VtES social game report

(A "relying on blogger not to lose my notes" post)

So, Monday's social game was quite fun. I managed to fit 4 games in, the last (admittedly a 3 player), in just over 35 minutes, and tried different decks each time. I didn't try my !Malk deck, which I had wanted to play, since I somehow left out 2 vampires when reconstructing it, which was somewhat daft.

In the first game, I was playing an experimental Samedi deck. The table was Phillip, playing a !Salubri deck, bleeding Brendan's !Tor combat deck bleeding my Samedi, bleeding Marc's potence combat deck. A very combat heavy table. The Samedi deck didn't do particularly well, which, given the thrown together nature of it, is not that surprising. Damage prevention was a major issue, so I should prehaps add some Fortitude to the deck idea. I think there's a potentially fun vampire bloat module using Genina + Compress + Amaranth + Ritual of the Bitter Rose, and then rescue Genina if the blood hunt sends her to topor, but I need more Amaranths and Rituals to make that work. The concept of using Reanimated corpses and Shambling Hordes didn't come out at all, which partly reflects how the deck struggled. Marc's potence deck eventually swept the table, thanks to dealing vast amounts of damage, and gradually building up a stock of useful devices to boost bleed.

The second game saw me playing my Blood Brothers deck, bleeding Brendan with a Settite deck, bleeding Val's Eze bloat deck, bleeding Phillip's experimental deck, bleeding James' !Brujah bleed deck (I think I started, although that may be incorrect). Val's bloat strategy worked exteremely well, while Phillip's deck never really got going. I was able to oust Brendan, using Walk of Caine for a 5 bleed, but ran into the problem of not being able to fill up blood quickly enough to put pressure on Val. Having Angelo Banished twice in the game certainly didn't help me, either. I should look at adding the Sermon of Caine's, to get blood redistribution, and I need some additional pool gain (maybe a Powerbase Chicago?). I'd dearly love to have some Hungry Coyotes for the Hermana's hunting, but that will probably require searching eBay, and a secure ahven or two for Angelo is probably also a good idea, since the deck is heavily reliant on him. Anyway, 1 VP for that deck is not bad, and I can blame Brendan for not putting enough pressure on Val for my later troubles :).

The third game saw Val, playing a weenie gun deck, bleeding James (the deck never got going, but looked bruise-bleed'ish), bleeding Phillip, playing a Nossie bruise bleed deck, bleeding me, playing my Toreador Alexandra star vampire deck, with Val starting. Val got off to a very fast start, as the weenie's are prone to do, and, by adding camera phones, was setting up to be very dangerous. James never got into the game, not being able to defend against Val succesfully. I had a good opening few draws, pulling Alexandra early, being able to minion tap her, enchant down, and pull Elliot quickly as well, followed by another Minion Tap, leaving me with two minions,. Alexandra's untap ability and surprisingly good pool levels. While I never had the vote lock, since Phillip pulled out several titles, the early pressure from Val, and a well timed Scorn of Adonis enabled me to get a Kine through. A couple of bleeds, and I was able to oust Val before he ousted James. I did have a uncovered haven slapped on Alexandra, but was able to draw enough strike combat ends to survive that. James was quite weak, and I was able to get a couple of Aching Beauties down, so I ousted him quickly. Phillip had got a Army of Rats into play, but I was generating pool fast enough that I could cope. In general, the cards were very kind to me, in addition to the two minion taps, I drew three Aching Beauties, and both the Hunting Ground and the Art Museum quite early. which helped me keep my vampires sufficiently healthy. Due to the number of minions, the endgame between Phillip and me got quite tight, but, with two minions with Aching Beauties, I was able to oust him successfully. Despite not having the vote dominance the deck usually has, I'm quite pleased with how it went. Had Val been my predator, though, things would likely have gone rather poorly for me. Like any star vampire deck, the Toreador deck is rather fragile, but it can be very effective.

