Last weekend, I found myself in Macclesfield to celebrate the engagement of Liz and Simon. Highlights in brief included:
Board games with the happy couple and their friends, as well as the Aberites who were present. Just like old-school Geek Nights.
Liz & Simon’s awesome new house. Also, their cats, one of whom took a special interest in Bryn‘s crotch for the
duration of his visit.
Seeing people I don’t see often enough. Meeting lots of fabulous new people.
A surprising heavy dump of snow, tramping around in it, and attempting to sledge on a sleigh made from – by the looks of things – a plank of wood and two chair legs (not
particularly successful).
Tasty pizza. Followed by the chef coming out to ask me how it was, presumably because I’d been overheard talking about the art of pizza making, the consistency of their dough, etc.:
I’ve been eating a lot of pizza, recently, as I’ll explain in a future post.
Dancing until late to awful music on a knackered old sound system by a foulmouthed transvestite DJ. It’s always a pleasure to get the chance to dance with Liz, one of the few people
who seems to enjoy flailing around to music almost as much as I do.
Brief game of I Have Never… in Liz & Simon’s kitchen, after the night out: even more “just like old times” than old-style Geek Night, for a handful of us at least.
Friday night was Murder… In Space!, our most recent murder mystery party. This is the second of our murder mystery nights that I’ve been the author of (the first one was
Murder In The Reign Of Terror), and I took a lot of what I learned
from the experience of writing and co-hosting of that mystery… and then disregarded about half of it.
Me as the hologram of Ground Control Director Dan Griffin
One of the things that I thought we’d do differently from normal was a more “freeform” roleplaying experience. Instead of communal debates punctuated with pre-scripted dialogues, I
wanted to create an atmosphere that felt more… like a group of people trapped together, where one is a murderer! I wanted distrust and backstabbing, secrets and lies. So instead of
scripting dialogues and drip-feeding clues to the players between courses, I gave a lot more information “up front” and relied on the characters to develop their own social
interactions, with mixed success.
Captain Rusty Schweiper (Adam) issues a mission patch to reporter Robyn Morse (Claire)
As I expected, I disregarded my own suggestion to myself to refrain from committing to a date for the event until I’d written at least half of the materials. Unfortunately, this was
coupled with my incorrect assumption that writing a murder mystery in which I didn’t pre-script the dialogues would be somehow easier or faster than the contrary. Also my
mistake in thinking that writing for ten people would only be 25% harder than writing for eight (in actual fact, complexity grows exponentially, because each person you add to a murder
mystery has a theoretical relationship with everybody added before them).
Little red pieces of paper abound in the early stages of the game
The game proved challenging early on. Without the structure of initial dialogue and with no formal introduction phase, it took some time for the players to get into character and to
understand what it was that they wanted to achieve and how they might go about it. In addition, a lot of the characters held their cards very close to their chest,
metaphorically-speaking, to being with, resulting in a great shortage of “free” information during the first half of the game. However, the “space age” multicoloured cocktails did their
work quickly, and after a sufficiency of liquid lubrication virtually everybody was slotting into their position in the group.
Helen Shaman (Ruth), the biologist
Once the players got into the swing of things, including (for those who’d attended this kind of event before) culturing an understanding that it was encouraged, perhaps even necessary,
to meet up with fellow crewmembers in smaller groups and swap information and plot items – something that was new to this particular adventure – everything went a lot more smoothly. As
I’d hoped, characters would take time to creep away in twos and threes and gossip about the others behind their backs. At least one character attempted to eavesdrop on others’
conversations, which was particularly amazing to see. In addition to the usual goal of “detect the murderer”/”make a clean getaway”, I’d issued each character with a set of secondary
(and tertiary) goals that they’d like to achieve, typically related to learning something, preventing others from learning something, or acquiring or retaining a particular plot item.
Some characters had more complex goals, relating to keeping the blame on or off particular other characters, making good early guesses, or being the first to achieve particular
milestones. I felt that this added a richness to the characters which is otherwise sometimes lacking, and it seemed to work particularly well for helping the players play their roles,
although I should probably have put the goals higher up on each player’s character sheet in order to make it clearer how important they were to the overall plot.
