December 17 2003 RussCon Report

News

For those who didn't know, I recently started studying German and Mandarin Chinese. (One reason I'm learning Chinese is because I intend to visit Beijing in July for the Esperanto world congress in 2004.) I am surprised how many people I know who speak or are learning Mandarin. Just at RussCon this week, I got help from William, Pauline, Meng; and RussD is also learning it. Cool! It is certainly good to know other speakers when one is studying a language.

This year has been very eventful and pivotal for me, a major reason being my learning other languages after years of thinking I sucked and would always just be a lame monolingual... if anyone's looking for a New Year's resolution, learning a new language (or two, or three) is a great one!

And speaking of New Year's, don't forget that for the first time in RussCon history, December 24 and 31 are Wednesdays, and so there will not (repeat not) be RussCon As Usual those 2 evenings. Perhaps JeffS's New Year's party will include some gaming, for those who just can't go without.

Game Results

CarcassonneCastle	2	RussW 1 Marty -1
CarcassonneCastle	2	RussD 1 Pauline -1
ScreamMachine	6	JimG 5 Ben 3 JP 1 MarkG -1 Whendy -3 MarkH -5
Tichu	2	( Ben Whendy ) 1 ( MarkH JimG ) -1
CarcassonneHunters	4	RussW 3 Clayton 1 William -1 Marty -3
Transamerica	2	MarkG 1 JP -1
WebOfPower	3	JP 2 Meng 0 MarkG -2
ZirkusFlohcati	4	RussW 3 Whendy 1 MarkG -1 JP -3
ZirkusFlohcati	4	MarkG 3 Whendy 1 JP -1 RussW -3
Carcassonne	2	MarkY 1 Clayton -1
Bluff	5	RussW 4 MarkY 2 MarkG 0 Whendy -2 Clayton -4

Whee, I had a good evening, winning 4 out of 5 games! Carcassonne Castle continues to be enjoyable and popular. My game with Marty was much lower scoring than my previous games (high score was in the 70s, I believe), no doubt because we both had 2 dudes locked on a large road that took a while to complete, finally completing and scoring for neither of us. And the largest keep only had 3 tiles!

MarkH emailed me later that his Scream Machine deck seems to have lost a card, so if anyone has an idea where it might have disappeared to, let me or him know.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:         
 3.6889 RussW
 1.6094 Ben
 1.3863 MarkY
 1.0986 JimG
 0.6931 RussD
 0.2877 MarkG
 0.0000 Meng
-0.1054 Whendy
-0.4055 William
-0.6931 Pauline
-1.0986 JP
-1.8971 Clayton
-2.0794 Marty
-2.4849 MarkH

Win Ratings:
 4.7875 RussW won 4 of 5
 1.0986 JimG won 1 of 2
 0.9808 MarkG won 2 of 6
 0.6931 RussD won 1 of 1
 0.5108 Ben won 1 of 2
 0.4700 MarkY won 1 of 2
-0.2877 Whendy won 1 of 5
-0.2877 William won 0 of 1
-0.3522 JP won 1 of 5
-0.4055 Meng won 0 of 1
-0.6931 Pauline won 0 of 1
-0.8755 MarkH won 0 of 2
-0.9808 Marty won 0 of 2
-1.2040 Clayton won 0 of 3

I am the Devil! Ben and JimG are Co-Vice-Devils. Then MarkY, RussD, MarkG.

If you are confused how the ratings work, you could peruse the FAQ.

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

Marty was the Meta Devil. Here is the Meta Game he mailed out:

The Devil Gets His Due

It may be Christmastime, but at least for the last Russcon of 2003, it will be a Devil of a time, since the designer is Dual Devil (both top gaming devil and winner of the meta-game from the previous week!), a rare and very coveted fete (even more so than the Rare and Coveted Extra Average Award, but I digress...).

So, here are the details, wherein the Devil always resides:

1. Play any game involving a Devil or demon (bad Maia count, hint, hint), get 5 metagame points (MPs); win the game for 2 more MPs
2. Play a game with the main Devil (ie, yours truly), +2 MP/game played
3. Pull off a Devilish move in a game (as voted by >50% of the participants in your game), get 1 MP/Devilish move (record this in The Book with game results)
4. Bring Devilsfood cake to Russcon on Wed Dec. 17th, get 5 MPs!
5. Quote, sing or hum a few lines/bars of a popular song or well-known verse/script of Devilish content or name, 1 MP each occurance (each unique song/verse usuable only once per night per person for MPs)
6. Dance like the Devil himself has possessed you at any time for up to 10 sec. By a vote of your peers (those playing the game you are in, or anyone you can get to vote for you if you're not currently playing), get 0-5 MPs (# decided by voters)
7. Burn in the eternal fires of Hades, 1,000,000 MPs (you must be able to verify it...)

Taking a Devil-may-care attitude toward this Meta-game will make you the hindmost, where the Devil shall take you!

Jim "Daredevil" Gutt

(Jim was devilishly mocked for the fete/feat mixup, as was his due.) As far as I know, none of the games played involved deviltry (no doubt due to the counterbalancing effect of Christmas spirit); several people played games with JimG, but of those, only Whendy also sang song fragments ("The Devil Went Down To Georgia" and "Sympathy For The Devil", the latter in a stirring but brief duet with me). So Whendy is the Meta Devil and has 2 weeks longer than normal to design the Meta Game for 2004-01-07!

Links

Gaffes: Fellowship of the Nitpickers

The Lamb Community, the first film in the famous Tolkien trilogy The Lord of Lambs, directed by Peter Jackson. Don't miss the second part, The Two Turns.

weebles-stuff.com has a clip from a restored version of The Two Towers

Clandestine! The Kennedy Center stage archives have several streaming videos of Clandestine concerts!

Slate has a sample of Alan Moore's rather detailed script for the first volume of League of Extraordinary Gentleman

Bob Harris's travel journal

The American Conservative criticizes the Bush administration's quarantine of dissent

They Thought You'd Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks

QRIO Demo is a movie with dancing robots

The Brick Testament illustrates the Bible with Lego scenes