General Tuesday - Hogwarts! Hearthstone! Exercise! Geekway!

I thought this would be a good time to catch up on a number of topics, just to touch on a variety of things.

Hogwart's Challenge

First off, the Hogwarts Challenge on MFP is going swimmingly. the Slytherin House is representing itself very well, we're by far the most active! We've got a great lead on our competitors:


Current House Cup Standings:

Gryffindor: 60 

Hufflepuff: 103 

Ravenclaw: 103 

Slytherin: 133

We've done introductions, initial weigh-in, an exercise challenge, and a trivia challenge. So far the entire challenge is running very well and I have to give huge props to the person running this, she's really stepped up and is making this a fun thing to do!

Exercise

My 'Goalbusters' Class is still going strong. We're up to do ing 2 sets of 70 squats at the start of class, and each station is up to one minute. Last night we did lots of partner work... waves on the rope while our partner anchored, isometric holds with resistance bands interlocked, and doing side lunges simultaneously with out partner, planking face to face with our partner and alternating claps, kettlebell squats handing off each time to our partner, and medicine ball bounces across the room from wall squats to each other. In addition to two circuits of that, we did biceps and triceps work, crunches, and stretching.

Geekway to the West

The game convention (http://geekway2west.com) I help run is in full swing. I just loaded another 10 boxes of board games to give away into my car to take to the storage unit. I still need to pack all the games that I have for the game library, get the Play and Win games packed and ready to go to the Punch and Play Day at Jay's house, cheer on my wife as she folds and organizes another 100 convention T-shirts, and finish my board game for the Game Design competition while keeping up with last minute registrations. Fun times! 

Hearthstone

I finished up an arena run last night with a Mage deck I expected to go to 5+ wins and only got 2 wins. I lost TWO games to disconnects/crashes (stupid Windows 8 tablet)  where I was crushing my opponent. Then I went from 0-2 to 2-2 playing exactly the way I expected the deck to work. My final game though, was against a Warlock. Despite over half my deck costing 0-3 crystals, my initial hand was Coin and 4 4+ cost spells. I threw everything back... and got 3 4+ cost spells and a single 3-cost spell (Arcane intellect). My opponent opened with a Flame Imp and it never got better. I didn't have a minion on the board until I was at 18 life, but I fought back and got them to 11 with enough damage on the board to kill them next turn, and two secrets in play, a Vaporize and an Ice Barrier. I had 5 life. If my opponent had just attacked, then between the Vaporize and the Ice Barrier, I'd have lived through the turn and swung in for the win. Instead he Hellfired and then Soulfired me, my Barrier never went off, and I died. Ah well. I did get a nice card out of my pack rewards, though.

Oooh.. Golden Holy Wrath! Shiny!

Hogwarts Challenge on MFP and Weekend Update

I just started a Hogwarts Challenge on MFP. 120 of us got sorted into the four houses (I'm Slytherin, obviously!) and will be tracking our weight for 10 weeks and doing food, exercise, and trivia challenges.

My 30 house mates and I are already working hard, and are kicking butts and taking names, with only the pesky Ravenclaws keeping up with us so far. (Edit: Scratch that, now we are clearly in the lead, with Hufflepuff chasing us, and Gryffindor is eating our dust!)

Our first challenges have been basic: Introduce ourselves, give an initial weight, and our first exercise challenge, do 100 jumping jacks.

I'm looking forward to the challenge, and I'm sure Slytherin will destroy the competition and take home the House Cup!

In other news, you may have noticed I failed to blog this weekend. It's getting easier to skip blogging on the weekends, and then catching up on Monday. This weekend I did a ton of yard work on Saturday: mowing, trimming, cleaning up branches. There's still a lot more to do.

Sunday we had a board game afternoon, and ended up playing two games of Eminent Domain with the Escalation expansion... one with  Scenarios, one without. Then we played Euphoria, the game I showed a picture of last week. We played two-player this time, and while it wasn't as good as 4-player, it played in 40 minutes, which was nice. We closed out with a quick game of Can't Stop and did some work on our Puzzle as well.