Robyn Morse (Claire), Sir Richard Virgin (Matt P), and Steven Win (JTA) in a private discussion
As usual, it was inspiring to see characters I’d invented brought to life in the interpretation of their players. As with Murder In The Reign Of Terror, I’d quite-deliberately avoided
assigning characters to players, instead letting Ruth do that based on my preliminary character
descriptions, thereby providing me with a number of surprises (and an even greater number of interesting coincidences) when it came to seeing how everybody chose to portray my ideas.
Particular credit must go to Matt R for his stunning performance as the self-aware android, TALOS-III,
and to Adam for the extraordinary amount of effort he put into his costume (including a silver jumpsuit, “moon
boots”, and a cap and t-shirt emblazoned with his name, insignia, and the mission name). That said, everybody did an amazing job of making their character believable and love (or
hate)-able for the characteristics they portrayed: there were moments at which it was easy to forget that this was all make-believe.
Adam’s “moon boots”
As usual, Ruth put an unbelievable amount of work into making the food fit the theme, and she’d tried to have food that represented the nationalities of all of the astronauts present,
in addition to making the food look like “space food”, even where it wasn’t (which resulted in the up-side that the foil containers out of which dinner was served needed no washing up
when the party was finished). She’d also put a lot of thought into “space age” drinks, which mostly consisted of brightly-coloured cocktails prepared from ingredients brought by
individual guests, which worked really well (although I apologise for the disparity that I’ve since discovered in the varied prices of the drinks people were asked to bring).
Pointing at the murderer, pilot James McDivvy.
As seems to have become traditional – although I swear that this is just another one of those coincidences – Paul‘s
character, James McDivvy, turned out to be the murderer: he’d poisoned the victim using carbon monoxide in his space suit’s air supply when he went for a spacewalk. In the photo above
he’s seen holding a data disk containing the program that controls the TALOS-III android: he played upon the fact that nobody could find it to imply that whoever had it must have
somehow used it to reprogram the android to perform the murder, playing upon everybody’s natural suspicion of the creepy robot amongst them, and this worked well for him, distracting
many of the others from the evidence that would have implicated him. You can also clearly see Rory‘s (Akiyama
Toyohiro) fabulous SG-1/Japanese space geek costume, including his digital scrolling Twitter feed hanging around his neck.
Angharad (Svetlana Svetyona), a first-time Murder Night attendee
As usual, there are lessons to be learned. In the hope that I’ll pay some attention to myself next time (yes, there’ll be a “next time”, hopefully before I leave Aber – and I’m hoping to make something even
bigger and cooler out of it), I’d like Future Dan to remember the following lessons:
I know you’ll ignore this anyway, Future Dan, but do not commit to a date for a murder mystery until you’ve got at least half of it written already. There’s lots
of stress, lots of panic, and a higher freqency of typos and other embarassing mistakes when you write the last few thousand words in the last day or two.
Similarly, have more leeway for additional characters: I know it feels like “wasted words” to write for characters who’ll probably never be used, but it’s better to plan for about
10% of your cast to be playing optional characters, so that when they pull out (or more people want to come) you’re already prepared.
Plan for a structured introduction round in which the host more-fully explains “the story so far”, and perhaps pre-script the first conversation(s) that players are likely to engage
in, in order to make breaking into character a little less like diving in at the deep end.
Much thanks to Ruth and Paul for running
an awesome murder mystery party last night, and to Rory for snapping some great photos. We played Death By Chocolate, in
which American tycoon Billy Bonka had been murdered, but by whom?
[warning: contains spoilers for the Death By Chocolate murder mystery pack]
Most remarkably, it wasn’t Paul’s character this time, as has become traditional. Instead, it was Rory’s: Mike Bison – a loudmouthed American boxer who Rory really brought to life (and
whom the rest of us – all “civilized” Europeans – mocked mercilessly). I might have guessed correctly – Claire did –
if it weren’t for the fact that I disregarded some of Claire’s character’s – Dame Barbara Carthorse’s – observations because she presented it so drunkenly. That’ll teach me!
I played Dr. Sigmund Fraud, pre-eminent psychoanalyst, which was a fabulous role to be cast as, because it gave me license to blame everybody’s faults on the forgotten traumas of their
youth. And also talk about phalluses (phalli?) a lot.
Much credit also due to JTA (Monsoir ‘Chocolate’ Bertrand, rival chocolatier to the deceased), whose already-awesome
French accent only became more ludicrous and pronounced as he got more and more drunk, and to Elizabeth (Dr. Doris Johnson, explorer, adventurer, and expert in Aztec culture), who was
brave enough to come along to one of these things for the first time, and survived.
