Livejournal picnic

This weekend was the most recent cambridge livejournal picnic. Sunflowerinrain took crashspace, so I met her after croquet on saturday and we watched DVDs.

I cooked a pasta bake, which by combining my techinique of mixing pasta, mushrooms and nice vegetables, with sonic's technique of homepride pasta sauce, turned out really nice, and lasted through sunday.

The picnic started out small, but filled out to quite a lot of people. I do know[1] how many -- I took my camera and managed to photograph everyone there (except me, possibly a couple of people who arrived late, and a couple of trinity mathmos who were walking past). I don't know if they'll turn out very nice, I need to upload them.

How do you recommend I do that? It'd be nice to add captions, but I don't know who minds what combination of their face, username and real name being identified together in public or to my friendslist. (No namebadges were visible.)

I waved to everyone, chatted to nice people, put some more names to faces, and avoided writing down any quotes because they were all too disturbing :)

[1] I meaI have the knowledge, but I have the knowledge externally, not in my brain. I want to say extelligence, but there must be an ordinary word for that.

Pizza

Tonight, at post-geek-pizza we played croquet at Relativity. This is very good, and must be encouraged at all opportunities. I didn't manage any spectacular shots, and muffed a couple, but am generally getting comfortable with the idea of what I'm capable of doing, what strategies are most machiavellian, and generally being an non-embarassing if not good player. Though we must also practice on full size lawn pre-winkers :)

Then we played penultima. We're in a definite penultima phase, I'm sure some people must be bored. But both of tonight's games went fairly well, if slightly long. They both reached brief endgames, where people had nearly figured out some pieces, and knew something about more, and were just about able to execute one or two move ahead plans, though in the end both ended with fortunate chance, working out how a fairly powerful piece moved, or moving a king into a bad position.

I'm sure penultima needs modding somehow, but I'm not quite sure how.

* Spectators may not want to concentrate on entire game, but chat also. Suggestion: people can explain a rule to another spectator who wants to watch, and then not have to pay attention if they don't want to.
* The endgame often gets bogged down when people are drunk and tired and trying and failing to think of plans.
* There's a spectrum of rules from those worked out soon to those which (while preferrably still useful) are still keeping you guessing at the end. I think an ideal game would have a spread, and we currently edge toward the more complex end.
* But it's quite well balanced, I think. If you *stated* rules at the start, it'd be like learning chess all over again and require too much thought. Here you often work out rules toward the end, enough to have some strategy, but not enough to be sure.
* We (mainly Ian) are experimenting with rules that get pieces out and active, without excessive jumping, but that discourage randomly bombing into the enemy bank ranks or asking "Can this piece move onto the enemy king" every turn. An early couple of these turned out not so well, but in general we've been having interesting ideas