Weekend!
In any given gaming group, there’s eventually going to be a fighter named after the polearms. “My enemies call me the Pike. In France they call me Glaive-Fauchard-Bardiche-Voulge. My friends call me Halberd. You can call me Bill.”
Or maybe that’s just me that does that.
In any case, I’m gaming this weekend.
There’s a new game I played the other day and it’s fairly interesting: it’s a dice game with a handful of unique personality cards (different personalities have different powers), a handful of different roles (sheriff, deputy, outlaw, and renegade), nine arrow tokens, and five special dice.
Everybody gets a personality that is face-up, a role that is face down (and secret), and then the sheriff begins the game. (Well, *HIS* role card gets turned face up. Everyone else keeps theirs secret.) The point of the game for the good guys is for the Sheriff and Deputy to kill the outlaws and renegades. The outlaws win the game by killing the Sheriff and Deputy. The Renegade wins by killing everybody else.
How is the game scored? Well, there are six special faces on the dice. A #1 bullseye, a #2 bullseye, a Gatling Gun, an arrow, beer, and dynamite. Well, you don’t want to roll dynamite. You get 3 of those and you take a point of damage and your turn ends. Oh, and you can’t re-roll dynamite. You’re stuck with it. Single beers can be used to heal yourself (or someone else, if you’re kind). If you roll an arrow, you take an arrow token no matter what and when all nine arrow tokens are used up, everyone takes one point of damage per arrow token before refilling the arrow token pile. 1 bullseyes do 1 damage to a player on your immediate left or right, 2 bullseyes do 1 damage to a player sitting two away from you. Gatling gun rolls require 3 gatling guns, but if you get those, everyone else takes one point of damage. You get three roll attempts and can reroll whatever you want except for dynamite.
It’s cheaper than $20 and a six-person game is over in less than a half hour.
I’ll see if we’ll be playing that.
So… what’s on your docket?
I am going to see this band tomorrow because I am awesome:
http://vimeo.com/34360223Report
Say it like Kanye:
‘Cause my life is dope and I do dope shit.Report
Eh, without Hook, it ain’t the real deal.
(But I have a friend who just saw them and really enjoyed it. So ignore my curmudgeonly self and have fun!)
(I may have mentioned that I lucked out and got to see the ultimate NO show for my only one, they were promoting a BBC comp that spanned both JD and NO, so they divided their set equally between each band’s songs. All the best, from both sides. Also, Sumner kept baiting the German audience with Nazi jokes. “What kind of music do you all like? Oh, right, marching music.”) (no politics!)Report
Dangit, now I have to watch this amazing footage of their first US show AGAIN, and marvel at the mechanical monster that is Stephen Morris:
(For Chris, “Ceremony” is at 28:45. But start at 24:47 and you’ll get “Procession” too.)
(I’m more partial here to the set closer – a primordial version of “Temptation” taking shape before our eyes – if there’s any clearer example of NO’s genius in realizing a two-chord VU trance bash could be laid on top of Kraftwerk’s sequencers and ridden into eternity, I’ve yet to see it. Maybe it’s ‘cos they’re IN NYC, but Sumner even throws in some Reed-esque phrases – “Tonight we’re gonna get uptight”, “Around the bend”.)Report
I swear, “Ceremony” is like a drug for me.Report
I have every single drum hit of it memorized. The way all the instruments interlock…Sumner slashing across his strings…it’s pretty much perfect.
Is there a simpler, sadder lyric in pop music than “All she asks is strength to hold me / then again the same old story”? Man, that feels like the specific end of one relationship, and the inevitable end of all of them.
And “I’ll break them down, no mercy shown, heaven knows it’s got to be this time” is so full of a sense of determination, a final assault with the highest of stakes against overwhelming odds; I wonder if it would hit as hard as it does, without knowledge of what happened to Curtis.
I read somewhere that no doctor today would prescribe the drug combo he was put on for his epilepsy, but at the time they just didn’t know any better (and he obviously already suffered from depression and had gotten himself into an emotionally-stressful situation).Report
They did some Joy Division songs for an encore.Report
Am I revealing my total lack of hipster creed if I admit that my favorite NO song isn’t some obscure track from a lesser-selling album, but Regret?
After so many years, that song still packs a wallop for me. Happy, upbeat, and all these years later that last line — “I guess that’s what they all say, just before it falls apart” — is one of those moments that never fails to make me mist up, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.Report
@tod-kelly
Regret was the second song they played.
@glyph @chris
This was the best concert of my fucking life*.
*So far.Report
@tod-kelly – well, “Ceremony” and “Temptation” are definitely two of their best-known songs (I’ll concede “Procession” as semi-obscure) but there ain’t no shame in loving “Regret”; it’s a great song, maybe the last truly great one they ever did IMO, with one of Hook’s most memorable bass melodies ever (I’m singing that bass riff now; and the lyric you mention gets me every time too).
It was the advance single for Republic, and I was SO EXCITED for the album to come out based on that single, and so disappointed in the actual album, which was otherwise pretty meh. But that song’s a stone-cold classic.
Report
Dude, glad you had fun.
And “Regret” is a really good song.Report
The gods of heat and water deficiency proved the Anasazi beans aren’t a match for this region. They grew fast, but browned early. The Hopi corn faired reasonably well, enough to plant a larger plot next year. With the experiment complete, the bed will be turned to make way for the diehards (cowpeas and beets).