Ruth and I have started talking about the potential for the next one to take place near the end of October. Hope everybody can make it!
Alec and Suz‘s wedding was
this weekend, and I went along to the wedding reception on Saturday evening, along with Claire, Jimmy, Liz and Simon. We turned up stylishly early, and took advantage of the bar while we waited for anybody else we knew to
appear (okay, so there was the bride and groom, of course, although they were generally pretty busy socialising with all their other guests, and a handful of others like Andy and Siân).
All said, the night was amazing. The venue the happy couple had chosen was County Hall, the Marriott hotel across the river from Westminster Abbey and a stone’s throw
upstream of the London Eye, which is an amazingly beautiful hotel in a great location. The balance of traditional and modern wedding reception themes was strikingly cool. Oh, and Alec
and Suz both looked fabulous, if a little exhausted.
It was great to catch up with so many folks I haven’t seen even remotely enough of late, like Bryn, Matt R, Matt P, Liz, Andy, Siân, and
Sundeep, as well as hanging out with folks I still see regularly, like Ruth and JTA. It was also fab to re-meet folks I’d only ever met in passing before (in Aber, like Caroline, or in the bigger wider world, like
Simon).
And so we drank and danced the night away to a (generally) great selection of music. Liz has an impossible supply of energy and kept dragging Aber-folk up to the dance floor, and
getting down to the bangin’ choons with the old gang filled me with a sense of nostalgia. I’m pretty sure I even saw Jimmy dancing when there wasn’t a girl dancing with him,
which is a first, although he’ll certainly deny that ever happened.
Also of note was the hotel’s response to Matt P’s arrival. Matt P turned up late in combat pants and a t-shirt, and carrying a backpack, and strolled in to the five-star hotel, and I’m
pretty sure that – as I helped him change into the suit he was carrying, in the gents toilets – at least one member of staff came in to check what somebody dressed like that
was doing in their hotel. Fun and games.
There was other stuff. Having travelled as far as London it made sense to do a couple of touristy things, too, as well as to meet up with a London-based potential new volunteer
developer for a software project I’m working on, but the wedding reception will remain the highlight of the weekend, and perhaps the social highlight of the year. It’s occurred to us
that with QParty last year, Alec & Suz’s wedding this year, and Ruth & JTA’s planned wedding in
2010, that we’re lacking an excuse to get the usual suspects together for any reason in 2009. As it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see a wedding or similar event on behalf of, for
example, Andy & Siân, we may have to find some other reason to have a get-together in the coming year. Claire’s looking into the possibility of a group holiday (like the Pembrokeshire fort trip early this year), which is an option, and Matt R proposes Cardiff Is Amazing 2009, a party which (so far) has no more premise than can be inferred from it’s name. Nonetheless, Alec & Suz’s wedding has reminded me
how much I miss many of the people I used to spend time with on a weekly basis, and I’m keen to see one or both of these plans come to fruition.
Oh, and – congratulations, Alec and Suz! Have a great honeymoon, and enjoy the rest of your married life together!
I couldn’t (easily) post these pictures while out-and-about, so I thought I’d share them now:
The tailbackon the M6. That’s a serious amount of traffic at a complete standstill, and people million about on the carriageway. In the distance, in the first one, you can just about
make out the tops of the emergency services vehicles, despite the low resolution of the picture.
Gareth and Penny’s birthday cakes. Gareth’s is decorated with a small place flying across a blue sky, while Penny’s is shaped like a fairytale castle.
This was the moment during their recollection of their boating holiday that Matt suddenly realised that what Liz was telling him about a “steaking incident” was actually true and not
something he’d dreamt.
Claire, Jimmy, and Beth. I don’t think Beth approves of this photo being taken.
A fabulous example of BiCon’s non-assuming, gender-doesn’t-really-matter thinking, in the form of the signs on the toilet doors. Behind these, the secondary signs are the same, except
the the “Toilets with urinals” sign has had appended to it “Standing up okay,” and the “Toilets without urinals” sign has had appended to it “Standing up okay, put you might end up
pissing on the seat.”
Not only a transgender-friendly statement, these signs also function as a reminder that in an environment where your gender is one preferred by not 50% but closer to 95% of the people
present, imposing privacy by something as arbitary as gender is even more pointless than it is in the rest of the world.