Finally, I am still playing Hearthstone! Not as much as some of my friends, but I've gotten over the hump and and am making decent progress. I'm trying to get all nine heroes to at least level 15 right now, and I want to level them up together, as I think playing a Hero is the best way to learn how to beat it!

Not great, but I'm getting better!

In this post I talk about Hearthstone (and last night's workout!)

I went to last night's Goalbusters class despite being a little sore after doing yardwork most of the day Sunday, and I'm glad I did. Class was good and I think it helped work out some of the soreness I picked up from crawling around under the deck pulling weeds and killing ivy.

Class was a little different than normal, and we're getting into the middle of the run where the warmup is getting tougher. We opened with our normal medicine ball, jumping jacks, split squats, wall pushups and then got into 3 sets of 50 squats. Ouch. the circuit itself alternated between strength training exercises and cardio, 1 minute each as we went back and forth between the equipment and mat stacks... at the mat stacks we partnered up and did waves against each other with the heavy ropes... wow that was a workout. By the 6th time around, I was ready to set those ropes on fire.

Instead of filling up all this space talking about specific exercises and weights and reps though, I'm going to talk about Hearthstone. This is a new CCG that Blizzard has put out, and it just came out for iPad. I played in the closed Beta and wasn't a big fan off the game, to be honest.

Now, though? I really, really enjoy it. They've balanced a lot of cards, the 9 different heroes all feel very different, and with it no longer being a beta release, the player base is much larger... which means it's easier to find people around your skill level.

Thrall vs Uther, early in the match

There are four basic ways to play, first off, you should play against the computer itself. You'll start out playing Mage decks in a tutorial, and it teaches you the game really well. After you finish playing the Mage tutorial, you should play 'Practice Mode'. Here, you can beat all of the 9 heroes and unlock their decks. My suggestion is to unlock all the heroes, and then use their basic decks to play against the basic and expert AI... get every class up to level 10, playing against a variety of Expert AI heroes. As you do this you'll earn free packs, gold, and cards. Don't spend any of that though.

Once you've gotten all 10 classes up to level 10, you can then check out the Arena (card drafting, you'll get to play with awesome rares, epics, and legendaries... but it costs you gold to play, and you can't keep your deck). It costs 150 gold to play Arena, but you always get at least 100 gold back in the form of a pack. Unless you hate drafting, I would never spend gold on packs in the store, I'd always play Arena, as if you get 3 or more wins, it should pay for itself, and even with 0-2 wins, it's a good deal and gives you great experience.

Finally, there's Play mode. Here you play a constructed deck from your collection. You'll need to make decks from the cards and packs you've won, and you can play against other people. Hearthstone removes 99% of all player communication, so you won't have to deal with jerks calling you names when you play.

One final word of note: play Ranked, not Casual. This sounds crazy, but you'll start at Rank 25 and play against others that are newbies in Ranked, and you'll have good games. If you play Casual, you're going to face people with massive collections of rare and gold cards that have insane decks that will destroy you. Don't do it!

The game is fun, free (unless you want to spend real money), and has amazing graphics, sound, and feels very 'tactile'. I highly recommend it.

If you're playing, feel free to friend me on Battle.net! I'm Arsh#1939

Happy Easter

No post today of note... I spent a few hours doing yard work,  then played Hearthstone,  assembled a custom insert for King of Tokyo, then watched two episodes of A Game of Thrones.

Back from PAX!

So, I really did mean to blog while I was at PAX. However, good intentions fell to the wayside once I was there. A couple of times I felt like I should blog but then I just didn't. And I'm glad I didn't because I was already running perilously low on sleep.

So, how did my PAX adventure go? Well, first off, I was not able to stay on plan as well as I'd hoped, but I did much better than I feared. I had my Medifast meals and my almonds with me for the convention, and I did dinner each night in as reasonable a way as possible, but I broke plan every day. I'll go over my breaches:

Thursday: I arrived in Boston and got checked in. Brandon and I didn't get hooked up together until around 8 pm and I met him, Damien, and Ken for dinner. We walked from the hotel and hit Whiskey Priest, an Irish Pub where I chose fried cod and potatoes. The cod was very lightly dusted in flour and fried, and potatoes are totally off the reservation, but I went with it anyway.

