Remember when we were going to play Mafia on the blog?
I've never played Werewolf, but I've witnessed it being played from across the room and it made me want to punch somebody in the face. I'm sure it's possible to play it without causing that reaction, but I'm also pretty sure that in any random group of more than 10 people who want to play Werewolf, at least one needs a punch in the face.
weird: I played games last night too, and that was one of the options, but the group went with Concept (I loved it), Coup (I've realized that games that simulate violence at all wind up kind of stressful for me), and Beat Sherlock Holmes (that was fun too).
3: that makes you sound like a bit of an ass?
The "punch in the face" game was also big last night.
5: Maybe you've never played a party game with someone who was more than a bit of an ass? It happens.
I've been going to board game meetups occasionally and what I've learned is that the kind of people who go to board game meetups are very, very serious about games and I am not. The middle of a board game is no time for chit chat! How do you expect to win a game of Race for the Galaxy if you've dulled your senses with alcohol?
but I'm also pretty sure that in any random group of more than 10 people who want to play Werewolf, at least one needs a punch in the face.
...was in response to me and my friends playing Werewolf. You might instead have phrased it "Gosh my friends are bits of asses and I generally want to punch them, which sometimes coincides with watching them play Werewolf from across the room."
My kids went to watch a sanctioned Rubik's cube competition yesterday. Social skills and puzzle solving skills were pretty much exclusive. Also, having a vagina and entering the competition were exclusive. That said, the older two are going to enter a contest at the end of the month which means they'll have official times on the cubing global organizing body website.
but I'm also pretty sure that in any random group of more than 10 people who want to play Werewolf, at least one needs a punch in the face.
...was a joke. But I'm also surprised that in a random gathering of more than 10 of your friends, you don't agree that at least one probably wants for a punch in the face. You must be brimming with love for your fellow man!
Also, I'm genuinely curious: you don't know what I'm talking about? Because in my experience party games are often dominated by loud, obnoxious personalities. People who I'm sure are lovely in other contexts but turn into nails-on-a-chalkboard when liquor and competition are introduced.
I can imagine the type of person you're talking about, but I don't really have any friends that fit that description. This is mostly a group of friends that gathers to drink and be silly and catch up, while playing games. The game doesn't trump the social dynamic.
be silly
See, totally deserves a punch in the face.
||
Wtf am I queueing to get out of a fucking airport? Mysterious half mile fucking queue AFTER passport control and backage reclaim.
>
16: You've already gotten on the train from the arrival terminal, right? (It's been a really long time since I've flown internationally into Dulles. I don't remember if the baggage claim for international flights is in the main terminal or not.)
Dulles. I believe it's customs. Twitter full of complaints about 2 hr queues. I always forget what the US can be like. This is insane.
That seems most likely if that screening point wasn't right by the baggage claim.
Also, heebie's comments on this thread clearly show *she's* the one who needs the punch in the face!
I'm willing to stipulate both Heebie and Jammies are beyond reproach. It's their friends who suck.
So they checked passport and customs info again, for the third time. Third, fffs.
Figuring out which player should be punched in the face is a lot like figuring out who the patsy is in a poker game.
Dulles is awful and a fitting introduction to the imperial capitol.
And who the fuck has an international airport, of the capital city, ffs, that's not on the metro.
I may have to leave off venting.
Fucking fucking fuck.
Might as well just get a few more in. Fuck.
Aw, ttaM, I was going to warn you about that. So very sorry. You can take a bus that will connect you to Metro or take a taxi to the city for an exorbitant fee. ($60 or so, and they are REQUIRED to take credit cards.) Wmata will have the bus info if you use the trip planner from IAD to your hotel. You can input the exact address of the hotel, not a particular Metro stop.
Yeah, I got the bus, then negotiated the metro machines that don't work. So, fingers crossed I am not whining about anything else.
I'm on a plane heading for Dulles right now. I'll be there in about five hours if you are still there.
I made it to the metro! Train stuck unmoving, of course. Nearly three hours from wheels down to get to nearest metro. I always hate this about the US. I'm not sure if people are aware how fucked travel is compared to major cities elsewhere.
Is the silver line supposed to reach all the way to Dulles?
