jollymerry hollyberry

Worked out a plan with the 'rents, and am showing up in time for Xmas dinner tonight. So, er, guess I'm leaving in a couple of hours. Slept in today, after getting up at six yesterday, question mark exclamation point. Blame the cold, I guess. Anyway, this makes everyone satisfied, and lets me avoid feeling stuck in a shut-down Kennebec Valley for an entire day.

In the meantime, I think this may be my first Christmas in MA (as an adult, anyway). I heard Santa on the street last night, and I giddily ran outside to say hi! But then I saw that he was standing on the steps of the house across the street, facing the door and wishing it a meeeeerry christmas, ho ho ho, repeatedly. This kind of freaked me out I disappeared back inside and turned up the music so I couldn't hear him any more. Poor Santa.

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When I was in high school I memorized The Computer's First Christmas Card.

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Spent yesterday evening at dougo's, learning new board games. I liked Vinci, and was not so much about Betrayal at House on the Hill, which seems broken. Though I had fun trying to role-play my character, an old man who (like all the other characters) had a propensity for finding dead bodies or triggering ghostly displays of bleeding walls, in the same fashion that rikchik plays Dr. Lucky.

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I take back my assertion that VASSAL is a competitor to Volity; after playing with it some more, I discovered that it's really just a boardgame UI toolkit, with attached network protocol. All the game logic and piece manipulation must be manually provided by the human players, just as if they were playing the game physically; there is no analog to Volity's referee at each table. So, the two systems are really not even in the same league.