Next week my blog will return to normal. What I mean by that is I’ll be including links and the like. My vacation will be over in the next 24 hours and then I’ll be on the long flight back to Canada.

I accomplished quite a bit while in the Philippines, for that I am grateful.

This past week saw the creation of a large number of new conversions, including the last couple of monsters from 2005’s King Kong remake. I wrote up the stats and background for Carnictis, Lavalantula, Decarnocimex, Lekgolo worm, Kong, and Nazi zombies.

Seems my conversions contain a large number of zombies, but then again there are tons of different types of zombies from various sources to use. The latter, the Nazi zombies have tons of sources for me to choose from, and the ones I wrote up were inspired by the movies ‘Outpost’ and ‘Dead Snow’.

I’m starting to keep close tabs on how many more creatures I need to convert before I get around to finalizing the book, and as of today I have 17 more to go. I have already chosen seven creatures to convert, and they will be written up as soon as possible, but I need another ten.

I’ll figure something out, I always do.

Tonight (which is early AM for folks in North America) I will be posting two more new creatures for my New Mutant Monday series. I’ve written one up and still have to create the second, and at least I have quite a few to choose from, notes I have compiled over the past few weeks.

This week I created and added the Elecminoos and the Stutterers. I can promise one of the creatures I already created is a vile and disgusting little vermin with a twist.

I want to talk about gaming and gender. I have seen plenty of posts over the years on my newsfeed about people playing something other than their gender in both online games and table top versions.

I’ll admit I have occasionally played female characters in MMO’s but over the years I have gotten away from that, sticking pretty much exclusively with my own gender.

During my time in MMO’s I ran across a ton of so called ‘female’ characters that, just from their actions and the way they communicated, were clearly male. I have rarely in real life ran into women who acted the way these so called females did. The verbiage they employed, the way they acted, it was so obvious (to me at least) the avatars were in fact controlled by a male.

Being a heterosexual male, there are few things in this world I love more than a healthy female body. I love to look at a woman, I love to see a woman dressed nicely and looking… well feminine Thank god for women!  Over the years I have come to the realization it is simply not right for me to control a female avatar in games. Maybe it has something to do with my age, or maybe I’m finally maturing, but I firmly believe I should only play male characters.

This is one cardinal rule I will always follow when it comes to table top games. In fact with my group one of our players used a female once, and I was polite but I told him straight up it was pretty creepy. He has not done this since.

Am I infringing on his personal rights? I guess I kind of am when I ask him not to play a gender not his own. I guess if it came right down to it since it creeped me out I should have left the group instead of imposing my will on him.

Then again when the other members of our group likewise agreed he should stick to males, I guess it is more of the majority winning.

There is the old excuse about wanting something nice to look at when you’re playing an online game. So be it, if you want to look at a sexy avatar’s ass while you play, then at least admit you’re a dude playing a girl!

Bottom line of this little discussion is I think it’s creepy for a man to play a woman, and a little strange if a woman plays a man in a game, mainly for real life table top gaming.

Besides – how many times have males played females in various games who turned out to be complete sluts?

That’s just… I don’t know - eww?

This week I finished ‘Deeply Odd’, book six of the Odd Thomas series. I found this novel had my mind wandering a little bit while I listened to it, although there were references to several of his other novels I have read over the years, and I really kind of like the little ‘organization’ which appeared in this book.

It also got a little stranger than I’m used to… seemed to involve demons and alternate dimensions. Then again that is the case with a lot of the Odd Thomas series of books. Supernatural mixed with science.

And I had to chuckle the number of times various characters said ‘Call me xxx’, to which Odd would reply ‘yes sir / ma’am’.

Don’t get me wrong I fully intend on finishing this series, and if Dean Koontz has not killed Odd by the end of book 7, I hope to see more in the future.

At the time of writing this blog, I am not quite finished the current book I’m listening to. Then again it was a bit of a whopper, being 22 hours in audio. I have just over five hours left on it. I hope this will mean I have two or more books to review next week.