The key is not ever to take the metro from a US airport. I can't think of a single American city where that's a good plan. Maybe Oakland, or Boston, or if you're at DC National for some reason, but even in those places its at best even with a cab. Just act like the Romans when in Rome, don't be misled by this blog, and take a car and factor that in to the travel budget.
Boston and National are the two airports I use most often and both are fine for public transit. In Boston it can even be a better choice if there's a long cab line and the bus/subway hybrid thingy is arriving soon.
Yes, I guess that's right, at least if where you're going is near BART. I was burned so many times by being fogged in at SFO that I now never use it -- Oakland if I have to go to SF, San Jose for Silicon Valley.
SFO works if you a) don't have much luggage and b) are going somewhere very near a BART stop. Otherwise, cab.
And having recently taken the RER from CDG to central Paris, it's not like that's a walk in the park either. You're still stuck humping your luggage through multiple Metro stations and walking a bit.
It's easy to take the train from Philly airport to downtown.
Of course the best option for a night arrival is your wife picks you up. With no traffic (typical for 10pm or later) it's 15 minutes to my house.
Therefore the real solution is to have a spouse in every city you plan to travel to.
36: Sort of, someday. It will have a stop near Dulles, but actually doing it properly was too expensive, so the stop will be something like half a mile away with some silly connector like a series of moving walkways.
41.1: At least for the SF area, it's pretty common for your destination to be a lot closer to a BART stop than to the airport, so you can rail-to-cab for less. (Maybe not less than a shared van, depending how far you're going.)
Oakland now has a special extra $6-one-way tram connecting BART to airport. Haven't tried it yet.
And having recently taken the RER from CDG to central Paris, it's not like that's a walk in the park either. You're still stuck humping your luggage through multiple Metro stations and walking a bit.
i'm pretty sure this is an indefensible argument. Yes, you do have to carry your luggage when you're taking public transit! And it's unlikely that the stop is going to be directly outside of wherever you're staying! But that's true of ANY public transit from an airport, anywhere. I've done that as well (well, to a not-super-central part of Paris) and honestly thought it was a piece of cake even jet-lagged and alone. (And I am also an over-packer.) I don't think I've ever managed to take public transit from an American airport to my final destination successfully.
25 - Look, you saw the people they had doing those checks. If you were setting things up assuming those were the people trying to find out whether or not someone was illegally bringing, I don't know, drugs or explosives or beef jerky or something into the country would you want only one of them checking? Three tries is probably already dangerously lax security.
47: I will freely admit I'm way over on the "convenience" side of the money/convenience spectrum. I also despise shared airport vans and will happily spend more for a car that'll take me straight to my destination.
OT: Fuck fucking useless electronic fucking boarding passes and fuck fucking motionless fucking check-in lines and fuck fuck fuck you are robbing me of hours of my life.
That said, in Jamaica subway station the other day some guy in a suit that looked like it didn't feel OK wearing him said:
"Blue Eyes!....Take *care* of him."
you don't get that on the Piccadilly line.
50 doesn't seem off topic at all.
41.last reminds me of when a couple friends and I did the college kid Europe backpack thing and wore our large backpacks on the overcrowded metro. Middle age French guy rolls his eyes and grunts to no one in particular, "Ach, les jeunes!"
47: I will freely admit I'm way over on the "convenience" side of the money/convenience spectrum. I also despise shared airport vans and will happily spend more for a car that'll take me straight to my destination.
Yeah, I hear you.
I'm a person who does take the Piccadilly line and RER, I like to be introduced to cities that way. But getting to Dulles is not that great and I usually drove. Special insanity: my BIL took mass transit from Hopkins in Baltimore to Dulles. He was all set to so the reverse after coming back from Europe, but his wife decided picking him up was worth not having him exhausted.
Oh, last trip I was willing to take BART and CalTrain to Palo Alto from SFO. Of course, when I got home I walked from the airport in less than twenty minutes. Why yes, I do live within sight and sound of DCA.
I've described before taking the light rail to downtown Seattle, also to downtown Mpls, and I've ridden some sort of train from O'Hare. Even BWI to Union Station isn't the trip worst ever.
Dulles is particularly bad, and anyone who suggests public trans rather than taking a cab should be ignored (on that and probably everything else).