The organisers of BiCon run a census each year. I think this photograph of a small part of the survey really does reflect “BiCon thinking” when it comes to the definition of gender and
sexuality. One question reads “What term(s) do you use to describe your gender?”, with the following options – female only, female mostly, female somewhat more, female/male equally,
male somewhat more, male mostly, male only, none/no gender, androgynous, genderqueer, other (please specify). Where almost any other survey would provide in the region of two
mutually-exclusive choices, BiCon’s survey provides 10, which can be used in combination, and the space to define an answer yourself if you’re not satisfied with those available.
BiCon attendees are encouraged to decorate their name badge with stickers showing their affiliation to various groups, causes, ideologies, relationship structures, fetishes, etc. These
make really good conversation-starters, but the list on the first day – with about six different “codes” – tends to have no bearing on the final-day list, fully-expanded by people
adding their own codes and encouraging one another to make use of them. Click on the list to zoom in.
I’m currently in the middle of a murder mystery night: The Brie, The Bullet, And The Black Cat, and I just wanted to point out how clever it is! My character is a secret agent from
England in Casablanca before the British invasion of Africa. My alias – a French nightclub owner – has been blown, and my booklet gives me a SECOND alias which I’ve managed to pull off
without question, and subsequent clues have (so far) been ambiguous as to which alibi I’m using! Very clever!
Last night, Ruth ran the second of her murder mystery nights, which was cool. It didn’t work as fluidly as the first – partially
owing to, in my opinion, a less well-conceived pack, and partially because it turned out that Paul‘s character, who’s gender Ruth had
changed to facilitate the number of people available, was intended to be not only a murdress and an adultress, but also a wife and a mother, which made the plot somewhat confusing as we
tried to patch the holes with convenient “spot fiction”.
Nonetheless, Ruth and JTA put on a great night of food and fun; everybody’s costumes were great (I’ll try to ensure that some make it
online soon), and the evening wore on and folks trickled away home (or staggered away, in Paul’s case) and those that remained drunk themselves philosophical and all was well with the
world.
There’s nothing quite as funny as Paul in a drunken fight with a cigarette holder.
Yay. Woo. I’m 25. Etc. Quarter of a century old. [Insert meaningful speech here.] Ahem. Thanks to all of you who came to Troma Night yesterday
and saw my birthday arrive; and in particular to those of you who brought me alcohol. Bonus.
As I seem to have been given at least two (three if you count expansion packs) board games for my birthday, and it is Geek Night (Aberystwyth’s favourite alternative board games night),
tonight’s Geek Night will be extended such that it will start not at 7pm as usual but at 5pm. This’ll give us a chance to play not only the usual favourites, but also some of the new
stuff – Gloom, the designer card game with funky semitransparent cards, in which the aim is to make your family as unhappy as
possible and then die, while trying to cheer up the other families and give them happy lives – a great oppertunity for nanofiction; Il
Principe, a renaissance Italy strategy and resource management game (why do the Germans make all the best board games, by the way?), and the 5-6 player expansion for Seafarers of Catan, which finally completes the main published tree of my collection of the Settlers of Catan games. Oh, and we’ve also got a copy I’ve assembled of my interpretation of the Programmer’s Nightmare card game, which Claire and I playtested yesterday and it seems to work…
although anybody without a grounding in Assembly language might find it somewhat confusing.
So, hope to see you all at 5. Or at 7. Or whenever.
This photo was shared here retroactively, on 26 May 2019. It could possibly be seen, in hindsight, as foreshadowing the four of us pictured in bed together here ending up in a set of polyamorous relationships together a few years later.
SmartData and friends (including our French exchange students and some of their friends from placements around the UK went out for a few drinks and a dance on Friday night. Here’s a piccy which I think pretty much sums up the theme for the evening:
Went to Andy‘s unbirthday party (sadly the
original party, this summer, had to be cancelled as nobody who matters could make it). That was fun – drinking
and TwisterTM. Will try to post pictures as they become available (JTA has more).
I played Twister until I hurt my back. Then I stopped. Andy did remarkably well, and won two successive games.
Update 7 October 2019 (15th anniversary of this post). Andy’s LiveJournal is long-dead and purged, but I’ve recovered the text of his post,
which I linked to, from archive.org:
The Birthday which was not a Birtday [Oct. 7th, 2004|01:13 am]
[
mood
|
Mood? Me?
