4/24: What I Accomplished Today

1. Went to a meeting about a possible CCCC presentation for next year in New Orleans.

2. Graded two sets of papers, prepped tonight's class, taught tonight's class.

3. Finished the paperwork on the Arthur course and mailed all the necessary forms to the people who need them (our library department for supplemental materials, our registrar to verify unique course number, the chairs of every public college in the state to determine transferability).

4. Wrote my paragraph of the CCCC presentation and mailed it to the other people for review and revision.

5. Read. I caught up on my Entertainment Weeklys and read the new Wired and Bookmark. I'm a few weeks behind on my New Yorkers, so I read three of those, bringing me up to the first week in April, so that was good progress. I'm almost halfway through the Oppenheimer biography as well. We'll see if one of the authors, who speaks at tomorrow's luncheon of the Literary Society, inspires me to finish this book. If he doesn't, I'm not going to. My Co-Vivant had also finished several weeks of Sunday papers, so I read the comics and the magazines because those are my job.

6. Watched a few perfectly average comics on Comedy Central and a few episodes of Mad About You. Co-vivant watched Daily Show and Letterman while I read.

7. Played a little Pogo; worked on two Premium badges. Tomorrow is new badge day. I like new badge day.

8. Finally got my blessed World of Warcraft Draenei Warrior to level 25! Hurray!

Here's how this works: I have nine characters, one of each class; between them, I also have at least one of each profession. Right now, I have five characters at level 20 and four at 25. As each one gets to 25, then I move on to the next level 20 and take it to 25, and then the next, and so on; when they're all 25, I'll take the next to 30, and then when she gets to 30 I'll take the second level 25 to 30, and so on. My inner accountant loves WOW; there are statistics to keep track of, and quite a few things to make sure you have fully trained, and a gamillion different resources (armor, weapons, quest items, profession items) you obtain and have to decide how best to deploy.

I think in large part this is why I play games: I really enjoy resource allocation. Almost every game I play a lot involves resource allocation. The Sims: you've got limited time and money, the character has certain things it wants, and you have certain things in mind for this character that may or may not square with its goals for itself. You have to use that limited time and money to help it meet a reasonable percentage of its own goals and your own. Civilization, Age of Empires, other buildy games--obvious resource allocation. ("Do I build a citadel, or do I use the resources to make my cavalry faster, or should I train more farmers?")

The other day, I asked my co-vivant if she could think of any games that weren't resource allocation.

"Baseball," she said.

"You have a limited number of players with given strengths and weaknesses. You are playing opponents with limited strengths and weaknesses. You have a given playing field and limited equipment to use on that playing field. How is that not resource allocation?"

"Freeze tag."

"You have a certain speed and agility. So do the people you're playing with. You all have varying knowledge of the terrain. Sometimes the game is won or lost because you know you're not as fast as Kenny, but you know the yard better."

"Monopoly."

"Limited capital, limited access to spaces depending on who lands where."

"Gee, why would you think like that? Doesn't that suck all the fun out of the game? 'I'm not just playin' a game and having good, clean, silly fun; I'm allocating resources!'"

I think resource allocation is fun.

9. This one surprised me. Checked out the BigFishGame for the day, and it's a Donald Trump Apprentice in L.A. thing. I don't like Donald Trump. I don't like The Apprentice; I've never been able to get through an entire episode because it all looks really petty and mean-spirited. I wasn't even going to download it, but then something looked intriguing in one of the screenshots, and I figured, "Oh, just download it; if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to play it."

I finished the whole hour and was disappointed I couldn't play longer; I may actually have to buy this one.

Essentially, it's a series of interesting twists on what Big Fish calls Time Management games: Diner Dash, Back to the Bakery, Believe in Santa; there are a gabillion of them, and I probably own most of them because I love these suckers. I got through the first three challenges, and much to my surprise, there were aspects of these levels I hadn't seen before (the rental shop where you have to get out all the orders you can, have the big burly guy blow up the inflatables, have the wiry guy get the surfboards, and restock the returned rental items was really manic and therefore fun).

I know it's a license so he'll end up with some piddly-poo percentage if I buy this, and I don't like the idea of some of my hard-earned money going to the pompous jerk with the marmoset on his head, but I enjoyed this game.

10. Took out the box of recycling (with the paper stuff) and the bucket of recycling (with the cans, bottles, and plastic stuff). Changed the toilet paper roll in the front bathroom. (Yes, I know how utterly useless and piddly this makes me look. However, I want things documented so I can't be accused of "never doing things." The funny part is that both my Co-Vivant and I are going to think that my documentation of such things proves us right. I get that.)

I appear to have used the word "piddly" twice within two paragraphs. Actually, that makes three in three paragraphs.

In the Wired I read today, there was a headline that said something like "Five things you don't know about [some woman I'd never heard of, so her name could have counted for one of the five things and her picture another]. I thought that was an interesting premise, so I said to my Co-Vivant, "If anybody asks you to tell them something about me that nobody else knows, you can tell them that I can say 'I would like an ice cream cone' in three languages." (Why do I care about somebody's aunt putting a blue pencil in my red shoe? I wanted to learn at least one sentence I could actually use, and after due consideration, I picked this one.) Of course, she hadn't seen the magazine, so this just seemed to come out of nowhere, which amused her.