'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

It's November, which means it's time for anther month of semi-coherent ramblings!

Ironically, despite the current Covid insanity today was much like this time last year: a surprise games evening. Except because of Covid it was online (via the excellent Board Game Arena site) instead of in-person.

Myself, elemnar and a mutual friend played two games this evening. First up was Solo, which is much the same as Uno or Crazy Eights with one slight twist: you can play matching cards out-of-turn. So it's probably just as well that we were playing this online rather than with actual cards - they wouldn't last long around elemnar and I (we mangled several decks playing Spit back in the day)! The variant on BGA has four rounds, and somehow I won all of them.

Next up we returned to our old favourite of Stone Age which plays very well on BGA - this evening, we just played the base set and it ended up being very close run through most of the game. The twist in Stone Age however is a lot of points aren't counted until the very end of the game... and I managed to pull off my second victory of the evening by getting all the meeples and about 5x worth of multipliers on that (without that 50 points it'd have been very close indeed).

Well, another year, another November of trying to think of some random insanity to post every day. This year was less successful that past ones, in that I completely forgot about an update on the 8th and then again on the 22nd. But on the other hand, this will be post 31 of a 30-day month so I have averaged slightly more than 1 post per day, albeit with a lot of filler (and yes, I'm fully aware that this is also a filler post). Then again in 2013 I managed 40 posts, so even with the extra post this is still below average for NaBloPoMo.

Anyway, this is the point at which this blog normally rapidly descends back into radio silence for another year - each year I mean to keep the posting frequency up after NaBloPoMo, and each year I fail. Except for 2016 when I kept it going for most of December with daily advent blogs - who knows, that might happen again this year after elemnar and I exchange advent calendars...

It's somewhat ironic - I had so many plans of varying degrees of cunningness for NaBloPoMo, and in the end hardly used any of them. Disregarding the traditional filler posts (Guy Fawkes, Remembrance Day, the LJ Comments Meme, and the obligatory poll) I only made two Zelda blogs, scanned one film, and didn't dissect a single Magic deck. Admittedly some days were easier than others - Monday is always good for a pasta night gaming blog, and Wednesday provides the odd bit of bible study from housegroup - and there was a fair amount of last-minute filler and ramblings to bump up the post count (and a handful of fudged timestamps). But still, this seems like one of my more successful NaBloPoMo months.

The question now, as always, is will this blog descend back into radio silence for December or will I somehow manage to keep up some level of blogging? There does seem to be a cyclical effect where NaBloPoMo gets me blogging again, but it then quickly fades off and by the next summer the posts are few and far between. Perhaps I should try and do a regular schedule of posts (say Tuesday gets a Zelda update, Magic happens on Wednesday, Friday becomes Film Friday, ...)? I don't intend to repeat last year's daily advent calendar posts, though tea miniblogs may become a thing (I have seen my advent calendar from elemnar and it is intriguing...) and I really ought to blog more snippets of real life randomness. I sit on potential posts for far too long and then they just don't happen.

Brrrr. It's quite literally freezing out there - when I left Sussex University (after visiting SWARM) the roof of the Alfa was all sparkly with frost and the temperature gauge read -4°C. Which reminds me, I need to make up a stronger screenwash mix - it froze on contact with the windscreen and I had to scrape a thin layer of ice off!

Speaking of the Alfa, I dropped in on the garage at Newick so they could poke around at the power steering. Result: puzzled. There was one fault code logged - B1067: dynamic control selector on CAN/intermittent - which probably refers to the DNA switch (Alfa's "sport mode" button), but that's been working fine the last few times I've used it and while it does control the power steering one would expect it to just result in the steering staying in normal mode. A flaky battery was a possibility, so the garage did a battery test which reported 513A which is oodles of current (and most of the 600-odd amps it's rated for - the current battery is significantly up-rated compared to the original). So it's still a mystery.

I happened to mention this all to Si at SWARM and turns out he'd encountered something similar in his Skoda - on one trip he had a progressive loss of electrics as he was driving along, including power steering. In his case it turned out that the cable from the alternator had been merrily corroding and had a high enough resistance that it was no longer supplying enough current for the electrics. I'll mention this to Paul as a possibility.

