Tonight, I went to Jason’s game night for the first time in a while. We played two games: Cosmic Encounter, and Viva Java.

Cosmic Encounter should need no introduction to most of the people reading this; it’s a classic game of light-hearted space treachery for nerds. In my opinion, any game of CE where people have to start analyzing the rules to figure out exactly what should happen is a win for everyone involved, and this game went well:

I was the Masochists, whose special power is that they can win by losing every single one of their tokens. I’d quietly put my last few tokens into allying to defending against an attack that would have won the game for the attackers; when the defenders win – which they did – defensive alles go back to any base their players own. But if you have no bases on anyone’s planets (yours or the other players), your tokens go into the same place all the other dead tokens go. Which meant I won when the next turn began. After the other players looked at the rules, and decided that yes, this sure sounded like what was supposed to happen, nicely played you magificent bastard you.

Except I didn’t win, because another player tossed a Cosmic Zap card, which nullified that use of my power. So they had one turn to cobble together some other kind of victory. Everyone else was one base away from winning the game, and there were frantic attempts to try to pull together a 4-way or 2-way victory when the Destiny Deck dictated that I was not the person who would be attacked that turn. I don’t recall who actually got the official win – I think it was a 4-way – but damn, I pulled off a sweet move that triggered a moment of Rules Lawyering; in my book I pretty much won.

And then we tried a game our host had gotten off of Kickstarter a while back. It was this thing called Viva Java  that really wanted to have about seven players. Which, at this point, we had – a seventh had come in halfway through Cosmic Encounter and spectated.

This game mostly taught me one thing: if I’m ever doing the graphic design for a board/card game, test it in low light conditions. Because this game utterly failed to work in the moderate light of Jason’s living room. Like a lot of West Coast houses, there’s no overhead light. And this game? Well, this game has lots of brown in it, because of the coffee theme. We had to try and distinguish between brown bean tokens and red-brown bean tokens. We had to try and distinguish between black, red-brown, blue, and green icons, all of which were… pretty much black, unless we shone a flashlight on them. We had to try and parse reference cards printed in white on pale tan backgrounds. It was really gorgeously themed, with some really pretty art on the cards, but wringing any sense out of the damn thing took an awful lot of work. If there’s anyone colorblind in the group, you can put it right back on the shelf – it’s hard enough for people with full color vision to tell things apart.

It didn’t help that it is very much a Euro game. It’s hard to recover from Incorrect Play in your first few moves, it’s very very analytical and dry. And it kinda depends on holding a lot of state about which colors of beans other players are holding in their bags of beans in your head, when you can barely tell what color they’re picking up sometimes. And, well, I’m the one who proposed Cosmic Encounter. I’m an Ameritrash player. Its mechanics did support its theme interestingly, but honestly I got to a point where we’d all run out of wisecracks to make about its design problems and got bored waiting for my turn to come up, and took out my phone and started playing Threes. I might have lasted longer if I’d been able to actually tell what the hell I was looking at at a glance instead of having to squint closely at everything.

The general consensus around the table was that it needed work, even from the people who are totally into hyper-analytical Eurogames. Even playing the simple introductory rules felt like there was a little too much going on; it might have been improved by adding some more things from the full version, but I suspect there would still be some superfluous mechanics. Dunno. I doubt I’ll ever end up playing it again, in part because it requires seven people to supposedly get good, in part because it’s just not my kind of game…

Seriously people this is a wonderful SF movie, go see it. It gave me all the feels that 2001 was supposed to induce but never did for me. Sit back and let it wash over you in all its quiet magnificence. (Yes, quiet. All the extereior space shots are silent except for the occasional musical cue. YAY SILENCE IN SPACE.)

I’d seen some suggestions that it is kinda mauldin, but honestly for me it earnt its way to tugging on my heartstrings; I cried at a couple of bits and didn’t feel used and manipulated the way I do when I’m watching a Disney feature mash down on my emotional buttons.

Also in the cinema bathroom afterwards I discovered that no, it’s not just me, automatic toilets flush in the space between getting the tissue over the seat and you putting your ass down for cisladies, too. There is no secret lore my mom failed to pass down to me about those things.

