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Looking up information about Axis & Allies, I hit boardgamegeek.com under my own power for the first time, and have been browsing it. Interesting site; I like poking through the users' by-topic lists of games. There is a major trend in the comments of "I liked this a lot 20 years ago, but I can't play it any more now because of da wife & kid", to which I say thank the wife and kid because these games suck and you are insane. Cough.

That said, I now for the first time have a couple of old or foreign games I want to try because they look cool... Avalon Hill's old "Gunslinger", and some nutty German thing which the Americans call "The Lifeboat Game" (as per "The Bean Game"), which looks really mean & nasty & fun. Among its apparent game mechanics is voting to push other players overboard. So it's a board game version of "Werewolf"? I dunno.

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In related news, I spoke to my dad over the phone yesterday, and he dropped a hint at me that he'd like a new game to help him through his convalescence. Rather, that he'd like to play some new games with me this Xmas; he doesn't have any game partners normally, except Ricky for Cribbage (and only Cribbage). (I have tried to teach Ricky other games, but his burnt neural pathways make it slow going, and he gets frustrated and becomes random before we get far.) I note the distinction to acknowledge my temptation to get a new game or two "for dad" and just keep them myself, bringing them up when I visit. Heh heh. OK, OK... don't look at me that that...

Battle Cry (another new discovery through BGG) looks good, since he loves Civil War stuff, and reviews are positive (one person labeled it as "the eurogame that thinks it's a wargame" which actually sounds pretty promising).

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WTF. At the Diesel and sitting next to the central power outlet, and people keep sneaking up to grope my ankles by accident whilst plugging in their laptops n cellphones n gameboys n shit. Meanwhile there are two guys up front who I can't see, but I hear them laughing like diseased hyenas and shouting what sounds like "Hoverstrike!" I bet they love Axis & Allies. No, I actually, bet they find it too amateurish.

"Language." "Nng, sorry..."

So babies & toddlers are starting to inevitably spread through my social group, and are being brought to gaming events, which serve as the mead-halls for my social life. This much is fine. I like kids OK, and I like smart kids a lot, so I honestly look forward to this crop getting old enough to think and talk, so I can start feeling jealous for their awesome childhoods within a whole crowd of delightfully immature "aunts" & "uncles". (Versus that of poor baby jmac, raised by friendless oldsters and sent to bed at 6pm every night. Alas!)

But there is one thing I don't like so much: it's accepted that, when the wee ones are around, all the grown-ups must refrain from using cuss-words. This actually makes me a little annoyed. Actually: rather annoyed, and a little angry, that I must constrain my own behavior for reasons which, when I think them through, seem more harmful than beneficial to the kids in question.

I mean: beyond being a futile exercise (you do plan on sending them to school one day, yes?), it smacks of teaching one's children a known falsehood, setting them up for later disillusionment and confusion. I guess I could see it if we as a group truly abused the words to a nautical degree, but I would argue that we use them as proper language flavoring: salt rather than syrup, if you will. So wouldn't one want to expose their kids to smart grown-ups speaking naturally, rather than teach them the fiction that the words simply don't exist, and are never said by anyone?

Naturally, I say all this as a non-parent, and further one who can't imagine changing this status, not without a rather severe personal mental rearrangement, so maybe there's something magical I'm not getting. Furthermore, were I ever put in charge of a child, I would (barring, again, a drastic change of personal philosophy) teach them during their first sentient Xmas the truth about both Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, and I don't know how different this strategy would be from even the new parents in my current crowd.

(no subject)

I am really struggling with 3001. Clarke has blown what I first thought was a clever dodge of inconsistent backstory by specifically mentioning the fall of the USSR as it actually happened, thus dropping his own 2010 into paradox. And now he's apparently revealed the Monolith's True Purpose, and it's all wrong. I'm starting to remember reading reviews that felt the same way, when the book was new.

I'll finish it eventually because it's just a short book, but I don't think I'll like it.

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After whining about it a lot I continued to read Transmetropolitan, serially borrowing the collected volumes from rikchik. It does get better, with Spider softening up and becoming more likable to the point of arguable inconsistency with the earliest issues, but whatever. (And while I resemble his tendency to prefer the companionship of women, it would be nice to see him make some male friends too. Oh no he's becoming feminized! Call Bill Maher at once)

Major background-level plot hole that I bet is never resolved: So there exists, in the book's world, a well-known technology to scan a dead but intact brain's neural pattern and flash-clone a new adult body to house it, and yet this isn't used by everyone (or at least everyone who can afford it) as a method of functional immortality (philosophical questions of continuity aside)? I mean, nobody even brings up the possibility? Bzzt

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I forgot that I actually succeeded in teaching Battle Line to Ricky last year, and he mopped the floor with me. So I shouldn't sell him short. (It was specifically trying to teach him Go, which I don't know all that well myself, that frustrated him.)

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Boardgamegeek is the first place I've really seen outright hostility to Fluxx. Posters can't imagine why anyone would like this game, and are flabbergasted that it remains a top seller in its class. I am reminded of conversations with daerr over why anyone would vote Bush. It's about the Strict Colonel frame vs. the Stoned Hippie frame.

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The RPG Transhuman Space takes place in a Transmetropolitan-like future, and features brain-scanning tech as well. It uses both an elegant solution and a shrugging hack to stop players from abusing it past the GM's control. First of all, it declares that the only way to upload a human brain involves physical dismantling of said brain at the cellular level. OK, fair enough; it's reasonable to state that non-destructive scanning won't be invented within 100 years from now. But they couldn't think of an elegantly explainable way to prevent cp-ing a personality once uploaded, so instead the authors state that it's simply one of the most illegal things one can do in 2099 society. I'm not sure the game explains why this is (I don't actually own a copy, but read through a friend's), but it's looked upon as something like the inverse of murder, and equally reprehensible and punishable.

It's fun to watch authors struggle with Singularicious ideas, trying to play with them while keeping things grounded enough that we primitives can still relate to them.