Year 3, quarter 1: End
Dec. 8th, 2007 09:01 pm[This entry was begun on Saturday and completed on Sunday. As usual, almost all quotes approximate... man, I haven't said that in a long time, have I? Well, you can just assume it pretty much anywhere I haven't said it.]
EDIT 10 Dec 2007: Added Chinese food story. (Do a search.)
Part 1: Victories and losses[0]
I have failed! Failed to beat Metal Slug 3 before the end of the first quarter. Grr. So close - I probably only would have needed a few more tries. Hm, I never did write that "unintentionally creepy" entry, did I? Because I was saving that for when I beat it.
Next quarter, then, for sure.
Colin and I did finally resume our Twilight Struggle feud as the quarter ended - only one game, though. I beat him. First turn I started out doing stuff in the Middle East, and he followed suit. "Huh, he must think I'm doing this because I have the Middle East scoring card or something." So I continued to lead him on there, but didn't worry so much about actually getting ahead. Turned out he had the Middle East scoring card.
I eventually won on the 5th or 6th turn - I had 15 points, and was holding scoring cards for Central America, South America, and Africa - all areas we had barely any influence in. He had 3 in Cuba, I had 1 in Panama, he had 2 in Chile, and I had 1 in South Africa - all either there from the start of the game or the result of events we didn't care much about. Coup attempt on Cuba... succeeds. He does something in the Middle East. 1 in Panama for control (and thus presence in Central America), 1 in Colombia for control (and presence in South America), while giving him a ton of influence in Africa. He does something in the Middle East. Central America scoring - 2 points for me. He does something in the Middle East. I give him even more control over Africa, and make a coup attempt on Chile, which succeeds astoundingly - I now control Chile and thus dominate South America. He does something in the Middle East. South America scoring - I win.
Turns out he was bluffing; he had a good position in the Middle East by the end of that, but he didn't have the scoring card, and was just trying to bluff me into playing there. I did think he had the scoring card, but instead I just raced him to end the game. :P (And, of course, even though I was holding the scoring card, I could afford to give him a good position in Africa for the same reason.)
I think I really won that game largely due to Colin losing a lot of points for not making coup attempts, though.
Also, maybe it's just me, but realignment rolls don't seem to come in handy all that often. The situations that obviously call for them (enemy influence in a place surrounded by your own, and Defcon high enough for it to be legal) just don't seem to come up very much. Maybe I just haven't played enough. *shrug*
Enough TS... I played a great game of Nexus Ops against Peter and Youlian, where I gutted my position for a sudden point rush - in the /middle/ of the game. Then (with the help of a few lucky die rolls, admittedly) managed to recover enough to do it again at the end for the win.
Also, I have never bought a single lava leaper any of the times I've played Nexus Ops, but I think I may finally have figured out what they're for: they're anti-dragon units. Or, more generally, a way of fighting back against large units guarded by small ones. Except, you know, the rock strider's superior speed may let it get in to attack the dragon before the dragon has a chance to plasma breath it, wherease the lava leaper's movement bonus is rarely relevant. But hey, considering how often dragons end up near the monolith, maybe it would be, if you bought them early. So, I'll try to actually think about them, in the future, but ISTM right now that if I have 12 rubium, I'd still rather get 2 rock striders most of the time than a lava leaper and whatever.
I also had an embarrasing game of Gnostica against Youlian (his first time playing) where all he did for about the first half of the game was use the Fool repeatedly. (It was a really bad starting board, though.) Yet somehow I ended up in a much worse position than him. I nearly lost to someone who spent a good deal of time essentially playing randomly. I eventually won - but only because he declared too early!
Part 2: Hannah and Sasha[4]
Somehow I don't think I've ever spoken of them. They're the RHs' kids. Hannah just turned 3, while Sasha recently started using walking as her primary means of locomotion and can't yet talk. Hannah comes out a lot less, she's a bit shy, though I think now that she knows us more that's changing. While Sasha can't yet talk, she can imitate my tongue-clicking, but doesn't seem to have much of a sense of rhythm yet. Well, I don't think I really need to give a whole introduction to them now, I really only have one story of them to relate right now.
