 300 Pounds just to get there from Nottingham - return tickets not included.
Instead, we opted for a much cheaper (albeit waaaay slower) coach ride. Booking website claimed it was gonna be 5 Quid per person, but they slapped on so many fees and other crap that we ended up paying 15 per ticket. Which is a lot more than the amount they advertised, but still not anywhere near the ridiculous amount we'd pay on the train.

London looks 100% the way you picture it in your mind.

Going by coach ain't soo bad. They're nice and comfy and you can do all kinds of fun, sneaky stuff on there. Huehue. And a three hour ride is perfectly fine and not significantly longer than going by car - they all get stuck in the same traffic after all. Then you grab the all day tour bus ticket for 30 Quid, get carted around all the sights, have them all explained to you in 12 different languages and there's even a journey on the Thames included in there.

Hmm... moisture.

We've checked out all the sights they force you to learn about in English lessons and went on our merry way. Because apart from the usual attractions, every city is the same now, anyway. Fucking Starbucks, Subway, McDonald's all over the place, same food, clothes, touristy souvenir shit wherever you look. I'll admit London was a little more pretentious and up its own ass with the whole organic food places and fucking yoga advertisements. Look, nobody gives a shit about your hip vegan lifestyle if all you get at your organic grocer is a fucking coffee to go with a plastic lid on top, you pretentious cunt. And "yoga" the way it's practiced today isn't some ancient mystical art from thousands of years ago, but really just started somewhere in the 1860s. In a way, the people and shops in London were a lot like the stuff you see in Los Santos. Which is sad, as Los Santos isn't even based on London. But like I said - you see this dumbass wealthy, stupid, decadent first world behaviour pretty much everywhere today. I think I prefer remaining a poor, uneducated asshole for now.

Oh hey, our Paizo miniatures for Pathfinder got here! Well, "here" being the local post office until Monday, because the parcel ninja left a note saying he couldn't reach us. On a Saturday. Where we've been up since 9am. Sigh.
The Pathfinder starter kit thingie comes with a crapload of really incredible cardboard miniatures. They contain pretty much everything you could wish for in most campaigns and the artwork is nothing short of stunning. Alas, they're not very cat-proof. Our first adventure ended when the cat jumped on the board and ran off with my fighter. You can actually see the bite marks all over his face now. Grrr!

So being the special snowflakes that we are, Claire went with a D&D kenku sneak to represent her tengu rogue. Paizo tengus are hard to find, because they're not one of the core races and reeeeally pretty damn optional. Even the advanced rulebooks only cover them in a few small paragraphs about tengu society. Lots of people prefer their human characters or they won't go any further than your usual dwarves and elves and the like. Which is fine, but we like things to be a little more exotic, so...

They get to peck and glide and do birdy stuff.

It was even more difficult to find a gnoll in heavy armor which doesn't look like total ass, so we weren't entirely successful on that front. The figure looks big, heavy and scary enough, but it also sports one of the shittest paintjobs I've ever seen:

Because painting teeth is hard, so let's paint that whole area black!

I lack the tools, talent and money to fix that guy, so he's really one for the "eh... close enough" category. He's still better than my little cardboard dude who smells of old catfood!

Kitten Jr. spent the day here yesterday and he's naturally good at Golden Axe coop and eating pizza. You see, Golden Axe multiplayer is designed in a way that makes you hate other players. You can attack one another, steal food and magic potions and the freaking mounts, which usually results in a whole lot of revenge-kills and in-fighting. Growing up, my brother and I killed each other more than we fought the baddies. But for some reason it all worked incredibly well yesterday. Boss monsters were kicked back and forth between us in really well-played sessions of baddie-tennis, items were distributed depending on who needed them the most at the time and we didn't kill each other by accident (or deliberately, for that matter). Fun stuff!

And then came the pizza. Delivery guy brought him two pepperoni pizzas instead of one. The kid sat there clenching both pizza boxes like Gollum protects his precious ring. He chomped away one slice after another until the first pizza was completely gone. I tried to take the second box off of him, so he'd have more space whilst gaming, but he held on to it and started eating the other freakin' pizza. o_O
He killed half of it, then took the other half with him when he left. I don't think I ever ate two pizzas in one sitting when I was 13 years old. Fuck, I don't think I've ever done it now that I'm in my 30s!

Oh well, it's all back to the usual business now. I've got quests to write (for work! How cool is it that I can say I write videogame quests for work?) and there's translating to be done. The more work I get done, the better. We gotta bring the kid's computer fund to a level where he can afford a decent gaming machine, so we can play some Warframe, GTA and all those other glorious multiplayer games, which require more than a potato to run. I'm hoping to introduce him to my friends at some point so we can all play together like Haggy did with his nephew. Multiplayer gaming is awesome, because it really brings people together. To think how many times I got told off by my teachers and my own stepmother because gaming is oh so antisocial. Ha!