More games

Dragged by dougo and cthulhia to novalis & co.'s housewarming on Friday. Fun was had, la, la, cookies, games, and beer. Played two rounds of Telephone Pictionary, except this crowd (mostly strangers to me, I think largely MIT students) called it something different ("the paper game", maybe). I drew the Wizard of Oz, the Torah, an alcoholic female surgeon having a crisis of conscience, Genesis 1, Isaac Asimov, and an insult to birds. Both cthulhia and I were consistently complimented on how our drawings stood out from the violent stick figures. As usual, this was the closest thing I've done to cartooning since... the last time I played this.

My taking-things-too-seriously-as-usual notes on the game:
• There are basically two styles of play, and this is wholly the choice of the person writing the starting sentence.
•• It can be a well-known quotation, idiom, or adage. This is more likely to succeed in carrying through to the end, unchanged. (Some people get sad when this -- that is, nothing -- happens to their sentence, but I think it's an impressive show of group communication when it occurs.)
•• It can be anything else, in which case wide mutation is almost guaranteed.
• For best results, the starting sentence should have at least a chance of making it through to the end.
•• Making your starting sentence a line of ungrammatical pop-song lyrics that isn't yet baked into pop culture is dumb.
•• Making your starting sentence a joke about one of the players when not all the players know each other is also dumb. (That said, my drawing of the surgeon, which I am pretty proud of, came from one of these, so: whatever.)
• Some (most?) players tasked with drawing a sentence will try making a sort of pseudo-rebus from it, rather than drawing a comic or something else evocative. This is doomed to failure. I mean, do what you will, but you may as well draw a picture of a pretty pony or a birthday cake or something else you like, and it will be as successful in conveying the meaning as some hieroglyphs that you just made up.

Played Zendo, and also played Zendo the night before with some other people. Zendo is a great game. I love Zendo.

Saturday went to Freak House to play Karaoke Revolution 3. It has male/female duets now; very nice. Also features a short-song mode that helps deflect my complaint with the first KR game: when playing at a party, it often took way too long for your turn to come around again. So that's good. I'm still not very good at the game. But it was fun singing "What a Feeling" with jadelennox while dressed as a pirate and a Canadian robot.

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Finally found a copy of Katamari Damacy, at Best Buy for $20. You should be like me and only like weird good games that are anathema to generic teenage boys; they're always half-price or better. Short review: I like it. Longer review forthcoming, as part of GS-01.

Mini review of camera stores in Harvard Square

...from the point of view of a novice video hobbyist looking for his first tripod.

Ferranti-Dege
A general camera-stuff store, but they have a clear emphasis on printmaking. The whole place smells strongly of photo chemicals, and so reminds me of the Maine Campus offices in the basement of Lord Hall at UMaine. Tight quarters, they was, so the photogs' pungent odors always won the day.

Seemed overstaffed (esp. compared to Hunt's). The guy I asked about tripods said that while the ones they sold would work OK with camcorders I'd probably be happier with a video-specific one, and advised me to go check out Hunt's. Bonus points for this place unless he was trying to eject me for being ugly or something.

Hunt's Photo and Video
This store has more of an emphasis on equipment sales, though they have a little darkroom in the back. They also had a self-service kiosk up front where you could insert digital media (in a variety of formats) and money, and have some prints spat back at you. I'll have to remember that.

Chronically understaffed. I got attention only when I started huffing out the door after waiting for help for half an hour only to be skipped over. (Note: it was Sunday. Maybe there are more people there on other days.)

Epilogue
I ended up getting a cheap tripod from Hunt's. It's not really video-specific, but it's suitable for beginning hobbyists such as I. Which is to say, it's cheap. Nice that it works with both my cameras, though.

More mappiness

Interesting and refreshingly non-snarky splitting of the U.S. into ten political regions.