Okay, so it's just partly-homemade garlic bread, which for some reason we decided to call SCIENCE BREAD. Today's experiment was a tiger bread baton from Tesco's, with a mix of garlic paste, grated cheese, and a little parsley as a filling. I then dampened the crust a little and we stuck it in the oven until it started smoking. Verdict... definite success for the bread, mostly successful for the filling - the garlic paste had a slightly odd aftertaste to it. I think the previous experiment with real garlic worked better but there was a lack of butter to blend the garlic with. The cheese was a good idea but it needs a bit more.

Today's game of choice was two decks of Exploding Kittens combined with the Imploding Kittens expansion. The game went on a surprisingly long time - people kept on surviving explosions by managing to grab defuse cards from the discard pile. In the end it came down to three players and three cards (two of which were explosions).

Speaking of games, I borrowed Settlers of Catan off of Jonners recently and yesterday the family gave it a try. The Gnu's reaction was interesting - after a few rounds of everyone getting to grips with the mechanics he started paying serious attention to the probabilities involved (his comment was the game must have been created by a mathematician). We'd gone for a completely random setup and he managed a good set of starting locations, which he quickly linked to claim the longest road bonus. The victory points accumulated until The Gnu and I were on 9 points each and just needing one more to win - I went down the development card route which had a fair chance of victory, but in the end The Gnu managed to get enough resources to upgrade another settlement to a city for the final point. I can see this being another game to get our own copy of...

Today was the day of Thanksgiving celebrations at Beth & Jonners, and so was full of Things Happening.

First off, pleaseremove and I avoided Thanksgiving entirely and instead dropped in on brokencube to visit his new flat (and because Craig wanted a graphics card). It appears that Nik's anti-technology field is currently destroying all his hard disks in sequence... instead for the one that stubbornly refuses to die despite making horrid clunking noises. So that's business as normal for Nik :)

Next up was the pre-Thanksgiving "exercise" in the form of karting! We were on the downstairs Crawley track, which is one with a couple of corners that I've never quite got the hang of. There was enough of use for a race and so the first session was a qualifier where I gradually improved during the session but ended up 8th overall. I spent a good half-dozen laps stuck behind someone which didn't help - I couldn't quite make it past them as they aggressively claimed the apex on every corner... until after a bit when someone else passed me and then punted them at the corner before the ramp. So I sneaked through the gap left behind :)

For the race we did a reverse grid so I started third, and managed a good start up the middle to rise into 2nd round the first corner. I made it over the bridge, braked hard at the bottom to avoid the leader who took the hairpin slower than I was expecting, got shunted by someone but managed to recover, and then two corners later the race was paused. I think I may have left a multi-kart pileup behind me :) The rest of the race went reasonably well (with me gradually dropping down the rankings as the faster drivers snuck past), apart from one bit where I lost it on the 2nd straight after the bridge. It was slightly surreal - the two straights are separated by a right-angle corner which I take flat out, and as I continued to accelerate past the corner I could feel the back slowly drifting more and more out until I lost it and ended up facing the wrong way down the track. That said after stopping there was enough space that I could power the kart round and continue on, so I recovered without causing a yellow or red flag - go me!

I ended the race 8th again, though I improved my lap time a bit, to I think 25.0s (Jonners has the timesheets). One day I'll manage a sub-25s time!

Being a race there were prizes from TeamSport for the top three, and a bonus prize for first place - see, a while back I mentioned at housegroup about the karting and one of the guys went "Ah, I've got something you might like"... which turned out to be a real-life scale model r/c Mario Kart, minus battery and controller (TeamSport chap: "Nice idea, whoever brought Mario!"). So of course this had to become a bonus prize for first place! Perhaps we should get it mounted and make it the annual Thanksgiving trophy?

Finally, 'twas time for Thanksgiving itself! It's not something people generally celebrate in Britain (though Black Friday is now a thing here), but Beth being American hosts a Thanksgiving meal each year and so it's become a tradition in her friends circle. Plus it's a good time to catch up with friends I rarely see, and for those of us who are really prepared (not me! - though I have handed over one present already this year) a chance to hand out Christmas cards :)

I forgot to mention that I played a new board game the other day. A friend from church is part of a gaming group (I think mostly full of IBM chaps, so he and I are the odd ones out!) and occasionally hosts at his place, so I went along. This time the game was Imperial - in a nutshell, everyone's competing to invest in major European powers to build their empire. The twist is that it's not the players who take turns, but rather the countries, with the player that's invested the most in the country getting to decide what it does. This does make setting up long-term plans tricky as it's all too easy for someone else to wrest control of a country from you and then scupper your carefully laid plan.

