Words are inadequate

I have Returned, and it is Good. Got in around ten-thirty Monday night; had a good sit on the couch with Mr Tuppert, who missed me, and then crashed. I tried to crash "pretty hard" but kept being ... it's not 'woken up' if you haven't fallen asleep, 'disturbed' I guess. Got around seven hours sleep all told.

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To the extent I had a Game Of The Week I guess it was 18India, an 18xx game where one has a hand of shares one can buy (some randomly dealt, some drafted) rather than all shares being available at all times. The game's doing some other neat things as well, with trains and gauge changes and track-laying. I played once and thought I liked it, then played a variant and thought I hated it. Turned out, when I played the base game again, that what I hated was in fact the variant, and the base game is more to my taste.

I also played a lot of Free Ride, a train game that I'd been thinking of as Friedemann Friese's Ticket To Ride but which Daniel Karp pointed out is more accurately Friedemann's Transamerica. I'd played once a few years ago and enjoyed it well enough but had trouble figuring out where the various European cities were on the uniformly-coloured map. Last year Friedemann came out with a USA version which a) is a more familiar map and b) colour-codes the cities into regions, so it's much easier to play. It's a good game. I'll likely be picking up one or both versions at some point.

And two games of Moon Colony Bloodbath, a sort of shared-event-deck-builder. You're nominally trying to build your moon colony, but really you're trying to have yours not be the moon colony that totally collapses due to bad luck and robot rampages. It's enjoyable but to me it feels like the gaming equivalent of empty calories. Everyone does their own thing, someone wins, shake hands and sure may as well play again. Then again this is how I felt about Dominion (same designer) way back when, and gamers do love them some Dominion, so there's clearly a market for that sort of thing.

Sometimes there are people that one just clicks with. For me at the Gathering that's the Massachusetts folks, who I originally thought of as "the 18xxers" and now only somewhat less accurately consider "Joe R--'s Discord". I don't really know what it is: mindset, outlook, humor, something. But I have a good time with them, and I feel ... better able to relax around them, or something. Always a pleasure.

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Steph arrived on Friday evening, so I shifted from 'gaming' to 'tourist/date' for the last few days. That was good: relaxing, after a week of Peopling, and comforting, and all such good things. We hit up an indie new/used bookstore on Saturday, of the "three levels and a maze of bookcases" variety. On Sunday we went down to the falls and wandered around.

We both flew out of Buffalo, which extended the goodbye a bit, and that was the right call too.

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Once more I have brought the plague back from Niagara. Sunday after touristing I started feeling a bit feverish, but tried to blame it on Too Much Sun. Monday, travel-day, the feverish remained along with clogged sinuses, which is No Way to travel by air. When it hadn't improved any by Tuesday I went ahead and tested and yep, two lines, though the one was faint and incomplete.

It's not as bad as last time. Yesterday I was more muzzy-headed than I think I was, but I think that has passed. The chest cough that started up yesterday has gotten slightly more serious. To the left, the sinus stuff may be letting up (or I may just be drugging myself more effectively), and I'm not noticing any taste deficiencies.

I have nowhere I need to be for another week at least, and only the one class. As things go this is about the best time to be laid up. Mr Tuppert approves of the increase in couch time as well.

Back in July I sold a number of boardgames online. One went to a local guy named Noel who, when we were arranging payment/delivery, said "Your Boardgamegeek profile looks like you have pretty good taste in games, want to come over sometime?" So I did, and it was fun. I've gamed with him and his friends ... three? times now.

Yesterday we played two of my favourite games, two more that I'm quite fond of, and a quick cardgame that I think could be pretty interesting but we were just killing time until another person showed up so we didn't play much of it. And it was just... it was fun. Most of my gaming the last few years has been with Rainbow House, a shared-household of boardgamers whose taste, it turns out, diverges from mine in significant ways. I'd forgotten just how light and enjoyable it can be to dive into a game I like. Or one I don't know but that's got aspects that I enjoy: responding to the actions of other people, straightforward rules but complex interactions, gametime that's not horrifically long so if you're doing poorly it's over fast.

It's nice to remember that boardgaming can, in fact, be a fun social activity. More importantly, it's nice to remember that I can, in fact, change my circumstances to make myself happier. I'm really good at saying "well this is how it is" and working within a situation. It's easy, and less scary than trying to change things. Still learning to value my own happiness and comfort, and to take conscious steps to improve those.

I have had an amazing weekend with Steph and a pretty good week at the Gathering. It's not really a surprise that I'm crashing hard as of a few hours ago, though. Lots of time away from home and kitten, lots of people-time. Now I just want to curl up and be taken care of for a bit. Or maybe just have someone I love nearby.

For all that it was a bit of a low-key-ish Gathering. One game of Sidereal Confluence, several 18xx games (including not one but TWO wins; I guess playing online once a week for a year and a half has upped my game significantly). I got to playtest the prototype for the new Race For The Galaxy expansion, and one for a sort of cooperative poker deduction game that an acquaintance from DC just sold to a publisher and is getting late-stage playtest data for. I waved at Steffan a couple of times but he looked busy and tired. I spent a lot of time hanging out with Eric B-- and with Jeroen, both of whom I am continually a bit surprised to find that I think of as "friends" and not just acquaintances.

Bag is 90% packed. Tomorrow morning I take a cab to the Toronto airport and fly to Vancouver, and go home and see my kitten and order groceries and fall over. Next week I can start figuring out what I'm doing next.

As alluded yesterday, there have been books.

What are you reading right now?

Finally getting back into the ebook of Moving Pictures. What I actually want to be reading is either The Ten Thousand Doors Of January (Harrow) or The Poppy War (Kuang), because I have fancy SubPress editions of both waiting for me. But I'm reluctant to take those to work with me, so they await a stretch of time when I'll be Not Working for a bit. Maybe this weekend.

Anyway, Moving Pictures is a bit of a slog, which surprises me. If you had told twelve-year-old me that there was a forty-plus-book fantasy series that was more like a bunch of interlocking serieses, as funny and readable as Douglas Adams but with actual plots, but the subseries I'd like least was the one about all the wizards, well. I would have thought you were entirely out to lunch.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. First reread of Ann Leckie's Ancillary books. Still excellent. These prefigure Murderbot in some ways, which I had forgotten but which I greatly appreciate. Also the line "We're not cousins anymore" late in Ancillary Mercy remains the funniest line on the funniest page of anything I have read in quite some time. (I note with some excitement that Leckie has a new Radch book out next year, heavily featuring a Presger translator.)

Also read the first two of Walter Jon Williams's new space opera trilogy, sequel to his previous excellent Dread Empire's Fall trilogy. I outsource my commentary to paraphrasing Marissa Lingen, who said of the first "it's more of the same, space battles and space empire politics, it's still good but start with the first trilogy," and of the second "it's MORE OF THE SAME, stupid awful interpersonal stuff with the leads hooking up and breaking up, and i may be done with it now." I note that she hasn't reviewed the third, which came out a month or two ago.

And reread Gibson's The Peripheral and read Agency, which ... these are weird, but I like them. In both roughly the first third is sort of orientation, getting you used to the world(s) of the novel, and then most of the rest is ... nothing really happens, but you get a lot of nice character and worldbuilding and dialogue moments, and then in like the last thirty pages there is suddenly PLOT! and then it's over. Spook Country did this as well. It is very much not my normal reading mode. And Gibson's characters are... they're sort of emotionally muted, which contributes to the sense of not much really happening. I'm not describing this well at all. I think I liked them? Keeping them around, at the very least.

What do you think you'll read next?

Maybe 10K Doors or Poppy War. Maybe Provenance, the sequel to the Ancillary books. Maybe the third of WJW's space opera books, it's on the shelf and then I can be done with them. (They /are/ well-written and fast-paced and well-plotted, it's just the relationship between the two leads that grinds my teeth.) Maybe whatever the next Discworld is.

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And, from ironymaiden, the return of the Five Questions meme. Comment and ask and I'll ask you five questions of your own.

1. What has been the biggest surprise about life with Mr. Tuppert?

It's the sitting-on-shins thing. The way he's not hugely a People Cat is a bit of a surprise, and not being able to tempt him up onto the couch to sit next to me is a bit of a disappointment, but. Starting from the very first night he was here, when I get into bed he comes up on the bed with me, and he'll usually come up for a few scritches first. Then it's like a switch gets thrown in his tiny cat-brain, and he tries to position himself lengthwise on top of my shin, and kneads at the blanket and makes meowy-growly noises of discontent that he can't get situated comfortably there. This goes on for several minutes, usually until I shift a bit at the right time or in the right way to shake him out of it, and he'll either get comfortable on my feet or curl up next to them.

