Monterey Trip

I went to Monterey California last week for work and got away for a few hours on my last full day there and went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Point Lobos State Reserve.  The aquarium is a really world class facility and what little I had time to see of Point Lobos was really great.  Here are some pictures and videos that I took.

The aquarium was having a special jellyfish exhibit, which was really awesome because I think jellyfish are one of the coolest creatures under the sea, as you can probably tell from my video.

"I see you!"

"Boo!"

They seemed to have a small exhibit dedicated to the different varieties of "sideways fish."

Awesome.

Big turtle!

I'm not going to bore you with the many pictures I took for Liz at the reserve, but I'll tell you these sea lions had to be having wild sex for all the noise they were making.  There is too much wind for the mic to really pick it up, but trust me you could hear it for a clear mile away.

Picture taken to the sound of sea lion porking.

Here are some panoramic pictures.  Close to 180 degrees each at two different locations.

Getting My MERCS On!

Got two games of MERCS in last night at Icons.  CCC (me) vs Keizai Waza. 

For the first game my buddy Thomas pulled a cool piece of terrain out and Jason & I decided to try and play a King of the Hill 6-turn game. Didn't run too well because the terrain was really uneven.  Really sweet terrain though. I ended up winning but it was entirely because of the side of the table I took during deployment, so using this terrain needs some work.

Too many choke points and too few access points. 

Medic on point! 

Assault Leader looking badass. 

For the second game we played a simple "first to kill three wins" skirmish.  Just enough terrain that it would be mostly open, block LOS on turn one, and play fast.  I got a few lucky rolls which let my Heavy kill two models in one Overwatch trigger.  This was after Jason rolled a nat 10 with his sniper, which for Waza means "head shot" which deals three blood, single handedly killing my Demolition Expert on turn two (a literally killer personal ability).  My Incinerator got a lucky initiative roll and was able to pull out a narrow win.

Still working on getting the Incinerator into a tactical position quickly.

I also made a major tactical mistake in which I moved my Assault Leader and Heavy into positions that they should have traded. That makes my win very much luck based.

And clearly I enjoyed playing with the 5 megapixel camera on my new phone.

All in all, super fun night of gaming and I learned a lot from experience.

Posterous sucks, unfortunately.

I created a Posterous page for quick and easy blogging, but I've had nothing but problems with it.  So looks like I'm back to Blogger.