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A good mix of activities over the last seven days.
Games: Boardgame group has resumed, with the added bonus of two ridiculously cute and rambunctious new kittens. We played Everdell. And I mean played. We spent four hours on this 80 minute game, largely because the group's major in-it-to-win-it player went into full-on grandmaster mode when it began looking, halfway in, that they were not going to win and began taking 15 minute turns to game out hail Mary strategies.
They ultimately ended up winning, with a score nearly double that of the next highest player's, at which point...
...Specifically, our player had achieved their runaway success by forgetting that you can't have multiple unique cards in your village (a rule created precisely because the stacked effects of multiple unique cards in this scenario is too OP to allow for competitive gameplay). This is funny to remember now but it was even moreso to us at the time, when we were already slap happy from being up in the middle of the night, after a long gaming session, after a long week.
Music: We saw Nine Inch Nails, a phenomenal show and perhaps my favorite of the three times I've seen NIN live (the first with A Perfect Circle opening; the second their "final" show at Summer Sonic in Osaka). The GC, by contrast, had never seen them before and if you only had to see one of those shows, I think this was the one.
We had upper mid-level seats, which was an excellent choice because although the actual band members looked like ants at that distance, we had great sightlines on both stages, the visual effects screens, the crowd, and the insane soundboard setup (+ the soundboard personnel who at times were going as hard as anyone on the floor), and I don't think our views would have been anywhere near as good anywhere else. (That said, the pit looked insane and I am kinda bummed I was not in it; OTOH, I doubt anyone who was in it saw more than the tops of the band members' heads.)
NIN is an old enough act that I figured they would play all of the big hits, and they did: Closer, Hand that Feeds, Head Like a Hole, Hurt, Perfect Drug. They didn't play three of the tracks I've never seen live but want to: Happiness in Slavery, Ruiner, and Survivalism. But they also played a bunch of stuff—including some deeper cuts—I was very excited to hear live: Copy of a, I'm Afraid of Americans (!!), March of the Pigs, Mr. Self Destruct, Gave Up (!!!!), Reptile (!!) Wish. Gave Up is in my top ten Nails tracks and I'd never seen it live before, so that was incredible. As was Josh Freese, who I'd seen live with A Perfect Circle and The Offspring before, but never with NIN. That man is a goddamn MACHINE, which you always sort of know but forget just how much of one until you're actually watching him drum. So yeah, freaking amazing show. I wish I could watch it all over again.
Monday's house session had seven people—the biggest attendance since I've started playing with this group, and a commensurately big sound. The number of players also meant each individual called fewer sets but we played a bigger range of sets, and at different tempos, than the norm, which was both challenging and fun. And I'm going to adopt a few of those sets for my own calls in future sessions.
Podcasts/Articles: No podcasts. I did read a couple of longform articles: Apocalypse No: How almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong and The Privileged Life and Tragic Death of an 11-Year-Old Tipperary Girl.
Roleplaying: Nothing.
Television: We finished the final episode of Max Headroom season 2, and with it, the entirety of Max Headroom itself. The final episode, Grobags, never aired during the series' first televised run and that is...not a bad thing. The plot itself is convoluted and not entirely cohesive, and predicated on the idea that women no longer having to gestate human babies within their own bodies is freakish and unnatural—an opinion explicitly voiced by several characters at several points throughout the episode. And, is it though? More freakish than what pregnancy and childbirth naturally do to women's bodies? Even "easy" pregnancies and "easy" childbirths? More freakish than surrogacy? More freakish than sperm donation? Paired with the vintage "only in the 80s" casual misogyny and racism of Headroom's ::cough:: comedic monologue that closes out the episode, you don't have a winner. Even the big plot development with Bryce isn't enough to save it. I'm glad th episode never aired during the original run; to me Lessons is the cannonical final episode, and it's just superior in every way. All that said, Max Headroom is still one of the shows that was before its time, and cancelled before its time, and setting aside the few dud episodes it still absolutely holds up.
Video Games: Nothing this week, what with the concert + standing post-work activities + peace monkpocalypse during my commute.
