Areas of Unrest

5 November 2000 - But Robots Are So Cute!

QOTD: "A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn’t have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it." - Russell Baker

Reading: Daniel Pinkwater, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror

Listening to: Ondar, Back Tuva Future

Today's title is the explanation I used for my strategy while we were playing Outpost this afternoon. It was actually a fairly good strategy. I bought robots instead of a warehouse, so I was limited to holding five cards. That meant I had to keep investing my money in titanium factories (with lots of cute little robots to run them), letting me rake in the cash each turn. I still ended up losing to Lonnie by two points, probably because I got my moon base one turn too late. It was fun, anyway. Wizard's Quest was less fun than I remembered, though, probably because we had never tried the six player version before. There were more orcs around and each person had less territory to start with. That made the play slower and a bit tedious towards the end.

Before gaming, I'd been over in Westwood doing the photo shoot for the Bards' concert in February. Dino has a friend who's a photographer and had set things up. So we spent an hour or so being draped in various odd and uncomfortable positions around this thing in the park that is either a piece of playground equipment or a piece of art. We had to fend off various children who wanted to climb on the Thing, but we'll probably have some fun photos out of it. The poses were a little bit limited since Greg had broken a rib in a car accident earlier in the week. He'd brought Dobby (his wife) along and we had a nice chat about the upcoming election. Barry had brought J.J. (his daughter) with him and it was fun to watch them together, particularly since J.J. is throughly adorable and a natural ham. We did several group photos, both with and without Dino (since she won't be performing in this concert), and a few individual shots since there was film left. It's always useful to have publicity photos, so I hope some turn out well.

By the way, just to keep me from having any real spare time this weekend, I went to the Contemporary Crafts Market in Santa Monica yesterday. This is a twice a year event and is, by far, the best crafts show in the L.A. area. As usual, I bought a lot of odds and ends. There were a few pieces of jewelry I couldn't resist, for example. But my best purchase was some glassware - two wine flutes with a design of dragonflies etched on them, a green shot glass with bats, and a black shot glass with spiders.

I never did get around to anything on my lengthy list of stuff to do, alas. By the way, my ISP is still not responding to dial-ups, so I'm not sure when I can upload this. And, of course, their customer service number only gets answered during office hours, so it's unlikely that I'll get help before the morning. I really need to get around to finding a backup ISP, but I don't really want to do that before I get a new computer, which might be waiting until I fix the phone jack in my bedroom (which I broke about six months ago). I could really use some of those nice cute shiny robots to run my apartment. That must be easier than handling all those titanium factories.