Another Fun Little Weekend

Another happy fun little weekend. Troma Night on Saturday was particularly good: we watched both Kill Bill films back-to-back, along with the usual collection of other crap. Not-gay Gareth couldn’t make it, in the end (his parents are visiting this weekend), so we may have to see him some other weekend.

We’ve proposed a few more traditions for Troma Night. The first of these – and the one most likely to be implemented – is that of the “Honourary New Person”: following in the traditions of “Honourary Kit” and “Honourary Claire”, this tradition would dictate that whenever somebody comes to Troma Night for the first time, another person (a regular) is nominated “Honourary New Person”, and has the rules and traditions explained to them, and is teased mercilessly for the real new person’s lack of knowledge.

Other proposed new traditions were ‘tried out’ at Geek Night, on Sunday, such as an “Honourary JTA And Ruth” – the latter of which punches the former every time anybody insults the real Ruth. Of course, the real Ruth is eligible for nomination to be “Honourary Ruth” or even “Honourary JTA”!

Geek Night itself was fun, but a little drawn-out. We started with a longer-than-usual game of Carcassonne, this time with both the expansion packs that we have. The latter, “Traders And Builders”, really does add an extra something to the game. I won (miraculously, I thought Andy, just one point behind me, was going to!), after a long battle over a few key farms and two large cities.

We went on to play Munchkin. A very long game, with all of us waiting on level 9 for a long time. I spent most of the game as a woman, after an early sex change. Ruth looked most likely to win for a long while, then Andy and I tried to gang up and “win together”, just to get the game over with! Eventually, I won with a lucky draw at just the right time. A little luck had me win twice this Geek Night. Good-o.

We should have played Hacker, but for some reason everybody else seemed to think that Munchkin would be quicker. Ha!

In other news, after my revelation about ACME Computer Games I gave them a bell. They have none of my stuff in stock and it may be several weeks before they do. Five minutes later the called me back and told me that, actually, he had just found a copy of Fluxx and would be posting it to me ASAP.

Oh, and JTA‘s moved his blog over to it’s new home. Go take a look: I’m quite proud of the design I helped him with.

I Don’t Think ACME Get Many Customers

I recently bought three board games (Munchkin 3, Fluxx and Puerto Rico) from ACME Computer Games in Bangor (yes, I know, the same guys who got confused over my order before…). Somehow, I don’t think they get many e-customers: I just grabbed this screenshot from their web site –

Screenshot showing Munchkin 3 and 'People who bought this also bought:' listing Fluxx and Peurto Rico

Notice that I’m looking at Munchkin 3, and the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought says… yes, my two other purchases. And nothing else. Hmm.

Still no sign of my order, or any word from them (I placed the order over a week ago). Better give them a bell, I think.

×

Munchkin game… Of Doom!

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.

Ruth wrote:

Dan: “Let’s play Hacker!”
Andy: “No, let’s play Munchkin. It’ll be shorter.”
General Agreement3 and a half hours later:

Dan finally wins. All players have been at level nine almost constantly for about half an hour. Several attempts at winning have been made, but all have been prevented, mostly by Andy. Dan wins by one point, in the face of all the cards Matt and Andy had left to prevent him.
All cheer. Except Andy, who nearly chokes on a pringle at having his plot foiled.

And now for something completely different…

…I like to call it sleep.

PS no idea why this is down this side. Pressed something randomly, too tired to try and fix it.

PPS O. Now it isn’t. Odd.

National Full-Stop Shortage

Extract from a personal (online) conversation, today:

Rockmonkey: it was very boring well no not boring but i could understand law like u and a simple web site so didn’t pay attention and explained it to others after
AvaPoet: Here, have a packet of full stops, you must have run out: [……………..]

Bubba Ho-Tep

What’s everybody doing tommorow (Thursday) night? Wanna go see Bubba Ho-Tep at the Arts Centre cinema? It scores 7.6 on the IMDB, so it’s better than most of the crap we watch. I’m trying to avoid learning too much about it in case I ‘kill’ it, but here’s the plot outline according to the IMDB: “Elvis and JFK, both alive and in nursing homes, fight for the souls of their fellow residents as they battle an ancient Egyptian Mummy.” Sounds like a must-see to me!

Thanks to Not-Gay Gareth, who I saw for the first time in years, yesterday, for this recommendation.

In other news, the U.S. election is looking very tight. Just three states left to call, two votes in it (lead to Bush), and a recount underway in Ohio… which will make the difference, one way or another…

Not-Gay Gareth

Not-Gay Gareth Is Back In Town!