(I've realized that games that simulate violence at all wind up kind of stressful for me)
Whereas I've learned that I really dislike any of the social games based on deception -- warewolf, the resistance, even battlestar galactica.
I am really bad a evasion or lying, but it's also that when playing a standard board game I can feel like there are two separate levels of interaction, the game and hanging out and chatting with someone (even if the game usually takes enough attention that the chatting is sporadic) whereas those sorts of games feel like they collapse the two levels and the social interaction becomes part of the game.
Seriously, Dulles is inexcusable. DCA is the best.
The RER is a bit of a pain in the arse. I've had better results getting that airport bus from CdG to near the Opera. Which was pretty good, when I had a hotel near there, last time I was in Paris for work.
I live reasonably close to the Piccadilly line, so this morning I left my house at 8:55, and I was through airport security and at the gate by 9:45. Even allowing for the [long] walk from the Tube station to the T3 departure gate I was leaving from. Not _quite_ the Dulles experience.
I suppose, to be fair, Prague also doesn't have a metro station in the airport.
35 I always hate this about the US. I'm not sure if people are aware how fucked travel is compared to major cities elsewhere.
To be fair, Dulles is much worse than most other entry points to the US, and travel in Israel is far more fucked than in the US. We're only the second worst first-world country.
re: 61
Bits of the UK public transport network are bloody awful, and lots of it over-priced by EU standards, so it's not all perfect here, either. But the major airports tend to be pretty well served by fairly rapid transport links, and Heathrow, for all its faults, is generally pretty quick to get to, and get through.
The last time I flew to SFO, it took 3 hours to get to San Jose via SuperShuttle. About an hour of it was waiting for the shuttle. It was after midnight, so there was in person help.
Man, I have never walked farther in an airport than I did the last time I entered the UK in Heathrow.....it felt like miles. (And given that it was at least 20 minutes, might well have been a mile.) But that was all before immigration. I do like Heathrow, though, in general. I must just have been unlikely with my gate.
The BA terminal at Heathrow is pretty nice. Decent pan-Asian restaurant on the second floor.
Thanks, boring travelers, for successfully changing the subject from me getting on HG's last nerve.
57.2: Maybe I enjoy the evasion and lying games because it forces social interaction instead of introverted ratholing on whether to trade wool or wheat.
Perhaps some day I'll fly again for some reason, although I can't think what that would be. I last flew, family trip to France, in June 2001. We took Metro in from CDG with our two kids, and had to muscle our luggage through turnstiles. I'd flown about once a year before that, to some American city or other.
My kids have flown occasionally as they've grown, and my wife flew to San Jose for a conference a couple of years ago.
The nature of my work makes planning trips, which would be time away from work which is never certain as much of an obstacle as cost. I end up with unpaid days off fairly often, but spend them looking for work, as a rule.
We took a trip to DC before our daughter was born in 1989, and used the public trans from National then.
Toronto is supposed to be getting a direct rail link to our godawful airport "coming in spring 2015".
Rail service at O'Hare is the best. They'll even drop you off at the top of the escalator.
. But getting to Dulles is not that great and I usually drove.
And you'll even facilitate me getting there! Or did I fly into the other one...
Oh yeah, I did drive you and Ace to Dulles. I couldn't abide your having to get up even earlier for Super Shuttle.
Now that I don't have a car, I'll have to give getting to Dulles some thought.
Just to combine the two threads, you can always play "Papers, please" a passport control and immigration simulator.
And five years earlier, you gave me and Jammies a lift back to the apartment we were staying at, after unfoggeddycon II.
I once rode the Dulles-L'Enfant WMATA bus after a red eye on a weekday morning. Never again.
I took the train from and to the Seattle airport with no problem and saved enough for a night at a bar.
Capsule movie review of what I saw on the flight: Peter Jackson doesn't understand how rocks work.
Jupiter Ascending was worse. It was like somebody set out to combine the worst of Dune, the Matrix sequels, and the Perils of Pauline.
I was sure ttaM was going to be at the Toronto airport, which has provided me with, hands down, the worst and most baroque customs experience ever. Dulles is bad too though. National is the way to go for flying into DC and having a pleasant public transit experience after.
Speaking of airports, I'm in one now. No need for customs, or even security, with this flight, though.
