Some of last week

[prog]

Well, I had some half-written blog posts but then my lappie had its weekly kernel panic and away they went. So here is the start of recollection in random order.

Friday I went to the eye doctor. It didn't go well; the first eye drops he applied made me flip out at the reptile-brain level; all my blood drained away and I started to sweat awful and I asked for a breather. Without breaking stride the doctor had me recline and applied cold compresses and gave me hard candy to suck on for blood sugar until I felt better. Then he did the rest of the exam without benefit of further drops. I felt really foolish, but he said that he had one patient fall apart like that every week or so. I'm special.

Anyway, I have a glasses prescription now, and it's not far from the one that was last ground out for me in 2001. I don't trust my own judgement in getting new frames, and dictator555 also needs a new pair, so we're going to visit the optical shop later this week together. That should be all right.

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Tuesday cthulhia and I saw Brand Upon the Brain! by Guy Maddin. I am glad I saw it but I do not generally recommend it. It's got moments, and at least one element of its narrative found strong resonance with me, but it suffers from odd and slow pacing, making its exploration of squirmy sexual themes even harder to watch. If I understand correctly it was originally presented not as a feature but a twelve-part art installation, so there you go.

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Played games over the weekend. Investigated Here I Stand, spending two or three hours to suss out the rules enough to play through one game turn. Determined that it's really only playable if you really really want to play it, and plan to spend much of one day at it.

There are many games like this, but I do not play them. I bought it mostly because the game board has a Henry's Wives Pregancy Chart on it (roll 1d6 and see what you get this time!). The game is so serious about its role as simulation that it makes no attempt to be elegant; there are many rules that apply only to certain players, or that come into effect only if one player does a certain action upon another specific player, or only on certain game turns. For example, the Ottoman player successfully besieged a Hungarian city, and this caused a one-time rule to come into effect which specifically gave all the other Hungarian cities to the Hapsburg player. That's just how the game is.

I'm not ready to sell it just yet. I think I still want to try actually playing it!

Also won a four-player game of Blokus for the first time, and fooled tahnan twice with my bogus definitions during a game of Dictionary, which is a kind of victory in itself.

Comments

[canadianpuzzler.livejournal.com]

Whoa, it's a little disorienting to see Guy Maddin's name in one of the blogs I read; he's from around here (where here=Manitoba, where I reside). In fact, Brand Upon the Brain was the first of his films not to be made around here.

Since my recent hard drive crash (and even before it, as I recall), I've taken to posting directly from the LJ website; it auto-saves for you every so often, which may help in future kernel panics.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Maddin has been my favorite director ever since I saw Tales from the Gimli Hospital in 2001, even though the only film of his I ever generally recommend is The Saddest Music in the World, which teaches us that Manitoba is the world capital of sorrow.