Tablesaw!

Some stuff from the past week.

• Hitched a ride out to Mission Viejo (inorite?) to go to Farrell's for wjukknibs's birthday party. W's on a quest to have birthday parties at locations when Angelenos our age would have had birthdays as children. We've done Chuck E Cheese's, and he's contemplating a McDonald's party.
• My role-playing group has been having a lot fun playtesting a new game. Of the games we've played, this is probably the one most up my alley, and I've been smiling because of it for the past two weeks.
• Went out to eat at Little Dom's. I enjoyed it, but Ojou was a bit taken back by the too-much-porkness of the menu. My entree, linguine with New Orleans–style BBQ shrimp, sounded unlikely, but was very tasty.
• Short hiking through Griffith Park. I wanted to take the Ferndell-Observatory trail, but I was stopped midway by a lonely coyote. My policy is to just leave coyotes alone when I'm hiking by myself. I repositioned, and walked up from the Greek Theatre to the Observatory and back down again. It's always fun hiking after winter rains. I'm walking along the side of the mountain, and instead of gold, everything's black and green. It was like I was in not!SoCal.
• I've been playing Sam & Max: Season One. Adventure games in 3-D still feel a little clunky to me, but the dialogue is spot-on and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the used copy I bought is skipping a little bit. I'm goign to see if I still have time to find the recent and try for a different disc.
• jedusor was in town for grad school interviews, and on Friday, I met up with her and cramerica and Artistry and Mr. Pizza on Fairfax. I got a really (really) big calzone, and two bottles of Dr. Brown's Black Cherry. 'Twas yummy.

Woo. It's been a busy few days, and it still is. Shopping and parties and work work work—I won't really get a chance to relax until Tuesday, when my New Year's break starts (five-day weekend!).

The executive summary of gifts received is: lots of nice clothes, two fantastick backpacks, and an Xbox 360 for ojouchan and I from my nuclear family.

As I mentioned earlier, I ran a trivia game based on Wits and Wagers. If you've never played it, I describe it as a combination of Balderdash, The Price Is Right, and Vegas betting. Everyone gets asked a trivia question with a number for an answer. Your goal is to be the closest without going over. Everybody turns in their answers, and they're lined up in order on the betting board. Odds are assigned according to the order of guesses, and you get to bet on which one was the closest without going over.

So, in the poll below, I've reproduced the questions, my family's guesses, and the odds that were assigned to them. Your job is to see if you can be better bettors than they were.

For each question you can pick either one or two guesses. If you check two boxes, you'll split your bet, placing one "chip" on each, and receiving the basic return if that bet is right (if the odds say 3:1, you'll get 3 points). If you check only one box, you double your bet on one option, and the rewards are doubled as well if you're right (if the odds say 3:1, you'll get 6 points).

Poll #1987 Christmas Wits and Wagers
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

In the song "Feliz Navidad," how many times does Jose Feliciano say "Feliz Navidad"?

According to the free edition available online from Project Gutenberg, how many words are in the main text of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, from "Marley was dead: to begin with" to "God bless us, every one"?

Across both their entire twelve-game seasons, how many points did the USC and UCLA football teams score combined?

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, in what year was the first Nativity creche made?

According to the Shulchan Aruch, a codification of Jewish law, what is the maximum height for the lights of a menorah, in cubits?

In a Gallup poll conducted between December 11 and 13, what was the average amount that American adults predicted they would spend on Christmas gifts in 2009?

What was the total precipitation in downtown Los Angeles, from January 1 through December 25 2009, measured in inches?

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, how did daytime last in Anchorage, Alaska on December 21, from sunrise to sunset?

According to a poll conducted in Canada, what was Santa Claus's approval rating in December 2008?

According to Walt Disney Studios, how many "fully animated Disney features" have been made from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to The Princess and the Frog?

Obviously, no internet research is allowed. Also, the poll is set to display everyone's guesses once you've entered yours, but try not to let it effect your responses.

When my family played, the best team got 28 points from betting. Can you do better?

Hey guys, I don't know when ojouchan will get around to posting it, but she's been hired as a preschool teacher.

Tell her woo, and also hoo.

SatNYTX: 30. MonNYTX: 4. TueNYTX: 10:30. I deliberately slowed down when I noticed the theme, and I tried to solve the puzzle using as few down clues as possible.

