Closed, Normal Service Resumes Very Shortly

I'm off for the weekend to go hang out with Unitarians, this blog resumeth next week.

My predictions about last weekend were mostly right. Everyone enjoyed it hugely, but... well... Munchkin is the kind of game where you end up having conversations several days later which involve the phrase "You KILLED me and STRIPPED MY CORPSE even of cards you weren't meant to steal!" whilst the other party looks guiltily at their feet.

Though not too guiltily. It is Munchkin after all.

So, Games Day Then...

It's Games Day at my house tomorrow. This concerns me since there appears to be no faster way to learn which of your friends are untrustworthy, unscrupulous, backstabbing fiends than playing Munchkin with them.

Yes, Alexi Conman, I am looking at you. And no, I haven't forgotten the whole Plutonium Dragon incident.

I've laid in supplies of beer, fizzy pop, pizza and cake, and ensured that we have the necessary individuals present:

1. One frazzled gamesmaster,
2. At least one person who has not played the game in question before, and wishes everyone would just be nice to them
3. A couple of people who actually know how to play the game and will be nice to person 2.
4. A couple of people who actually know how to play the game and will take the existence of person 2 as an opportunity to test out their backstabbing skills to the max*.
5. Someone to sit in the corner and actually not play the game, but provide a running sarcastic commentary on all the players' bad decisions.

* I'm not naming names here, I'm just making a prediction based on how these things pan out. 'Cause, if you're not tough on the newbies, how will they learn to play the game? ::evil laugh::

Still, at least we're not playing these:5 Board Games That Ruin Friendships

Unbiblical Thoughts, 2

Still continuing my reading of Psalms for Lent. Still finding it challenging. Perhaps the hardest thing to grasp is that the Old Testament was written in an age where the individual was less important than the tribe, and women and children less important than men. What mattered was not who you were. It was who you belonged to. I believe it's a testament to all the world's major religions that we can understand their essential truths, though those truths were written in an age when human ways of thinking about the world were utterly different.

I was recently reading Ursula Vernon's story about Susan Pevensie from the Narnia Chronicles, "Elegant and Fine", in which she comments "half my short stories turn up as 'Point of view of the woman in this otherwise well-known story'". I was recently rereading (taking a break from Psalms) one of the Bible's more familiar tales, which also has a lion in it; the book of Daniel.

I'd forgotten how the ending to the tale of Daniel in the lion's den was not that Daniel lived after the lions refused to eat him. It was that the king threw into the lion pit the advisors who told him to put Daniel in there.

Along with their wives and children.

Stuff We Learned At The Sunderland Comics Convention

Which was held last month in Seaburn, and was an excellent way to spend an afternoon.

• The meaning of "Adamtine" by Hannah Berry. I asked her this, and it's related to a crossword clue mentioned in the book. One character is trying to fill in a crossword answer; the word in question is "Rhadamanthine", and the letters he doesn't have spell out "Adamtine". "Rhadamanthine" means "unfailingly just". Make of that what you will. More details here: ConSequential review.
• Hannah Berry is awesome, and her next book "Livestock", is out next year.
• The writers of 2000AD agree that the next Judge Dredd crossover should be Dredd meets the Doctor. As one of them pointed out, the great thing about Dredd is that he can be the bad guy, and he doesn't have to win. 
• At least one writer of 2000AD would like Dredd to meet David Cameron, and the entire British Cabinet. Slowly and painfully.