Someone - Bryan, maybe? - recently brought Guitar Hero 2, and now when Hannah comes out she likes to go up and play it. By which I mean "hit random buttons on controller 2 while someone else plays". We tried, several times, having her actually play, on Easy, which of course did not work. I figured maybe the hitting both the button and strumming was a bit beyond her, so we tried she does the buttons, I do the strumming. Didn't work. Haven't tried the reverse yet.
Anyway, I think, what would be a game someone that age could actually play? And I think, Pitfall! I mean, I wasn't 3 when I was playing it, I don't think, but I was pretty young. (Of course, I was also playing Donkey Kong at that age, and if I had only had as much coordination as Hannah, I'd hardly have been able to climb more than 1 ladder succesfully.) But I figure, Pitfall... most people don't even know you can win and just try to explore... so I loaded up the Atari 2600 emulator on Julian's Xbox and demonstrated moving and jumping. She ran into a wall repeatedly. So I demonstrated in more detail how the game works, and then she didn't want to play.
Actually, another quick story, from O-week, before I was here. Hannah comes up to Kate Aguirre and asks her if she can read her this book she's holding. Kate doesn't want to, so she says she can't read.
Part 3: Old news and new news[3]
This doesn't really fit in anywhere, just some old news I never wrote up. Supriya writes for the Maroon, and in connection with some video game music thing happening somewhere in Chicago, she nearly got to interview Nobuo Uematsu. No joke! In the end, however, they couldn't find a translator.
As for the new news, which I'm also putting here because it doesn't fit anywhere else, when I return for 2nd quarter, I may have a new jacket. But I'll still probably have my old green one.
Part 4: Tufts at Midway
And at last we get to today[5]. Actually, I have little to say about this, except that I ran into a ridiculous number of Tufts people at the airport today. Katy, Kate, Girl Alex, Mike Boylan, Winston, Bryan, Julian, someone I forget, Joy, Colin, Sam Levin, and Emily Lu (who of course Winston and Bryan did not recognize).
...no, actually, that's not quite all. Emily Lu was on my flight, but her ride home evaporated, so she asked if I could get her a ride home. I couldn't, as we (er, my parents and I) were going to my grandmother's in Queens rather than back to New Jersey. As we leave, my mom asks me, "So that's the one, Emily, who lives in New Jersey?" Meaning, the one in Tufts House. I reply, "Mom, that's Emily Lu! From high school!" She hadn't recognized her at all. (Of course, Emily Lu did live in Tufts, but I think she was almost certainly thinking of Emily Feldman.)
This leads me to another story, the bus *to* the airport, where I encountered Katy, Kate, Girl Alex, and Mike Boylan.
"You know where I'm going?" Girl Alex asks me.
"To the airport?"
"Yup. And you know where Mike's going?"
"To the airport?"
"Yup. And you know where Kate's going?"
"To the airport?"
"Yup. And you know where Katy's going?"
"To the airport, possibly even on the same flight as me?"
"No, she's just along for the ride." (This was true.)
Anyway, as it happened, Girl Alex had recently been in the hospital with an ovarian cyst, but she was out in two days and had just been taking painkillers. I comment, you were out rather quickly. I was in for two days, she says, and the process of getting out was not easy. Well, I say, I once tore a hole in my esophagus, started vomiting blood, and was in the hospital for a week (largely due to my having lupus anticoagulant and their not knowing about it, which was screwing up their readings). And I say how they stuck a tube up my nose. (Apparently it was only in for a day, according to the entry, but it sure felt like longer than that... or at least it's expanded to such in my bad memory.) Anyway - I say about why they put the tube up my nose, and how much it hurt (Katy tells a story about someone throwing up when he had a tube forced into his nose, which is weird because the reason they put the tube in your nose in the first place is to prevent gagging), and I say, but I'm sure you must have had it worse. But she says, no, I was on painkillers. Well, if that's not a license to go ahead... so whenever Alex said something about being in the hospital, and the comparison made sense, I would say, "And I had a tube up my nose." (And Katy, Kate, and Alex would all act disgusted.) Until finally we actually arrive at the airport and Girl Alex is once again speaking of how they were feeding her through IV, and I simply say, "I'm not going to say anything."
