“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” J.R.R. Tolkien

I apologise for my once again delay in the writing of this blog, thus I would firstly like to extended my congratulations to anybody who keeps up with their blogs on a more frequent basis than I, which would be pretty much anyone.

So my most recent event was going to Connetticon over last weekend. Connetticon is a huge general Cosplay and gaming convention held in Hartford, CT (as I have mentioned previously). I played 5 sessions of Pathfinder over the weekend, bringing Professor Calaelen (my elven Alchemist character) up to nearly level 2. I even got to GM a game, which was really good fun.
I have been playing huge amounts of pathfinder recently, which is really good fun. It's good to get lots of rping in and I don't think I'll be returning to D&D 3.5 any time soon, so people back in Guildford should be ready for lots of pathfinder society play when I get back!






I'm really looking forward to my parent's and Soph's visit at the end of August for 3 weeks. I think the plan at the moment involves a mini road trip around the New England area, including Boston, Cape Cod,  Providence and New York. So I'll keep you all posted as to how good that is, as soon as it's done.

R2D2 Lantern which we made last year

I was sad to miss Rhythms of the World back in Hitchin, but I see that there was a fair amount of rain and thus maybe it was a good year to miss if I had to miss one. I hope that everybody had a wonderful time, hopefully James didn't drink all of the beer which I would have! This also a good time for me to mention that I am also sad to miss Towersey Folk Festival this year. I'm sure James, Michael and Katie will have lots of fun without me, but it might not be the same!




My board gaming has been continuing weekly, mostly playing lots of Castle Ravenloft at Nexus on Tuesdays, I am working my way through painting all of the minis and it is probably safe to say that I am "pimping" out this game pretty thoroughly. Apart from that, my game purchasing has been at a sad minimum, except for a preorder of Quarriors and Belfort, I have no games that I really need right now.

Back to work. The beam at WNSL is completely off now, unless I have said this before, I forget. My project is coming along fairly well, should be all finished shortly and then it will be time for me to start writing my dissertation for the year.

I'll try not to make this too much about gaming. I should going to GenCon this year to GM some more Pathfinder. This should be loads of fun, so I should let people know how that all goes after it's done. I have also been asked to do two more Conventions in November, so fingers crossed I should have a lot of experience GMing by the time I get back.

Thanks for listening.

Achievement Unlocked!

“The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.” - Jay Leno

Hey everyone.

I apologise for my huge lack of a blog recently. I see that it has easily been over a month hopefully people didn't miss it too much!

The Typical Times Square Shot. (Man I'm a tourist)

Most of you will know that Soph visited me during May, since (what with the Royal Wedding and all) the British (who are still in Britian) get a quite frankly stupid amount of days off within a short period.

It was nice for me to be a tourist again, with a great visit to New York where we did all the touristy type things, Empire State, Grand Central (didn't have much choice about seeing that, as it's how we arrived!), Central Park, Lincon Centre and shopping!


The M&M store and Nintendo world were awesome, my only regret is not getting a certain pair of hilarious boxers from the M&M store! (People who want to know what they have printed on them should ask me, since I don't want to post it publicly!)

Central Park is beautiful. 

Soph and I spent our second weekend together visiting Hartford, which was slightly disappointing as a town. Despite being the capital of CT, there was a huge lack of things to see or do, unless you enjoy looking around Malls which have no shops in them (which was actually a little freaky). This meant we ended up just getting a taxi to a nearby (open) Mall and just shopped for the day.

I won't go through Soph's entire visit, just thought I would summarise it, since most of you can look at pics and stuff on facebook or can find out details other ways. It was really really good to see her and now that she has returned to the green and pleasant land (or whatever). I do miss her a lot.

Still my parents, sister (2 mentions!) and Soph have now booked their flights to visit on the 22nd of August till some time in September (I think 12th), so I'm really looking forward to that.

So, I'm here on my first night shift in a good while, which has been really nice and I am taking a break from work every now and again to update this. Things are progressing forward with my work here at the lab and we're all very much rushing around trying to get things sorted for our last 3 weeks of runs before the beam here is shutdown on June 24th (which also means no more shifts after that date!)

I'll deviate slightly into gaming for a second, to mention some of the stuff that I have been doing in my free time recently. In NY, after Soph left I picked myself up a copy of RuneBound, which I am looking forward to getting another game of on Tuesday, which should be awesome. Neuroshima Hex saw a lot of play-time while Soph was here and seems to hit the table fairly frequently at Nexus, so I might look at getting the expansions for that at some point.
Literally 10 mins before I turned up for this shift (probably would have been better to sleep, upon reflection...), I finished Portal 2. I thoroughly enjoyed the game, it was perfectly balanced in humor, difficultly and length. So well done! (Incidentally if anyone is interested in playing the co-op then I am definatly up for that).