In the end I didn't do too well - I misjudged what was happening in the endgame and thought there'd be another round before someone reached the maximum level of investment and ended the game. Another turn or two and I'd have been able to score a good few more points, but oh well. I still had fun which is the important part and it's one I'd like to try again at some point.

Just getting to pasta night was hard enough - someone managed to roll a dustbin lorry of all things on the M27 eastbound... immediately before the J12 exit. This basically snarled up the entire M27 as far back as Southampton Airport. So I looked at Google's traffic data, and went "ah-hah, the A27 looks fairly clear, so I shall be Smart and use the A27 through Fareham and Portchester". This was actually a very good idea with only one flaw - to get to the A27 I had to leave Segensworth. That alone took over 45 minutes to achieve as the local roads were equally snarled up.

Today's game of choice was Betrayal at House on the Hill. It's a game of two halves: everyone starts off exploring the haunted house, until enough Omen cards are collected that someone fails the Haunt roll. At that point one of the players becomes the traitor and starts attacking the rest. In this case, Sarah's character became invisible and so we had to try and hunt her down (by guessing where she'd moved to and attacking in that room), while she got to sneak around. It was looking to become a long drawn-out affair until Jonners managed a lucky guess on Sarah's location and an even luckier attack roll that splatted her character in one hit. Definitely one to play again, though like Eclipse possibly at the weekend when we've got more time.

Definitely a wet and wild night, driving back from Billingshurst... not helped by having to dodge I think a dog walker on the A29 followed immediately by a white van man parked at the side of the road opening his door! Fortunately I could dodge into the other lane and didn't hit anyone or anything, but I could have done without that surprise.

Today at work my boss stumbled across GCHQ's Minority Report code challenge, and so since the rest of the business seems to have no idea what we should be doing the team decided to have a crack at it.

For reference, GCHQ's puzzle is:

If Samuel transcribed what Louis wrote…
…and Louis wrote what Ludwik translated…
…and Ludwik translated what Tim said…
…then what did Tim say?

Here is Samuel’s transcription:

IN AAAAIAN INAAANAIA IA IAINA AI AA IAIIA IAA AAIAAINN AA IAAANN IAINANI
NA ANNNNMA NAANIANMN NN ANNAN NN AM MNNNN ANI MAAINNIA AM NNAMIA NNAANIN
AM MMIAAMA MMIMAAMMA MM AMAAA MA AM AAAMA AAA MAMAAAAM AM AAIMMM MMMMAMA

CLUE: The key to unlocking the puzzle is identifying Samuel, Louis and Ludwik. There are links between them!

Anyway, after about 15 minutes we had the answer (which in lowercase and without trailing punctuation should have a MD5 hash of 29fa3b97488c805267461800b3c5d1a3). Turns out that if you throw a half-dozen software engineers at a puzzle it gets solved fairly quickly!

( Warning: spoilerish notes )

Because I'm clearly not trying to complete enough different games, I bought the latest Phoenix Wright instalment (Spirit of Justice) recently. I am trying to limit the number of unfinished games I've got, honest!

I've actually been playing it a fair bit and have now reached the final case. Being a Phoenix Wright game, the cases are all full of plot twists and turns and nothing is quite what it seems... except for your client being innocent. Probably. And the prosecution being narrow-minded and blinded to the possibility that they might be wrong. Certainly all the cases revolve around taking the prosecution's carefully constructed scenario and pointing out that what actually happened is entirely different... and then after having done so, shredding your own scenario in favour of a third timeline.

There's an overarching plot with references to some of the earlier games which is nice to have, especially as the plot is getting interesting (case 5 in particular has a surprise with who your opponent in the courtroom is). I like it when games put effort into the backstory - they could just have a string of mostly individual cases and indeed the earlier instalments were like that, but it adds to it when there's something to tie everything together. It's a bit like Wipeout 64 - yes, that's just a racing game, it doesn't need any plot at all, and yet the manual hints at a whole world with team descriptions, track design notes, quotes from notable figures in the Wipeout world. It just makes it all so much more.

Plus Spirit of Justice has some wonderfully silly bits of dialogue, such as this gem from Apollo (which reminded me of the whole Boaty McBoatface thing)...



...or later on, this time disagreeing with Dhurke's optimism...



I can see the writers/translators had fun with the dialogue.


One thing that caught my eye, or rather ear: the music for the Dance of Devotion sounds a lot like the opening theme to the first and second Ghost in the Shell films. Is it some sort of Japanese music theme/style?