I probably could have taken the bus to the airport, but I didn't.
Does everyone else, whenever teo mentions taking a flight, imagine a four-seater with skis for wheels?
Possibly with Janine Turner at the stick?
Wheel? Helm? Yoke? I'm not a plane guy.
imagine a four-seater with skis for wheels?
Yes.
78: The Perils of Pauline parts were the best! It was an amazingly good space opera.
I remember when they built the BART extension to SFO, but...stopped a mile short of the actual airport. I'm sure there was a good reason, but instead of catching a train at the terminal, you take the airport train to BART; and if you want to take Caltrain, you take the airport train to BART, ride it for one stop, then switch to Caltrain. At Schiphol there's just an elevator between the train station on the ground floor and the airport above. I guess that's beyond the Greatest Country In The World.
My one useful piece of airport info to friends who fly, while I lived in Chicago, was always take the blue line. Splurging on a cab will, dollars to donuts, add an hour. It made me feel knowledgey.
16: That Stamp Tax doesn't seem like such a great idea now, does it?
Is that how you use "dollars to donuts"? Did I make that phrase up? I'm having a weird day.
91: Yes. But you need to specify which airport.
There is actually a train station at the Anchorage airport, but no scheduled train service.
They're probably afraid the Palin gang would rob any trains for the Wells Fargo payroll.
88. It is worse than that. You take the airport people mover to BART. then BART to San Bruno and change there to take another BART train to Millbrae to get CalTrain. I think on weekends and later nights BART has a more efficient routing where the train does go direct to Millbrae, but for some reason it can't do that during the most popular hours.
I always hate this about the US. I'm not sure if people are aware how fucked travel is compared to major cities elsewhere.
You could substitute "countries" for "major cities" a whole range of things for "travel" and still have it be true.
I'm sure there was a good reason, but instead of catching a train at the terminal, you take the airport train to BART
Probably that there's more than one terminal? I was going to ask if there were places where an urban rail system made more than one stop at an airport, but it looks like Heathrow has five.
||
I lost track of the ttaM meetup thread. Is there still a possibility for a Monday night meetup? Let me know where and when, and I will be there (as long as it's transit accessible).
||>
Oops, or e-mail me at the linked email.
99: The one here goes to both terminals.
I was sure ttaM was going to be at the Toronto airport, which has provided me with, hands down, the worst and most baroque customs experience ever.
I once flew Vancouver-DC via Toronto. You usually do customs in Canada before flying to the US, probably so the flight can use a us domestic terminal. But instead of doing customs in Vancouver on that flight, I had to do it in Toronto, which meant retrieving my bag at as close to the baggage claim as I could get without needing to go through security again, then waiting a couple hours for customs, then re-checking the bag to fly to DC.
The Vancouver-Toronto leg was also one of those short red-eyes where you don't get much sleep. I guess it could have been worse, though: I could have gotten in line for the Tim Horton's.
I'd say San Mateo County kind of deserves shitty, overpriced BART service, given they rejected BART in the 1960s when construction and right-of-way would have been easier, but the people who made that decision aren't affected at all by the current crappiness.
Copenhagen airport has the nicest interface with a train station I know. In fact if you are flying to Stockholm from anywhere outside the country it makes a lot of sense to go to Copenhagen and take the excellent train up through the countryside for four or five hours to the centre of town. I know the same central train station is just as accessible from Arlanda, the proper Stockholm airport, but the cheap flights tend not to go to Arlanda.
Getting a journalist's visa for the USA is genuinely worse than it used to be to get into East Germany. You'd have thought with all that surveillance and everything they could make a decision without requiring six hours of personalised humiliation and inconvenience. But no.
Is Bozeman still the nicest airport in the USA?
91: It's "Dulles to do nuts".
(Th-th-that's Awl, folks! I'll be here all week, try the added value!)
Shared airport vans seem fine to me.
The Silver Line in Boston is much simpler than the shuttle that used to take you from the terminals to the Blue line airport station.
National is so much better than Dulles.
69: edna k-- Tell me more. I've flown to City Center, which is lovely, and taken the train out to the sticks where my future in laws live. (Well, to the train station an hour by car from the middle-of-nowhere "city" they live in.) They are claiming that there will be a train to Peterborough in a year or so.
