His picks:
Rangers vs. Senators: Rangers. This isn’t a hard call, the Rangers were vying for the President’s Trophy for the team with the most points.

Bruins vs. Capitals: Bruins. I’m iffy about this one. Boston has a good goaltender in Tim Thomas (even though he’s a giant douche off the ice). And it appears Ovechkin has turned on his game a little of late. I’m not sure I care too much, this round.

Panthers vs. Devils: Devils. The Devils are the 6 seed in the conference to the Panther’s 3 seed. However, the Panthers are only the 3 seed because they won their division. I agree with this call.

Penguins vs. Flyers: Flyers. And his reasoning is just…wow. To quote:

Where the Flyers have the advantage: Scoring depth and a toughness to go with it at the forward spot.

Scoring depth? Where the fuck does he come up with THAT? Evgeni Malkin won the scoring race by 12 points. TWELVE, motherfucker. OK, one guy is not depth.

Let’s compare, shall we?

Slightly tilted in the Penguins favor, as Dupuis breaks the pattern of 1 per team. And let’s not forget about the guy who played only 22 games and got 37 points, Sidney Crosby. He’s in the top 10 on the Penguins despite having played only a quarter of the games the team played this year.

Flyers have more scoring depth than the Penguins? Please. As far as toughness goes, I will grant you that the Flyers are a bunch of thugs…I mean, they’re a pretty tough team. And the Pens are generally smaller than most other teams in the league. I’ve seen situations where a Penguin player will check an opponent with speed and bounce, to be honest, and it bothers me. But we did call up Steve Macintyre, a known enforcer.

And we have a goalie who has won a cup before, and gone to the final dance a couple of times. Bryzgalov made it to the conference finals once and lost, and Bobrovsky is good, but the Flyers were swept in the 2nd round (Division championships).

One final point: Although tonight’s game had less impact on the standings than this post (see: none), and the top players on each team didn’t really play that much, I think it’s safe to say that the Pens can win games against the Flyers.

So, Wysh, I call shenanigans on you, sir. Shenanigans.

Quoth Gabe;
When I meet a group of people in Skyrim and they want me to join their cult or whatever I just freeze up. If I do join it, will I miss out on some cool thing later? If I don’t join it, are they going to have some rad adventure without me? No matter what I choose I feel like I missed out on something awesome. I’m not picking a direction to go, I’m deciding not to go a hundred other directions.

I suppose this adds to the replayability of a game, but I like just a little more structure to the game. Grand Theft Auto IV had lots of open world stuff, but has a structured plot. Assassin’s Creed does too. You can choose to ignore those plots until you’re ready, or you can tackle them in order right away.

We went to the beach. We went to the sound (which is like the beach, without the waves, and with a bunch of fiddler crabs). We went shopping. We went to a really crappy shrimp festival with a pretty cool parade before it. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. No sunburns except on the tip of my nose (probably due to rubbing my nose after going under the waves). I can’t really remember anything else.

Tenzil lent me a book (Leviathan Wakes) which started pretty slow but worked out pretty well. I wasn’t quite sold on some of the character development, but I did finish the 500 page (in TRADE SIZE) book in one day, so there’s that.

Played a bunch of minecraft…there’s a post there comparing Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress percolating. Both are sandboxy, but are pretty different, but you can do a lot of the same things…I’ll do a comparo at some point.

Yeah, got not much else.

There. You’ve been Raptured.

The Squire of Gothos: This one has a pretty good set-up. The ship encounters a stray uncharted planet. Kirk and Sulu are teleported (not transported) to the surface by Trelane, the eponymous Squire. After much technical faffing about, Spock and others manage to beam down, and they rescue Kirk and Sulu, but are not permitted to leave the planet. They sleuth out that Trelane’s powers come from a mirror, which they destroy, allowing them to leave. Then shit gets REALLY WEAK. Trelane manages somehow (conveniently off-screen) to regain his powers, and prevents the Enterprise from leaving. He brings Kirk back down to the planet, they play a little “hunt the wumpus” and then in an epically bad storytelling moment, Trelane’s parents come and take their little bad boy away, letting Kirk go.

I mean, SERIOUSLY? Deus ex machina from fucking orbit here. It’s like the writers said “Oh crap, we have 15 minutes to fill, and we’ve already solved the main problem! What the fuck do we do?”

One of the editors at the AV club gave this episode an “A” rating. I have NO IDEA where this came from, because, OMGWTFBBQSTFU it was basically utter crap.

Another episode that people love (and its sequel wasn’t an episode but an ENTIRE FUCKING MOVIE) was Space Seed. For the record, the movie wasn’t bad. The episode? HOLY CRAP was it horrid. This one wasn’t rated by the AV Club, but there are some lists which put it in the top 10 episodes. I don’t really see why, though. The acting was overblown even for TOS, and that’s saying something. Entire chunks of backstory are generated for Khan, and are just completely unbelievable. That may be due to the fact that Khan’s history was in the 1990s, but this show was filmed in the 1960s, and a eugenics program that generated a superbeing like Khan in under 30 years was nowhere near achievable. It’s ridiculous. They didn’t even TRY.

Of course, there are some fucking brilliant episodes, as well. So far, I’ve seen just one. Balance of Terror. Federation Guard posts along the Neutral Zone are being destroyed in sequence. The Enterprise speeds over to see if they can’t stop the destruction. We meet our first Romulan, and the cat and mouse game of fighting a cloaked ship begins. None of the action is unexplained, and it all holds together tightly.