2. What did you think of the "bonus episode" of Sandman?

So, this is two questions, or maybe three. The "bonus episode" presentation in itself is kinda weird, though it makes sense: may as well at least try to tell the stories in something like the original order, and they want to seed 'Calliope' early to set up for the chain that leads to The Kindly Ones. So why not goose numbers with a bonus episode? Plus, they've already done the Hob Gadling story, and the Element Girl story is unfilmable without using DC's cosmos (and honestly skippable anyway), so why not give us all of Dream Country in its original place? Works for me.

'Dream of a Thousand Cats' was a basically perfect adaptation with a stellar voice cast. A+, no notes. The story itself is slight but fun.

I am perhaps overly sensitive to stories that revolve around sexual assault, so I hated 'Calliope' on my recent reread. I disliked it much less onscreen. And it's always nice to see Arthur Darvill getting work, and Derek Jacobi too.

3. What's your current favorite boardgame and why?

With the caveat that I've only played it once in the last year-plus, and that's not too likely to change before April: Sidereal Confluence. I doubt I can improve on what I wrote awhile ago:

SidCon is a trading game where the point isn't to make a few good (ie, lopsided-in-your-favour) trades, it's to make as many trades as possible. Everyone has a pile of Stuff, and everyone needs some Stuff to run their machines, but no one has the kinds of Stuff they need. So there's a mad flurry of exchanges and negotiations, and the more of those exchanges and negotiations you can be a part of the better off you are. Even if you're not technically "gaining" anything, you're getting more Stuff that you can actually use. Now add on to that what they call "variable player powers," where each player can break certain rules in certain extreme ways. The end result is an awful lot of busy chaotic noisy fun.

It is extremely interactive, it is surprisingly smooth-playing with low rules overhead despite the high emergent complexity, and it plays in under three hours. I adore it. I've only played with a full nine-player contingent once, and that was under highly nonoptimal conditions: multiple brand-new players that I had to hand-hold for the first couple of rounds, a loud room at a convention, a table setup that made it difficult for everyone to talk to everyone else. It was still a top boardgaming experience.

4. Still working through Discworld? What's your current favorite?

I am, but slowly. Partly I've been reading physical books instead of ebooks; partly I'm just finding Moving Pictures to be slower going. My favourite is definitely Pyramids, though I've a soft spot for Wyrd Sisters, and Mort is also wonderful.

5. What food of your childhood is unobtainable where you live now, and is that a good or bad thing?

Growing up an Army brat means I don't really have food 'of my childhood,' other than the stuff Mom made on the regular, and most if not all of that is replicable. Closest thing would be good Memphis-style barbecue, which we had whenever we went to see grandparents: both sets lived an hour and a half out of Memphis (different directions). That lack is unquestionably a Bad Thing. There's at least one okay barbecue joint in the Lower Mainland but it's not the same.

Boardgames easily fit into the twenty-three-ish bankers' boxes they came in, with I think two leftover boxes, so that's nice. (The counting's a little weird for games: three of the boxes are not quite twice as long as standard bankers' boxes, one game [OGRE Designer's Edition] comes in its own packing box, and there's still a couple of large-but-not-OGRE-large games to be packed somehow.)

My game library's been shrinking for years. I'm getting pickier about what I keep, and what I might want to play, and what I'm willing to teach over and over again. A few years ago Joe Huber wrote something to the effect of "these days I ask myself 'Why should I keep this only Pretty Good game' instead of 'Why should I get rid of this Pretty Good game,'" and that's an attitude that's stood me in good stead.

So: boardgames fit onto two full-size Billys with an extra shelf, and there's still a bit of room for more. I'm pretty happy with that number / volume of games, I think. It's generally speaking the ones I actively want to play.

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I am slowly adjusting to new-work. It helps that India doesn't observe DST, so starting this week and lasting another, what, eight months?, my early-morning meetings will start no earlier than 7AM instead of no earlier than 6AM. (DST is still the devil, though. Blargh rant timechange rant blargh.)

Not that I'm doing any actual "work," it's all training and HR and such. That may change this week with the team meeting tomorrow; I guess we shall see.

In other news, my previous workplace paid me a full paycheck for my last pay period there. The payroll guy is not responding to me or to the HR person who I initially contacted about it. I suppose it's possible that my leftover vacation just happened to exactly be the number of hours to make up a full pay period but I suspect someone screwed up. At least I didn't get paid by them for this most recent pay period.

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Sound of Music was mostly good and I want to write more about that but my brain has been mush.

I appear to be, if not Burnt Out, then Burning Out.