Ever since I first mentioned the gentrified food trucks around my work, there's been at least one outside the office every weekday I happen to venture out. Bool and Fuxion, which I mentioned before, are regular enough that I suspect they must be doing some catering for offices nearby. And there's often one or two others. Today, there were three (in addition to Bool).

It says something about the market, I think, that the Kogi BBQ looked empty, a far cry from the crazed crowds of hipster foodies that were reported to follow its twitter posts like a siren song. Also unlined was Marked5, which notes that "When we first opened [in May], we were 1 of 6 catering trucks (BarbiesQ, kogi, green truck, Coolhaus, Don Chow’s and Marked5) running around LA." (Note that "catering trucks" does not include the many lunch trucks and taco trucks that were already in LA, an oversight that permeates the post.)

But the truck that had the line was a newcomer, Mattie's Southern Kitchen, and I ended up there too. I considered doing Kogi simply to say that I had, but then I reminded myself that was a stupid reason. Marked5's burgers with rice buns looked really appetizing for a decent price, and I may return tomorrow, if they're in the same spot. But I had a bit of a craving.

Spending Thanksgiving with ojouchan's family in North Carolina was wonderful, and the food was great. But we didn't get to take any of it home with us. No turkey sandwiches, no yams, and no collard greens; and the past few days, I've been missing all of those. The turkey sandwich I had last night using store-packaged sliced turkey didn't cut it, but here I had a chance to buy collard greens right outside the office.

The food was . . . okay, but it certainly hit a craving. The hot item seemed to be the vegeterian gumbo, and it was so hot that the truck sold out just as I got there. If they're around again, and I'm in the mood, I might go back and give it a try.

ojouchan is safely back in New Jersey, and I am alone in our apartment. It's nice being able to stretch out in the bed, but not that nice.

Before she left, Ojou made a huge pot of chicken soup so that I will (1) stay well and (2) have home-cooked food when she's gone. It's yummy though.

I wanted to say more, but I just started getting really sleepy. So, until tomorrow, then.

I spent a lot of the day in bed. Just relaxing, reading the internet, snuggling with ojouchan.

Is anyone interested in seeing this with me next week?

Get ready boys and girls for a thrilling episode of El Verde! Meet mild mannered Arturo Sanchez, born as an alien from the not so far away world of Mexico and raised in the good old U.S. of A. All Arturo ever wanted was to live an ordinary life, but after a freak elote accident, Arturo became . . . El Verde!!!

Join us as we go back, way back, to see how it all began. This November, TeAda Productions will present THE ORIGINS OF EL VERDE. Watch as Arturo becomes the superhero who fights for truth, justice, and the Mexican-American way! Then watch him as he battles the evil La Quinceañera with her ultimate plot to destroy the world.

Yes, EL VERDE is the live superhero show that’s fun for the whole family. If you’ve never been to an EL VERDE show before, be sure not to miss this one.

I meant to catch the show in August, but we got all busy. I don't want to let this one go by.

I'm running a game for ojouchan, cramerica, amythyst, and maybe thefreak (who's will probably be working) and pbchris (who hasn't let us know whether he's coming glare). Ojou asked for Call of Cthulhu, which I've run before, but I decided to switch to Trail of Cthulhu, which looked awesome and is nicely streamlined. I'm finishing up writing my notes now, which is good, because I still keep moving things around as I do it. But two things have been bouncing through my mind.

(There are no spoilers for the game in this post.)

One, it's awesome that the places that I walk to when I want to clear my head are exactly the setting of the game I'm writing. I live just a few blocks away from the old Krotona Colony. Krotona was a colony for Theosophy, an esoteric religion that still exists today. (So does the colony; it moved to Ojai in 1926.)

A regular feature in my walks is this stairway, which served as the southern entrance to the colony. I knew that several of the buildings up there were from the colony, but I didn't realize how many. A review of the architecture of the area (available as a PDF) has this to say:

Nearly all of Krotona's major and many of its minor buildings still stand occupied, though all have been to some extent remodeled and most changed dramatically in function. Together they comprise what may well be the largest coherent group of architecturally significant, Theosophical structures in the western hemisphere.

And sure enough, looking through the pictures, I kept recognizing the less flamboyant buildings as ones I walked past.

