1233 Tornado Shelter.

Alex is dangerous in her element. John is hardly a moron, but he’s severely overmatched as far as base intelligence goes. This would be a rare moment of him staring to feel inferior. Unlike, say… Reggie, however, he is aware and accepting of his shortcomings. Which allows him to remain calm in the face of them. As I often say, a man needs to know his limitations. That said, a person shouldn’t feel bound to stay with in them. Reach, but be aware that if you reach too far things might not go as well as you hope. Be prepared for that. Be prepared for people to point it out endlessly. X3

Speaking of failings, I purchased Mario Gold World Tour from the eshop the other day. It’s ten bucks less than a usual Nintendo offering. This is likely because they have removed about that much content from the game so it can be downloaded. If you buy the whole pack it takes the base price right back to what you would expect for a new 3DS game: $35. I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand I appreciate being able to budget in a new game that I can add to over time. On the other hand, all that stuff I just said about content being removed. Of course Nintendo maintains that the content was always meant to be downloadable. I think that’s horse shit.
Putting all that aside, it’s not like the game isn’t a full game minus the DLC. You get access to plenty of characters and your collection of Miis. There are also plenty of courses to keep you busy and items to earn via play. You’ll get your money’s worth if you never buy anything else.
Honestly, Nintendo has been pretty good about DLC so far. The Fire Emblem stuff really enhanced my enjoyment of the game. The Mario Bros 2 stuff was cool, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out when I didn’t get it all. I will probably get all the gold stuff because I really like Mario Golf on a handheld. As I said on my Twitter feed I chose Reggie as my gold avatar because he seemed the type. I then played the worst game of golf I’ve ever played to set my handicap… What’s hilarious though is that the game chooses a selection of Miis to be your avatar’s entourage. All of my Miis are the comic cast except for my personal Mii, so on every hole they all gather around to praise Reggie. Honestly the Reggie Mii acts pretty much like how I imagine he should. He celebrates a bit too long, and gets grief stricken when he fails, but ultimately ignores his mistakes. It’s also cute that the cast is supportive of him in his efforts. They give him hugs when he messes up big and it gives him the strength to try again.

I actually never played a Mario Golf game before Advance Tour. This is because golf is boring as fuck. Why would I ever bother with such a turd of a sport? I only tried it because I had just started working for EB Games when Advance Tour came out and my manager forced me to buy it. He insisted that I would enjoy it and that we weould enjoy playing it together. To his credit he was correct. The RPG elements of the game sold me on it completely. There are some RPG leanings in World Tour, but it appears to come down to equipment selection. This disappoints me honestly, but I understand the change. It’s probably to help even out the online tournaments. In Advance Tour you actually leveled up your golfer into a ball whacking monster, which incidentally is the name of a popular Japanese porn series.
In addition to my manager my friend Zac also played Mario Gold obsessively. (Zac, by the way, was also obsessed with Fire Emblem to the point he would play while driving.) Eventually we all became so skilled at it that we insisted that nearly every hole had to be completed with a trick shot. Backspin was always my favorite. Overshooting the hole to purposefully roll the ball in backwards is pretty satisfying. It’s also how I got my only once ever hole in one.

It’s getting to be that tornado time of year again. We’ve already been under two watches at least. Precipitation of any kind is rare out here. Even more so recently, but we have has a tornado pass within a mile or so of the house. A couple of properties have been destroyed, or at least badly damaged, in recent memory, so we remain vigilant. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there needs to be some mandatory shelter laws on the books in some places. Especially since wind is pretty much the only disaster you get in large sections of the Midwest. It’s just a damn shame that so many people get killed by a weather condition that can be easily thwarted with a hole in the ground. Of course some people die because they are never alerted to the danger. Unfortunately sometimes a person can just sleep through even the loudest sirens. I’m more concerned with people living in apartments with no place to go when things start to blow. That was one of the worst things about my old apartment in Kansas. It was basically a sheet rock box. Riding out a storm in it was less than ideal. In one particularly bad storm I ended up driving across town to a friend’s house.

Honestly I think the shelter idea is kind of a lost cause. Fatalities happen every year and everybody just kind of shrugs. I don’t know what the death to outrage ratio needs to be, but we haven’t reached it apparently.

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I think John is getting wise to where all this innuendo is heading. If he isn’t careful, he might find himself in a sticky situation (pun intended).

According to http://www.erh.noaa.gov/cae/svrwx/tornadobystate.htm if I did the arithmetic right, about 77 people are killed by tornadoes each year in the U.S.

The population of the Midwest is about 65 million. So your chance of dying in a tornado is around one in a million per year.

Your chance of dying in a car accident is vastly higher. About 42,000 deaths per year, out of about 300 million. More people die on the road in a day than die from tornadoes in a year.

Tornadoes are scarier…but… what were you saying about people just shrugging about fatalities?