The final game was a three player game between me, playing my Ahrimane deck, bleeding Simon, playing his !Salubri deck, bleeding James, playing Micheal's Osebo deck. This game was rather madcap, since we were pushing to be over by midnight, and only started at just after 11:30 pm (in the end, me finished at 0:06, which was't a bad effort). I was able to sweep the table, thanks largely to how the table interaction fell out - James, while doing quite a bit of damage, never got enough blood back onto his minions, so was scrambling to keep them out of torpor by the end. Simon suffered from having a minion burnt in combat early, and I was able to get a Army of rats in paly, and defended it for long enough for it to significantly reduce his pool. I also was able to get good use out of the Carrion Crows + Aid from Bats combo, sprinkled with a few Strength of bear's + Scorpion Stings, so I was able to do enough damage in combat to be OK. I did have several vampires got to topor, and one vampire burnt. I also drew Ohoyo for the first time since I started using the deck. He provided some useful additional combat options, and the ability to swap him in to a combat was most useful. While he was burnt after only a few turns, he did enough damage to be worth the cost, and it allowed to to play a Vulture's Buffet with good effect. I eventually was able to play Tier of Souls, which, with the added bleed, gave me sufficient momentum to oust Simon and then James. A game, which, despite ultimately sweeping the table, was quite tight, and generally good fun. I think the Ahrimane deck is actually shaping up reasonably well now. While not A-class, it's got enough going for the bruise and bleed option to be quite dangerous when things go it's way.

Humanity

I'm usually fairly upbeat about humanity. I generally believe that most people are pretty decent, and so forth, despite the, at times, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On days when I have to be early, though, this tends to be much less true.

While part of this is due to my just not being an early morning person, and the consequent bad mood that puts me in, much of the blame is due to having to deal with early morning traffic. The selfishness, lack of forethought, general stubbornness and sheer stupidity to be seen in a few minutes of driving is enough to severely strain my tolerance.

Of course, this raises all sorts of questions: Is driving merely well suited to bringing out the worst in people? Are people always like this, and I just don't notice most of the time? Is it just because I'm really irritable at that time of the morning (and usually running late)? All of them?

Probably the only firm conclusion that can be drawn is I really do need to work harder at avoiding early mornings.

Common experiences

Communication is much easier when people can call on common experiences. While many concepts and experiences are fairly universal, there are others that are far less common, and, while it may be quite possible to cover the broad outlines, it is very difficult for someone who has not shared a similar experience to truly grasp the details.

Dealing with a mosquito buzzing around inside your helmet on the N2 probably falls into the "not universal" category.

The Eskom Rant

In which nothing particularly new is said about the situation, no great answers are provided, and the tone of the debate is not raised to any great height.

That we have a power crisis is a major problem, and shows poor planning. That we have a crisis, and no particularly coherent response from the warning signs in 2006, is an example of poor planning.

Several things that have struck me during the current situation:

• A scheduled power cut that doesn't happen is almost as bad for productivity as a power cut.
  
• Eskom ain't at all good about providing information about why things go bad - their press releases are appalling. "We need to load shed, tough cookies" basically.
• This leads to lots of rumours (X% of the generating capacity off-line, so much power exported to other countries, etc, etc.), and the lack of information from Eskom makes the denials implausible.
• Unfortunately, the people jumping up and down about the rumours most ardently (the DA and Solidarity stand out here) aren't plausible either, so it's really hard to good any feeling on what the heck is going on
• WTF is up with poweralert's trend pages. The displayed historical trend changes radically over quite short periods of time.
• While the working laptop is nice, until everything that connects me to the Internet at iTL is also on various long-lived battery backups, I can only work at about half capacity during a power failure. When did I become so reliant on Google and other online services?
• Why is iTL listed as both iThemba Labs and Cyclotron in the load shedding schedule? It makes no sense.
  
