Hard to believe it's been a month; I thought two weeks maybe. But then I've been distracted, exhausted this week. Some dim, overoptimistic bureaucrat in my hindbrain is convinced that I only need five or six hours of sleep a night. Anything more is counter-revolutionary.

On Friday I finally had to give up and stay in. I think I was in bed for 12 hours, but I managed to sleep for 8, which is enough. Whatever my brain is up to, I just wish I didn't need me as an audience to do it. At the very least it could clue me in.

Anyways, hopefully that's done — I feel OK today, and I was able to outlast all comers at Barry's b-day party yesterday.

As a pre-party we played Ticket to Ride; I'd talked to Barry a few times about getting it for myself, but after reading some reviews he decided to just bite the bullet and order it off Amazon. Great news for me as that means I can continue collecting light fantasy stuff to complement Last Night on Earth. It seems socially convenient to become the go-to for the type of boardgames I really really want to play.

(I've been brainstorming a Christmas variant of the zombie game, with Santa as an added NPC, but I have no sense of how to do the balancing. Going to try it with three player deaths, maybe scale that down.)

Ticket to Ride was fun though. I can't help but think of it as Risk For People Who Like People. There's still the competition to dominate the map, the limited space. But. Instead of armies and dice rolls you have train cars and cards, conflict is a race not a battle, no one gets kicked out early, and there is an end to the game, definitive and swift.

Probably it was good that I cut my teeth on Monopoly, Risk, Illuminati — long cruel games, sure to build character, to teach people to compete without taking it personally. But these days I can only play Illuminati, for its humor and depth.

I can't stand the other two, and part of the reason I've been getting into boardgames recently is that I'm finally discovering ones that encourage the kinds of social interactions I want to have: quick games that are strategic, but where nothing is taken personally. Games that aren't a battleground but rather an excuse, like the magic of a bar (we can sit around and talk and yet it's doing something — six years drinking and I'm still fascinated by that).

I think I've mentioned this before, but my aversion to direct conflict has been growing for a while. I was in debate for five years, mediocre although I had my moments. I used to think that I liked arguments, but by the time I was out of college I'd realized that, no, I like ideas, I like differing points of view.

Monopoly, Risk — these games encourage arguments, and an actual argument just isn't worth it unless the stakes (personal, political, what have you) are actually high, unless the argument actually matters.

As a general rule it doesn't, and I've seen too many conversations grind to a halt to admit the argument, like it's some movie star shown up suddenly at a small party. I've seen too many arguments in bad faith, with fallacies on both sides, implications that are veiled insults meant to get a rise out of the other person without looking like the bad guy. I'm done with that, done with any little argument that doesn't have a healthy sense of humor.

(Which is another reason why I still make an exception for Illuminati. Somehow, we've more-or-less figured that one out: there's nothing like a tongue-in-cheek Illuminati argument, where everyone knows exactly what everyone else is up to and we're just having a bit of sport about how evil the other guy is compared to our sainted selves.)

As a pre-party, Ticket to Ride was a bit of a failure unfortunately, but only due to timing. I was literally late to the party and so we didn't finish quite quickly enough.

With the recent snow the roads were still terrible, so instead of dining out we had some pizza (only one of the three pizzas was veggie and once I realized it was the clear favorite I had to eat fast to get a decent dinner before everyone else finished it), then played some Soul Caliber (where I'm still the button-mashing king), some Tekken (where my mashing failed me as ever), and sat around listening to music over a muted episode of She-Ra.

I'm somewhat worried that Barry didn't do quite everything he'd have wished this year: certainly I run my birthdays more tyrannically, I feel like it's an understandable prerogative. But whatever, I had a good time, seems like everyone did.

Today I did my usual Sunday Psych and Bloody Mary ritual, with Markie thrown in the mix because this episode was a Twin Peaks homage.

On Friday I'd thought, rather ambitiously, that I might go into work yesterday, but I just didn't have time between running a week's worth of errands and undoing a week's worth of insomnia. Today though, well, that's just my fault, but I won't go into any of that. Suffice it to say that, except for Psych, even my slacking off today wasn't what it should have been.

(I'm thinking it may be that these pajama bottoms are cursed, or more prosaically, that it's difficult to actually start a day without proper pants on. When I put these on this morning I was committing myself to a day where I didn't leave the house.)