Evening

Unable to scare up company on a one-hour notice, I went to the location of that Nintendo music show, but got confused. Where I expected to see the Enormous Room, I saw a sign that said "Central Square Kitchen". Both names are strangers to me, so I walked in anyway, went up some stairs, and found myself in a bar of no particular size. Huh? My hindbrain said hezzzz at all the strange people sitting in the dark, and I really didn't have the will to look for my orker in the crowd for a show I was only semienthusiastic about. The hell with it; fell back to Mission B and T'ed back to Harvard to check in on the kitty-cat of doctor_atomic and Igor while they wreak havoc in the Rockies.

At Harvard station I bumped into E, the sunny front-lady to a local band of some note and a member of Tribe Ex-O'Reilly. (Actually she waved her hands in my face until I acknowledged her; iPod in my ears, I thought she was some guy gonna ask me for money, at first.) She was going my way, and we chatted all the way to the doctor's doorstep. So, that fulfilled my sweetness & light quota for the evening quite nicely, and reversed my feeling stupid about the other thing.

After policing the cat, I saw Million Dollar Baby at the Harvard Loew's, paying full price because I really wanted to see it before it got spoiled for me; I understood that it had a very weighty and unexpected shift in it, and that can't last long before it permeates popular culture (like the twists in The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense or, hell, Citizen Kane). It's less "political" than I was led to believe from Ebert & Roeper (who loved it to bits, but made references to other critics razzing it), but I found it somewhat strange in structure, becoming a movie about something else entirely, only with the same characters.

But life is like that. I guess. To be honest, I liked the first part a lot more. It made me feel engaged in a way that no movie since my first viewing of Fellowship of the Ring has affected. (Not that this movie was anything like Fellowship, because it wasn't.) The second part just made me feel distant and resigned, for the most part. But: the final ending-ending, I mean the very last scene before credits, was absolutely perfect and bound the two parts together, with the lightest touch. I liked that.

(no subject)

It occurs to me that it's more likely that I was part of a long "seed list" to receive only the premiere issue of Make as a freebie, rather than an entire subscription to it. If I had the inclination I'd dig through my archive of the O'Reilly email newsletters I don't read and find the real explanation, but I'm too lazy and anyway a bit of harmless mystery is nice.

That said, I like it! It's colorful and fun. I'm too hyper to actually read it right now but it has lots and lots of little articles about all kinds of crap, and, uh, looks like a few longer ones. Uh-huh. Very nice.

Also noted: two-page ad inside the front cover, inviting readers to visit careers.yahoo.com. It's not like the days when they'd buy entire Red Line cars' ad space, but a good sign nonetheless.

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I want to note that "The Bushel" has come to an end, after nearly a year and a half of realtime (representing one weekend of game-time). My thanks and congratulations to rikchik and cnoocy for running a great story!

The main reason it took so long was the players complicating their own lives as soon as we started, making scheduling very difficult. Among the half-dozen players, two GMs, and two "special guest stars", there were two weddings (involving three of the players), a baby (involving one of the newlyweds), two houses purchased, a PhD dissertation commenced, and a return to school (as yet another first-class technogeek transmogrifies her career to do something interesting for a change, an action that I used to think was utterly strange, but now...). I think I may have been the only one of the six players whose life was more or less free of Milton Bradley's The Game of Life-class events. My car's strictly a two-seater, baby. BRUM BRUM i don't know.

On the guest stars: During the last two sessions: the GMs secretly invited two of our friends (both seasoned GMs themselves) to show up mid-session and portray key NPCs as they walked into the story, first the "good guy" one and then the "bad guy" one during the finale. Quite clever and delightful, really.