• Although I finally found a real personal use case for searching pdf's. Pretty much every other document I deal with, I need to read the entire thing, and, since most are academic papers with figures, I usually use the figures to navigate if I need to find something again.
• Considering the number of power outages, I'm surprised more of the hardware I maintain hasn't died.
• Discovering I mis-set my alarm clock after yet another power failure was an unpleasant surprise.
• I need new UPS's for some of the Stellenbosch machines.
• I badly need new UPS's for home.
• Why is it going to take so long to build another power station? There is surely lots of scope for just throwing extra resources at the project (it's not software after all)
• Aren't we due to have the pebble bed reactor come online around 2013 anyway?

New Toy

I have a rather old laptop. Considering that I acquired it at the end of 2001, it's served me exceedingly well, and proved rather robust. All good things must come to and end, and, although I've kept the laptop alive despite a gradually failing hard-drive for some time, the screen, which never quite recovered from water damage due to being caught in some rather heavy rain on the bike, eventually gave up the ghost.

Thus I have a new, shiny, fast toy. I acquired a Fujitsu-Siemens Li1718 laptop (dual-core 1.78Ghz Pentium, 160GB harddisk, ATI graphics, etc) (pictures here). Overall, a very nice shiny toy.

My home desktop machine is still marginally more powerful, but, considering I only spent 7000 rand on the laptop, and I spent slightly more than that on the desktop machine 18 months ago, it's quite a testament to how technology prices have continued to fall.

Installing Debian was quite painless - The latest etch installer had minimal trouble, and upgrading to lenny was completely painless, thanks to doing it at campus, with a nice fast local mirror available (I've not been tracking testing for a while, so I thought this was a good time to start doing so again). The only thing not working out of the box is the wireless network card, but there are patches for madwifi floating around, so hopefully that will fix itself in due course, and I'm not such a heavy wireless user that it really matters. The graphics card is currently not accelerating OpenGL stuff, but the current work on the DRI drivers should solve that fairly soon. There was a time when I would have booted into the windows partition just to check things, but these days my confidence in Linux's hardware support is such that I no longer bother, so I honestly don't know what was pre-installed on the machine.

And, with Eskom's current failure to provide the country with reliable power, it is nice to once again have a machine with a battery life that can be measured in more than seconds (Of course, this means I lose an excuse not to do work, but the toy's worth it.)

Hermanus Hike

Over the weekend, I went hiking with Simon, Adrianna and Simon's Mom Pat in the Vogelgat Nature reverse near Hermanus. Overall, a most enjoyable weekend (hopfully I'll have the photos up by the weekend (edit: now up at my dip site). Observations from the experience

• I'm no longer hiking fit. Since was never an issue when I worked at UCT, I blame the lack of hills in iThemba LABS buildings.
• Guy's Pool was worth the hike, though.
  
• It's a very pretty nature reverse
• I'm probably overly addicted to trying to construct Panoramas at the moment.
• Consequently, I could use a larger memory card for my camera
  
• Being far from it makes me realise just how much a fan of indoor plumbing I am.
• I need to find a tame botanist to drag along on such trips. Identifying things as "pretty flower" lacks accuracy but I don't want to invest the effort into learning how to identify plants personally.
• The people who made the paths did a truly impressive amount of work.
• They weren't kidding about the slippery rocks, either.
  
• Hopefully, my next water bottle won't have the cap disintegrate mid-hike.
  
• Weather changes fast on mountains (I knew this, but it was a reminder)
  
• Next time, I'll take a Bookcrossings book to leave at the hut.
• There will be a next time, if for no other reason than I couldn't get good photos of the Main falls because of rain on the Sunday.
• The wind on the way back from Hermanus was impressive - the rainbow was pretty.
  

Achievements

On Friday, I defrosted the fridge in the lab.

It's a sad comment on the state of the fridge (regrettably, I didn't think to take my camera) that actually achieving what I did on Friday, which was to get almost all the ice out of the fridge, represents a significant achievement, and occupied a considerable chunk of my time. Anyway, the fridge is now again usable.

Probably the frustration of spending most of my day wrestling with a fridge is why I got involved in debugging a postscript issue on #clug - for whatever reason, evince doesn't properly render postscript without the %%Page: comment deliminators - once we figured that out, everything worked a lot better.