Tomorrow's adventure begins at this house, though not with its then owners, the parents of Mary Astor.

Second, I've always wondered the extent to which Cthulhu roleplaying games are fundamentally racist. Not in the sense of mechanically dealing with 1920s American race relations in roleplay. More in the sense of whether Lovecraft's stories structurally racist, whether they contain or foster or support ideas of the primacy of whiteness. There's no doubt that Lovecraft was a serious racist, even for the 1920s. (If you doubt it, read this; you can get the gist by looking at the title in the URL.) But the last time I ran the game, Ojou drew up a character that was essentially her grandmother, and it threatened to break the game. Not because of min-maxing or anything, just in having a view of the world that was not the WASP academic worldview that Lovecraft relies upon. That worldview is necessary for the horror to work, and as a result it supports it in the reader. Add a character that doesn't fit into that worldview (like a rich black woman withconnections to other African-American practitioners of Vodoun), and the story completely changes.

The role-playing games are very good at breaking down the stories of Lovecraft (and other Mythos writers), and examining them can give a sense of what's there structurally. There's definitely a sense of extended Terra Nullius. The Mythos contains a whole host of gods, creatures, and alien races that populated earth long before "humanity." And yet, non-White humans (like the native Tongva of Southern California, or ancient or even contemporary Africans) seem to have regular contact with this mentally toxic existence.

Trail of Cthulhu takes Call of Cthulhu's legendary "Sanity" stat and breaks it into Sanity and Stability. Stability is what many people consider to be "sanity"; it's the ability to hold yourself together when terrible things happen, whether they're natural or supernatural. Sanity is specifically tied to knowledge of the "Cthulhu Mythos." From the ToC manual:

Sanity is the ability to believe in, fear for, or care about any aspect of the world or humanity as we know it: religion, science, family, natural beauty, human dignity, even "normal" immorality. The horrible truth of the Mythos is that Sanity measures your ability to believe a comforting lie . . . . It is perhaps best understood as a long-term measure of how close you are to fully realizing the bleak and awful reality of the cosmos.

Given all this (and some other things), I start to see Lovecraft's take on horror as one in which Whiteness and its privileges is equivalent with "humanity." Horror comes from the threat to Whiteness, the comfortable (and comforting) lie that is threatened by incursion from or exposure to the Other, who are alien and unhuman. It's an attitude and analogy that does permeate the structure of Lovecraftian horror, and I'm trying to find ways to neutralize it.

In the past week, I have lost three pairs of pants.

The first was a tear when I tried to squat down with my legs too far apart.

This morning I woke up to a crash sound and confusion. It turns out, ojouchan had broken a light bulb as she was leaving for work. She tossed me some shoes and ran to catch the bus, leaving me to clean up the mess.

It turns out, it's not a good idea to try to clean up a mercury spill. I was barely able to move for fifteen minutes, the fifteen minutes I'm advised to have already left the room.

The breakage wasn't actually too bad, but it still took a long time to clean up. The broken bulb pieces mostly landed on the hard floor or a conveniently located plastic bag. On the other hand, it wasn't all roses; several pieces fell on a few pieces of clothing that were on the floor, including a pair of black jeans, and the pants that I'd intended to wear to work today.

I went to work late, with ninety minutes less sleep than I should've had. I was slow and distracted all day. When I got home I passed out with a headache. And when I woke up feeling a little better, Ojou started having intense cramps.

Now I'm going to get into bed and watch The Last Dragon and hope nothing else goes wrong.

Meeting ojouchan for lunch at Octopus. Lots of fun stuff in their lunch special.

Tomorrow, it's back to gaming. I think that's tomorrow. The e-mail chains have confused me a bit.

I decided to spruce up some of my old userpics. Nothing special, I just pulled up the original images, if I could find them; sharpened them up a little; and saved them again in a better format.

A couple weeks ago, ojouchan told me she hated one of my icons. I agreed with her, saying I was thinking about dropping it. But after a little while, we realized we were talking about two different icons—I liked one but not the other, and so did she, but vice versa.

And so, a poll:

Poll #1295 One Saw Leaves
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

Which icon sucks more?

I have selected the icon I hate most of the two above, but among your other icons is an icon that I hate more, and I shall tell you what it is in the following box: