Mega-Gaming Week
No, I'm not running out of gas as far as writing in my journal is concerned; I'm just running out of time to keep up with it lately. This week, for instance, I was busy pretty much every night of the week after Monday, and probably got no more than 7 hours' sleep any given night - which is less than I'm used to.
Ceej and David have gotten back into Magic recently, and I went up to their place on Tuesday and we spent the evening playing. To my surprise, my old decks did quite well, although admittedly CJ's deck is in its formative stages and is undergoing fairly rapid evolution. I suspect the two of them have enough older, insanely powerful cards that it wouldn't be hard for them to construct a deck that could blow me out of the water. But, the fun of Magic decks to some degree is constructing working decks around a particular theme.
Wednesday was regular gaming night at Subrata's, and I invited CJ and David to join us. We played bunch of Settlers of Catan, which David had never played before. He seems to have enjoyed it quite a bit, since he hinted broadly the next day in e-mail that he wanted to play again. It is a very good game. I was playing at the other table from the two of them, but it seemed like they fit into the gaming crowd fairly well.
Thursday evening was Bridge night at Cafe Borrone in Mountain View. I was not on my best game, and was rather muddled in both bidding and playing - possibly because I kept getting dealt these ridiculously weak hands. Bo-ring. I did have a couple of good moments, though, and we had quite a few interesting hands (that other people played), including one hand with a 9-card club suit.
Finally, Friday afternoon at work a bunch of us got together to play Starcraft - in fact, we ended up with an 8-player game, 7 humans and one computer player. I finally acquitted myself well in the game, finishing off one opponent on my own, and helping with the mopping-up of another. We had three players (plus the computer) left at the end, and two of us had to get going, so it effectively ended in a draw (the one player left, who "won" by default, was the least likely to win had the game played out to the end). I've been practicing getting my 'economy' going in the early game, and using some of the more advanced Protoss (one of the three races) units. The game lasted three hours - you can see why some of us aborted.
After work I drive up to visit CJ and David again (CJ described it as David "brow-beating" me into coming up, to feed his Settlers need). CJ had jury duty this past week, so she's working longer hours at work to make up for it, and did not get home until after 9, so David and I walked out to get Thai food for dinner, and played a game of Starcraft. When CJ came home, we played Settlers in a Seafarers variant.
I think the cats have actually been pretty annoyed at how little I've been home lately. However, hopefully CJ and David will come down here to visit me sometime this weekend (i.e., tomorrow or Monday). CJ wants to meet my cats, and it'd be nice to have visitors. This is one compelling reason to move to the peninsula: Hardly anyone's willing to drive down here to visit me much when I'm living in the valley.
And today I mostly stayed at home, other than running some errands in the late afternoon. Caught up on some TV, read a whole bunch of comic books in my stack, petted the cats, cleaned up a bit in anticipation of weekend visitors, and so forth. Oh, yes: And slept in, which I will likely do tomorrow, as well. Ahh, a long weekend. A nice thing.
I also read Charles Vess' Spider-Man graphic novel, Spirits of the Earth, which is an entertaining comic, beautifully drawn, but rather clumsily written. I don't think Vess has written much; Spirits contains bits of exposition which lapse into phrases like, "They spent the rest of the afternoon discussion such matters, and then they...". And the dialogue never rises above the merely servicible. Oh, well.
Oh, and the fourth part of the "Crisis Times Five" story in JLA was published. This was a new Justice League/Justice Society team-up, which was rendered kind of pointless by the relatively few JSAers who are still young enough to participate (although a revelation about Wildcat was rather amusing). Plus, I think Grant Morrison has long overstayed his shelf-life on this title; the cleverness of his plots have been going steadily downhill, and his characterization has always been very close to zero, so this ends up seeming like one more aimless superhero book. Maybe when Mark Waid takes over in a few months it will improve, although I've not been too thrilled with much of Waid's work, either. Both of these guys, like Peter David before them, seemed to start off their careers with a bang (David's "Death of Jeanne DeWolff" in Spectacular Spider-Man, Waid's "Return of Barry Allen" in Flash, and Morrison's first five issues of Animal Man), and then slowly run out of gas, to the point where they seem to be just going through the motions.
Although, truth to tell, not a whole lot on the comics scene really has me waiting eagerly for the next issue. I'd say that Planetary is probably closest to fitting that bill.
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