There are three keys on my computer whose paint is starting to show severe wear: E, N, and O.

E is pretty obvious; it’s the most common letter in the English language. But I find it interesting that the next most common letters – T and A – look as good as the day I bought the machine.

I have a strong suspicion that N gets a lot of extra use on my computer because it’s the shortcut for the pencil tool in Illustrator. I hit that a LOT, from a slightly weird angle as I’m usually controlling AI with my right hand on the stylus and my left hand on the keyboard.

O, I’m not sure of – in Illustrator it’s the shortcut for the mirror tool, which is not one I’m constantly using. Maybe I just hit command-O to open files a lot?

So the day before yesterday, two animated music videos popped up on Twitter at about the same time for me.

“Freak of the Week” by Freak Kitchen, animated after a $140k Kickstarter campaign by the dude who draws ‘Blacksad’ and a few other Disney feature veterans…

…and “Ghost” by the Mystery Skulls, animated for an unknown budget by “Mysteryben27” and a few other folks.

A hell of a lot more people were retweeting the Mystery Skulls video than the Freak Kitchen video, myself included.

I find myself thinking about why this is. Because clearly the Freak Kitchen video is “better” animation, right? There’s a lot more attention paid to any individual frame, the motion is beautiful and fluid. The Mystery Skulls video’s animation is often crude even by the standards of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons it borrows from. (The individual drawings are pretty good – but there are so few of them!)

And yet. The Freak Kitchen video is just “hey here are some caricatures of the band rocking out”. It switches back and forth between animation and stock footage; in terms of narrative, it’s little more than a standard video made with lots of shots of the band playing. Nothing really happens – there’s no tension built up about whether or not these leering musicians will be destroyed by the molten metal involved in their cartoon stage presentation. The Mystery Skulls video, on the other hand, is presented in a consistent style from start to finish, and has a narrative. It’s very much intertwined with the music – everything bounces to the beat, its action riffs off the lyrics – but it adds a whole new layer of story to the song. Halfway through when it hops into a flashback and gives you a reason this skeleton dude is pursuing these Scooby-Doo parodies, it may even become somewhat emotionally affecting. The Freak Kitchen video never reaches for that; at the end, all it has to sum itself up with is ‘the band leader was imagining a really cool stage show and now they go play for real’.

On the micro level of frame-by-frame animation, the Freak Kitchen video is far superior. Juanjo and his crew are into drawing these dudes rocking out, this animation has really been loved on. But on a macro level, the Mystery Skulls video is the one that wins, with its attention paid to story, character, and the occasional gag.

As always: pour all the care and craft you like into a drawing, but ultimately, when dealing with any form of art in sequence, it’s story that carries the day.

Today Nick came over in the morning. We went to the farmer's market, then rented a car for a few hours to haul the last wave of Kickstarter packages to the post office. The post office was supposed to come pick them up yesterday, but never showed. Even though I paid 'em $20 to supposedly come at a particular time.

We also ran up to Northgate for some sewing supplies for my coat upgrade. And because he'd left something there that he was bringing to my place, and was afraid he might have left at the bus stop.

After lunch, we went back to my place and lounged in the living room for a while. He puttered on the net, I played some more Amalur for a while. At one point “famous people who share your birthday” came up, and he found out that in addition to sharing P. T. Barnum's birthday, I also share Bill Watterson's. Which was cool. I'd known about Barnum since I was a kid but that was new.

We also played the latest version of Ascencion, which was pretty fun. I ended up winning 107-70something, not bad for a few mistakes in the beginning and not playing any version in a good while.

And now I am lying alone in my bed listening to a neighbor practice their bongos. They have been joined tonight by a flute. It is simultaneously charming and annoying, and is kind of the price of living in the university district, really. (Also the drummer's playing is significantly more complex than when I first started hearing their evening sessions – hooray for the power of practice!)

Tomorrow I will probably do some combination of working on the coat, dealing with non-Kickstarter packages that have backed up while I dealt with the KS, and writing Rita.