これで以上です。
Games: Boardgame group has resumed, with the added bonus of two ridiculously cute and rambunctious new kittens. We played Everdell. And I mean played. We spent four hours on this 80 minute game, largely because the group's major in-it-to-win-it player went into full-on grandmaster mode when it began looking, halfway in, that they were not going to win and began taking 15 minute turns to game out hail Mary strategies.
They ultimately ended up winning, with a score nearly double that of the next highest player's, at which point...
...Specifically, our player had achieved their runaway success by forgetting that you can't have multiple unique cards in your village (a rule created precisely because the stacked effects of multiple unique cards in this scenario is too OP to allow for competitive gameplay). This is funny to remember now but it was even moreso to us at the time, when we were already slap happy from being up in the middle of the night, after a long gaming session, after a long week.
Music: We saw Nine Inch Nails, a phenomenal show and perhaps my favorite of the three times I've seen NIN live (the first with A Perfect Circle opening; the second their "final" show at Summer Sonic in Osaka). The GC, by contrast, had never seen them before and if you only had to see one of those shows, I think this was the one.
We had upper mid-level seats, which was an excellent choice because although the actual band members looked like ants at that distance, we had great sightlines on both stages, the visual effects screens, the crowd, and the insane soundboard setup (+ the soundboard personnel who at times were going as hard as anyone on the floor), and I don't think our views would have been anywhere near as good anywhere else. (That said, the pit looked insane and I am kinda bummed I was not in it; OTOH, I doubt anyone who was in it saw more than the tops of the band members' heads.)
NIN is an old enough act that I figured they would play all of the big hits, and they did: Closer, Hand that Feeds, Head Like a Hole, Hurt, Perfect Drug. They didn't play three of the tracks I've never seen live but want to: Happiness in Slavery, Ruiner, and Survivalism. But they also played a bunch of stuff—including some deeper cuts—I was very excited to hear live: Copy of a, I'm Afraid of Americans (!!), March of the Pigs, Mr. Self Destruct, Gave Up (!!!!), Reptile (!!) Wish. Gave Up is in my top ten Nails tracks and I'd never seen it live before, so that was incredible. As was Josh Freese, who I'd seen live with A Perfect Circle and The Offspring before, but never with NIN. That man is a goddamn MACHINE, which you always sort of know but forget just how much of one until you're actually watching him drum. So yeah, freaking amazing show. I wish I could watch it all over again.
Monday's house session had seven people—the biggest attendance since I've started playing with this group, and a commensurately big sound. The number of players also meant each individual called fewer sets but we played a bigger range of sets, and at different tempos, than the norm, which was both challenging and fun. And I'm going to adopt a few of those sets for my own calls in future sessions.
Podcasts/Articles: No podcasts. I did read a couple of longform articles: Apocalypse No: How almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong and The Privileged Life and Tragic Death of an 11-Year-Old Tipperary Girl.
Roleplaying: Nothing.
Television: We finished the final episode of Max Headroom season 2, and with it, the entirety of Max Headroom itself. The final episode, Grobags, never aired during the series' first televised run and that is...not a bad thing. The plot itself is convoluted and not entirely cohesive, and predicated on the idea that women no longer having to gestate human babies within their own bodies is freakish and unnatural—an opinion explicitly voiced by several characters at several points throughout the episode. And, is it though? More freakish than what pregnancy and childbirth naturally do to women's bodies? Even "easy" pregnancies and "easy" childbirths? More freakish than surrogacy? More freakish than sperm donation? Paired with the vintage "only in the 80s" casual misogyny and racism of Headroom's ::cough:: comedic monologue that closes out the episode, you don't have a winner. Even the big plot development with Bryce isn't enough to save it. I'm glad th episode never aired during the original run; to me Lessons is the cannonical final episode, and it's just superior in every way. All that said, Max Headroom is still one of the shows that was before its time, and cancelled before its time, and setting aside the few dud episodes it still absolutely holds up.
Video Games: Nothing this week, what with the concert + standing post-work activities + peace monkpocalypse during my commute.
これで以上です。
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