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alexxkayI haven't written in a while, but life has been, on the whole, good. The hole in my mouth is, after two weeks, finally healing to the point where I don't need painkillers just to stay sane, at least during the day.
On Friday last, I flew out to Chicago to visit![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rickthefightguy. I love flying. Airports not so much, but the actual experience of getting launched into the sky has yet to get old. And I still always get a window seat, to look down upon the landscape from an unusual perspective.
The visit with Rick was good. It would have been awesome, if I hadn't been laid up with chronic debilitating mouth pain. But, as I said in one of my planning emails, that was no reason *not* to visit, so I did.
While there, I also got to hang out some withtamarinne and jamey1138, which was cool. Tamarinne recently posted some of the conversation that swirled around.
Rick showed me the first few episodes of The West Wing, which I had not previously seen any of. It is indeed good television, and a powerfully attractive core fantasy ("the government is run by people who are fundamentally Good and Competent"). Don't know if I'll get around to watching the rest of it or not, though. As I often remark when people ask why I haven't read/watched/played some important cultural milestone: "The world is large, and full of stuff; I don't have time for all of it."
My visit was the excuse for a fair chunk of gaming. It's been a while since I did that, and I had fun.
I was introduced to a card game called Gloom, which was clearly inspired by Edward Gorey (and had artwork which was a pretty good pastiche of his). Each player controls a family of five eccentrics (Circus Freaks, Mad Scientists, Hillbillies, Decadent Aristocrats). Most card play involves miserable life events followed by untimely deaths. Once any one family is completely dead, the family with the most woeful set of untimely deaths 'wins'. I ended up winning, but only partially due to native skill; this is one of those games where the first few people who try to win get stopped by others. Advanced players of such a game can strategize the timing and parity of their win attempts, but with novice players, it's mostly luck.
There was a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill. The good guys turned out to be particularly well positioned to beat the Haunt that turned up, and won handily. (Sadly, my own character, while first to get *to* the exit, didn't actually get *through* it, due to an Event card. He ended up stuck behind the Catacombs, next to a particularly nasty Monster, and can be considered to have not survived.
There was a game of Cosmic Encounter, but I was pretty wiped, and didn't stay up for it.
The next day, I was introduced to Puerto Rico. Interesting game, very European resource allocation sort of thing. I didn't actually win, but had a very respectable showing for a first game.
We then pulled out a game that someone had gotten as a present, and hadn't yet played, called Dread Pirate. The game itself turned out to be pretty poor in a game-mechanical sense, with very little in the way of meaningful strategy. On the other hand, the production values were *incredibly* high, and there was much talk about writing a new game to utilize them, or just stealing parts when appropriate. The game box is a nice wooden chest. The ship pieces are 3D metal sculptures. There are velvet "loot bags" in different colors for the various players. The treasure consists of 'jewels' which are glass beads of various colors, and 'doubloons' which are actual solid, heavy metal coins, with golden sheen, and cast in a nifty, highly-textured period pattern. The game money alone is probably worth owning for anyone who likes piratey games.
On Saturday afternoon, we went out to Hot Doug's Sausage Emporium. This is apparently run by a former high-end French Chef who decided that what he *really* wanted out of life was to run a hot dog joint. So he did. And they are sufficiently good (and famous) hot dogs that the place regularly has a line out the door, and often down the block. There's a quote on the wall: "There are no finer words in the english language than 'encasesd meats'. -- Secret Robbie" On Fridays and Saturdays, they cook the french fries in duck fat, because, yum. I stuck with the simple end of the menu: one classic dog, one polish sausage, both with 'everything', and an order of duck fat fries. This turned out to be two meals worth of food, and was most excellent all around. (Another really excellent feature of this place: the menu explicitly defines what condiments you will get when you say 'with everything', and what others are available. I wish more places would do this.)
Home again on Monday morning. Cleverly, I scheduled a week of vacation after the Chicago visit. How often do you hear the phrase "I need a vacation to recover from that vacation"? Well, this time I scheduled one. Admittedly, I had originally planned to get a lot of room cleaning done during this week. As it was, I've mostly spent the week vegging out and trying to heal, so it bears more resemblance to sick leave than vacation, per se. Sigh.
kestrell and I have started a project of watching all the Master episodes of Doctor Who, so I'm seeing a lot of Jon Pertwee episodes for the first time. Man, the state of the art has come a long way since then. And I'm not even talking about the special effects, but about general television storytelling technique. When they first announced the revived Doctor Who, and said that it would be hour-long, mostly self-contained episodes, I worried that the stories would be much less complex than the old style Who, with half-hour serials that typically went 4-6 episodes. Not so much, as it turns out. These old episodes have a lot of dead air, repetition, and padding, by modern standards. Mind you, I still do enjoy watching them with Kes, but I probably will never *re*-watch them after this.