The Conscience of the King was also a good episode. Not a spectacular episode, but the mystery was (to my jaded eye) solvable early, but built up well.

Anyway, I hope that the stories get better in later seasons, because the number of episodes solved by deus ex machina is getting to me.

Then I ran the co-op course. And unlike other cooperative games, where one guy can do the heavy lifting while the rest of the team can be crappy, Portal 2 made it so that you have to cooperate. Since my computer is aged, there were a few points where my frame rate was in the single digits. But it STILL kicked ass.

Given the flaws in the single-player mode, I can’t give it more than a 9, but after doing the co-op missions, I can’t give it less than a 9.

And now I’m going to download all the Half-Life games and play them again, because I need some ACTION. Hopefully I have the hard drive space.

In other sporting news, the Penguins are doing pretty well. But that won’t last. Sidney Crosby (you know, franchise player #1) has been out for 12 or 13 games with a concussion suffered Jan 1. Probably a few more games. And I hope he doesn’t get Lindrossed (as in, concussion-prone to the point of being forced out of the game – see also Mark Savard). Evgeni Malkin is almost definitely out for the rest of the season with torn MCL and ACL from what looked like a fairly minor hit. He must have caught his skate blade on the ice when someone hit him. He wasn’t really contributing anyway. I think he bought into his own hype and can’t live up to it. We have some minor (relative to Malkin and Crosby) players out, too. I’m predicting they get into the playoffs, but don’t make it out of the 2nd round. They may not make it out of the first round.

The Pirates…well, who gives a flying fuck about them, they’re a minor league team anyway.

Until next year!

1> Decoder Ring Theatre. They’re Canadian, that’s why they spell it “theatre”. Gregg Taylor is the only writer for the majority of their shows. They have two main shows, and then a summer showcase that lets them expand beyond the core shows. There’s only one feed, and they release twice monthly, the 1st and the 15th of every month. Their core shows are The Red Panda, which is basically The Shadow, and Black Jack Justice, which is basically hard boiled detective stories. Both of them are tongue in cheek takes on their subjects. I really enjoy these shows, because they’re almost always excellent.

2> Afterlives. This was a short-run (16 or so episodes) series put out by a group I know nothing about. The first season (say, 10 episodes?) was excellent, and by far the best. The 2nd season felt tacked on, and the 3rd season was three big shows that basically attempted and generally failed to follow through on the premise. Unfortunately, it appears to have disappeared from the net.

3> Edict Zero: FIS. This one was introduced to me by the Sonic Society podcast, where they are playing the first two episodes (out of 6 so far) of the series. The thing about this show is the incredible density of the audio. There is always something going on in the background. They don’t follow the Pendant style of directing that I did, where each character is in their own place in the audio landscape. Instead, they move the characters around, often, if not almost always in the middle of the lines. The background ambiance is rich and dense, and most of the sound effects are pretty good. The acting is generally excellent, but it can be sketchy occasionally. The characters all have distinct characterizations, and are consistent, so it’s not usually a problem.

4> Earth-P. Pendant’s version of the DC comics universe. I listen to this partly out of loyalty to the brand, because I’ve directed one show (Superman, for a season) and have a somewhat major (but not leading) role on another show (Green Arrow), along with bit parts here and there. The most recent crossover (Insolitus) was the first crossover that I thought worked really well. Ex Tempus (the previous crossover) wasn’t bad, but it was a side-show, not really related to the main continuity. There are shows that I think really stand out, some which do adequately, and one that I really could do without in every form.

5> Dixie Stenberg. Again, out of loyalty to my directorship of 6 episodes, I must mention this. It was a good show, but it’s ended now. I had a bit of a tiff with the writer/show-runner regarding the music in the last scene, which was his choice. I’m going to avoid commentary on the quality of the show as a result.

6> Midnight Radio Theater. This is a series I picked up after hearing one show on the Sonic Society. I enjoyed it then, but I’ve since cooled on them. Their stories fall into the standard “slightly supernatural story” mold, which turns me off. The acting and characterization aren’t bad, though.

7> The Sherlock Holmes Society of London Podcast. Being a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, I had to snag this, as my attempt at a Holmes podcast was basically shot down by the Estate of Sir ACDoyle. Not a bad rendition, but their Holmes is nothing compared to the radio version performed by Basil Rathbone.

8> Squadron Leader Jack Steel and the Starblade. Another WWII pilot goes science-fiction show. I like the characterization. Hasn’t been a new episode lately, though. They may be done, as the main story seems to have been completed. Caught this one from the Sonic Society again.

Unrelated to modern audio drama:

9> X Minus One. This is a science fiction show that is basically a series of short stories adapted for radio by NBC Radio Theater in 1955 or so. There are some really thought provoking stories in this one. More than half of them are classic 1950s science fiction, which implies lots of bad things, like weak female characters, stories which are considered hackneyed and cliche and downright bad. There are also some real gems hidden inside them.

Unrelated to audio drama at all:

10> Real Time with Bill Maher. The man has some whacked out views, and it’s pure punditry and thus suspect from the start. But I do glean some insight into the viewpoints of both right and left (well, right and center-left, at least)

11> Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me. A left-leaning but willing to roast anyone news quiz show. Generally funny.

The state of my podcast directory, in a nutshell. Am I missing anything?