A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Games run amok this weekend. Hadn't played any tabletops in a while so it was all good.

On Saturday classicaljunkie had a birthday party and lo the games were busted out. I brought along my copies of Citadels and Shadows over Camelot and actually got to play both.

---

Played Citadels first, and I won... again. Maybe my fifth win in a row. I am chronic at winning this game. I do not have a clear recollection of the last time I lost at it... maybe at J&C's foo two Decembers ago? Please play it with me some more so that I will lose. I am inviting you to BRING IT.

Oddly I have never played this game with five people and so never encountered the rule that each round starts with some number of role cards tossed out face-up as well as face-down. I have only played the game with three or seven people, I think! So that was a new, and I liked this version of the game as much as I like the others (that is, quite a bit). I'm glad that another experienced player was at the table to note the rule difference.

---

Shadows over Camelot - I have been lugging this around to different game events for months without playing it, so was very happy to finally get a chance Saturday, and it ended up being the craziest game of it I've ever had. I had a Loyal role, and while I was gearing up the courage to accuse one player or another of being a traitor (one kept promising to help me with the Grail quest and then going somewhere else, while the other consciously chose to play an Evil card that caused a quest to fail) I found myself at the end of an accusation!

My jaw literally dropped at this, not just because I don't think I was acting particularly traitorous but because a lot of the table thought I was it, and I wasn't even aware of it. Apparently treachery was seen not in how I was playing the game but in my lack of interest in the other players' discussion of who the traitor might be. Interesting! Of course the traitor turned out to be classicaljunkie herself, who spent the whole game playing as quietly and passively as possible, and she ended up winning by lasting the whole game undetected for a final sword tally of 7 dark to 5 light. Very nice!

Having played Shadows a few times now, I think I understand how to play within the spirit of the can't-reveal-your-cards rule, as well as the letter of it. A couple of first-time players were sticking only to the latter so that the whole rule became meaningless, but everyone was clearly having a lot of fun so I didn't press the issue. (doctor_atomic, you would have been proud.) Still, it would have been nice if the printed rules showed how this was done, maybe with a sample player dialogue.

---

Finally, there was semi-spontaneous Settlers on Sunday, at a visiting meerkitty suggestion. The Andys were over, and trolling for anyone else interested hooked pheromone. Who, after mumbling about unfamiliarity with the vanilla rules (being one of those C&K people) and having made her apologies ahead of time for not playing well, proceeded to leisurely stomp the four of us into the dirt sheep pastures.

Beware the Settlers sharks! But really any sting from the loss was soothed by some fun followup conversation about my business because boy do I love to talk about that because you know it's all I do ha ha HA ha HA ha though I am blessed that I can occasionally take breaks to engage in sinful acts of random number generation with friends. Coz that's what it's all about ultimatley.

Yesterday was a bad day. I became very sad, and shut down early. Two true facts about me: it's hard to emotionally unbalance me, but if I do lose balance, a good night's sleep always restores it. This is likely a good thing.

Why was I sad? I was thinking about what a wash A.D. 2001 seems to me. I don't feel as if I've done much this year, especially compared to 1999 and 2000. I thought about various decisions I had made poorly, or failed to make at all, and opportunities lost due to lack of strong communication. And this isn't even getting into the bigger stuff of the layoffs and 9-11. I wanted to cry, and wondered at what age I lost the ability to will myself into doing so, or if I ever really could.

Today was a good day. Worked for a couple hours in the 1369 on chapter 7, which is due tomorrow, enough to convince myself that I can turn it in before Monday's done. I should have had it done today, but I ended up sinking half the day into a visit to Joe's. In retrospect, I think of the scenes from the film "Pi" of Max visiting his mentor. Just like this, Joe is a cranky old man (two years older than me) who works in my field, except far more experienced and published, and who gives me lots of curmudgeonly advice, but who also abandoned his most ambitious project when it got too dangerous (actually he dropped his most recent book contract because it got too boring) and enjoys having me over to play our favorite game, Go. Er, I mean Fluxx. And Settlers of Catan Card Game.

However, even though I am, right according to script, working obsessively with my own project, I failed to ride around randomly on the T while staring at a Settlers black knight token in my hand, and then have dreams about finding my brain sitting on the stairs at the Central Square station. Which is good, because eventually I'd find Joe dead in his apartment, slumped over his keyboard while half-written treatise on Man Things Was Not Meant To Know About XML-RPC glowed on his monitor, and his whole Fluxx deck laid out along pseudo-Kabbalistic patterns (his copy of "The End Is Near" would be open next to it, for reference). So that's good.

If I make a movie about XML it will be called this: <:-/>

Stayed home from Rick's housewarming so I could play with the new*new*new XML::SAX Perl module. Since I'm not very experienced with SAX, and since further it doesn't actually come with the documentation packages it's supposed to (grumble... but forgiveable, since it's only at v0.03), it took some extra time to grok, but I think I got it. Emailed Erik and Nat, asking them to sanity check my summary of the module's magic. (Basically, it seems to be just a highly intelligent parser dispatcher, and its handlers work the same as PerlSAX always has.)

Worth noting: on my walk to the cafe, a very little boy was so ecstatic over seeing the snowfall, finally normal weather, that, ignoring his parents' directions to stay put, he raced down his front steps, picked up a double-mittenful of snow, ran up with a huge grin to a total stranger, and got him good, right on the leg.

"Ouch, I've been snowballed!" I said, only slowing my pace a little, to let him scoot past and dive into a whole yardful of new snow. "Oh! Did he get you?" said his mother. I could only shrug and laugh.