---
While writing the above, I've been sitting in a waiting room at Boston Medical, waiting forkestrell to finish an appointment. One of the receptionists is being very distracting on the phone. She's been doing some detective work on the family cell phone bill, and is convinced that her husband is having an affair, because he's spending tons of time on the phone with a female coworker after hours. Right now, she's telling him that she wishes she'd cheated on him when she'd had the chance. I mention this mainly because I can't concentrate on anything else with this soap opera going on in the room, so I might as well document it :-/
OK, Kes is out (and fine), so we can go home. She told me they stuck her in a waiting room with a TV playing Divorce Court. I then had to tell her that I had been getting the live version.
---
Last night, Kes and I went out to see "A Winter's Tale" at MIT, as put on by a touring group of students from Cambridge (England). While getting settled, we ran intofabrisse, eanja(?), cheshyre, and xiphias, as well as some other folks whose LJ names I don't know. There was good shmoozing and fan-geeking.
The show itself was quite good. A small but talented cast, they used lots of doubling, but were up to the task. It was funnier than most productions I've seen. They cast Bohemia as Wonderland, where Perdita gets adopted by the Mad Hatter, and his son, the March Hare, and everyone goes barefoot. It had a very silly dance, halfway between English Country and Square, with one figure devoted to miming one half of the couple being a sheep and the other half shearing them. Even the scene where they report Antigonus' death by bear was pretty funny. (The infamous "Exit, pursued by a bear" was, sadly, just stupid-silly.)
At one point in the second half, the thief-clown Autolycus plopped down a hat and did some singing and strumming on his banjo. He gradually made it clear that he would not allow the play to continue until the audience had coughed up some actual, real money. "The record so far is twenty minutes..." Kes later remarked that getting extorted by a clown added a certain authenticity to the experience -- possibly too *much* authenticity, but she did pay up :)
On Friday last, I flew out to Chicago to visit
rickthefightguy. I love flying. Airports not so much, but the actual experience of getting launched into the sky has yet to get old. And I still always get a window seat, to look down upon the landscape from an unusual perspective.The visit with Rick was good. It would have been awesome, if I hadn't been laid up with chronic debilitating mouth pain. But, as I said in one of my planning emails, that was no reason *not* to visit, so I did.
While there, I also got to hang out some with
tamarinne and jamey1138, which was cool. Tamarinne recently posted some of the conversation that swirled around.Rick showed me the first few episodes of The West Wing, which I had not previously seen any of. It is indeed good television, and a powerfully attractive core fantasy ("the government is run by people who are fundamentally Good and Competent"). Don't know if I'll get around to watching the rest of it or not, though. As I often remark when people ask why I haven't read/watched/played some important cultural milestone: "The world is large, and full of stuff; I don't have time for all of it."
My visit was the excuse for a fair chunk of gaming. It's been a while since I did that, and I had fun.
I was introduced to a card game called Gloom, which was clearly inspired by Edward Gorey (and had artwork which was a pretty good pastiche of his). Each player controls a family of five eccentrics (Circus Freaks, Mad Scientists, Hillbillies, Decadent Aristocrats). Most card play involves miserable life events followed by untimely deaths. Once any one family is completely dead, the family with the most woeful set of untimely deaths 'wins'. I ended up winning, but only partially due to native skill; this is one of those games where the first few people who try to win get stopped by others. Advanced players of such a game can strategize the timing and parity of their win attempts, but with novice players, it's mostly luck.
There was a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill. The good guys turned out to be particularly well positioned to beat the Haunt that turned up, and won handily. (Sadly, my own character, while first to get *to* the exit, didn't actually get *through* it, due to an Event card. He ended up stuck behind the Catacombs, next to a particularly nasty Monster, and can be considered to have not survived.
There was a game of Cosmic Encounter, but I was pretty wiped, and didn't stay up for it.
The next day, I was introduced to Puerto Rico. Interesting game, very European resource allocation sort of thing. I didn't actually win, but had a very respectable showing for a first game.
