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[WTS]
Happy Endings :|
The director, like
the director in the film,
seems to try too hard.
Strange Soviet Buildings
"I have been taking some LL games with me to the boys'
school classes. They have one class on Monday and one on Thursday.
I end up playing a lot of Treehouse with the kids in the Study
Hall. Usually they are around 5-7th grade. Today a little girl
played. She is about 4. She usually just has fun stacking the
pyramids on her own. But she played Treehouse today. She lucked
in rolling the ones she understood -- HOP, TIP and SWAP usually.
Being so young, none of the other players paid any attention
to her. She won. She was SO THRILLED to beat all the big kids.
Just thought I'd share." -- Kimberly
Terrill, posting to the Rabbit list, 11/9/6
   
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Hobnobbing with the Trimbles |
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 Over
the weekend, Kristin
and I went up to Rochester
New York to attend Astronomicon
10. Although we're generally trying to cut back for now on
the shows we attend, we find it hard to say no when offered the
VIP treatment as their official Gaming Guests of Honor, so we
went!
Although the weather was yucky and we didn't get to see much
of Rochester, we had a great time at Astronomicon. We played
our games all weekend in the GameZone, and they sold well in
the dealer's room, where they were being sold on our behalf at
the table of our friends over at Laughing
Pan Productions. Beside playing lots of games, we also attended
and presented panel discussions, checked out the art show, went
to parties, and generally just had fun hanging out.
The best part about any convention is getting to meet new
people, and we made some great new friends this week: The Trimbles!
Bjo
and John Trimble were the Fan Guests of Honor at Astronomicon
10, and I got excited about meeting them as soon as I heard they'd
be there.
Of course, unless you're a Star
Trek Geek like me, you may not recognize the name, even though
her Wikipedia
entry describes Bjo as "one of the most significant
figures in the history of science fiction fandom." This
entry mentions many of her accomplishments (including the fact
that she created the concept of the sci-fi con Art Show, 3 years
before I was born), but oddly enough Wikipedia currently doesn't
identify the landmark reference book which first put her name
into my own brain: The
Star Trek Concordance. This excellent book is a comprehensive
guide to Star Trek knowledge circa 1976 (i.e. after the Animated
Series but before the first movie). The STC was one of my most
prized possessions when I was in Jr. High School... it occupied
a spot of Bible-like importance on top of the TV for years (eventually
being ousted from that sacred position by Marc
Scott Zicree's Twilight Zone Companion).
So of course, it was a particular pleasure for me to meet
Bjo Trimble and gush about how much that book meant to me, a
meeting made all the more fun for me by the fact that she'd heard
of me and enjoyed one of my creations as well! When she found
out I was the inventor of Fluxx,
Bjo described the hilarious time she'd had once, trying to learn
Fluxx from a group of drunken people during a thunderstorm. Turns
out she has family on both coasts who are fans of our games,
and she and John and their daughter Jenn spent far more time
than they'd ever expected to at this con playing games and hanging
out in our gaming space. (That's John and Bjo, by the way, learning
to play my newest game Martian
Coasters from Kristin, in the photo above.)
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| Anyway, it was great fun getting to meet Bjo Trimble and
her family. As Captain Kirk said at the end of "Mirror,
Mirror" (my favorite episode), "She just seems to be
a nice, likable girl... I think we could become friends!"
(Speaking of which, during her slide show, Bjo told a great story
about how she helped Nichelle Nichols get away with showing off
her belly button during the filming of that episode... so if
it hadn't been for Bjo taking the observer from Standards &
Practices out for a long lunch, who knows, we might have been
deprived of seeing Uhura's tummy!) |
Thanks for reading, and have a great week! |
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I'm calling for a minor change to the rules for Homeworlds.
Instead of allowing the first player to enjoy the dual advantages
of being one move ahead and getting the best choice from among
the Homeworld configuration options, I think the player who goes
last should get the first choice for Homeworld setup. (When more
than 2 are playing, the Homeworld selection phase should be done
in reverse turn order.) |
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Segregation has ended among the felines in our household!
In August we
got a new kitten and we've been keeping her isolated from
LittleCat, since whenever they got near each other, they immediately
tried to kill the enemy cat. But while we were gone, Alison decided
that the "getting used to each other" phase had gone
on long enough, and opened the border. Squabbles are still common
between the black and white spies, but they're working it out
and starting to get along! Yay! |
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I really enjoyed the two
lists John posted last week, of good and bad things about
our country. A few examples, of Good: "We have invented
amazing things, like the internet, lasers, and jazz," and
"We have sent men to the Moon, and robots to other planets
and outer space," and of Bad: "We torture people. We
execute people. We start wars. Our prison population is one of
the highest in the world. Our murder rate is one of the highest
in the world. We have prohibitions against certain drugs, consensual
sex, and gambling." I notice John found 13 Bad things but
only 10 Good things to list. Does that means our country is more
bad than good? |
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