I am judging this based on the fact that I very badly want to set up the TV, hook up the Wii which plays Gamecube games, and replay a couple of games that I beat ages ago (Zelda on a boat, the Metroid Prime games, maybe Eternal Darkness).

Note that I don't want to play any of the small backlog of unplayed games I've got hanging around. I explicitly want to Do A Thing which is a thing that I have done before. At a guess, what I get out of this is something along the lines of: comfort; consistency; sense of accomplishment without corresponding fear of failure; mental-sense of being in another, safer(?) time.

Bah. Work is being terrible: I've been doing the work of at least two people since the beginning of March, and for the two months before that it was 1.5 people. I lack the energy to apply for other jobs, if indeed there are any that are hiring at the moment, and if indeed I would be able to function well enough to take on a different position. I miss humans-that-are-not-Erin but I do not think I would be capable of interacting with them at present (I certainly do not have the ability to reach out, and do not appear to even be able to respond reasonably). I badly miss role-playing, which I've done zero of since ... November 2016? and I miss boardgaming, and at this point I'm not even able to indulge in gaming-adjacent activities like "playing online" or "reading rpg books". (Honourable exception for Through the Ages, whose asynchronous play keeps me going. I can generally brain well enough for five minutes at a time of taking my turn.)

... and there's a hell of a lot of other stuff just under the surface of this that needs digging through, but I certainly do not have the time and may or not have the energy.

So. Noted: today I admitted that I was burning out, yet again.

And thus ends the Four Weeks Of Ridiculously Busy. (We now return to your regularly-scheduled Busy.)

I was down in Portland early last week, for the Write The Docs tech writing conference. It was good! Lots of friendly people, some good conversations. Nice to be reminded that tech writing is something that I sometimes enjoy. I also ran into ex-coworkers N-- and S--: about a year after I got laid off, they left MSTR and moved to Seattle, where they seem pretty happy. So that was kind of great. If I go next year I'm just taking the train home afterwards, and skipping out on the last session: I stayed an extra day and flew home too early in the morning this time, and that was both expensive and physically rough.

I also took the opportunity to wander through Powell's. I left with: Nnedi Okorafor's three Binti books; nice Easton Press editions of This Immortal and WJW's Metropolitan (!); a copy of Last Call because I don't currently own one; Noelle Stevenson's Nimona (which I've read online but I believe the print edition has more and/or different stuff); a giftable Dragon Waiting, the first I've found in some years; a set of interviews with Ursula Le Guin; and [REDACTED] for Julianne, whose birthday it just was. And also with a sense of wonder and comfort, because Powell's really is just that pleasant for me to be in.

(I did /not/ pick up Murderbot 2, because I didn't realise until later that it would be out when I was there. I did preorder it from Indigo, though, and have already devoured it. Quite enjoyable.)

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Then on Thursday, Jenn P-- came into town. I've not seen Jenn in, o, I guess it's about three and a half years now, which is Just Too Long. We talked the evening away, and the next morning wandered around Van Dusen with her Todd when he got free of work, and I had a beer ("Berliner Geist" by Strange Fellows) that is the first beer not offered to me by Erin that I have voluntarily put in my mouth a second time, and then they went off to tourist for a couple of days.

I've missed her. I've missed that sense of connection and history, and of reconnection after an absence. I'm also glad that copy of Dragon Waiting turned up, as it left with her. Twenty-two hours was not really enough time: there were (being deliberately vague) some additional conversations I'd've liked to have had, that I didn't even realise how to put into words until a couple of hours before the end.

This is, to some extent, how I operate: I get new information and it takes me some time to process it, and I can't really process it while doing something else (like, say, holding a conversation) at the same time. When I'm aware of it I can take a brief break and recenter my head and be ready to act on the new information. In a stressful situation I'm not always even aware of it, though, and interacting with another human is often a stressful situation no matter how much I like them or know them.

The other tricky part, of course, is recognising when I'm squelching my responses because I need to process new information versus when I'm squelching my responses because I'm trying to bury the new information and not deal with it.

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Had folks over for games again on Saturday, which went well but was certainly not low-stress. Friday evening and Sunday daytime became much-needed recovery days. I'm still moving a bit slow today.

And Wednesday morning I fly up north, for two weeks this time. Curious to see how it goes; I expect it will turn out to be easier than one week at a time. Very much looking forward to seeing Erin again, too. That's been easier as spring has set in, on a number of fronts: most notably, I've had more cope, and can start digging through things that I kept burying because I was in survival mode for so much of last year.

There. That's that month, except for the pagan stuff that I still don't know how to talk about, not really. Will try again later.

