A Wizard is Never Without Cake and an attachment! (Patreon)

Been working on Jedi Knight, Patlabor Movie, and Inquisition, so thought I'd take a break to drop the third Time of Wizards for you early, since with this being the one year anniversary of Vimeo kicking me out, getting something early is a novel reversal of being late. It's hard working on some of this though. Reviewing Patlabor the Movie is a bit like having nothing but a single solitary chopstick and a booklet about Asian cooking that's written in Dutch.

Most of my family has been vaccinated, so my parents had a small get together this past Saturday. Of course with the various limitations I still look very much like Gandalf the Grey, although if Wisconsin legalizes pot I suppose I can easily transition into that pipe smoking he does. Although I probably look more like I'm into acid, and with the amount of sleep lately that's only been exacerbated. I have my wife being disruptive when I go to bed, cat's coming to wake me up in the morning, and then an Amber alert at 3:30 in the morning. I don't want to seem like I don't care, because if I knew where the kidnapper was I would have leapt into action. You'd have heard on the news of a naked Gandalf beating up a kidnapper with a Tom Servo puppet, you'd know it was me. But I could offer no help, and I think it's not unreasonable to program your phones not to blare an alarm if it detects the room is dark and it's the middle of the night, you're not going to be any help to anyone until morning when you have a) left your bedroom and b) are conscious. And would have been over anyway, the cops found the guy ten minutes later, and sounds like it was probably a misunderstanding. Just saying, I obviously wouldn't have said anything otherwise, I'm not Marvin the android telling someone worried her kid's in a ditch "You think you've got problems? I have a cat that wakes me up early in the morning." Kid's okay, so I'm allowed to grumble that I'm too tired to brush my teeth.

I did take the opportunity to give my goddaughter her birthday card. I'm always awful and feel horrible about it, her birthday is in March and in March I'm always so worried about taxes I forget about it. This time I remembered though, and because my wife was pestering me for cigarettes (one of those Barney "Between this pack, and the other pack, there might not be enough packs!") I dropped her at the store. "Listen to me," I said. "I want a birthday card and $30 cash to put in it for her. The register only lets you take it out in twenties, so buy a card, pay for it, take out $40 additional dollars, use one of the bills to buy your smokes, give me the rest so I can put $30 in there." "Okay." "Now repeat it back." After explaining it twice more (once to explain no, the card was not for my dad, lest she come back with something filthy for a 12 year old girl) she went in. I waited for her to inevitably return to explain her brainfarts and how much it would lead to being taken out of the bank and if I now owned an entire box of Charleston Chews or something, but she remembered all the steps. Except "It only went up to $30." "You needed to go to the next screen then, but that's fine, so you have the $30?" "I took out $30, then I used the ten to buy the smokes, I didn't forget! Here's $20 to put in the card!" My goddaughter was still happy and hugged me, proving she's far too good for this world.

Still was a good time. Played a lot of Sheepshead (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepshead_(card_game) ). Everyone is better than me because I'm horribly unlucky and have played three times since graduating from college. I get a little voice in my head saying "Oh, time to play that!" "Why?" "I don't know! We all agree down here you're supposed to! It's Sheepshead, what part of that name tells you this game makes any damn sense?!" I finished with a score of -1, which for me is worthy of victory music from an eighties movie. 

But it was kind of short, we got there late on account of me waking up late and realizing I'd completely forgotten to edit, nevermind post, Picard. So I scored my negative, exchanged theories on the Ever Given ("Don't they have balloons that can get it out?" "You mean like the old man in Up?" "That go under the boat. I think I read Abe Lincoln made it." "I suppose if he did that it might have been overshadowed by a couple other things."), ate ice cream cake because a Wizard is never without cake, Frodo Baggins, and then got to come home to work on Jedi Knight. It was a full day. Party days usually leave me so exhausted I need a vacation. I think I might take a day tomorrow to decompress, I think my own madness is starting to come through in some of the video game characters. I don' think the Jedi is supposed to have a nervous breakdown, but I'm thinking of leaning into that. Between C2 and Kira, no explanation is really needed.