I'm continuing my way through DA2, which I am actually enjoying. It seems to have got a lot more rap than I believe it deserves, but this could be since I am playing it as a role-player, not as a pc gamer (incidentally my character is a silly joker, especially in serious situations). My only complaint about it is the CONSISTENT re-use of areas, which I find really annoying. I understand that I do lots of side quests, and the game offers lots of side-quests, which is great, but slight changes in the areas, just different objects or textures in places would have been greatly appreciated.

I apologise for the massive delay in actually posting this. I entirely forgot about it.
I will ensure that it's not this long in between my posts other times. To make up for it, here is a picture to express my deepest apologies.

P.S. Happy now Elle? :p

"A birthday is just the first day of another 365-day journey around the sun. Enjoy the trip." - Author Unknown

Hey,
Just thought I would quickly mention that I turned 21 yesterday. This is kinda a big thing in the US since it means that drinking is allowed!

I had a wonderful day, thanks to everyone for making it awesome!
Special thanks to Surrey GameSoc for all of them wishing me a Happy Birthday by webcam in a very cool way, which included lots of clapping for some reason!
Also thanks to Nathan, Raphael and Gabriela (from the lab) for a cool night out and my first frat party (even though there was a lack of beer there [next time BYOB sounds like a good plan])

Stay tuned for a follow up to the previous blog post. Yeah, I actually have a plan! It's mad! So I might post that before Soph gets here (in 3days!) or if I don't have time then I guess I won't...
Anyway... Another awesome picture to sum it all up!

Also, Rachael exists. :p

Achievement unlocked! 

"Fly, you fools!" Gandalf- J.R.R Tolkien

Hey everyone. I'm back again. 
Just thought I would quickly have a mention of things to come her in the US. 
This is honestly not a shameless effort to guilt or force people into coming to visit me. I just thought I would let people know some of the big events which I am hoping to get myself to this year, to take advantage of my vicinity to some of the best events in the world. Right here in the United States. 
Incidentally if anyone fancies coming to these events with me, that would be awesome. Just let me know asap, even if you are just thinking about it, so I can know in advance. 


Okay, so my number one event to do this year:
GenCon 2011: August 4-7. 
http://www.gencon.com/2011/indy/default.aspx
"The Best 4 Days in Gaming"
This is pretty much perfect for me, the largest gaming convention in the world. Held in Indianapolis, Indiana. It features many brand new board games, rpgs that fill around 5 hotels, true dungeon runs and everything else immensely awesome. 
This is something that I have always wanted to go to, some kind of massive gaming convention, and this is about as big as it gets! 

A close second comes

Dave Matthews Band Caravan: July 8-10. 
http://www.dmbcaravan.com/
Okay, so this one is a slightly longer story. Basically, during the exam period during the first half of my third year, I was attempting to revise as best I can and realized that I wasn't revising as well when I had my favorite music playing. Thus for this reason and for the sake of broadening my musical horizons I ran a small competition on facebook, some of you will know it as BONNANZATRON! 
Basically each day 5 people would give me a band to listen to, one which I had never listened to before. I would make a Spotify playlist from those 5 bands and listen to that all day. I then chose my favorites and awarded a point to those people. Through this I heard about Dave Matthews Band, thanks to Christopher Smith. 
(Incidentally the contest was won by Guy, who still has yet to claim his prize)
 Dave Matthews Band are an American rock band, featuring, you guessed it: Dave Matthews. It is a fairly large band and is teaming up with a large variety of awesome performers to put on 4 big weekend concerts across the States. 
I would also very much like to see Chicago, so since this event is right in the center of Chicago, it will give me a perfect opportunity to see the Windy City! 
If someone fancies seeing this then check out the band on Spotify, I recommend "You might die trying" and many of the other awesome songs!

Next on the list of things to do is for me to visit New York. 
I know that this isn't exactly an event, but it is something which I very much want to get around to, especially since it is only just over an hour away by train. 
I assume that I will be visiting this while Soph is visiting, but I'm sure there is far more to do in New York than can be done in a couple of days visiting. I will also try and see Mark Aaron James play if he has any gigs in New York once he is back in the US. (Very disappointed that I am missing him playing back at f55 in Guildford). 