Part 5: A second Chanukkah
So I arrive home and Elana calls on the phone, and after speaking to Mom and Dad for a while, she asks for me. So she tells me, since she's missing Chanukkah entirely, we're going to have a second Chanukkah when she gets home.
"Really? A second Chanukkah? Are you going to bring 8 days' worth of oil?"
"Well..."
"Sorry, rather, one day's worth of oil and make it last for 8."
"I think that would require a miracle."
"Well, that would justify a second Chanukkah."
"Well, we had a second Thanksgiving when you came home."
Of course, I didn't ask for any such thing (Elana did, Mom told me later), but instead I say,
"Well, people seemed pretty thankful."
So she goes with her stock response of "You're mean."
Speaking of Chanukkah, when we arrived home we immediately went to my grandmother's house (as I mentioned above) and then went to this Chinese restaurant she likes. Much later, my mom commented, "So this is how we celebrate Chanukkah - we go out for Chinese food." I replied, "I guess it's not so different from Christmas after all, then."
Part 6: The pinball machine
Finally, the pinball machine. Today[7] we were up at my grandma's house[8], where they have an old (non-coin-op) pinball machine, by the name of Star Explorer. My grandfather had repaired it many times, taping down bits that were popping up and interfering with the ball. (Of course, the tape itself interfered considerably, but...) Well, it happened today that I was playing it, and I got the ball in the "bonus score" kickout, and it did kick the ball out but the trigger remained stuck down, so the score counter just kept going up. Well, I come upstairs and I say, I broke the pinball machine. So we go back downstairs, get a screwdriver, take the top off, and find there's a bit of tape that's gotten stuck in there. Mom was shocked at all the old loose tape, so we took it out and put down new tape. And we put it all back together, and... all of a sudden the flippers didn't work. Huh? We didn't have time to investigate, and IPDB (see above) had no useful information. Weird.
...I think that covers everything.
-Harry
[0]"$X and anti-$X" is a really convenient naming formula, isn't it?
[3]"$X $Y and anti-$X Y" is pretty good, too.
[4]Not quite opposites.
[5]Saturday.
[7]Sunday.
[8]Not the same one as before.
EDIT 10 Dec 2007: Added Chinese food story. (Do a search.)
Part 1: Victories and losses[0]
I have failed! Failed to beat Metal Slug 3 before the end of the first quarter. Grr. So close - I probably only would have needed a few more tries. Hm, I never did write that "unintentionally creepy" entry, did I? Because I was saving that for when I beat it.
Next quarter, then, for sure.
Colin and I did finally resume our Twilight Struggle feud as the quarter ended - only one game, though. I beat him. First turn I started out doing stuff in the Middle East, and he followed suit. "Huh, he must think I'm doing this because I have the Middle East scoring card or something." So I continued to lead him on there, but didn't worry so much about actually getting ahead. Turned out he had the Middle East scoring card.
I eventually won on the 5th or 6th turn - I had 15 points, and was holding scoring cards for Central America, South America, and Africa - all areas we had barely any influence in. He had 3 in Cuba, I had 1 in Panama, he had 2 in Chile, and I had 1 in South Africa - all either there from the start of the game or the result of events we didn't care much about. Coup attempt on Cuba... succeeds. He does something in the Middle East. 1 in Panama for control (and thus presence in Central America), 1 in Colombia for control (and presence in South America), while giving him a ton of influence in Africa. He does something in the Middle East. Central America scoring - 2 points for me. He does something in the Middle East. I give him even more control over Africa, and make a coup attempt on Chile, which succeeds astoundingly - I now control Chile and thus dominate South America. He does something in the Middle East. South America scoring - I win.
Turns out he was bluffing; he had a good position in the Middle East by the end of that, but he didn't have the scoring card, and was just trying to bluff me into playing there. I did think he had the scoring card, but instead I just raced him to end the game. :P (And, of course, even though I was holding the scoring card, I could afford to give him a good position in Africa for the same reason.)
I think I really won that game largely due to Colin losing a lot of points for not making coup attempts, though.