My badge and my Pinny Arcade Pins I acquired. I failed to get Leeroy Jenkins and for that, I am very, very sad.

Friday: Full day at PAX, and I had hoped to playtest Thornwatch that night, at 7 pm, but I was not only not on the playtest list, I wasn't even on the alternate list. But, if I wanted a shot, I'd need to be there. So I ended up having lemon pepper hot wings from the convention center food court. They were baked, not fried, but still... hot wings aren't on the menu either. I didn't get a chance to playtest Thornwatch, either, as I was about the 20th person in line for the 'alternates that didn't even get onto the alternates list'.

About to playtest Hearthstone on iPad, I watched some Heroes of the Storm

Saturday: Another full day at PAX, and the night of the Frontalot concert. Brandon got a group of us together to go get Japanese Hot Pot in Chinatown, so Ken, Brandon, Lena, Henny, Brad, Chris and I all piled into a van after we got poached from the cab line. We ended up at this amazing hot pot restaurant where I had shaved chicken breast slices, 6 types of mushrooms, tofu, cabbage, and udon noodles all cooked in spicy broth. If I had skipped the udon, this meal would have been completely on plan, but I ate them anyway. We had to zip back to the hotel so Brandon and Ken could get ready for the show.

Not a great picture, but you can see Vic-20 (Ken), MC Frontalot (Damien) and Bl4k Lotus (Brandon) here. Sturgis (Sturgis) was out of frame behind them.

Sunday: Partial day at PAX. I ended up in airports and/or airplanes for 11 hours. I found a place in Newark that let me get hot and sour soup and chicken teriyaki for dinner, and that seemed like a fair choice.

After this, I was fairly certain I'd thrown myself out of ketosis, because of all the carbs. I think that's fairly accurate considering that I'm pretty hungry today. However, by sticking to one reasonable meal a day, and no desserts, combined with the fact that I was walking 5+ miles a day, I came home to a pretty happy surprise... a nearly 4 pound loss from Thursday morning, and nearly 3 lbs down from my previous low.

Now, there's some more caveats this as well. I wasn't drinking anywhere near enough water. I mean nothing close. And, I was getting about 5 hours of sleep a night. So... today I'm a little logy and I'm drinking as much water as I can stomach. We'll see what this means for my weight over the next couple of days, and if I'll rehydrate and pop back up some, or if I'll rehyrdrate and lose more.

Either way, I'm happy to have made it through PAX without a gain!

Super Active Day!

We've got one more day of faux Spring before winter smashes us again tomorrow, so we made the best of it.

The day started with a trip to the gym, where I did a ton of lifting...

• 4 minutes EFX, 9 minute mile pace, level 13
• T-Bar Rows, 3 sets of 5 at 125 lbs
• Cable Rows, 3 sets of 5 at 180 lbs
• Barbell Bench Press, 3 sets of 5 at 135 lbs
• Barbell Squats, 3 sets of 8 at 155 lbs
• Barbell Deadlifts, 2 sets of 5 at 185 lbs
• Dumbbell Bicep Curls, 3 sets of 5 each arm, 35 lbs
• Dumbbell Triceps extension, 3 sets of 13, 35 lbs
• Dumbbell Shoulder Press, 3 sets of 5, 70 lbs
• Barbell Military Press, 3 sets of 5, 75 lbs
• Cable Lat Pulldown, 2 sets of 5, 120 lbs
• Machine Leg Press, 3 sets of 10, 345 lbs

After the gym I came home and played some Hearthstone, where I won three matches and earned my Hearthsteed in WoW (woo!)

It's not too gaudy, is it?

After that we took our daughter to her art lesson, and then my wife and I walked for 20 minutes or so around the pond at Vlassis Park. After we picked her up from art, we took her to her next appointment, and my wife ran her 5k training at Longview, and then Lauren and I went to Queeny Park and hiked for a couple miles taking pictures.

After we got home from the park, we all went out together and watched the Lego Movie, which was adorable.

All in all, a great day, and makes it easy to not think about the fact that we're getting more snow and ice tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a non-event and not cancel our D&D game.