Although I would have preferred to watch more movies, I was surprisingly busy this week here in the Philippines. I did manage to watch ‘San Andreas’, and it was a fun, effect laden romp. Great effects, terrible story. I mean, come on... a city which has been absolutely devastated by a series of quakes, and yet the windows in one still under construction building somehow managed to survive?

Yeah it had me rolling my eyes. Still I'm like a crow - I like shiny effects.

I've seen a lot worse, believe me!

I also watched ‘5^th Wave’. I read the book about two years ago and it kind of slipped my mind. I guess I’m getting kind of tired of the dystopian / post-apocalyptic teen dramas, although I have watched many of the movies produced.

Overall it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, but it did keep me entertained for nearly two hours. Heh I just realized how often I say that… the movie was simply average. Would I recommend it? Meh, if you have nothing better to watch, sure.

Lets see… I did watch ’10 Cloverfield Lane’ as well. This movie really has you wondering what the hell is going on, at least for the first little bit. A woman gets into a car accident on a lonely stretch of highway and awakens to find herself handcuffed to a wall, an IV in her arm, and her leg injured. She meets her captor, who claims that everything has gone to hell on the surface, that there was some sort of attack, but he is quite vague about it.

As the movie progresses she learns what appears to be the truth, and discovers she’s not the only person he has inside the bunker with him. The movie has a lot of suspense and it is quite satisfying how it ended.

I do recommend this one.

I also finished watching Dead Snow. This horror movie was clearly (at least in my opinion) a love letter to Sam Rami and his Evil Dead series, even going as far as to having similar style when it came to certain scenes. I can’t really say anything else about it without spoiling the movie but it involves a secluded cabin, six young men and women, and zombie Nazi’s.

That last bit of information should be enough for you to want to see the movie!

Then there was ‘The Outpost III: Rise of the Spetsnaz’. The movie should not have included the Spetsnaz in the title, as all it had to do with the Russian special forces were a group of Russian special forces in WW2. It had pretty good action, and the story was not all that bad, and of course it was about Nazi zombies. Another movie I suggest you see.

Every time I come to the Philippines I have a few – I guess the only way to describe them are rituals. I like to get a shell from the beach to take home, I always stop at the same fast-food eateries, and I always buy a new flash drive. I know it’s a silly ritual, but isn’t life pretty much all about rituals?

Anyhow, I like to search for the best prices before I make any sort of purchase. Case in point is a series of 32 Gig Avenger Flash Drives. A hulk fist, an Iron Man fist, An iron Man helmet, Thor’s Hammer and Captain America’s shield. I found a couple I liked at a local computer store and picked them up for 500 Peso each, or about $15.

I decided I wanted the Captain America Shield flash drive since he is my favorite character. So I checked Amazon Canada and nearly shit myself when I read the whole set was selling for $145 Canadian! I then checked Ebay and found the drives for $10 US and free shipping.

You don’t need to be a genius to figure out where I purchased the drives from. The reason I am sharing this story is because it nearly always pays off to search before you make any type of purchase.

I tend to do that a lot when it comes to DVD’s and books, checking both Amazon Canada and the states. Even after shipping I have saved quite a bit of cash on many books and movies.

Shop around, don’t just make a purchase without a little research. Otherwise you could end up paying $145 for a set of flash drives when it could have cost you only $40.

While in the Philippines, I have been observing the other white guys I see. As anyone who has been reading my blog will realize, I am not the kind of person who happens to jump on the band wagon. I don’t really follow trends and I try to be my own person.

99% of the white guys I see in the Philippines are always wearing flip-flops, shorts and typically tank tops or T-shirts.

I buck the system and I don’t do what these other guys do. I wear full-length pants and shoes. The only time I dress like they do is when I’m in the privacy of my relative’s home, and even then, despite the heat, I tend to wear the same things.

Strange, I know, but it’s the way I am. I do not do like everyone else does.

So there you go, that’s it for my last blog from the tropics. Odds are I’ll be back in a year and a half to two years, maybe sooner. Next week I’ll be back to my usual routine of posting Sunday night.

I guess it’s been pretty cold in parts of Canada and the states the past few weeks. Not in Calgary from what I could see.

Stay comfortable and happy!