Also, maybe it's just me, but realignment rolls don't seem to come in handy all that often. The situations that obviously call for them (enemy influence in a place surrounded by your own, and Defcon high enough for it to be legal) just don't seem to come up very much. Maybe I just haven't played enough. *shrug*
Enough TS... I played a great game of Nexus Ops against Peter and Youlian, where I gutted my position for a sudden point rush - in the /middle/ of the game. Then (with the help of a few lucky die rolls, admittedly) managed to recover enough to do it again at the end for the win.
Also, I have never bought a single lava leaper any of the times I've played Nexus Ops, but I think I may finally have figured out what they're for: they're anti-dragon units. Or, more generally, a way of fighting back against large units guarded by small ones. Except, you know, the rock strider's superior speed may let it get in to attack the dragon before the dragon has a chance to plasma breath it, wherease the lava leaper's movement bonus is rarely relevant. But hey, considering how often dragons end up near the monolith, maybe it would be, if you bought them early. So, I'll try to actually think about them, in the future, but ISTM right now that if I have 12 rubium, I'd still rather get 2 rock striders most of the time than a lava leaper and whatever.
I also had an embarrasing game of Gnostica against Youlian (his first time playing) where all he did for about the first half of the game was use the Fool repeatedly. (It was a really bad starting board, though.) Yet somehow I ended up in a much worse position than him. I nearly lost to someone who spent a good deal of time essentially playing randomly. I eventually won - but only because he declared too early!
Part 2: Hannah and Sasha[4]
Somehow I don't think I've ever spoken of them. They're the RHs' kids. Hannah just turned 3, while Sasha recently started using walking as her primary means of locomotion and can't yet talk. Hannah comes out a lot less, she's a bit shy, though I think now that she knows us more that's changing. While Sasha can't yet talk, she can imitate my tongue-clicking, but doesn't seem to have much of a sense of rhythm yet. Well, I don't think I really need to give a whole introduction to them now, I really only have one story of them to relate right now.
Someone - Bryan, maybe? - recently brought Guitar Hero 2, and now when Hannah comes out she likes to go up and play it. By which I mean "hit random buttons on controller 2 while someone else plays". We tried, several times, having her actually play, on Easy, which of course did not work. I figured maybe the hitting both the button and strumming was a bit beyond her, so we tried she does the buttons, I do the strumming. Didn't work. Haven't tried the reverse yet.
Anyway, I think, what would be a game someone that age could actually play? And I think, Pitfall! I mean, I wasn't 3 when I was playing it, I don't think, but I was pretty young. (Of course, I was also playing Donkey Kong at that age, and if I had only had as much coordination as Hannah, I'd hardly have been able to climb more than 1 ladder succesfully.) But I figure, Pitfall... most people don't even know you can win and just try to explore... so I loaded up the Atari 2600 emulator on Julian's Xbox and demonstrated moving and jumping. She ran into a wall repeatedly. So I demonstrated in more detail how the game works, and then she didn't want to play.
Actually, another quick story, from O-week, before I was here. Hannah comes up to Kate Aguirre and asks her if she can read her this book she's holding. Kate doesn't want to, so she says she can't read.
Part 3: Old news and new news[3]
This doesn't really fit in anywhere, just some old news I never wrote up. Supriya writes for the Maroon, and in connection with some video game music thing happening somewhere in Chicago, she nearly got to interview Nobuo Uematsu. No joke! In the end, however, they couldn't find a translator.
As for the new news, which I'm also putting here because it doesn't fit anywhere else, when I return for 2nd quarter, I may have a new jacket. But I'll still probably have my old green one.
Part 4: Tufts at Midway
And at last we get to today[5]. Actually, I have little to say about this, except that I ran into a ridiculous number of Tufts people at the airport today. Katy, Kate, Girl Alex, Mike Boylan, Winston, Bryan, Julian, someone I forget, Joy, Colin, Sam Levin, and Emily Lu (who of course Winston and Bryan did not recognize).
