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This weekend was the first in a while for a Sunday boardgame afternoon. This weekend, we played a five player, full game Le Havre, and then followed up with a game of El Grande.
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( Click through for more detail )
Oct. 19th, 2009
This weekend was the first in a while for a Sunday boardgame afternoon. This weekend, we played a five player, full game Le Havre, and then followed up with a game of El Grande.
( Click through for more detail )
( Click through for more detail )
The dangers of resetting
Oct. 19th, 2009 10:59Resetting doesn't really solve anything if you're suffering from serious hardware issues or non-volatile storage corruption.
And, it's not clear at all that MLSE doesn't have a full-on, force ten, disaster on their hands. Having watched four out of the seven games that they have played so far, frankly, this is perhaps the worst I Leafs team I can ever remember seeing. Ever. I am not optimistic at all, even with the addition of Kessell, the seasoning of the youngsters, the settling in of the new defence-men, and the (excuse me) execrable goaltending situation, that this team can manage to rise out of the draft lottery this year.
And if they can't (and heaven forfend that they "win" the draft lottery this year), I can't imagine that Burke isn't going to get pilloried and burned in effigy by Leaf Nation.
It's shocking indeed how fundamentally bad this team has become, and it's difficult to contemplate how much worse things could get.
And, it's not clear at all that MLSE doesn't have a full-on, force ten, disaster on their hands. Having watched four out of the seven games that they have played so far, frankly, this is perhaps the worst I Leafs team I can ever remember seeing. Ever. I am not optimistic at all, even with the addition of Kessell, the seasoning of the youngsters, the settling in of the new defence-men, and the (excuse me) execrable goaltending situation, that this team can manage to rise out of the draft lottery this year.
And if they can't (and heaven forfend that they "win" the draft lottery this year), I can't imagine that Burke isn't going to get pilloried and burned in effigy by Leaf Nation.
It's shocking indeed how fundamentally bad this team has become, and it's difficult to contemplate how much worse things could get.
The dangers of resetting
Oct. 19th, 2009 10:59Resetting doesn't really solve anything if you're suffering from serious hardware issues or non-volatile storage corruption.
And, it's not clear at all that MLSE doesn't have a full-on, force ten, disaster on their hands. Having watched four out of the seven games that they have played so far, frankly, this is perhaps the worst I Leafs team I can ever remember seeing. Ever. I am not optimistic at all, even with the addition of Kessell, the seasoning of the youngsters, the settling in of the new defence-men, and the (excuse me) execrable goaltending situation, that this team can manage to rise out of the draft lottery this year.
And if they can't (and heaven forfend that they "win" the draft lottery this year), I can't imagine that Burke isn't going to get pilloried and burned in effigy by Leaf Nation.
It's shocking indeed how fundamentally bad this team has become, and it's difficult to contemplate how much worse things could get.
And, it's not clear at all that MLSE doesn't have a full-on, force ten, disaster on their hands. Having watched four out of the seven games that they have played so far, frankly, this is perhaps the worst I Leafs team I can ever remember seeing. Ever. I am not optimistic at all, even with the addition of Kessell, the seasoning of the youngsters, the settling in of the new defence-men, and the (excuse me) execrable goaltending situation, that this team can manage to rise out of the draft lottery this year.
And if they can't (and heaven forfend that they "win" the draft lottery this year), I can't imagine that Burke isn't going to get pilloried and burned in effigy by Leaf Nation.
It's shocking indeed how fundamentally bad this team has become, and it's difficult to contemplate how much worse things could get.
At one point, I thought that I was a big fan of science fiction. But then, I look at the number of SF books that I've actually read, and the particular examples that I've actually enjoyed and read with relish, and it seems plain to me that, in fact, I am not.
I seem to like otherworldness. I also seem to like optimism. Painfully precise and esoteric scientific speculation doesn't really do much for me, on the other hand and most of what the genre considers its best foot forward these days seems to me to depend rather heavily on a level of scientific or mathematic literacy that I'm not particularly interested in wading through.
For some reason I decided to take a flyer on Peter Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction", the first newly reprinted volume in his "Night's Dawn Trilogy". Perhaps it was because someone, somewhere had made the comment that this series was an example of an essentially Lovecraftian ethos: that a horrible, monstrous, "thing that man was not meant to know" lurked at the center of the universe, wholly incommensurable with the humanity that was about to pierce the barrier behind which it lay. I don't know.
