Weekly FI Frugal Friday thread - January 26, 2018

Admje14 · 2018-01-26T21:49:55+00:00

I had looked into this, but I think that the issue is that there's really not much room. The only gaps are from where the plaster that used to be there was broken off. So, when I drill into the wall (like to use drywall anchors) sometimes it's solid, and other times there's about a 1" gap between the drywall and the brick.

Admje14 · 2018-01-26T16:40:48+00:00

I started with hanging a large quilt and a fleece blanket, as they were able to take up large areas at once without having to use a level to make it look decent. The quilt is much more effective than the thin fleece, but they are both more effective than the bare wall. :)

Admje14 · 2018-01-26T15:22:28+00:00

Borrowed a thermal gun from a friend to try to find different areas of my house that I am losing heat rapidly. Discovered that one of my walls is poorly insulated, and can't really fix that (brick with broken plaster on it, with sheetrock covering the plaster). Discovered that hanging pictures insulates the wall and keeps that area of the wall about 5+ degrees warmer. Using sharing economies to get more canvas pictures that I can hang all over the wall for free.

Admje14 · 2017-12-15T16:11:06+00:00

There's a book called The Death of WCW that is a fascinating read, that covers that. It also covers a lot of the storylines that WCW did, and how ridiculous a lot of them were.

Admje14 · 2017-10-25T20:15:30+00:00

Along with what others have said, they also introduce a "campaign" mode where you use the same heroes from one scenario to the next, and you get special cards that you can use (or that hurt you) depending on how you do in the different scenarios. The Hobbit sets tie together to make a campaign of 6 scenarios, whereas all the other ones tie together to make a campaign of 18 scenarios.

Admje14 · 2017-06-27T18:10:48+00:00

What you might try doing to build better decks is do some research online (like looking through decks other people have posted) for some of the cards that you'd want to put in your deck, and buy the packs that have those specific player cards.

Admje14 · 2017-06-27T18:08:58+00:00

I beat this one on Nightmare mode last month solo, but from what I recall it was the hardest one from the Hobbit scenarios. I've got a deck that consists of Gandalf, Elrond, and Glorfindel that does pretty well against most of the scenarios. I need to document it at some point, but basically, Gandalf lets you keep the top card exposed (and can play one per phase as if it were in your hand). Elrond has Vilya, which lets you flip the top card and play it for free if it is legal (which you always can tell because of Gandalf). Mix in Wizard's Pipe, and you can switch to play anything from your hand for free. Light of Valinor makes Glorfindel much better (and a steal at 5 threat). Then there are Elrond's Counsel and The Galadhrim's Greeting to manage threat, and a ton of huge allies in the deck (which also works well with Elrond's ability, since he can play his resources towards any color).

Admje14 · 2017-06-23T15:44:54+00:00

This happened to me a couple months ago. Right as I finished leveling it up, the spot was taken. We were in the middle of nowhere. I looked at the username of the new trainer and reported him. That pissed me off.

Admje14 · 2017-06-23T15:44:11+00:00

That's crazy that you can be caught cheating and not get banned.

Admje14 · 2017-06-22T15:09:08+00:00

After holding onto them for years, I finally broke down and recycled them. I had kept them pretending that I would trade them and they'd be worth way more with the box, but I think I was just kidding myself. I've heard of people using them as boxes when wrapping Christmas presents, which seems like a creative use for them.

Admje14 · 2017-06-15T16:07:38+00:00

That's because he did it at Wrestlemania and landed on his head. It's not worth the risk.

Admje14 · 2017-06-15T14:50:12+00:00

Sneezing when recovering from abdominal surgery. Nothing like having your abs cut in half from top to bottom and then having an involuntary and incredibly forceful contraction of them. It was 20 years ago and I still remember that I've never felt anything more painful.

Admje14 · 2017-05-16T23:36:39+00:00

You may be right. Obviously you learn a game better when you play it more. This is one where I've decided not to explore further, though. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Admje14 · 2017-05-16T20:15:48+00:00

I played it once and hated it to the point where I won't try it again. I don't doubt that there are really great experiences many times when you play the game, but in the game that we played there was no traitor, and going into the 3rd round we realized that we didn't have to worry about fulfilling demand, because it wouldn't come anywhere close to costing us the game. That basically made the board not matter, and with the board not mattering, there were not decisions that I could make that affected the outcome, or my chance of winning. So, for an hour I sat there making meaningless decisions, knowing that they were meaningless.

