Skill-Affirming
So far, this weekend had been oddly affirming of my abilities to compete and fit in with the people I hang out with out here.
We played Starcraft after work yesterday. I seem to be widely regarded as the second-best Starcraft player among the group at work, although there are four or five of us who are fairly close in skill level. I'm slightly behind other-Ben, and first-Ben is a little behind me (but learning very quickly). One bummer about this is that I always end up on the other team from other-Ben when we divide up in teams.
But one game we played was a free-for-all between myself, the two Bens, and Francois, another cow-orker who is still in the learning/practicing stages of the game's fundamentals. Francois had learned a lot since last I played with/against him, but I still took him out fairly easily. But the two Bens ended up fighting it out, and I then quickly moved to crush Ben, and then made major inroads against other-Ben before he surrendered. Considering I was playing the Zerg, whom I'm less familiar with, I was pleased to handle them so well and win the game.
Well, John pronounced it "the best baklava I've ever had." Wow. John does quite a bit of cooking and I think can reasonably be labelled a food snob. He asked if I have any other amazing cooking recipes that I haven't introduced him to. I do have a few other recipes around, but admittedly the baklava is near or at the top of the heap. I was very pleased with this, especially since in the past I've gotten by with just thinking that being able to manipulate fillo dough was good enough. But apparently I don't just do it, I do it well. Gee.
And Ben checked to make sure that I bring the leftovers to work on Monday. I said, "What makes you think there will be any leftovers?" But given the vast quantities of butter and sugar in the thing, I will either be really fat or really sick (or both) if there aren't leftovers on Monday.
In the evening, we played poker. In contrast to the last time I played poker, this time I did quite well, winning a share of three of the first four pots, and bailing on the other one very early. I was especially happy that I managed to get a pretty cheap bluff past Ben on one hand. Atypically for him, Subrata didn't do so well (although I half-wonder if he lost some deliberately since we were ribbing him earlier about how he's always the person to beat in games. Subrata's a very upbeat person, but I can see that constant ribbing about that could get to be a drag).
I actually nearly didn't go to this party, since when I got confused when planning to game with CJ and David this weekend, I offered to punt on the party and game with them instead, since I felt more in a gaming mood than a partying mood. But CJ decided it'd be better to put it off for later, and I'm glad we did, since I had a really good time at the party. (And, I half-wonder if CJ might have punted on gaming to push me to go socialize. Though more likely she just had her own reasons.)
The movie has gotten bad reviews, though I'd still like to see it. But it's another one of those things which could have made a really good movie, and it's too bad it (apparently) didn't.
One interesting thing about watching it is realizing how fistfights were a staple of many American TV series of the time. Star Trek, of course, had many of them, sometimes to good advantage, sometimes not. Fistfights seem to be a rarity in '90s TV. Even in the '80s, on The A-Team and its ilk, the fights seemed dumbed-down and increasingly rare. And ghod forbid that you saw a good slugfest on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Not that fistfights have any intrinsic value (aside from the choreography, which is sometimes impressive; Robert Conrad in WWW puts on some nice displays of athletic ability), but as a point of contrast, they are interesting. How would a show go about working in fistfights in a traditional '60s manner today? Do any shows do it, i.e., shows I don't watch (i.e., almost all of them)? It'd be interesting to see one try, a few times, anyway.
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