]
[
music
|
Virgin radio – quiet can’t wake anyone
]
Wow people turned up I was impressed. Yay for Andy’s Aber friends. Wish more people could have been here but many studying in silly far away places so couldn’t but thanks all who did
show especially those who engaged in twister. You have either all gone home and/or gone to bed so will leave you all for the night. Love al my party friends… Andy
Claire, Peter and I gatecrashed a friend-of-a-friend’s house party last night, and ate all of their Pringles. One of the housemates’ music collections was fab: all the best of the
Goo Goo Dolls, 3 Doors Down, Nirvana… and some weird (but actually quite good) Welsh rock band.
(Is Welsh Rock a genre? Or just something you buy on the prom at Aberystwyth?)
Must start my Christmas shopping.
[Edit: Came home from the party with an irresistible urge to listen to Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Weird.]
This is my third and final attempt to write this journal entry without something terrible happing that causes me to lose it in it’s entirety.
Spent a long weekend (Friday to Tuesday) in the North-West of England, firstly at Andy’s party, then later visiting my folks
in Preston, with Claire. Details follow…
ANDY’S PARTY
The weekend started at Andy’s 21st birthday party, in Bury/Bolton/somewhere-in-that-whole-Northern-Greater-Manchester-area. It was an absolutely fantastic party, with beer flowing
freely down our chins and onto the floor, interspersed only with drinking other things, including but not limited to helium from a
great quantity of balloons we shouldn’t have been left near. Now that other people I know are passing the great 21-barrier, I don’t feel quite so old (at 22).
Andy’s speech was beautiful and heartbreaking. The food was great. The company was even better. It was great to see
folks who I’d not seen since the end of term (and, in some cases, who I won’t see again for some time). Later, we retired to Andy’s house and lounged around drinking and talking until
approaching 5am (I, sadly, fell asleep at about 3:30, as Claire had some hours before).
The following morning, we played Mario Party 4, and Claire won!!! With a hangover, no less. This is her first time as the ‘Party Star’, and she seemed glad of it: as my
entries on 30th June and 7th July, among others, show, I have a bad case of winning whenever I play. This was, I believe, the first time I’ve ever not won. I came second. Barely.
;-)
MY FAMILY
After this, Claire and I continued to Preston to meet my mum, my sisters, and my gran, who’s visiting from Hartlepool. I hadn’t seen my gran in about a year, and it was good to see her
again… although she still insists – most strangely, somewhat favouritistically, and at least slightly tactlessly, that of her two children and five grandchildren, I am the ‘favourite’ –
the ‘special one’, as she puts it – old people, eh? [photo removed]
Played lots of Super Monkey Ball 2 and Mario Party 4. Sarah, the elder of my two younger sisters, and the self-dubbed ‘white sheep of the family’, is getting to be really good at the
former. Spent a great deal of time at the pub. Watched “Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas”, a very well animated and clever cartoon feature
film from Dreamworks, with an all-star voice cast. Apart from some confusion over the motivation of the evil goddess Erin, and a little
over-frequency of ‘saw it coming’ (probably less of an issue for the children at whom the film is targeted), this is a very good film.
Back in Aber now, and have loads of work to do before a deadline on Friday. Better get on with it.
Good progress at work today, easily catching up on the things I didn’t get done yesterday on account of having been at the Royal Welsh
Show.
AbNib is proving itself popular, but I’m still not happy with it: there are a load of really cool features I’d like to add, yet. But that’s a job
for another day. I’ll be up in Lancashire this weekend for Andy‘s party and to visit my folks, so I can’t do it then, either.
Claire’s gotten herself temporarily sterilized with a fantastic hyperdermic full of progesterone and with the aid of the nice people at Aberystwyth Family Planning Clinic. Woo and
indeed hoo. She’s (theoretically) a lot less likely to forget to have an injection every three months than she is to forget to take the pill: something she’s demonstrated herself to be
very proficient at.
I’ve been excessivley stressed for the last 48 or so hours. I think it’s mostly a result of having no money and my paycheque still being a week away, and having to live off my credit
card in the meantime (which I don’t like doing). Also that my crisp-wound in my mouth from the other day has developed into a spot which would probably heal faster and hurt less if I
could stop playing with it, but I can’t. And that I’m not making nearly as much coding progress on Three Rings as I should be.
I have a strange urge to go for a long walk in the rain this evening. I hope it rains.