I certainly don’t shrug about vehicle casualties. Even before legislation I insisted people who ride with me wear seat belts. It could have saved my uncle.

The people I am living with right now have several stories of family friends who, if they had been wearing seat belts during their car accidents, would have been killed because of wearing them. Not saying they should never be worn, but there is proof that there are some accidents that it would be better to not wear them.

Statistics is on the side of people who wear seatbelts. Your head through a windshield at 75 MPH explodes like a melon when it hits the road. Or if you only go halfway through the window, and the car rolls, the sharp remains of your wind shield can cut halfway into your neck and make you bleed out. Like my uncle did. But whatever. Maybe you’ll get lucky.

I agree about the deaths from a tornado being less likely than car related deaths. But, there’s also secondary issues like financial damage and such collateral that are just as scary. I live in Missouri, and just say Joplin and people are still spooked by the damage the tornadoes did. I bet the tornado that leveled Greensburg, KS will be talked about for years to come.

Tornadoes are much more splashy, much more alluring. The kind of thing that is horrific to watch, but also something you’d marvel at as well. The other day, there was a local picture of a firenado, which is a fire plus a tornado that happened next to a parked truck. If it had more intensity and moved towards the truck, god knows what kind of kaboom that could have been.

It’s working, Alex. He’s blushing while smiling. This is the right direction to the destination you seek.

Have like a couple of thousands of NDS games(many none translated or just plain crappy) on my comp that I can play with my NDS simulator where one of the games was Mario golf advanced, and is actually not that bad compared to many other games I have played, it’s a excellent “downtime game” as I like to call it as you can pretty much play and pause wherever you need to, there’s also a tennis version of the same thing as well, just that the golf stick is switched with a racked and is a little more “active”, if you liked the golf I guess you will like that as well if you don’t mind kinda fast paced games :-P

A storms a brewin’ Johnny my lad. But shelters close at hand.

I hope John is allowing for the possibility that just because she is advertising for sex pretty hard doesn’t mean she doesn’t want more than that. I would not want to tick someone like her off. Or this comic is about to get its first evil mastermind!

Tornado, Hell! John had better brace himself for Hurricane Alex!

“Nintendo maintains that the content was always meant to be downloadable.”

And your wallet is uploadable. Sorry, but making folks pay extra for content is a dick move in my book. Program pushers do it with software, and Amazon even had a few MP3 albums where you had to pay extra to get all the content on the physical CD (hidden tracks et cetera), although I haven’t seen that in a while.

I hate what Adobe has done with PhotoShop. Now you have to pay a monthly fee to use the software you bought, and it won’t work if you don’t have an internet connection so it can check. Never mind that you’re five hundred miles from the nearest cell site, and the Sultan of Sandypants wants a print of that portrait you just took of him.

Sounds like you’ll just have to make do with the GIMP. I’m not saying one is better or worse than the other, but I suspect there’s a reason one is considered industry standard.

Yeah after a certain point I’m surprised all the standard buildings in tornado alley aren’t replaced with underground bunkers. Or you can all live in hills like halflings.

My dream is to someday live in a Hobbit hole.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

And you can bet Bilbo Baggins didn’t concern himself with the occasional passing funnel cloud. Just Wizards and Balrogs and Dwarfs, (Oh, my)!

In my part of the country, if you dig a hole, it’s just as likely to fill with water when it rains. Storm shelter or basement.

That hasn’t stopped some people from building a house on the ground, then piling dirt on their house to bury it under a berm. Do a little landscaping on that berm, and it won’t erode so easily.

I really don’t know why having a high water table is such an issue unless the building methods available are just not up to the challenge.

My cousin made an addition to his parents house a few years back and his biggest challenge was getting straight timbres for the roof. Everything else is reinforced concrete. No such thing is stick and frame construction there – its practically illegal to build anything that flimsy there. The foundation + basement was no issue for where he is and the water table is maybe 6 inches bellow ground level at best. Explains all the small canals in the region. The thing is built like the offspring of a concrete canoe and a WWII bunker. If I didn’t know any better, I would bet the dang thing would float if the region somehow ever flooded. They still loose roofs to tornadoes and the occasional all brick Edwardian building will tumble down in such weather but not much else.

I don’t know if he gets what you’re driving at. Try pulling up your shirt and say, “Play with these.” He can’t miss that.

John is the most prolific “player” at the store. I am pretty sure he knew what Alex was driving at from the start. He’s probably a bit surprised about how insistent she is, though.

Surprised we got this far without a “it’s a trap” warning light for John. On the other hand, if that shelter includes really fast wi-fi…

Supposedly, we’ve got earthquake warnings for Oklahoma now. Amarillo, TX has already had some small ones. Ever notice how trailer houses are always where tornados strike, and brick houses are where earthquakes hit?

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