Jes and I took a trip up to Oakland to catch up with the hometown crowd and see some Raiders football. There was a bit of haze from the Santa Rosa fires, but not, like, SD in '03 or anything:



We played some X-Wing miniatures at Rob's sweet new digs, we stopped by the Beast Mode store, and we checked out the rather impressive Oakland museum.


The Raiders game can be summed up like this:


... really amazing seats but a regrettable result. Happily, the stop that the Oakland defense couldn't manage came the following Thursday in one of the greatest finishes in NFL history. Too bad we weren't there.




Chase decided he wanted his bp to be a 100-mile manually-powered bicycle ride from Santa Ana to SD Old Town.


Since the metro section of Amtrak was out of commission for trolley construction, we had to leave a truck at Old Town and drive another up to Oceanside. From there we caught the 05:30 train to SNA.


The first stretch down to the ocean was mostly just riding alongside the Santa Ana "river", it was pretty easy going. The Newport-Dana Point section had some nasty hills, not killer, but rough knowing there was 80+ miles left.


San Onofre was the first of Dave's many, many tire changes. We ate in Oceanside (the 60 mile mark) where I grabbed Derrick's truck to meet them down in Old Town.


Since Battleborn is EOL, J and I have moved on to Paragon - an in-beta moba that supports PS4/PC crossplay. It has all the usual stuff - heroes, squishies, abilities, ranks, mmr, towers, cores. The only departures I've seen are no mercs and the addition of equippable cards that add a new dimension to character build.



Letha? Sorvukk? Not sure if they're trying to establish a lore or what. I can't imagine why.

At present, there's more or less one map. Three lanes, a bunch of jungle between with the npc xp farms. This may be a thing in non-HOTS games, but the lanes are asymmetrical.


Of course there are tanks, dps, crowd control, laners, healers.


As usual, towers defend the lanes, you need squishies to take the tower hits while you do damage. You have to keep an eye on your six so you don't get stuck between an enemy hero and a tower.


Everything inevitably culminates with a team battle on one or both cores. Staying in ranks and using abilities in unison is crucial.

I ever tell you about the time my buddy Keith and I were on the top of a burning building and we had to fight our way down like five floors of zombies? Wait a second. I guess that was you guys. Aww, shit, man, I can't wait to tell Keith about that one.

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