What I do know was that I latched on to the 1100 pages of this first book (sic) in the series and trundled through it without much in the way of flagging or distraction. Hamilton's balance between the science behind his epic, the plot being spun, and the jovial characterization of a wide spread of figures, was pleasing.
This book reminded me, in tone, quite a lot of Herbert's "Dune" and Simmon's "Hyperion", and perhaps that's instructive as to why I liked it. It knows what it is, revels in it, and doesn't depend on any one aspect of the genre overly much.
I have ordered the two follow-on tomes, and hope to enjoy them as much as this one.
I seem to like otherworldness. I also seem to like optimism. Painfully precise and esoteric scientific speculation doesn't really do much for me, on the other hand and most of what the genre considers its best foot forward these days seems to me to depend rather heavily on a level of scientific or mathematic literacy that I'm not particularly interested in wading through.
For some reason I decided to take a flyer on Peter Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction", the first newly reprinted volume in his "Night's Dawn Trilogy". Perhaps it was because someone, somewhere had made the comment that this series was an example of an essentially Lovecraftian ethos: that a horrible, monstrous, "thing that man was not meant to know" lurked at the center of the universe, wholly incommensurable with the humanity that was about to pierce the barrier behind which it lay. I don't know.
What I do know was that I latched on to the 1100 pages of this first book (sic) in the series and trundled through it without much in the way of flagging or distraction. Hamilton's balance between the science behind his epic, the plot being spun, and the jovial characterization of a wide spread of figures, was pleasing.
This book reminded me, in tone, quite a lot of Herbert's "Dune" and Simmon's "Hyperion", and perhaps that's instructive as to why I liked it. It knows what it is, revels in it, and doesn't depend on any one aspect of the genre overly much.
I have ordered the two follow-on tomes, and hope to enjoy them as much as this one.
At one point, I thought that I was a big fan of science fiction. But then, I look at the number of SF books that I've actually read, and the particular examples that I've actually enjoyed and read with relish, and it seems plain to me that, in fact, I am not.
I seem to like otherworldness. I also seem to like optimism. Painfully precise and esoteric scientific speculation doesn't really do much for me, on the other hand and most of what the genre considers its best foot forward these days seems to me to depend rather heavily on a level of scientific or mathematic literacy that I'm not particularly interested in wading through.
For some reason I decided to take a flyer on Peter Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction", the first newly reprinted volume in his "Night's Dawn Trilogy". Perhaps it was because someone, somewhere had made the comment that this series was an example of an essentially Lovecraftian ethos: that a horrible, monstrous, "thing that man was not meant to know" lurked at the center of the universe, wholly incommensurable with the humanity that was about to pierce the barrier behind which it lay. I don't know.
What I do know was that I latched on to the 1100 pages of this first book (sic) in the series and trundled through it without much in the way of flagging or distraction. Hamilton's balance between the science behind his epic, the plot being spun, and the jovial characterization of a wide spread of figures, was pleasing.
This book reminded me, in tone, quite a lot of Herbert's "Dune" and Simmon's "Hyperion", and perhaps that's instructive as to why I liked it. It knows what it is, revels in it, and doesn't depend on any one aspect of the genre overly much.
I have ordered the two follow-on tomes, and hope to enjoy them as much as this one.
I seem to like otherworldness. I also seem to like optimism. Painfully precise and esoteric scientific speculation doesn't really do much for me, on the other hand and most of what the genre considers its best foot forward these days seems to me to depend rather heavily on a level of scientific or mathematic literacy that I'm not particularly interested in wading through.
For some reason I decided to take a flyer on Peter Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction", the first newly reprinted volume in his "Night's Dawn Trilogy". Perhaps it was because someone, somewhere had made the comment that this series was an example of an essentially Lovecraftian ethos: that a horrible, monstrous, "thing that man was not meant to know" lurked at the center of the universe, wholly incommensurable with the humanity that was about to pierce the barrier behind which it lay. I don't know.
What I do know was that I latched on to the 1100 pages of this first book (sic) in the series and trundled through it without much in the way of flagging or distraction. Hamilton's balance between the science behind his epic, the plot being spun, and the jovial characterization of a wide spread of figures, was pleasing.
This book reminded me, in tone, quite a lot of Herbert's "Dune" and Simmon's "Hyperion", and perhaps that's instructive as to why I liked it. It knows what it is, revels in it, and doesn't depend on any one aspect of the genre overly much.
I have ordered the two follow-on tomes, and hope to enjoy them as much as this one.