Enoch

Tom Waits -- The Piano Has Been Drinking

I'd take another turn, but I'm going to be away from my PC until next week. Depending on how close that gets us, I may just play out the string until Domination.

Today is my last workday before the long weekend. Thursday, of course, is the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and I'm taking Wed. & Fri. off so that I can go spend it with my family in New Jersey. As the last day of work pre-holiday, it is going veeerrrryyyy ssssllllloooowwwwllyyy. Tomorrow, I will be fighting the I-95 traffic between DC and NJ, and then helping my parents set up the brining of the turkey. A good overnight soak in some brine really helps cure some of the natural dryness/blandness of turkey meat.

I'm beginning to suspect that 19-0 is almost more likely than not, if the important guys stay healthy. The Colts are the only team that has played them close (Dallas kept it tight for 3 quarters, but that was mostly due to a fluky defensive score early on), but with the injury problems they've been having, I don't see them having such a good game at Foxborough in the playoffs. The team that might have the best chance of beating the Pats (meaning that they have about a 1-in-4 shot) is probably the Giants, who they play in the Meadowlands in the last week of the regular season. The temptation for Belichick to sit his starters early will be high, and the Giants will probably be playing for playoff seeding. Plus, the matchup will be interesting. NY should be able to run the ball at least somewhat effectively to eat the clock and keep the Pats offense off the field. On defense, the Giants' weaknesses in the secondary don't really matter-- every team is weak in the secondary against Brady and those receivers. Since they can't expect to sit back and cover them, they should just bring the pass rush. If they send 5-7 guys at Brady on every down, there's a chance that they'll generate enough mistakes to pull ahead. (By the way, I agree about all the "running up the score" nonsense. These guys are all professionals, they don't need pop-warner mercy rules.) Oh, and one other team to look out for down the stretch is Jacksonville. With Garrard now back, they might steal the division from the Colts.

Bruce Springsteen -- Magic. (Title track from the newest album)

Quite good. I would have been happier if it had a few heavier tunes. Radiohead - Bodysnatchers Personally, I like that they've focused on what they do best. The first 2 tracks are probably the heaviest on the album (can we still call it an "album"?), and to me they're the least enjoyable. But from "All I Need" through the end, it almost reaches the level of Kid A. I love the cello counterpoint on "Faust Arp," the inventive chord shifts on "House of Cards," and absolutely everything about "All I Need."

If anyone here gets the Independent Film channel on their cable/satelite lineup, there's supposed to be an interesting documentary about LARPing on tonight.

Well, now you're extrapolating based on outside data (i.e., past performance of both teams in other games). I was only talking about the plays on the field last night. Even so, based on their play this year, I'd probably be comfortable in saying that the Colts are more talented than the Chargers. Mostly because of what they have at the most important postition on the field-- Phil Rivers has not looked good. It's not all Norv's fault. And, yes, the Colts often have trouble with SD and other 3-4 defenses. I think this is because their offensive linemen tend to be smaller, more agile tacticians, who can get pushed around a bit by the bigger defensive linemen that you see in a 3-4.

I think it's more a case of the Colts defense playing a hell of a good game, only to have their offense and special teams fail them repeatedly. I don't think you can argue that a team with 2 special teams touchdowns (which are generally fluky plays) that only won by 2 points should've blown anybody out. They were damn lucky to get the points they did. 6 interceptions, and 2 touchdowns on special teams = Blowout for any team other than the Chargers. It depends on what you view as the outlier. If those 8 plays are the best indication of the relative quality of these teams, then yes, the Chargers should've mopped the floor with the Colts. But, if the other 100 or so plays of the game (where the Colts generally outplayed SD) are the better representative of how good these teams are, then the Chargers are an inferior team that just got lucky enough on a few crucial plays to pull out a win. I'm betting that the data set with the much, much larger sample size gives us better information on which team should have blown out which.

Well, the U.S. Army really has no option but to abandon, to a certain extent. Sure, the current "surge" of troop levels has decreased violence. But the Army only has the personnel to maintain troops at their current levels until sometime around early next spring. The whole point of this temporary increase in troop levels was to give Iraqi politicians the room to operate and come to some kind of agreement to stop all the clan- and sect-based conflict. I don't really know how successful they can be on this front in such a limited span of time.

