Two Saturdays
Last Saturday was a wonderful day - I went to Dennis' house and he and his wife generously gave a lot of help with the PhD exam questions. The first year exam is a test I'm taking in a week, and it determines whether I stay in the program here. The school gave us the questions in advance (30 possible questions, from which I'll get handed six. Of that six, I answer three. It's a five hour test.). For obvious reasons all us PhD folk have been preparing for a good while now, and it was really good to talk out the questions with Dennis (a linguistics prof) and his wife (a former ESL teacher). They gave me a big pile of books to read through, and I'm slowly plowing through them.
The whole afternoon was very lovely - we talked linguistics, ate delicious smoked barbecue, and traded our impressions of Stillwater. Stillwater is the sort of place that has many secrets - the little international market tucked away on Miller Street, the one grocery store that sells smoked barbecue on Friday and Saturday mornings only. Trading notes is essential, and it's the sort of place that takes years to really live in.
After dinner with the Prestons, I went to Game Night with my friends, which was good fun as always. There was much Rock Banding, and I'm finally getting so I don't suck at guitar anymore. I can handle most songs on Medium and score unremarkably - not great, but not terrible. I'm definitely best at the singing, but it's taken some adjusting - I'm used to choral music, not Creedence.
This Saturday's game night was fun, but subdued - it was just three of us, and we played some fun but involved board games - Arkham Horror and Shogun. We got totally owned in Arkham Horror, but we miraculously picked the one elder god that was a pansy. Most of the elder gods beat the living shit out of you, but we had a guy out of an expansion - all he did was make us make gradually more difficult Fight checks over and over again, but we killed him before it would have been a problem. So bizarrely, after a whole game of not closing gates and getting slaughtered by monsters, we schooled the Elder God. As an additional bonus, my character was a nun who knew fisticuffs as her skill. She carried a magic cane and threw down against unnamable horrors from beyond. Not only did she dodge being run over by a speeding car, she also beat a trucker in a drinking contest and won the allegiance of an art thief. Despite having almost no stamina, she never lost a fight. She was a badass nun.
Shogun is a really, really cool game where you're trying to take over feudal Japan, sort of like Risk. It's much more interesting, however, because it's not all military. You have a set of actions you can take, and you can only do each thing once per turn. You pick which of your provinces will do each thing. You don't have to take every action, but more importantly, you don't know the order that the actions will be taken in! So you don't know if you'll be attacking and then getting reinforcements, or getting reinforcements and then attacking. You might allocate spending but not know when your revenue for the turn is coming in. Extremely interesting game.
Still, overall people are kind of down here now. A lot of test studying mixed with a couple rampant illness (I was sick for much of last week) have kept folks somber and mostly staying home. I'll be glad when the test is over and everyone gets their lives back.
The whole afternoon was very lovely - we talked linguistics, ate delicious smoked barbecue, and traded our impressions of Stillwater. Stillwater is the sort of place that has many secrets - the little international market tucked away on Miller Street, the one grocery store that sells smoked barbecue on Friday and Saturday mornings only. Trading notes is essential, and it's the sort of place that takes years to really live in.
After dinner with the Prestons, I went to Game Night with my friends, which was good fun as always. There was much Rock Banding, and I'm finally getting so I don't suck at guitar anymore. I can handle most songs on Medium and score unremarkably - not great, but not terrible. I'm definitely best at the singing, but it's taken some adjusting - I'm used to choral music, not Creedence.
This Saturday's game night was fun, but subdued - it was just three of us, and we played some fun but involved board games - Arkham Horror and Shogun. We got totally owned in Arkham Horror, but we miraculously picked the one elder god that was a pansy. Most of the elder gods beat the living shit out of you, but we had a guy out of an expansion - all he did was make us make gradually more difficult Fight checks over and over again, but we killed him before it would have been a problem. So bizarrely, after a whole game of not closing gates and getting slaughtered by monsters, we schooled the Elder God. As an additional bonus, my character was a nun who knew fisticuffs as her skill. She carried a magic cane and threw down against unnamable horrors from beyond. Not only did she dodge being run over by a speeding car, she also beat a trucker in a drinking contest and won the allegiance of an art thief. Despite having almost no stamina, she never lost a fight. She was a badass nun.
Shogun is a really, really cool game where you're trying to take over feudal Japan, sort of like Risk. It's much more interesting, however, because it's not all military. You have a set of actions you can take, and you can only do each thing once per turn. You pick which of your provinces will do each thing. You don't have to take every action, but more importantly, you don't know the order that the actions will be taken in! So you don't know if you'll be attacking and then getting reinforcements, or getting reinforcements and then attacking. You might allocate spending but not know when your revenue for the turn is coming in. Extremely interesting game.
Still, overall people are kind of down here now. A lot of test studying mixed with a couple rampant illness (I was sick for much of last week) have kept folks somber and mostly staying home. I'll be glad when the test is over and everyone gets their lives back.