So, yes people, we move back to gaming conventions. A little closer to home this time. 
Connecticon: July 8-10. 
"A Massively Multigenre Convention" 
http://connecticon.org/
Firstly, people may notice that these are the same dates as the Dave Matthews Band Chicago event. Well done to these people. Very observant. Firstly I will look at when the August and September DMB dates are and where there are in the US and see if either of those are easier. Secondly, this is still a backup. Which I will go to if I don't go to the Dave Matthews Band event. 


Anyway, this is probably the largest gaming convention in Connecticut. It boasts a wide variety of games from Apples and Apples to Zooleretto, plus A Game of Thrones, Age of Mythology, Amun Re and Antike! This is still a fairly large convention with over 7,000 people attending in 2010, so it should be a really awesome weekend if I go. 

North American Games Day 2011: July 30th
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?aId=5800004a
Okay, so Wargaming here in the US isn't what it is in the UK. This means that I am taking a break from actually playing and collecting the game, unfortunately. This doesn't mean that I don't still follow the Hobby (new Tomb Kings look awesome) and am not very interested in going to the North American Games Day. It's held in Chicago again and is the largest celebration of everything Games Workshop in the world. It will feature huge battles, the latest releases and lots of hanging out with other fans of the Hobby! 

I will also attempt to visit the following places. This could be just for a weekend or when my parents visit near the end of the summer. 
Boston
Washington D.C. 
Hartford
I'm also aiming to go to other gaming conventions, but will let the blog know when I actually book those. 


Once again, I hope people enjoyed this installment of The Hinternet. Incidentally, the BONNANZATRON playlist is on my spotify account. I'm not sure how you guys can access it, since I don't know all that much about spotify. 
So if any of these sound as awesome to you as they do to me, let me know somehow and I'll try and sort something out. Note that tickets to most of these (especially GenCon) go really fast and so sooner would be awesome!


Achievement Unlocked!

A thousand words are worth a picture, and they load a heck of a lot faster. -Unknown

I personally am of the opinion that pictures are worth 346 words, thus for each 346 words in this blog, you will be treated with a picture. Well done readers.

Some silly people have asked me to post stuff about what I'm actually like doing out here normally, as opposed to loads of stuff about gaming and not much else... This seemed like a thoroughly strange idea to me, but what the heck, I'll try and keep it interesting in my own special way.

So, a week in the life of New Haven Matt. Where do I start? Monday probably makes sense, I mean, starting in the middle of the week would be a bit odd...

anyway...

On Monday I get into work at The Wright Nuclear Structure lab at around 9 (9:30 if I can't find my glasses) ready for the group meeting, where we discuss what we will be doing that week, go off topic for a bit, figure out who is doing what to set-up the experiment, maybe go off topic again, assign shifts and then possibly talk about something unrelated for a while. At the moment we take around 3 8-hour shifts a week, which basically involve being in the control room making sure that everything is going smoothly with the current experiment. So, on a Monday the experiment usually ends up starting at around 8pm, in a perfect world...

On Tuesdays I generally go to the Yale games club (Nexus), I won't talk about gaming too much, since I said I wouldn't but this is 4 hours of really good fun, mainly playing Euro-games as most of the people there are massive Agricola fans. It's not as big as my beloved GameSoc back in Surrey and there is no wargaming whatsoever, which gives me a massive sadface, but I'll just have to get my fill of Warhammer when I return. :)

Wednesdays is time for badminton, down at the Yale badminton club. This is a fairly small club since badminton isn't too big here in the states. Still, the club is 

Yay! Picture Time! 

of fairly decent standard and helps to keep me fit. I also try to go swimming at least once during the week, since I can use Yale's 3rd floor (2nd floor to you guys in the UK) pool. I'm not entirely sure why it's built on the 3rd floor except for it being a cool anecdote for people's blogs. 

On Thursdays I play D&D with some people I found through Nexus at a place called Guilford! This is just a short drive (the DM picks us up) from New Haven and we generally play for most of the eve intermittently due to the small children running around the room! For those of you who happen to be interested, I play a Grey Orc Monk, who says heavily meaningless philosophical things, often at the most inopportune moments!

Friday usually gives me my first night off of the week, but there is the oppertunity for more badminton if I wish to play more. Hence I usually spend this evening watching whatever film I have from Netflix at the time. Michael (my roommate) usually returns home from work in New Jersey on Friday eve, so I am attempting to get him into Firefly, since it is amazing!

Penultimatly, Saturday involves sleeping, usually to catch up on missed sleep due to night shifts or just staying up too late... I try and get down to the pool if I'm not completely over-sleeping and also use the weekend time to play some pc games and catch up with some lovely people back in the UK!

and finally... Sunday!

