No house party yet Games You can’t take the sky from me Work is also a game
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
After the usual promising-but-no-promises open house on the weekend, we got a call on Monday night from a guy who made an actual offer. Sadly, it was short of our minimum price by too large a margin for us to consider it, but the guy said he’d go away and think about whether he could afford a higher price. From talking to him, Fiona thinks he can probably afford it but has a slightly warped view of house values in the area because some friends of his managed to pick up a bargain (never mind that it was a dingy, unrenovated rat hole).
So, maybe getting closer to a sale, but still not there yet. And now it’s officially spring – aka the House Selling Season – so we’re now likely to be competing with a flood of new properties on the market…
Jimbo and Chris introduced me to the HeroClix game on Monday night. I ruled their lowly arses, thanks to the (implausible) team-up of Xorn, Storm, Callisto and Hellcat. All I need to do now is learn a MTG-load of rules before I play them again, because they aren’t going to cut me the same kind of slack twice.
After that we played us some Starship Manticore, which I need to tighten up considerably with some more interesting and motivated antagonists to distract them from the minor crime they seem intent on solving. They’ve admirably thrown their characters into getting to the bottom of a strange incident from the first session, but neither of their characters has any particular crime-solving skills or interests and it’s slowing things down a lot. On top of that I’m feeling simultaneously over- and underwhelmed by the situation. Anyone feel like fielding a plot synopsis and suggestion a few new plot developments or characters?
…but you can make it too painful to watch. Fiona and I started watching the Firefly box set last night, so of course the DVD player took the opportunity to go nuts and cease functioning. It has a long history of difficulty with 20th century Fox discs (hey, don’t we all?), which made watching the Angel and Buff sets occasionally incredibly frustrating. The screen would lock up while the soundtrack continued (or didn’t), or it would just spontaneously reset to the start of the first episode. We made it through the double-length first episode – which I had already seen – and only started to misbehave during “The Train Job” (which was fun, if a bit lightweight). It went absolutely berko during “Bushwacked”, so that after a half an hour we’d only seen the first ten minutes of the episode, which was enough to make me give up.
History suggests that the next time we attempt to play this disc, there will be no problems of any kind and we will go on being lulled into a false sense of security by our malicious tormentor. If I were rich, I would secretly murder and replace the player…
I continue to have a box seat for some spectacularly inept and unsubtle office politics at work. It’s very educational. Amongst the lessons I am learning is that I would do well to manage my associations very carefully so that when the inevitable detonation of egos occurs, I am not seen to have supported any particular brand of explosive.
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