mjp

First of all, didn't anyone get around to telling Texas that is it October! I mean seriously, it hit 100 F again today! This is crazy.

Secondly, when I was saying the observatory I am visiting is as far as you could get down south Texas and still be in the country, I didn't realize it was quite so literal. I'm setting up the camera and a bunch of guys on four by fours ride by chasing someone. I point this out to my host and she says, "Oh, that big fence over there... That's the border fence. Those guys are Border Patrol chasing people who run across." The telescope dome is like 300m from the fence. It's surreal.

Once more, I wander off into the crazy world of watching the sky from just the right place at just the right time. At least this time I get to visit some long unseen relatives.

See y'all when I get back!

There seems to be a giant appeal in cooperative games of late. Sadly, I just don't get them. Lord of the Rings, Pandemic, Hidden Planet, etc. The few times I've really enjoyed them was in the "just out of the box" play when no one knew what was going on. But in general, it seems like there's always the better way to proceed, and those who have played longer know what that is, so you should do what they say, and you either win or not depending upon the card draws. Not that card draws are bad; they're a fine mechanic. I just don't seem to be able to buy into the whole distributed single-player game thing as a group activity. Maybe I'm just conceptualizing it incorrectly. I do almost get the hidden traitors variants. Camelot and BSG both have hidden traitors/cylons/whatever. But it feels like in both games, the traitor(s) either blow themselves early, so nothing was really hidden, or they spend the game going along with the group mind. Deviate from the group mind optimal path one iota and you are clearly the traitor and then dealt with. How are these things supposed to work? Why does everyone else like them so much?

I'm here in this tiny little town near Disney down in Florida taking my class. After spending 8 hours a day in the classroom, I go a little stir-crazy, so have been walking all around the place on my lunch hour and after dinner.

Everyone here is pleasant. They wander around at a nice stately pace, nod politely to everyone they pass, and are generally calm and happy. It's all beautiful, and perfectly kept.

I happened to get back to my hotel at the same time as several other guests. While we were all in the elevator going up, I started a little conversation...

"So, how do you guys like the town?"

One guy said, "It's nice." An older guy said, "It's all quite beautiful." A woman in the corner said, "I think it's a little Stepford." Suddenly, everyone in the elevator was talking at once. "That's it exactly! It's Stepford-town!"

A tad creepy perhaps, but on the other hand, Stepford is a great place to visit for a bit.

Ah, there's nothing like a 10.5 hour game of Advanced Civ. to cheer one up from being snowed in all day. Well, winning was good too.

When the sentient super-weapon says, "Destroying the city is possible, but at the limits of my power,"
is it important to know if the weapon is referring to its upper limits, or its lower limits.

When I was little, my grandmother was very tricky. If you worked really hard, and were really good, and generally behaved yourself perfectly, you could get a special treat: Ooodles of Noodles Soup (Now called Top Ramen).

When I got to college and realized that not only could I eat Ramen anytime I wanted, but it was also the cheapest foodstuff in existence, I was exultant. All my little childhood desires coming true...

I absolutely loved the stuff, having been programmed to consider it a delicacy since age 6.

Suddenly, after thirty years of yumminess, I find I can't stand it anymore. Indeed, my last three attempts to eat a package of ramen have all ended in failure. I couldn't even finish a bowl.

How did this happen? Is the wonderous reward of my youth forever lost to me?

Everyone's invited!

See you tomorrow!

( Plane Flight from Hell )

At least the hotel has internet.

I just spent the week on vacation, and one of the things I did was play piles of Titan with Jelom.

While analyzing why I was losing so often, (I did manage to mutual with him once!), I realized two things:

1) My disdain for the Swamp recruiting tree is an error.

2) I have this strange reaction to probabilities during games. (Or at least during Titan)

By this second one, I mean, I seem evaluate each probability correctly, but I'm totally failing to adjust for the cummulative effect of my master plan requiring a simple 1-in-3 chance to happen three times in a row.

I mean, looking at it from here, it seems clear that a 1-in-27 chance is not something to base my plans on. But during the game, a set of 1-in-3 chances seemed quite reasonable.