I think it's more a case of the Colts defense playing a hell of a good game, only to have their offense and special teams fail them repeatedly. I don't think you can argue that a team with 2 special teams touchdowns (which are generally fluky plays) that only won by 2 points should've blown anybody out. They were damn lucky to get the points they did. No argument there. My Giants, sadly, lost to the hated Cowboys this weekend. They're a tough team to evaluate at this point. They're clearly not in the class of Dallas and Green Bay (two 8-1 teams who account for all three of the Giants' losses). And they're clearly better than the dregs of the league they've played for most of their wins. I think the key to beating them is the offensive line. If the Giants' opponent has weaknesses on the OL, they're going to tear them apart. But if the other team's OL is competent and healthy, a decent QB is going to be able to find holes in the Giants' secondary.

I've been toying with the idea of creating a campaign world without divine spellcasting, where bards (most of whom are church cantors) are the only source of supernatural healing, besides some rare alchemy-related stuff. It'd be a spec project at this point, as I don't have a regular group to play with, but it's intruiging enough to spend a few subway rides thinking about. It'd require a pretty thorough re-working of the core rules, though, and I don't even own any of the 3rd ed. rulebooks. Generally, though, I agree that the image of a bard in battle is pretty laughable.

The idea that '80s culture is worth revisiting makes me feel ill.

Last night I played some basketball after work with a group of co-workers. They rent an elementary school gym to play in for 2 hours every Wednesday evening (hoops are regulation, but the court is 3/4ths length). I had fun, but I managed to jam my right thumb on a rather forceful unanticipated pass (fortunately, I'm left-handed, so it didn't affect my play much). Now my calves are killing me whenever I stand up after being at my desk for a while-- I'm not used to being up on the balls of my feet as much as a basketball game requires. I should really do this more often, though. I don't have the motivation or patience to do solo aerobic exercise with any regularity-- I need some kind of competition or game to hold my interest.

The problem in France is that those people protesting for their rights are too powerful. Any time there's legislation proposed that would allow employers to actually fire lazy or incompetent workers, they have one of those riots that shut down commerce across the entire country. They could use a decade or two of "right-wing" rule (and I say this as a flaming liberal, as we in the States calculate things).

In the lexicon of Teh Internets, "to hit" means "to have sexual intercourse with." Thus, our good friend Jags is implying that your reluctance to have sexual intercourse with a moose led to the termination of you relationship with your ex, which further implies that your ex was the moose in question. Well played, Jags!

That seems to be the best way to proceed. I hate it when large cities have to be razed because of the AI's incompetence. Nippur and Akkad were really a huge fork up. By the way, clearly, I did not mean that 1 NW of the horses (on the peak) would be a good location. I meant to type NE.

My thinking was that, if we were to keep Akkad, it would be in the same dilemma that U-Burg is in now-- half of its workable area in the cultural borders of it's former owners. Were it my decision, I'd want to ask for Hammy's capitulation as quickly as we can. I think that we might be able to get him to agree, after the fall of Akkad. If we were to capture it, I'd rather go on and raze the next town over so that it can use all of the tiles in its fat cross. Also, Akkad is in a terrible location. Maybe we could replace Akkad and Nippur with one new city midway between them (1 NW of the horses)?

I'm not so confident just yet. The English and the Ethiopians are nearly even with us in technology. If we go Space Race, they could be right there in it with us. Although this is Noble, so we should be able to out-tech them generally. But with so much of our rivals together on this continent, I think Domination is the victory condition for us. Raze Akkad, vassalize Babylon, then turn the army south to Egypt (Hindu Holy City!) and Korea.

Thanks, and condolences. I'm currently eating some rather nice homemade chicken soup. As luck would have it, I had roasted a chicken for dinner Saturday night. When this set in on Sunday, I realized that we had some carrots, celery, and fresh thyme in the fridge along with the leftovers. Perfect opportunity for some cure-all soup.