Michael and I are planning on playing badminton at the Yale gym on sundays, but we haven't managed to find the time as of yet, far too busy! Again, I try and sleep a fair amount so that I'm not too tired for my next jam-packed week.

So hopefully that was an interesting insight into a week in the life of New Haven Matt! I hope you enjoyed reading it about as much as I am enjoying living it! I'm looking forward to the weather getting a bit better, which it seems to be. However, apparently it only stays at a

Lol

bearable temperature for about 2 weeks and then becomes very hot, since we are at the same latitude as Mid-Italy!

Just as a final note, I thought I would add an extra pic to the end, since this weekend just gone I biked up to the top of East Rock Park, which is a small park just north of where I live. It has fantastic views of New Haven, as shown below, which means that the bike ride back down is great fun (especially compared to biking up).

I know that it hasn't quite been 346 words yet in this bit, but maybe it will be by the time I finish this segment about how I haven't quite reached 346 words. At the end of the day, I could always insert some Lorem Ipsum into this paragraph and see how many people actually notice, but that wouldn't be very sportsmanlike of me now would it? 

Maybe I could add a short story to this segment... especially since I would like to go to bed soon and also want to finish this before bed. I will advertise again that people are very welcome to come and visit me if they want to, most of you will know that Soph is coming here for 3 weeks on the 18th April (right after our birthdays so I might post another blog after that, unless anything spectacular happens between now and then (apart from my birthday) I'm gonna be 21, which means that I can drink in the US! (it has been quite strange not being allowed to drink) 

I hope everybody at home has a fantastic Easter break! Enjoy the massive amount of holidays that you are getting off in the UK, which you are all of course going to be using to watch the Royal Wedding. Yay! Maybe not... 

Anyway, there was going to be a short story but it seems like we are out of time, and it was about a rapacious glowworm who sets off to discover Asia, but finds much more than he can handle... 

Thanks for reading again people! Hope you all found this interesting, hopefully it was worth typing out!

As always,

Achievement Unlocked!

Also, take another Achievement if you checked the word count between any pics before reading this sentence!

As promised...New Haven (my house is around the middle-right of the pic)

“I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.”- Steven Wright

Ok, hello people!

Sorry that I haven't updated this in a while. I kept forgetting etc...

I would say that I am now fairly settled in the US, the moment the Marvel and DC posters went up in my room I knew I was at home.

So, I have been here over a month now, the time really does fly by. I have been given my project at work for this year. I am getting very used to the lots of slight differences in the US and keep accidentally saying things like "restroom" and "sidewalk" and saying things in an American accent, so I may have lost my wonderful British accent by the time I return. (Sorry)

Okay, so this weekend was ConnCon! This is a gaming convention held in Stamford, CT every year. I managed to play 10 new board games which meant that I stayed up until 3:30am and got up at 7:30am for more gaming both nights! My weekend involved playing these board games, watching bits of Harry Potter (which was on abc family all day) and sleeping. Probably in that order!

Still it was an amazing weekend and I really enjoyed myself, despite not doing all too well in the games!

I'll speak a little about the games in a bit.

You can ignore the next bit if you don't really like board games (also you're silly)

During the weekend I got to play, in some kind of order: Stone Age, Civilization, Amun Re, Dungeon Lords, Alien Frontiers, The Adventurers, Dominion and Le Havre.

My awards for these are as follows:

Superest-duperest: Dungeon Lords. This is a game where you are a Dungeon Lord, who has to build a dungeon which is going to be attacked by a party, so you have to hire monsters and build traps to keep their thieving hands of your hard earned treasure! Despite doing fairly badly, I had great fun playing this game and have in fact bought it for myself, so if anyone fancys a game, come to New Haven!

Most Disappointing: Civ. This is the board game version of the pc game, where you are one of the world super-powers building up your civilization to victory. I was expecting this to be a fantastic game, despite never being a fan of the pc game series, I thought I would enjoy this. However, it did not feel like there was much development in the game and some of the victory conditions are far easier than the others, so it was a bit rubbish.

Okay you can come back now, I'll finish these later. 

 

Crazy confusing Mall

During this weekend I also got the opportunity to go in to downtown Stamford, which is a bit bigger than New Haven, in that it has a Mall! The Mall was pretty cool (as shown) and is, as expected, very similar to a shopping center in the UK, but seemed to be that you went up floors to get to more expensive shops, as if poor people are afraid of magical risey-stairs or uppy-down boxes. I'm not sure if this is the reason, or whether it's just Stamford, but I thought it was a bit strange. There was also a queue most of the way round the bottom  floor of the  Mall to get into the Apple shop. I had no 

idea why and didn't really want to find out!

