That's one way of getting it...

I am fairly sure that while part of my endorphin high upon getting home this evening was from having (as predicted) walked nearly double my daily step goal (again), that a large part of it was probably from the general emotional rollercoaster of the work day.

Thursday was a meeting belonging to my Overlady (who was out sick).
Friday was a meeting belonging to my Grandmanager.

There were a lot of things going on this week. My manager came back from vacation, and began spreading her soothing and competent influence over everything. (Paddling like hell.) This afternoon she praised my work in helping my grandmanager's meeting to go smoothly. I have found that one way that's helpful for me to think of things is that I am helping absorb the ambient chaotic crazymaking. I have a rather lot of capacity to absorb chaos and crazy, oh yes I have.

As a contractor, by California law I don't get to take part in things like the $WINTERHOLIDAY work shindig. A few folks (including me, because I don't get to) have been skipping the semi-regular decompression-and-booze gatherings (loud, crowded) in favor of fun with games.

I think my efforts to bag the most convenient to the partying meeting room are doomed: other folks (guys with laptops and powerpoints) have been bagging it despite it being booked in the calendar system. I'll turn my efforts elsewhere, and I am to hope in a direction where more people will be willing to respect a calendar booking. (Important meetings do get priority over card games, though.)

After the meeting logistics fun and the hard work and the news, oh god the news, I was reading Twitter and yeah, the Onion said it well and so did elf -- it was very good to relax with some delightful people from the internet, bond over the horrors of the calendar system, listen to Tom Lehrer songs, and laugh ourselves stupid over the things we put together with Cards Against Humanity.

And after that I called Nora on my way home, upgraded my portable electronics backup power situation, and then came home to tell #dreamwidth how much I love y'all for so many reasons.

Endorphins. Because oh my god, the mental whiplash today. Owww.

#CAH: house rules for low player count mitigation

The Cards Against Humanity crew tonight was me, Mr. Zune, and The Intern. Three players is not particularly many (and it's a game that tends to increase in fun with more players, at least up to a certain point), so we sort of added some house rules.


Previously, when Mr. Zune and I played in the inaugural round, we were trying it two-player style, and we tried playing two sets of cards each and coming to a gentleman's agreement on the winner, with a random black card runoff in case of a tie.

With three players, we were able to have one judge who did not play, but we continued the practice where if only two players are contributing white cards, then each player submits two.

For added randomness and hilarity, after a while we introduced a "random player" -- a card (or two cards, in case of pick two) drawn at random (face-down, unexamined, and usually placed by the judge) -- and in case of the random player winning the hand, the black card was forfeit.

This meant that instead of having to pick between two cards, the judge was looking at five cards. This was found to play well.


TSA Rules were put to use for the first time this time, but because of a hand that had become basically unplayable because of ineffective/not very funny/not very horrible cards, rather than horribly unplayable cards. I'd tried to write the rules to make it so people wouldn't exploit it as a loophole for that, but it turned out that the "hand screening" was a good combination of benefit (ditch half of a weak hand) with drawback (expose your entire hand while picking which cards to discard) with fun/hilarious (everyone gets to see your hand and have opinions).

Having seen the TSA Rules hand-screening in action, I may re-word it to accommodate wholly bad hands of any sort a little better.


Another, non-play-related standard: write-in cards are now encouraged to be either five or seven syllables, to encourage better haiku possibilities.

9 tweets for 2012-12-15

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Saturday, 0401: My fitbit #fitstats for 12/14/2012: 4,812 steps and 2.1 miles traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/23LLYD
• Saturday, 0440: DW entry: #CAH: house rules for low player count mitigation http://azurelunatic.dreamwidth.org/6975064.html
• Saturday, 1347: RT @ohshitcircuit: "Rudolph" would be great if it ended with R being like "fuck all y'all & yr fucked-up standards of inclusiveness, ...
• Saturday, 1349: RT @yeloson: "Males go for most mates, females for best mates" experiment proven completely false: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/12/13/166953517/promiscuous-males-and-choosy-females-challenging-a-classic-experiment
• Saturday, 1354: RT @RaisingBoychick: You know what's more likely to happen to someone "unstable" than killing a bunch of people? Getting shot by cops.
( read the other 4 )

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