After all that, the weekend was pretty decent.

( people, housing, stuff )

I'm at the Gathering.

I'm doing better this year than last year. Partly that's due to having a room to myself. I like Scott R quite a bit but our schedules collided just enough that I never really felt comfortable there. (As opposed to Christine, who was asleep when I woke up and otherwise basically never in the room at the same time as me.) Partly it's just, you know not being horrifically depressed. Which I'm pretty sure I was last year. I'm also taking a bit better care of myself, both before and during.

Anyway. I've only been here since Wednesday night, because time off is a valued commodity and because Erin vanishes for the far north in a couple of weeks and squeezing in as much time with her as possible is important. It's been good. No super-duper new games this year, not really even anything on the order of last year's Ponzi Scheme. Some good 18xx games, some good shorter games.

The passage overnight through Toronto and training down still seems to be the best way to get here. I had a middle seat for the flight but they gave me some sort of nicer, roomier seat, so it wasn't bad at all. Redeyes are still the most reliable way to get me onto East Coast time.

I feel like this is the con of my heart, in the way that BGG.con isn't. A lot of it's the venue: the light's better, the noise level is lower. Some of it's just that I've clicked really well with a lot of people here. I could do that at BGG.con if I went back ... but it's loud, and glaringly bright, and super-busy, and just not really a thing that interests me, not if I've got the Gathering.

The people. My first year here Eric B started teaching me 18xx games about midway through the week, and my second year he and his gaming friends sort of took me under their wing, so I've pretty consistently been able to find people to game with and to talk to. And I'm gradually meeting other folks as well and recognising them from year to year. And vice versa, which will probably never fail to surprise me. People remember me! They even sometimes seem excited to see me! It's ... neat. Eric hasn't been here the last couple of years due to life stuff, and I miss him and hope he can make it next year, but Joe R and Jeroen and all have been fantastic as well. I really like the sense of ... community, I guess, that I have here.

In a few minutes I'm going downstairs to play what will probably be my last big game of the weekend, and then tomorrow I'll maybe play some lighter stuff and fly home through Newark, with another Vancouver local who got the same flight I did.

Home. That's a thing.

This is what I mean when I say I'm ridiculously lucky:

I have awful teeth, have had since pretty much forever. Orthodontia since third grade, a year and a half of braces, crowns and root canals on six or seven of my back molars, all that. In retrospect this all started when I mixed a hardwood floor, a blanket, and a running start at the age of four and had a root canal in one of my baby teeth. I'm used to dentists, is what I'm saying.

I'd been going to the same dentist since we got to Vancouver but I hadn't been totally happy with her. So when I got laid off and my insurance lapsed, it seemed like a fine time to just forget to go in for cleanings and such. And when I got a new job, insurance didn't kick in for three months, and then I just didn't feel like bothering. I didn't want to go back to my old dentist, and I didn't want to go through the hassle of finding a new one.

One of the crowns that I got in DC has been giving me a bit of trouble since I got it: it was painful to put in place, it didn't sit right on my bite, and there was a little lip at the base of it that caught when I flossed. On Satyrday night, while we were at a small local gaming convention (playing Die Steven Seagal[1]), I bit down on a lollipop stick and felt something give way.

The entire crown above the gumline had sheared off.

"How on earth," you ask, "is that lucky?"

It doesn't hurt, thanks to the root canal.

My insurance kicked in two months ago. (Emily's doesn't until next month, so it could have been better, but half covered is better than none.)

And when, spurred by the sudden need for a dentist, I complained about my lack of same, David recommended his. I went today for a cleaning and checkup and prepwork for tooth/crown replacement and he seems likely to be the best dentist I've had since I left Dr Ankrum in Blacksburg. And who had a last-minute cancellation, so that I could get my teeth cleaned during the prelim appointment.

Lucky.

[1] A German trick-taking/bidding card game that's really named Die Sieben Siegel, or The Seven Signs/Seals. It comes with a standup figure, the Traitor, that you can take as your bid if no one else has and you feel like just mucking with everyone else. Naturally we refer to the Traitor as Steven Seagal...

The convention was pretty good, too: played some heavier games, some lighter ones, a really good round of Tichu, and on Sunday wrangled thirteen people in three 18xx games.

And tonight we just got back from seeing The Big Short, which is very good and avoids being horrendously depressing by being extremely funny in a dark way. Relatedly, I am growing accustomed to the idea that I will sometimes be the only one laughing in smart movies. At least I had uilos there laughing with me tonight.