Britannia and Doctor Who on Boxing Day
Hope that all my friends had a good Christmas, and a fine Boxing Day.
I spent Boxing Day in a pretty good, relaxed mood.
After spending the morning puttering around a bit, and taking care of some laundry, the Sunday gaming group arrived and we settled down to play a game of Britannia again, as they had decided that's what they would do after we broke up last Sunday. Tammy was still a bit leery of the game, I think, but once we settled down to play, she got the hang of it relatively quickly again. Once again, I played the purple side (Romans, Romano-British, Scots, Dubliners, and Norwegians), Tammy played the red (Brigantes, Irish, Saxons, and Norsemen), spross played the blue (Belgae, Picts, Angles, and Normans), and we left the green side (Welsh, Caledonians, Jutes, and Danes) to be played by all of us.
I thought that I played the Romans pretty well, and managed a good 44 points with them, but the forts got crushed by the other players and the green team, and I did pretty well with the Romano-British, but got well and truly beaten up with the Scots and the Dubliners, as I just couldn't make any headway with those two. I was ahead of the others at the end of Turn 7, with 58 points, spross and his blue team trailing me by 13 points at the time. By the end of Turn 13, The green team had leaped ahead with a 9-point margin over Tammy, 108.5 to 96, on the strength of my playing of the Danes during their major invasion, since I had nothing to do with the purple forces at all for that entire time, the Scots and Dubliners gaining me 2.5 points from Turns 10 to 13. I was a distant fourth, as spross had 74 points by that time. By the end of the game, when I had managed to get a good number of points for the Norwegians, spross managed to pretty much take Tammy's Saxons out of the game, and he overtook her to come close to the green player's totals. The final scores were Green Player 127, left for the day, my mom came over. I had promised to cook dinner for her on Boxing Day, and so she and I had a steak dinner, with baked sweet potatoes, a side salad, and fresh green beans mixed with peas and some ginger. Good stuff.
I spent the evening watching the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas special, "A Christmas Carol". While I'm not going to discuss stuff about the episode at length, I will give folks some minor spoilers, so...
I will say that I enjoyed it much more than I expected to, but after the first half-hour, it devolved into a typical Steven Moffat story that by the end of the tale, left me feeling unsatisfied and somewhat cheated. I was definitely not pleased with the way the Doctor went about things in this episode, mucking about with Sardick's life and timeline and changing history, especially given that the Doctor has avoided doing exactly this so often - and we won't even talk about the business with Kazran Sardick's older self literally hugging his younger self. That sort of thing is just such a no-no in Doctor Who canon as has been established, but of course some would claim that writer Steven Moffat can get away with it because after all, it's fairy tale DW. I'm not in this camp.
I did love the whole flying fish schtick and the business with the sonic screwdriver and the shark, and laughed out loud about the Santa sleigh stuff, but personally I wanted to know more about the honeymoon of Rory and Amy and their interesting choices of wardrobe! :) That said, Michael Gambon was simply superb in his role as the DW version of Scrooge, and more than made up for the deficits in the episode with his acting. I loved Katherine Jenkins as Abigail, was totally impressed by her singing, and found she was a much better actress than I expected. While the story was meant to be a DW Dickens retelling, it was pretty depressing, given what happens for the most part, Very much a Dickens-like piece, with all sorts of other influences throughout. I was also somewhat surprised by the similarity of the look the fellow playing the adult, not old, Sardick had, and thought for a moment that he and Matt Smith were brothers.
Good top off to a pretty good day.
I spent Boxing Day in a pretty good, relaxed mood.
After spending the morning puttering around a bit, and taking care of some laundry, the Sunday gaming group arrived and we settled down to play a game of Britannia again, as they had decided that's what they would do after we broke up last Sunday. Tammy was still a bit leery of the game, I think, but once we settled down to play, she got the hang of it relatively quickly again. Once again, I played the purple side (Romans, Romano-British, Scots, Dubliners, and Norwegians), Tammy played the red (Brigantes, Irish, Saxons, and Norsemen), spross played the blue (Belgae, Picts, Angles, and Normans), and we left the green side (Welsh, Caledonians, Jutes, and Danes) to be played by all of us.
I thought that I played the Romans pretty well, and managed a good 44 points with them, but the forts got crushed by the other players and the green team, and I did pretty well with the Romano-British, but got well and truly beaten up with the Scots and the Dubliners, as I just couldn't make any headway with those two. I was ahead of the others at the end of Turn 7, with 58 points, spross and his blue team trailing me by 13 points at the time. By the end of Turn 13, The green team had leaped ahead with a 9-point margin over Tammy, 108.5 to 96, on the strength of my playing of the Danes during their major invasion, since I had nothing to do with the purple forces at all for that entire time, the Scots and Dubliners gaining me 2.5 points from Turns 10 to 13. I was a distant fourth, as spross had 74 points by that time. By the end of the game, when I had managed to get a good number of points for the Norwegians, spross managed to pretty much take Tammy's Saxons out of the game, and he overtook her to come close to the green player's totals. The final scores were Green Player 127, left for the day, my mom came over. I had promised to cook dinner for her on Boxing Day, and so she and I had a steak dinner, with baked sweet potatoes, a side salad, and fresh green beans mixed with peas and some ginger. Good stuff.
I spent the evening watching the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas special, "A Christmas Carol". While I'm not going to discuss stuff about the episode at length, I will give folks some minor spoilers, so...
I will say that I enjoyed it much more than I expected to, but after the first half-hour, it devolved into a typical Steven Moffat story that by the end of the tale, left me feeling unsatisfied and somewhat cheated. I was definitely not pleased with the way the Doctor went about things in this episode, mucking about with Sardick's life and timeline and changing history, especially given that the Doctor has avoided doing exactly this so often - and we won't even talk about the business with Kazran Sardick's older self literally hugging his younger self. That sort of thing is just such a no-no in Doctor Who canon as has been established, but of course some would claim that writer Steven Moffat can get away with it because after all, it's fairy tale DW. I'm not in this camp.
I did love the whole flying fish schtick and the business with the sonic screwdriver and the shark, and laughed out loud about the Santa sleigh stuff, but personally I wanted to know more about the honeymoon of Rory and Amy and their interesting choices of wardrobe! :) That said, Michael Gambon was simply superb in his role as the DW version of Scrooge, and more than made up for the deficits in the episode with his acting. I loved Katherine Jenkins as Abigail, was totally impressed by her singing, and found she was a much better actress than I expected. While the story was meant to be a DW Dickens retelling, it was pretty depressing, given what happens for the most part, Very much a Dickens-like piece, with all sorts of other influences throughout. I was also somewhat surprised by the similarity of the look the fellow playing the adult, not old, Sardick had, and thought for a moment that he and Matt Smith were brothers.
Good top off to a pretty good day.