In the wild I have noticed for several seasons a large grass, (likely echinochloa crus-galli) has been productive well into July, The green seed pods have a delicious sweetness, left to dry it makes a reasonably nice millet. The native sunflowers and dyers chamomile are producing heads dry enough to harvest.Report
That sounds like a great garden. How much space do you have for it?Report
The test bed is a 5×10 foot rectangle. One of many around our house. There are 3 sweet potatoes that i will need to work around as i till.Report
Squash is the weak link in the three sisters here. The white leaf powder quickly turns the leaves yellow. I find sweet potatoes work better so the pattern is Hopi corn, cowpea and sweet potato.
Thanks for the book reference Robert, I see that same pattern in nature, tall grasses shrubs, then trees. The native trees here are the exeption, they are hardy enough to do well without much of the soil improvements from the grass and shrubs.Report
Have you tried a three-sisters test plot? That’s corn, beans, and squash grown together.
Plant the corn first; in hills. Tradition was 4 seeds per hill, as I recall, with something for fertilizer worked into each hill. When it’s about 3″ tall, you plant the beans in the middle of the corn and the squash around the outside of the corn. The corn provides support for the beans to climb, the beans fix nitrogen for the whole group, and the squash provides shade to conserve moisture.
http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/teach/2003045238014436.htmlReport
“Have you tried a three-sisters test plot? That’s corn, beans, and squash grown together. ”
It was probably for the best that Chekhov changed their names to Olga, Masha, and Irina and decided to make them live in a small provincial town and yearn for Moscow.Report
I just finished reading a great book that you might find useful: Gaia’s Garden, by Tom Hemenway. There are several in-depth sections about how to create a productive, easy-to-maintain garden in a couple years, even in a very dry climate — one of the exemplar gardens is located in a particularly arid region near Santa Fe. The garden there has many fruit and nut trees, which provide good shade and soil conditions for some nice annuals as well.
Hemenway makes an interesting case for the idea that gardens have an innate tendency to “grow up” from cover crop infancy, to tall grasses, to shrubs, to trees. The idea is that certain plants do well in nearly-abiotic soil conditions, but through their own working of the soil, they create an environment that is more conducive to tall grasses, which in turn attract animal and fungal species that make shrubs and trees thrive. Given that an ecology of shrubs and trees is easier to take care of and more resilient in the face of environmental shocks (like drought or pest infestation), creating a garden with this “growing up” tendency in mind supposedly makes the gardener’s life a lot easier.
http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-Home-Scale-Permaculture-Edition/dp/1603580298Report
I have a pretty quiet weekend lined up. Some packing; might get to tinker with bikes. Saturday evening I’ll hang out at a friend’s place. There will probably be icecream.
My wife and kiddo just headed out of town for a family anniversary party in her boyfriend’s family. This will apparently involve their coming out as polyamorous to some fairly conservative, potentially rather judgemental members of the boyfriend’s family. I hope that goes alright.
On Sunday, wife and kiddo head to Saskatoon to leave kiddo with our parents.
On Monday, wife and I fly from our respective starting points to New York for the HOPE conference (!!) It’ll be the first time we’ve left kiddo for any extended stretch of time, and also the first time in my adult life I’ve been to the USA. The prospect of doing grown up things – spontaneously deciding to eat at a restaurant that only serves spicy food, or watching a talky play, or just sitting quietly somewhere – is kind of exciting in its own right.Report
More resting, more painkillers.
Gaming on Saturday!
Doctor on Monday at 8:30 am. (I am beginning to think some curse was put upon me so particularly that the curser knew how much I relish sleeping in on my summer Mondays off, and decided to thwart that by any means necessary.)
I plan to read a lot.Report
Need to get the house in order. Clancy has the weekend off, which is nice.
Lain has been a bit under the weather. Not sleeping, not eating much. I’m hoping that once it passes, I’ll be feeding her lots and lots of food.
Lately my diet has mostly consisted of eating what she won’t. “Does Lain want a banana? No, I guess Daddy will have a banana. Does Lain want some eggs? No? I guess Daddy will have some eggs…”
I draw the line at the peas, though. Those go in the fridge.Report
That game you played must be a variant of a game called BANG! which is based on Spaghetti Westerns… so much so that the instructions and cards are in English and Italian. It resembles everything you said, except without dice.
Your hand is the same number of cards as your life points (different personalities have different life points, and the Sheriff gets one extra point). At first, you can only shoot the people next to you, but you can get better guns or a scope that shoot farther, a horse to be harder to hit, a barrel to duck behind, and other things.Report
Yes, that’s exactly what it is. The dice speed things up to the point where I’ve yet to see the dice make the rounds of the table twice… but I was playing a 6 man game.Report
What’s it called?Report
Finishing up repairing the hole in my roof. Gotta lay some shingles, replace some siding, add some flashing, and put the gutter back up.
I don’t feel like doing it, but it’s supposed to rain, so I guess I have little choice.Report
Unless you want an extra shower in your house.Report
@saul-degraw
Well, I didn’t get all the siding and flashing up, and we’re supposed to have thunderstorms tonight, so I just might be able to take a shower in front of my front door tonight. I wonder what the old lady actoss the street would think?Report
Maybe they will start calling you Tiger
😉Report