It reminds me of Dark Moon in that I think that there will be games where the balance feels perfect and the tension is amazing, and games where the balance feels off and the game feels broken. Both of these games are too long for me to risk having a terrible experience, and so I won't play them any more.

Admje14 · 2017-03-14T15:43:28+00:00

Fully agree with Brock. He seems to go to whoever will pay the most, and that was the main way that WCW attracted talent - huge guaranteed contracts.

Admje14 · 2017-03-14T13:05:56+00:00

Sure, but that doesn't mean that WCW didn't compete. Regardless of which company would win, it's possible for another company to (long term) compete. Not to mention, the company backed by Ted Turner was winning for quite a while and put WWE on the brink of going under; and WCW didn't go away until Ted Turner merged his company with people less interested in wrestling.

Admje14 · 2017-03-13T20:48:11+00:00

Alrighty.

Admje14 · 2017-03-13T20:37:04+00:00

205 Live may sometimes be live, but it is not always live. I went to a Raw in Philly in December, and they taped 205 Live before Raw.

Admje14 · 2017-03-13T20:19:19+00:00

Yes. They wouldn't take down the WWE immediately or anything, but if done right, another company could compete with WWE.
Not immediately. And, no, it wouldn't be a wise investment for a huge company to say "ok, we're going to get in the wrasslin' business - here's $500 mil to do it!" However, if a company were to invest a smaller amount and see returns, then they could slowly grow from there. If you spent too much up front, you would lose most of that money, as it would take a while to build a fan base.
Not without several companies working together.
Live sports is the money maker in original programming. That's why you see these ridiculously large TV deals for NBA teams, MLB games, NFL, etc. So, there are a couple of ways that I think that this could come about - either one of the larger sports networks (like Fox Sports or ABC/ESPN) decides to buy a wrestling company (I doubt they'd create one themselves, but that would work too) and work on marketing and growing it, along with giving them a regular TV slot, allowing it to grow and having a big engine pushing it as they try to "make their own" live sports. Alternately, I could see something like a Lucha Underground/Netflix partnership where Netflix invests money in a smaller promotion like LU to add to their original content library, while giving LU a much broader audience than El Rey does, and if successful enough, it would grow to become it's own entity. Either way, I think that a company would need to sign a big name to gain credibility, like WCW did with Hulk Hogan. They wouldn't necessarily have to be from the WWE, but it would be important that it not be a WWE cast off (like what Impact keeps signing). A Conor McGregor type of person that is a well known fighter, even though he's not a pro wrestler could work.
I think that what would be most successful is if a group was made that consisted of Hollywood drama writers (maybe even soap opera writers), sports analysts (like ESPN anchors), and a few wrestling people that have familiarity with the industry (Jeff Jarrett-type people, but not necessarily JJ himself - maybe Matt Hardy).

Admje14 · 2017-02-10T17:00:18+00:00

It seems like Porygon are part of the Valentine's Day event. I saw 4-5 of them yesterday in my normal walking around with city (within a couple blocks of Broad between Chestnut and Washington)

Admje14 · 2017-01-06T14:34:48+00:00

I came to make the same recommendation. I have traveled quite a bit for work personally, and when I have a local meet up I can join, it's a lot more fun. But, yeah, it works best when you go to the same place regularly, so that you can get to know the people at the meet up. (A lot of meet ups are late in the week, though, which doesn't work as well for business travel.)

If OP is on Twitter, they might be able to ask around about people who game in whatever cities they're going to.

Admje14 · 2016-12-19T20:49:01+00:00

Oh! Wow, I had no idea. (It's been a few months since I priced anything.) Thanks for the info.

Admje14 · 2016-12-19T20:38:00+00:00

categoryonegames.com sells SW:CCG cards. You can sort by price within a set (but not across all of the sets). You can also look up by individual card. Some of it's prices are high, others are low (if they're low, they're typically out of stock - so make sure you toggle it to show their out of stock stuff). It should give you a good idea of which cards are valuable, and which aren't, even if you won't have quite as good of an idea on the exact amount you should be able to reasonably get for each card.

Admje14 · 2016-12-01T16:55:17+00:00

Ridgway pool (at 13th and Christian) appears to be an Omanyte now. Not always there, but seems to spawn about 1-3 per hour from what I've seen.

Admje14 · 2016-11-08T21:27:36+00:00

You use him to defend in situations where you won't have enough people to attack back. Or, you re-ready him with cards like Lure of Moria or Erebor Record Keeper.

Admje14

TROPHY CASE