Pic: Some creepy dude on the boardwalk of Seaside Heights NJ.
This new house has a ghost and it hates FDR. Those of you who have visitied my last two residences might've seen the Wall of Presidents I have. I picked up a few small white house portraits when I took the family to DC years ago and we crashed at Creepy Uncle Ben's house (Hosp). Teddy, JFK, Washington, Jefferson and FDR. But for some reason, at the new place, the FDR frame keeps falling off the wall. I put new sticky things on the frame, changed the spot on the wall, but it just kept falling until the frame broke. I'm pretty sure this place wasn't even here in the 1930s. Speaking of ghost, how come every ghost is super old. Like Civil War and before. How come no ghosts are from last Tuesday? I can buy that story at least. Ghost Bob died in car wreck and doesn't know he's toast. So Ghost Bob is walking around the Home Depot where he worked scaring customers. Until the ghost hunters tell him, "Yo Ghost Bob, you got smoked by a semi truck on I-80, you're dead dude." Then Ghost Bob can be like, "Oh, my bad, off into the light then."
Very silly for GCBC, but I want to stay light. The only other rant I had was about Elizabeth Smart's interview where she says pornography made her abductor rape her more. Now this dude was certified bat-shit crazy. Even had a sidekick wife helping him in his madness. As a society we can't just blame 'crazy' anymore, there always has to be a specific villain. Sometimes nutjobs do terrible things. And when they can get their hands on guns, they can do terrible things on a massive scale. 'Crazy' is a fact of life. There's always been crazy and there always will be. It's not the guns or the porn, they are just things. You can't stop crazy but you can mitigate it by the amount of resources a society want to put in treating mental health. And right now America doesn't want to pay for shit. Nothing. Road, bridges, services. Fuck all. Nothing that we actually need. Just bombs and walls.
Back to the porn, Smart is Mormon, like her family was. Mormons are all Republican, statistically. They are taking up the Moral Majority wing of that party. At the convention their platform was very anti-porn. Which is fine. It's a perfectly acceptable position to have. You don't care for it, you don't want it anywhere near your family. Even I'll concede it's unsettling that any kid can click two wrong buttons and they'll be subjected to hardcore stuff. You want some media regulations, fine, but this Culture War stuff was lost a long time ago. This section of the Republican party that insists on telling people how to live their lives based on religion has been dying a slow death and needs to be put out of it's misery. If Trump does that, then we will owe him some gratitude.
Now I've been neglecting my GCBC duties on the road. I've been wasting what free chances I get doing bad episodes on The Discard Pile. To be even more lazy, I outsourced the next two choices to whoever had an opinion. No one person could put together a solid good/bad combo so I'll cherry pick from the options given to me. They're both from A Time to Stand.
Why: The good card comes from Charlie Plaine. This was his 'good card I didn't design'. I'm going to throw a hypocrite flag from the door on him. When designing Insurrection we were debating on the cost and I suggested making it printed zero and adding 'this dilemma is cost +1'. The precedent set by He Wasn't Nice. Charlie disliked the idea and said we need to keep text like that to a minimum. But since Donatra was all the rage back then, we had no choice and the Zero +1 stuck. Becalmed cost is a 'variable' so I don't need to be Sherlock to cracked the code on who designed it. Unlike 'variable skills' (whatever the fuck that means), hopefully, the cost-related range text never gets messy. Now I was on the design team for this set for a hot minute and the goal was to push high-range missions. Noble goal, but these kind of small pushes on dilemmas (think of all the Decipher-era anti-dual HQ dilemmas that do nothing) don't really accomplish that. The cost is just going to be a random side effect to whatever decks are currently popular. Nobody is considering using that 4-range space mission just for Becalmed. Now I've gone off on another Design tangent, I apologize. Just talk about playing the fucking card, right? OK, the fake zero cost let's me avoid a kill by Overburdened, I like that. I can also download it with the premier 'bad card' in the game, Uninvited. The scumbag in me likes that too. I didn't like my Jem'Hadar being stopped by this dilemma in Atlanta Masters, that seems like collateral damage, but not much you can do about that. Too many attribute monster deck running around out there and this dilemma does a good job at slowing them down.
Why: Our Bad Card comes from Brian Sykes. I will ignore the "Matt Kirk Fancy Ten Dollar Word" used, that's a different beef. Easy to ignore since this card is a steaming pile of monkey crap. I remember pooping on it when it came out. I recall Design Intern (whatever the fuck that means) Nathan Miracle defending it. I'll give him credit for trying, but this will be his rookie mistake. We all have our design regrets. So where do I begin with this dumpster fire.... 3 cost to get one more draw/spend. Even my monkey Jersey math knows that a bad deal. It's not even 'equal or greater than the span'. Fuck all, you got to at least have that. So what's the best case scenario here? My opponent is playing a cheesy 2-span space mission. I got three dilemmas under. I got two of these bad boys out which I paid six counters for (maybe 5 if I had Party Atmosphere out). My opponent attempts with nine, so now I'm getting 8 instead of 6. Ok, that 'might' buy me another turn. But I sacrificed a turn in counters to do so. I didn't come out ahead. They only things they could've done to put lipstick on this pig is if they gave it the Temporal keyword. Then I could use Delivery Boy and drop it from free. How they missed that, I'll have to ask next time I see the intern. That's why real companies only let interns make coffee and fetch lunch.
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