The Round: First, I looked around our empire to see what needed changing. 1) Really deficient exploration. We know very little about even the territory of our closest neighbors. To remedy this, I traded our world map and 205 GP to Zara for his map. It revealed an opponent we haven't met yet, the Byzantines: 2) Non-focused city specialization. Port Avellone is supposed to be a specialist farm. As such, it should have no cottages, at all[/u[]. Everything should be farmed to help feed more specialists. Similarly, Peragus is a production center. Every tile there should be either a farm or a mine/watermill/workshop. This also goes for improvements-- since Peragus is a production city with very limited commerce, it should not be building a Bank (as it was when I opened the save). That's a waste of hammers that could be making military. Also, DOOM is a pure commerce city. As long as it has enough food to work every tile it can under the happiness cap, there's no need to irrigate anything. I changed 3 or 4 irrigated tiles there to cottages. 3) Espionage allocation. It was still set 100% on Babylon. They're not really a threat any more, so I spread it out more among our rivals. 4) Civics. A few turns in, I had a revolution into Slavery and Theocracy. (That's just the kind of guy I am.) I also converted to Hinduism. Under slavery, I whipped out some needed improvements in our specialist cities (mostly specialist-enabling buildings like libraries and markets). 5) Defense. All of our non-frontier cities had pitiful defenses. I tried to upgrade most of these with at least 1 modern unit (i.e., Riflemen). On to what happened in the turn: On turn 222, Wang Kong (and his Vassal, Tokugowa) declared war on us. Bastard. His invasion force, though, was kinda pitiful: 2 Knights, 1 War Elephant, and 1 Pikeman. There was also another Pikeman down by DOOM. The local garrisons made short work of them. On turn 225, our Great Merchant completed his Trade Mission in England. That got us 1900 GP, most of which went to upgrading our Longbows, Macemen, Pikemen, et al., to Riflemen (and, later, our Knights to Cavalry). The next several turns went without major incident. I bribe Zara to join the war against Korea (for Gunpower, which we didn't have a monopoly on anymore). On turn 235, we got a beneficial random event: I took the chance on doubling it, and it paid off. This event comes up pretty frequently, which is why I try to avoid building new improvements over city ruins unless I have to. A couple of turns later, something nasty happened. There was a borders pop in Nippur, which left Whatever-the-hell-we-renamed-Babylon surrounded by Babylonian-controlled tiles on 3 sides. I decided that Nippur (and Akkad, to the North) needed to be razed. I made peace with Wang (who gave me 100 GP for my trouble), assembled a stack of Riflemen, Cavalry, our Medic, 2 Trebs, and 1 Catapult (the remaining seige engines from our earlier war). When the stack got to Nippur, it found it woefully under-defended (1 Longbow, 1 Knight, 1 Axeman, 1 Horse Archer). I assaulted right away, suiciding the Cat and 1 of the Trebs, then marching my gun-toting troops all over their medieval remnants. As promised, I razed the town to give Urq-Burg some much-needed breathing room. The army now looks northwards toward Akkad, and awaits the next player. God_Emperor_Feargus_AD_1650.zip

I once ran over a rather large black snake, which was sunning itself on an empty road through in the middle of nowhere in the pine barrens of South Jersey. It looked like a tarred-over crack in the pavement, so I didn't notice until I heard a "pop." Today I am home from work. I had a nasty head cold yesterday and let myself sleep in to help recover. I felt better when I got up, and started to get ready for work, but by the time I was out of the shower and half-dressed, I was sneezing again and feeling the beginnings of more sinus pressure. Medication has helped both of those symptoms, but I've got plenty of unused sick time and no pressing deadlines at work, so I decided to stay home.

Okay, I've downloaded the save. I'll get to it sometime today-- I'm home from work with a lovely head cold. Hooray for Advil Cold & Sinus!!

What's the deal with the decor where the first group shot was taken? Is that the Obsidian Entertainment Hall of Diggeridoos?

Audiovisual equipment for a wedding? I can understand the audio stuff (background music, mic for the officiant, etc.), but what kind of visual equipment is of use for a wedding ceremony? Are they reading the vows off powerpoint slides or something? Jumbotron for the cheap seats in the back? By the way, as someone who is currently planning a wedding (or, more accurately, regularly getting berated by his fiancee for not helping enough in planning a wedding), no ceremony should be more than a half-hour. It's nice for pictures, and to give Grandma an appropriate opportunity to get all misty, but for 98% of the guests, the ceremony is just sitting in uncomfortable chairs/benches/pews wondering when the ****tail hour begins.