Greenenders Spinoff -- Tolkien Society

OK, maybe I'm a spin off of them, or perhaps poohsoc, but you know what I mean. Anyway, conclusions from the meeting:

* We should go to the CUFS pub crawl.

* We should buy Eni a leather bikini

* [censored] loves [censored]

* Matthew told us about a boy scount who built a breeder reactor in his shed[1].

[1] cf. http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html and http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1841152293/026-6031962-1521203 I have. I haven't established veracity yet, but it was so cool anyway it deserves its own post in a bit.

Amusing gravestone epitaphs

Amusing gravestone epitaphs:

1. </life>

OK, everyone should have seen this one before, but does anyone have a picture? I remember one (presumably photoshopped [TM][1]).

2. Nooo! This cannot beeee! I am inveeeencible!

3. http://www.peter-marina.com/normal/deadsanta-notreal.jpg

Greenenders, The Board Game

And then to games evening.

* We played Carcassonne. So that's what people were talking about. I thought I was losing, but at least we were playing fairly quickly, but then my farmers gained power and mana in proportion to the number of other farmers scored lots of points because I'd put one in the middle and made sure that field was connected all the cities everyone else was busily finishing. Sorry, Jacqy.

I should be able to make a Carcassonne fairly easily with a printer, glue, and cardboard, right, and could be trivially reworked to be a CTS game by painting orcs on stuff. Eg. Battle of the five armies, players become armies, roads become ridge lines, cities become spurs of mountain, farms become armies beseiging spurs of mountain, seminaries and the river bcome key events in the battle.

The other idea was you each represent a different chronicler, and everything was about making plot. (With the gameplay still modelled on an exisitng variant. For instance, no point using the same orientation of tiles to make things easy for old players.)

Greenenders, the *really* lame tie-in

Apples to apples is fun, but the creativity is limited, and lots of the cards are boring. Everyone suggests a Cambridge variant, which would be nice, but it'd be good to address the other problem at the same time. Ideas:

* Basically, you'd want to be able to play two cards at once, bound together somehow.
* Either you'd have noun cards and modifier cards, or you'd try to ensure every card could be used either way.
* You might be able to make these double as the green cards as well, I'm not sure.
* Or maybe every player plays one card and the judge chooses the best combination. But I don't think it could easily work.

Possible themes:

* Cambridge places and colleges
* Relative people ("player on my left's", "my last housemate", etc)
* Objects, animals, etc.
* Cambridge societies, houses
* Famous non-actors, eg. scientists, messaien, fictional characters, etc.
* Gerunds
* Stages of life (exam, first job, last foo interview)
* Amounts of things (£100, 200lb, etc.) just because
* Americans lots of people think are stupid, nethack references and fetish items because they are by far the most popular cards :)
* Food
* Adjectives: colours, temperatures, textures

Other categories?

Rule suggestions?

More book reactions

( spoilers for LMB: Brothers in Arms )

* Kushiel's Avatar: Joscelyn is wonderful. He's as bad as Rand or a Mary Sue in the way he can beat up any number of really trained people, but it truly is balanced by his restrictive moral code that he actually sticks to, often at inconvenience, and when he *can't* fight he, with difficulty, does a right thing. And I'm so pleased that despite his code, he

* OTOH, all these passwords and oaths. It's bad enough in a world where Gods enforce them, and at least some are backed up by a potential afterlife threat, but people seem to put too much trust in them.

* I read Minor Arcana, some short stories by Dianna Wynne Jones (*cuddles numberland*). They almost all had the strange property that I didn't enjoy them as much as some other stories, but felt moved in *some* way, and the ones I'd read before had left a powerful image imprinted of just one phrase or scene that I hadn't particularly noticed at the time. Other instances:

Ian Banks, The Business. When Kate was a little girl selling sweets. When she lets Uncle Freddy pat her behind. The viking funeral. Her description of the prince.

The bruce willis film about the monkeys. The first scene outside. The radio advert. The bit in the airport.