I'm going to have to work on that... I hadn't noticed it before in other games, but for some reason in Titan it's just smacking me over the head again and again.

We played History of the World over the 4th of July weekend. It was the weirdest game of HotW I've ever seen. Both the Arabs and Romans failed to show up, so all kinds of small empires failed to get cleaned up along the way.

Those who understand the game might be amused by this:



Yup, that's Sumeria, the first empire of the first era. Over to the right a bit is a British colony under Victoria. Sumeria, the empire whose capital could not be sacked for thousands of years. It survived right through the end of the game.

That's so wacky.

Well, Origins is over. The last thing I did before leaving was get inducted into the inner sanctum of the super secret society of airgamers. I'd been aware this was going to happen this year as two of the ringleaders of the airgaming community were bemoaning my lack of a callsign for much of the first day.

So I spent the whole weekend walking around on eggshells, trying to not do anything stupid in front of an airgamer, lest I be given a terrible callsign. I've been warned that the best way to get an unsatisfactory callsign is to attempt to come up with your own, and harrock has been bemoaning his callsign for years, so I was a bit anxious about the whole thing.

It couldn't really go too badly... After all, only people in the super secret society of airgamers is ever going to use it, so it's not like it's going to spoil my career or something. Even if you get one you don't like, after a few years you can grow into it and own it, so it's not a disaster. Still, I was hoping for something not too unfortunate.

As it turned out, the mob was feeling generous, and I did come in second place in the overall tournament, so they decided to go with something reasonably neutral. After a little speech about how I snuck into the airgaming community and scored a high rank in my first real tournament by participating in all the Demonstration games but none of the tournaments until I was secure in my skills, they decided to name me: Demo

I can live with that. Now to fly home!

Grr... This is the second time in two weeks that someone has insisted the only possible time they could meet with me was at 7:30 in the morning. Both times, I've dutifully gotten myself into work at 7 to get a little time to prepare. Both times, no one has showed up even close to that hour. Today's appointment was on a delayed plane. Last week's was stuck in morning traffic for three hours! (Or so he said.) I know that not everyone shares my crazy don't-get-to-the-office-until-10AM schedule, so I try to accomodate the early risers when I can. But please stop insisting on 7:30 AM meetings if you can't get here until well after 9 anyways!

Stolen from tirinian:

If you get stuck, remember, they're from my favorite movies, not normal people's.

Movie meme:

1. Pick 10 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Looking them up is cheating, please don't.

( Movie quotes beneath )

For those in my half of North America (Eastern times listed):

In the future, if you wake up late and have to rush to the Boston Wine Expo for four hours of continuous wine tasting without getting any breakfast, try and arrange your life so that this does not occur the morning after you spent a whole day fasting for lent.

One of the newer professors here refuses to go to our observatory in Chile. She's been awarded plenty of time (which others make use of on her behalf and then send her the data), and is great at analyzing data and figuring out what it all means, but she just hates the actual observing.

Another professor was trying to convince her that perhaps she should give telescopes another chance...

"You can't commune with the universe in the Temple of Science if you are unwilling to climb the mountain."

Yup. We observational astronomers are a mystic bunch...

Um, what happened to Peter's girlfriend?

Little Miss Time-Traveled-to-a-Future-That-No-Longer-Exists...

From a conversation with a much more senior colleague...

Me: "Well, I think you want to be careful about that. You've clearly plotted subtly cool success, but the uninitiated might look at that plot and conclude apparent failure, and we don't want to give the impression that we missed."

Him: "Wait, am I initiated? Are you guys at MIT conducting initiations?"

Me: "Er..."

I really thought that was a more common phrase. I often refer to "those initiated into the mysteries of whatever", or "possessing the secret gnosis for something" and so do several of my friends, but clearly others don't speak that way, or even hear anyone else who speaks that way. I didn't even carry the metaphor very far in the above conversation before everything derailed.

I'll have to start policing my speech even more than I normally do while at work.

Huh, I'm fairly pleased with this result. That's probably a bad sign...