Zath Chauvert

I recently stumbled across a nautical video game on the bargain shelf at Target. It's called (as you could probably guess from the topic title) Age of Sail II: Privateer's Bounty. It is supposed to be a ship to ship combat game. And while it is set after the GAoP, it still looks petty nifty. The only problem with it is that I can't get it to work! Every time that I try to play, it goes through the whole intro, lets me pick which battle I want to play, and then lets me go through setting up the options. However, as soon as I click the button to start the battle, it switches to a screen that says "loading" and never does anything again. No matter how long I wait, it never loads anything. It doesn't even give any sort of an error message. It just stops responding, and I have to Ctrl+Alt+Del to get out of it. Has anyone else tried this game, and if so, have you had any similar problems with it? If you can get it to work, is it enough fun that I should keep attempting to get it to work? Or should I just consider it a waste of $10 and move on with my life?

Well, it looks like I'm going to be at PARF this Saturday, the 23rd. If the weather is nice enough to not have to worry about getting soaked, then I'll be dressing up. Look for the shortish girl with dark hair and a green/blue/yellow waistcoat and potentially a green frockcoat. I don't have a pub pin yet, but I'll try to keep an eye out for other people wearing them. It would be nice to meet some more people from the pub.

It has been about a decade since I last built anything using foam core, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the stuff not bend well enough to be able to shape the hull bits? Maybe the ships are built out of the softer foam sheets that tend to turn up in the kids' sections of a lot of craft supply stores. Either way, the end results look cool.

That picture looks like it comes from the big rescue at the end. While we're nominating actors from Plunkett & Macleane to play pirates, why don't we throw in Johnny Lee Miller, just for fun? And we could add Michael Gambon as the jolly ex-pirate who retired with a decent stash of loot before the law could catch up with him. I'd also like to second the people who suggested Tim Roth and Paul Bettany.

Billy Connoly has already been a pirate. Just check out the beginning of Muppet Treasure Island. :)

The sheer imagery conjured by that phrase is the stuff that nightmares are made from. Splendid, frightening, groovy nightmares. I imagine a shot of a cardboard tallship being pulled through the water by a highly visible string.

Who on earth thought that "the Sea Monkey" would be a good name for a pirate ship, especially a cursed pirate ship? It doesn't seem to fit the theme, and the little "legend" that goes with it is plain silly. I still like the ship, but only because it makes me laugh.

We be tryin' t' do the same thing in the Philadelphia/South NJ area, but so far not many have stepped up to the plate. Most folks seem t' be goin down to Baltimore. Hopefully we'll get a semi-decent crowd goin for opening night though. I wish I could take part in a Philly piratical gathering for the POTC2 opening night, because it would be great to meet some people from the pub. Unfortunately, my time is already spoken for on the 7th. I'll just have to be content with going alone to a semi-local midnight showing Thursday night/Friday morning.

I finally got my hands on some of these. It took forever for them to show up in my area. I picked up one of the "Special edition" boxes. At first I was a little disappointed because the set had one ship fewer than it was supposed to, but it had Gog-Clocthoth, so I'm not going to complain too badly. Anyway, on closer inspection, the set seems even more unusual in that, aside from two generic crew cards and the special edition bonus ship, every single card was either uncommon or rare. I know that one box isn't anywhere near being a good statistical sampling, but it still makes me wonder. Did I just get especially lucky? Or are "rare" and "uncommon" not really very special?

It's kind of annoying that the picture they give for the hat doesn't show what the crown looks like. However, assuming that they used the same hat, then you can see what the crown looks like in the picture that they give for their "French highwayman coat."

I'm somewhat tempted to do the same, but have managed to resist so far. However, if they made a version of that mouse that came with a scroll wheel, then I would be on it in an instant.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you just said...

Has anyone read Fell Cargo, by Dan Abnett yet? It's part of the Warhammer series and is supposedly about people fighting a bunch of zombie pirates. I'm tempted to pick it up, but I've never read any of the other novels in the series, so I don't want to pay good money for something that that's not going to make any sense to someone who isn't already familiar with the Warhammer universe. Can anyone give a recommendation either for or against it?

Well, most of the popular ones have already been listed. However, unless I missed it, I don't think that anyone has mentioned one of my favorites. "A man born to hang needs never fear drowning." Also, John Masefield's nautical poetry if full all sorts of good quotes in varying degrees of piraticalness.

That's the problem with trying to find a good book used. If it's really that good, then almost no one wants to get rid of it. Before I quit my job at the local bookstore last month, I made sure to use my employee discount one last time to get the boxed set of the whole Aubrey/Maturin series so I can get around to finishing reading them all at my leisure. Previously, I had been getting them from the library and having to wait a week or two between books until the next one that I wanted was returned by someone else. I had gotten up to around book 8 or 10 (I'd have to go back and count to be sure) before I decided to set them aside for a little while and just never got back to them. Now I just need the time to read more.