By sheer coincidence, I bumped into not-gay Gareth, a friend of mine from my second year, who studied Film & TV while working as a projectionist at the Arts Centre cinema. It’s him who introduced me to both Troma and Studio Ghibli, and therefore him who’s (inadvertently) been a huge influence on the appearance of Troma Night – after all; without him, I may never have had that conversation with Paul that led to the decision to have Troma Night One.

So… I invited him along to this Saturday’s Troma Night.

Not-gay Gareth is also the guy “behind the camera” for Team CompSci’s “The Matrix”, the spoof that won Rory, John, Dom, Huw and I the “Best Presentation” award (and a nice cash prize) at the 2001 Student Skills Competition – a spectacular feat still talked about within Aber’s Department of Computer Science. With Claire, Paul and Ruth competing on behalf of Comp. Sci in the 2005 competition, I suddenly feel very old again. =o/

In other news, I’ve developed WikiBridgePuzzle on RockMonkey, a re-interpretation of a classic puzzle.

Catch ye all later!

Update – 12 October 2018: This blog post was also crossposted to the Troma Night website at the time, where I added:

As I’ve just recently mentioned on my blog, not-gay Gareth is back in town. This is relevant because it’s this guy – who I lived with in my second year – that gave me my initial interest in Troma and in Studio Ghibli. In fact; were it not for him, it’s unlikely that I’d ever have had the conversation with Paul that led to the creation of the very first Troma Night.

In any case, I’ve invited him along to an upcoming Troma Night. I’m sure you’ll all give him the welcome he deserves…

Tigris And Orkney

A somewhat low-key Geek Night last night: just a game of Munchkin and a game of the stunning Tigris & Euphrates. Matt won the Munchkin battle, with a cleverly executed win against a monster while he was at level 8, which we let him get away with (the other three of us were level 9’s) but we forgot that he was an orc and therefore able to claim an extra level by beating a monster sufficiently well. Bastard.

I won Tigris, in a very close finish – joint with Claire with eight points… so we went to the second (of four) categories (a ‘tie-breaker’)… on which wee were also joint with eight points… so we went to the third category, on which she also had eight points but I had nine. Bryn came third, with Andy coming in last, with just four points in his weakest category, Religion. I’d thought throughout the game that he was doing better than that, and it came as a surprise to me to see that I’d beaten him. I’m good at the strategy of the game, but I’m not so good at estimating other player’s scores.

Received two items of post from the Orkney isles this morning. The first was a postcard from Kit, including a picture of a blockade built by German POWs in the second world war, who were told that it was for people to drive across. The other was a letter from Kit and Fiona thanking us for our wedding present and our attendance at their wedding last week. The latter was addressed to “Troma Night”, so I’ll try to remember to read it out to everybody on Saturday.

Back at work – today’s bug only seems to occur on Mondays. Better get coding…

Halloween In Aber

I’m a big bad wolf, it seems. And last night I, along with Little Red Riding Hood (Claire), Death (Bryn), Paul (Andy!), Judge Doom [barely] (JTA), Pinocchio (Matt), and Matt (not in costume… grr), went out to the Coopers Arms to see Pagan Wanderer Lu. And he was good – some songs I knew, some songs I didn’t: tried to buy a CD at the end but it was £3 and Claire and I only had a £20 note between us and he evidently hadn’t sold £17 worth (i.e. 6) CDs yet because he couldn’t give us change so he’s holding one for us. Nothing rhymes with ‘Aberystwyth’, by the way.

We didn’t stay for much longer, because by this point the room was very full and very hot (particularly with us all in costumes)… so we bailed and went for a sly drink in Scholars, before retiring to the flat to watch My Neighbours, The Yamadas. Which was good.

Hmm… what’s everybody else saying:

ClaireMelton Wanted Even More Than MisterJTA

I’ve been playing around on RockMonkey a little much these last two days (it’s a wiki-based site I’ve helped Andy set up. Today, while browsing the WantedPages list (a list of pages that have been referenced by other pages but not yet defined) I noticed something interesting: the most-wanted entry is… ClaireMelton: eight pages reference my dear Claire, but nobody has dared to define her. More interesting still is that MisterJTA is also wanted, and the pages that reference him are as follows:

What a wonderful definition is sure to come from this start.

Meanwhile, I’m spending far too little time working, which means that I’ve got lots to do this Friday – servers to set up, code to write, clients to beat off with a stick… still; nearly the weekend now.

Went with Bryn and Claire last night, for the second of their three-day real ale festival. Tried a few fabulous brews, which was a nice distraction from all the things I’m supposed to be getting on with.

Back to it…