...no, actually, that's not quite all. Emily Lu was on my flight, but her ride home evaporated, so she asked if I could get her a ride home. I couldn't, as we (er, my parents and I) were going to my grandmother's in Queens rather than back to New Jersey. As we leave, my mom asks me, "So that's the one, Emily, who lives in New Jersey?" Meaning, the one in Tufts House. I reply, "Mom, that's Emily Lu! From high school!" She hadn't recognized her at all. (Of course, Emily Lu did live in Tufts, but I think she was almost certainly thinking of Emily Feldman.)
This leads me to another story, the bus *to* the airport, where I encountered Katy, Kate, Girl Alex, and Mike Boylan.
"You know where I'm going?" Girl Alex asks me.
"To the airport?"
"Yup. And you know where Mike's going?"
"To the airport?"
"Yup. And you know where Kate's going?"
"To the airport?"
"Yup. And you know where Katy's going?"
"To the airport, possibly even on the same flight as me?"
"No, she's just along for the ride." (This was true.)
Anyway, as it happened, Girl Alex had recently been in the hospital with an ovarian cyst, but she was out in two days and had just been taking painkillers. I comment, you were out rather quickly. I was in for two days, she says, and the process of getting out was not easy. Well, I say, I once tore a hole in my esophagus, started vomiting blood, and was in the hospital for a week (largely due to my having lupus anticoagulant and their not knowing about it, which was screwing up their readings). And I say how they stuck a tube up my nose. (Apparently it was only in for a day, according to the entry, but it sure felt like longer than that... or at least it's expanded to such in my bad memory.) Anyway - I say about why they put the tube up my nose, and how much it hurt (Katy tells a story about someone throwing up when he had a tube forced into his nose, which is weird because the reason they put the tube in your nose in the first place is to prevent gagging), and I say, but I'm sure you must have had it worse. But she says, no, I was on painkillers. Well, if that's not a license to go ahead... so whenever Alex said something about being in the hospital, and the comparison made sense, I would say, "And I had a tube up my nose." (And Katy, Kate, and Alex would all act disgusted.) Until finally we actually arrive at the airport and Girl Alex is once again speaking of how they were feeding her through IV, and I simply say, "I'm not going to say anything."
Part 5: A second Chanukkah
So I arrive home and Elana calls on the phone, and after speaking to Mom and Dad for a while, she asks for me. So she tells me, since she's missing Chanukkah entirely, we're going to have a second Chanukkah when she gets home.
"Really? A second Chanukkah? Are you going to bring 8 days' worth of oil?"
"Well..."
"Sorry, rather, one day's worth of oil and make it last for 8."
"I think that would require a miracle."
"Well, that would justify a second Chanukkah."
"Well, we had a second Thanksgiving when you came home."
Of course, I didn't ask for any such thing (Elana did, Mom told me later), but instead I say,
"Well, people seemed pretty thankful."
So she goes with her stock response of "You're mean."
Speaking of Chanukkah, when we arrived home we immediately went to my grandmother's house (as I mentioned above) and then went to this Chinese restaurant she likes. Much later, my mom commented, "So this is how we celebrate Chanukkah - we go out for Chinese food." I replied, "I guess it's not so different from Christmas after all, then."
Part 6: The pinball machine
Finally, the pinball machine. Today[7] we were up at my grandma's house[8], where they have an old (non-coin-op) pinball machine, by the name of Star Explorer. My grandfather had repaired it many times, taping down bits that were popping up and interfering with the ball. (Of course, the tape itself interfered considerably, but...) Well, it happened today that I was playing it, and I got the ball in the "bonus score" kickout, and it did kick the ball out but the trigger remained stuck down, so the score counter just kept going up. Well, I come upstairs and I say, I broke the pinball machine. So we go back downstairs, get a screwdriver, take the top off, and find there's a bit of tape that's gotten stuck in there. Mom was shocked at all the old loose tape, so we took it out and put down new tape. And we put it all back together, and... all of a sudden the flippers didn't work. Huh? We didn't have time to investigate, and IPDB (see above) had no useful information. Weird.
...I think that covers everything.
-Harry
[0]"$X and anti-$X" is a really convenient naming formula, isn't it?
[3]"$X $Y and anti-$X Y" is pretty good, too.
[4]Not quite opposites.
[5]Saturday.
[7]Sunday.
[8]Not the same one as before.
