OCT 28

2024

Monday: another night of Quizzo at Stogie Joe's. It's my second week having the chicken added to my salad, and at least this week, our performance was a little better than last time. Still didn't place, though.

2023

Saturday, 10:50 AM: today my dream was of a combat academy, and the drama of an expulsion, a betrayal, and civil strife.

5:09 PM: Mikey finally made it, but his check engine light came on for the last 80 miles or so. He wanted to put his precon red deck through its paces, so I let him stomp on me for a while before eating a mini flapjack and some gorp for breakfast, and the FFXIV crew stood around talking about Endwalker and related subjects. Infernarl's Modern Horizons 2 draft started just after that; I put together a Temur list with a light tokens theme, though I did get the honor of opening the premiere art Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer. We took a break for the group memorial just before 3, and I went with Julie to wander the mini golf course. Spent some time talking with Mothra about Star Trek and roleplaying games.

We tried to start the first round of games at 4, but it went a little late. My first game was against Haley, who had a modular list in Boros colors. She took the first game with flying fire-breathers. My lesson from this game is to make better use of information from my scrying, as I'd forgotten I had a removal spell on top of my library and tapped mana such that I wouldn't be able to cast it when I had the opportunity to draw during combat. I won the next game through sheer card advantage, causing her to scoop. Third game, she kept a risky mulligan and scooped on like the third turn because she kept drawing land. (She felt some regret afterwards when I revealed my own hand full of lands.)

Miffy's game started late, so the rest of us took a break as hot dogs were distributed as a late lunch.

7:44: Finished my matches against Miffy (0-2, her jump-started draw 2, discard 1 effects generated too much value for me to keep up with, particularly since she could reanimate her discards) and Mikey (2-1 against his Rakdos discard synergy, though we missed his suspend triggers on the last game and things might have been different). Dinner of jambalaya happened, though I missed out since we wanted to get our final games in before Qing of Posters. We've now assembled and people are picking their team names.

1:14 AM: Qing of Posters happened around 8, which got a lot of extra documentation on SB, including at least one video recording. Tigress recorded a video intermission. My favorite question was "What is [other poster]'s top five Zelda games?" (The first version of this was a trick question, because the named user seems to mainly play games that predate the Zelda franchise, and had not played any actual Zelda games.) Felix wanted to hot tub, so I joined him, Mikey, and Infernarl in the tub, followed shortly by Rudie. There's something about the way Felix needs to have people rejecting his requests that I can't handle in large doses; tonight he was getting his fix by asking everybody to get him a beer. I tried to cut him off by actually getting him a drink, but the group that was picking up groceries hadn't returned yet, so there were no beers to be had (not that this stopped him from asking every passerby to grab one for him). After the conversation had run its course and the karaoke started going, I excused myself to go back inside and shower before joining Julie on the ground-floor sofa where we've been sitting most of the weekend to play more Hearthstone and FFXIV, and I stayed there until I wrote this update.