Pearson is awful. I'm still trying to figure out though how one would get out of Toronto city center by car. Tim's parents live in Peterborough, and you are totally stranded if you don't have a car.
105.3 -- Your employer to send you to Kalispell for comparison. Fish your way down here, cover the continuing Krakauer thing, and fly out of ours.
I have no transport woes, but I did end up playing Cards Against Humanity on Saturday night, with my family, and the family of the chaplain of Well/ngton College (local fancy boarding school), which was not how I was expecting the night to go.
||
I probably should not bother being annoyed by internet memes but the cat woke me at 5:30 and someone Over There just posted this one:
"Audrey Hepburn. Born into the aristocracy, her father was a Nazi sympathizer who abandoned the family. She danced ballet in secret to raise money for the Dutch resistance, then left a successful film career to serve as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, for which she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. [and then in red letters] But she is remembered for being pretty."
|>
This is probably consonant with your reaction, but "Pretty" vulgarizes the qualities her screen presence was able to convey. Whomever wrote that is a person you don't want to know or have anything to do with.
God, damn. I've been on hold w/ B of A for fucking forever. AmEx payment should have cleared Friday and is still "processing".
When is the end of business day for banks?
Right, she's known for being one of the great screen presences of Hollywood's golden age, and most people who know who she was also know she did humanitarian work. But, you know, outrage! Disdain!
Maybe Winona Ryder has done a bunch of humanitarian stuff we all missed?
112: I think you're misreading it. Those memes are usually trying to show that there's way more to the person than what they're popularly remembered for. And since it was probably posted to Imgur to begin with, I doubt your average 15-year-old knows about her humanitarian work.
(It's also possible that I don't have a sentimental attachment to Audrey Hepburn, since SFAIK the only three films of hers I've seen are "Sabrina", which I hated, "Funny Face", which was good but also kinda creepy, and "Breakfast At Tiffany's".)
I think the only Audrey Hepburn film I've seen is Secret People.
Secret people, up and down the boulevard.
||
I think we can all agree that the real tragedy of the Texas Mohammed cartoon shootings is that it's given Pamela Geller a national platform.
|>
Seriously, you haven't seen Roman Holiday? It's good, even if we should remember Audrey Hepburn for her fertility issues and Givenchy perfume the way God intended.
120 Don't worry, she'll be the first one sent to a FEMA camp once Jade Helm gets underway.
I got to play board games on Thursday; a cute game where you recruit sailors and other people to claim cargoes. It had an interesting push your luck mechanic, but the game's name isn't coming to me. I know it's two words...
120: Which was exactly Gellar's plan.
I just want to know why she hasn't started campaigning for the free speech right to walk into a bar and start insulting people's mothers until someone throws a punch.
Roman Holiday, fantastic. Two for the Road a very, vey good movie. How to Steal a Million not a successful movie but still remarkable for the astounding lack of chemistry between Hepburn and O'Toole and Hepburn's particularly fabulous wardrobe. Some good physical comedy too. Charade manages to be enjoyable despite the age chasm thing that is probably as chronologically bad as in Funny Face and Sabrina. Conclusion - Cary Grant believably doable across the entire space time continuum? Yes I think that is right.
Rob, I don't understand that point. Are you saying the cartoons on display were literally "fighting words" in the first amendment sense?
Right, she's known for being one of the great screen presences of Hollywood's golden age, and most people who know who she was also know she did humanitarian work. But, you know, outrage! Disdain!
I like Hepburn herself well enough as an actress, but the thing that drives me crazy is the idolization of her as Holly Golightly in particular. Yes, by all means, let's have young girls put up posters of her! Something to aspire to!
Cary Grant movies I did not particularly enjoy include Charade and Arsenic and Old Lace.
I think you're misreading it. Those memes are usually trying to show that there's way more to the person than what they're popularly remembered for.
But Audrey Hepburn is quite well known as having been more than a pretty face. By saying "But she is remembered for being pretty" they are I guess implying one of a few idiotic things, that her distinguished career was only about her looks, or that she really wanted just to do humanitarian work but awful Hollywood made her submit to a glamorous career, or something, or that it's the fault of the patriarchy if some fifteen-year-old manages to ignore all the great things about her, which is one of the few things that is not the fault of the patriarchy.
