At loose ends.

It says something about the way our social lives have perked up, that we're looking at a weekend without major social engagements with a mixture of confusion and unease that we may have forgotten something.  In fact,

racerxmachina turned to me last night in the car and asked "Are you SURE we don't have anything planned this weekend?"

And we don't.  No conventions, no major parties, no costuming cliques...my mother was going to come up, but that never materialized...we have most of the weekend to ourselves, and we're not used to that.

Which is actually a good thing, come to think of it; I have a ton of writng involving acouple reviews and some scripting, and this will be a good chance to settle down in a coffee shop and get to it.  And maybe there's some gardening.  Or even going on a hike.

All we have to do is lose this nagging feeling that this free time means we''ve forgotten something..

 

First Impressions of D&D 4th edition.

Well well...the new location of the neighborhood game store is only ten minutes away from work, easily visitable during lunch.  And, it IS a nice day for a drive.

Hmm.  They have copies of the new Player's Handbook on sale, and have since midnight.  Well, I was going to save some money and order it on Amazon, but why not support the local game store?

So, first impressions, are...

Well...

It's rectangular.  And has a lot of pages.  And text.  And pictures.

Some of the pictures look pretty neat, like they now have lizard creatures as a player race.  And they split the elves into woodsy types and magic types.  And the text seems to be going out of its way to make itself understandable for new players, and- oops!  There's the light!

This is why reviewing a book while driving back to work is a bad idea.  Shortly, I will do a more thorough review, possibly after inflicting character creation on a test animal, like one of our cats, or racerxmachina 

No kidding, the Inflatable Car!

 Supposedly from the hype piece, this inflatable electric car could be delivered in two cartons by mail, be assembled in a couple hours, get 2500 miles on an electric charge.  it would also, supposedly be much safer than a regular car, since it's essentially made out of airbags.

Looking at the actual company website, it appears that they have simply done designs, and no actual prototype has been produced.  This automatically raises my skepticism meter, since we've seen similar displays of enthusiastic hype that never produced an actual product.

Still, if they're on the level (Unlikely) and actually manage to produce a product (doubtful), it would be neat.  And their idea for the backpack emergency vehicle is just too cute.