Back to finish off my board game awards:

Best Euro game: Le Havre, a game where you have to ship items from a French Port, using the money to buy buildings, which makes it easier to ship more etc... This was a really good game, I would recommend it highly, but probably not for more than 3 players, it would take aggggeeeesssss.

Best game teacher: Eric Summerers, yup Eric from The Dice Tower Podcast taught us how to play Alien Frontiers, which was cool. He's a really nice guy.

Best ending: Wrath of Ashardalon: D&D 4th Ed.: The board game. We took on the final campaign in the book, where you have to take on a boss (which for us was a Beholder) and then the Red Dragon Ashardalon himself! The guy who was running it said he had never even reached Ashardalon, so we didn't have high hopes. So we beat the Beholder and then set off in search for Ashardalon (with not much hp left). We were all nearly dead and in corridors filled with magma, so the mage ran out of the corridor ahead of everyone and right into Ashardalon! Fortunately we transported him to the Astral Plane just in time, and began whacking at Ashardalon. The mage died halfway through the battle, and we had no revives left (in this game you all lose if someone is dead at the start of their turn) So the battle came down to the theif performing his whirlwind attack, of 4 attacks which needed 7s (on a d20) to hit and we still needed to do 3hp worth of damage to Ashardalon.

First d20 roll: 6 NOOOOO!!!

Second one: 17 YAAYY!!

Third roll: 11 YAY!

Drumroll.... Get out the MASSIVE D20.... shake in hands... roll....

19!!!   Everyone jumped up cheering! We probably had the whole con looking at us. But no-one cared, it was AWESOME. [ I WANT THIS GAME! Will probably get it (all of them maybe) when I return to England and play with you guys at GameSoc ]

This isn't Ashardalon, its the Lich Dragon we took out in Castle Ravenloft

Okay, board games finished now, you all you sad people can start reading again. 

I'm off to the Yale Badminton club now, get some exercise in to help me deal with the large portions here in the US! I'll post on here again soon hopefully. 

On a side note people should start booking when they want to come see me. Space on my floor is in great demand and I want to see you all, so let me know asap!

Thanks people. See ya! 

(also I didn't get to the badminton club due to some sleet. grrr... especially when you're all having such lovely weather in England!)

Achievement Unlocked!

We killed Ashardalon! (This is the moment the Mage crapped himself!) 

"Home is not where you live but where they understand you." ~Christian Morgenstern

Hello again people.
I have now moved into my new apartment and have been here for over 2 weeks, thus it is probably time for a new blog post. I know how all you people in England just sit waiting at your computers for the next thrilling installment!

Okay, first new development. I finally have my new laptop! The pic on the right shows the massive improvement over my little laptop!
For those of you not interested in pc crap avoid the next paragraph, but those of you interested can read the specs below:
intel corei7- 1.83 Ghz- 8threads. auto overclock.
6gb RAM
1GB NVidea GeForce GTS 360M
64GB SSD (for OS)
18.4" HD Display.
Blu-ray player.
Face recognition login- this is terribly slow to login but is really cool nonetheless.

Secondly (yes it is secondly, since I would rather be a hobo with an awesome laptop than have a house with nothing to do in it!), I have a new apartment. These pictures have gone up on facebook, but just in case you didn't see them here is one of the lounge. It is a really really nice 2-bed apartment which I am sharing with a really awesome guy, who isn't around very much as he is out for work. This does mean that I have to actually get around to buying food and cooking and stuff, which I haven't actually done yet at all.
Also, the apartment has a movie projector (to the left of this pic)!

Thus everybody at home has to sort out some kind of timetable for who is coming to visit me and when. I have an airbed and sleeping bag here for you to stay on (or for some people I might give up my bed if I'm feeling very kind) Certain people may get to share the bed with me... (don't get too excited Jonny, we both know I don't agree with putting out on the first date, just squeeze and HONKA!) anyway....

Work at the lab is going well, I will put up pictures of my workspace shortly, when I actually take them. I should have fast wifi by tomorrow eve, so all of you missing me should add my Skype (matt.hinton) to talk with me (and see my amazing sexy headset). It was really good chatting with some of you at Elle's birthday, a catch up was awesome, even if some of you were quite drunk.

I'm playing a magic draft this evening, which should be awesome. I'm looking forward to playing magic again. Haven't played in ages.

I'll sign off here and will post again, as usual when anything interesting happens. Hopefully you enjoyed reading up on my life.

Achievement Unlocked!
P.S. if anybody feels like trying out league of legends then I would recommend it and you can come and play with me.