Bridge!

I have recently discovered Bridge -- learning the basics at Origins and the rest from friends at HoRGN -- and am surprised at how enjoyable and addicting I find it. Since my last game against humans, I have been playing Freeverse Software's version of it.

I just now beat it 6 times in a row, and suspect that I can more or less continue to do so at this point. (Even though I still don't quite get how scoring works.) According to mrmorse, it's difficult to program a good Bridge AI, mostly because of the difficulty in codifying the bidding process, which takes a level of subtle communication skill that only us wetware types can easily pull off, for now. Hmm... I'm not sure what to think about this postulation, but it is true that my compu-partner tends to pass after I change suits from her opening bid, which I am led to understand is (as Mr. Morse once told me) WRONG! WRONG!! WRONG!!! The THEM players tend to overbid a lot, too, trying for slams with every other hand it seems.

It has built-in network play which I haven't really tried yet. The one time I logged into it (as zendonut) a stranger asked me to join and I got skeert and run away. Maybe later.

(A pause here to tip my hat to Freeverse, whose card games I have been playing for exactly 10 years now. In fact, I think their implementation of Hearts was the first shareware game I ever paid for, in the summer of 1994, a.k.a. the Summer I Did Nothing. I snailed them a postal money order, and they snailed back a floppy disk. How strange to think, nowadays!)

Three shows

Saw The Lion in Winter last night. It was pretty good. I thought the leads were good (chanaleh was great, actually... and it was a pleasure to see her really act, versus play choral role in a G&S show) but the actual story didn't do much for me. It seemed to wander around between straight-up historical drama and anachronism-laden semi-surreality, without really settling on either. Shrug.

I was probably made a little negative by the crummy venue (a stifling-hot church basement, complete with people watching TV and washing dishes in adjoining rooms) and the strange set-changing. The sets were actually quite nice -- within any one scene. Between every scene, stagehands lugged around these heavy pieces of furniture, most prominently a (cleverly jury-rigged) four-poster bed. The first time they disassembled and removed the bed in under two minutes, they got a round of applause... but when they brought it back in, and then took it out again, and so on, it became a strange sort of running gag for the audience to snicker at. I do not think this was the intended effect. I am left wondering if they could have just done without the bed entirely, and gone with a much more minimal set. Maybe not.

Then I went home, and then was immediately summoned by dissidentdiva to watch Das Experiement at her house. It was kind of fun, but also kind of silly and cynical. Everyone had fun petting her new wee orange kitty-cat though, who is very very cute. Then I went home again.

On the way to and from her house, I walked past the Episcopal church at the corner of Beech and Mass Ave in Cambridge. Both times it contained a suited evengelical ranting in Portuguese (it's a Brazilian-centric church) at a couple dozen parishoners seated in the front pews. Both times, I paused to peer in at the spectacle for a bit.