Oh well, if there's an upside, for me, it's that it made me crack up in the shower trying to imagine Emma Goldman in Roman Holiday, because my brain does these things sometimes.
I have Roman Holiday recorded on DVR at the moment. Just haven't gotten around to watching it.
Wait for the Emma Goldman version.
127: Breakfast at Tiffany's is a mess in so many ways. Not the character Truman Capote wrote at all. I think AH did what one could with Holly Golightly as rewritten: the original manic pixie dream girl.
I tried to watch Breakfast at Tiffany's once. I couldn't finish it for reasons related to the A-Team and the Beverly Hillbillies.
Right around the second act of Breakfast At Tiffany's you were called upon to defeat a gang of smugglers using your sweet van, a barn full of junk, and your wits, in the course of which you struck oil, forcing you to light out westwards so promptly you missed the end of the movie?
the original manic pixie dream girl
Mary Magdalene?
126: In this context, yes. Gellar decided to run a "Draw the Prophet" contest because she wanted to provoke a violent reaction.
A "Yo' mamma" joke told by a comedian onstage and not directed at any particular person is protected speech. The same words, delivered when you get up in someone's grill in a bar is incitement.
I understand that the legal definition of incitement is quite narrow--I'll let the lawyers say whether this meets it. From a broader moral perspective, I think this sure as hell meets it.
136: I'll just register disagreement with the last point as I understand it. I don't think it's worth discussing.
I'm somewhat between 136.last and 137, but I'm only willing to discuss it if we call free speech absolutism a puppy and respect for religions a wolf cub.
133: George Peppard is so. astonishingly. beautiful. in that movie it's actually hard to believe he's the A-Team guy.
140:
Right, I changed the sentence as I wrote and didn't fix it when the object changed, not noticing until it was posted and not wanting to post just to correct.
129: FWIW I didn't know Hepburn as anything other than a pretty face until maybe 5-6 years ago.
135 made me pretty happy (but cannot be accurate).
re: 100
I think I'm busy this evening. Still free on Friday evening, though.
I was going to say Carole Lombard and Miriam Hopkins had that pitch decades before Hepburn, but 135 is so wonderful.
Oudemia and I always fight over the menz. Peppard in B at T is an endpoint of male beauty.
145: Lombard in My Man Godfrey has to be among the first.
108: Bostongirl, I got nothin for ya. There is no good way to get out of Toronto. The rail link from Pearson will be to Union Station, which will be convenient for you if there *is* someday a train (from there) to Peterborough, but Canadian trains are a rare and fragile species these days. And it won't make Pearson itself any less nasty -- though last time I was there, there did seem to be food. Still, I'd say stick with Billy Bishop and get used to playing road games on your endless trips through the exurbs. Sorry!
||
So, do we have anyone with acquaintances in the Columbia EE department? Sally has an internship this summer, and I'm wondering if there's any useful gossip to be collected.
|>
I can't think of anyone I'd know.
Only if EE is short for Eastern Equine Encephalitis Virus
Why are there Canadian "Union" Stations? Are they worried that "Confederation Station" will be interpreted the wrong way, or that "Dominion Station" sounds too still-colonial?
Why are there Canadian "Union" Stations?
It's union with a small U. It's a union station because it's shared between several different railways (when it was built, the CPR and the Toronto Terminals Railway; it replaced a previous union station, Old Union Station, which was also shared by several different railways).
The Washington DC Union Station is called Union Station for exactly the same reason; it's a union station for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the B. & O.
Nothing to do with the State of the Union, or the union movement, at all.
Plus Dominion Station sounds like something out of an Alistair Reynolds novel.
I was in Rome in the summer of 1996, and they had a great promotional poster. On one half was a picture from La Dolce Vita, and the other half was a scene from Roman Holiday
Below it said: "Questa Estate La Dolce Vita, Questa Estate Vacanze Romane." It was charming.
Union Square in NYC is the same -- neither Civil War or labor movement, just where some streets came together. I was terribly disappointed when I found out.
Especially since every square is where some streets come together. In Evreux in Normandy, you will find the Rue des Deux Rues, which seems to have been named on similar grounds.
I liked the world better when I could think Union Station referred to the US Civil War.