We then pulled out a game that someone had gotten as a present, and hadn't yet played, called Dread Pirate. The game itself turned out to be pretty poor in a game-mechanical sense, with very little in the way of meaningful strategy. On the other hand, the production values were *incredibly* high, and there was much talk about writing a new game to utilize them, or just stealing parts when appropriate. The game box is a nice wooden chest. The ship pieces are 3D metal sculptures. There are velvet "loot bags" in different colors for the various players. The treasure consists of 'jewels' which are glass beads of various colors, and 'doubloons' which are actual solid, heavy metal coins, with golden sheen, and cast in a nifty, highly-textured period pattern. The game money alone is probably worth owning for anyone who likes piratey games.
On Saturday afternoon, we went out to Hot Doug's Sausage Emporium. This is apparently run by a former high-end French Chef who decided that what he *really* wanted out of life was to run a hot dog joint. So he did. And they are sufficiently good (and famous) hot dogs that the place regularly has a line out the door, and often down the block. There's a quote on the wall: "There are no finer words in the english language than 'encasesd meats'. -- Secret Robbie" On Fridays and Saturdays, they cook the french fries in duck fat, because, yum. I stuck with the simple end of the menu: one classic dog, one polish sausage, both with 'everything', and an order of duck fat fries. This turned out to be two meals worth of food, and was most excellent all around. (Another really excellent feature of this place: the menu explicitly defines what condiments you will get when you say 'with everything', and what others are available. I wish more places would do this.)
Home again on Monday morning. Cleverly, I scheduled a week of vacation after the Chicago visit. How often do you hear the phrase "I need a vacation to recover from that vacation"? Well, this time I scheduled one. Admittedly, I had originally planned to get a lot of room cleaning done during this week. As it was, I've mostly spent the week vegging out and trying to heal, so it bears more resemblance to sick leave than vacation, per se. Sigh.
kestrell and I have started a project of watching all the Master episodes of Doctor Who, so I'm seeing a lot of Jon Pertwee episodes for the first time. Man, the state of the art has come a long way since then. And I'm not even talking about the special effects, but about general television storytelling technique. When they first announced the revived Doctor Who, and said that it would be hour-long, mostly self-contained episodes, I worried that the stories would be much less complex than the old style Who, with half-hour serials that typically went 4-6 episodes. Not so much, as it turns out. These old episodes have a lot of dead air, repetition, and padding, by modern standards. Mind you, I still do enjoy watching them with Kes, but I probably will never *re*-watch them after this.---
While writing the above, I've been sitting in a waiting room at Boston Medical, waiting for
kestrell to finish an appointment. One of the receptionists is being very distracting on the phone. She's been doing some detective work on the family cell phone bill, and is convinced that her husband is having an affair, because he's spending tons of time on the phone with a female coworker after hours. Right now, she's telling him that she wishes she'd cheated on him when she'd had the chance. I mention this mainly because I can't concentrate on anything else with this soap opera going on in the room, so I might as well document it :-/OK, Kes is out (and fine), so we can go home. She told me they stuck her in a waiting room with a TV playing Divorce Court. I then had to tell her that I had been getting the live version.
---
Last night, Kes and I went out to see "A Winter's Tale" at MIT, as put on by a touring group of students from Cambridge (England). While getting settled, we ran into
fabrisse, eanja(?), cheshyre, and xiphias, as well as some other folks whose LJ names I don't know. There was good shmoozing and fan-geeking.The show itself was quite good. A small but talented cast, they used lots of doubling, but were up to the task. It was funnier than most productions I've seen. They cast Bohemia as Wonderland, where Perdita gets adopted by the Mad Hatter, and his son, the March Hare, and everyone goes barefoot. It had a very silly dance, halfway between English Country and Square, with one figure devoted to miming one half of the couple being a sheep and the other half shearing them. Even the scene where they report Antigonus' death by bear was pretty funny. (The infamous "Exit, pursued by a bear" was, sadly, just stupid-silly.)
At one point in the second half, the thief-clown Autolycus plopped down a hat and did some singing and strumming on his banjo. He gradually made it clear that he would not allow the play to continue until the audience had coughed up some actual, real money. "The record so far is twenty minutes..." Kes later remarked that getting extorted by a clown added a certain authenticity to the experience -- possibly too *much* authenticity, but she did pay up :)