2742 I lived through dinner, then a grue ate me.

Wednesday, January 12, 2010

"What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

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Last night was the first meetup of my singles' group. Reservations did gradually fall away, so by 6:30 pm I was expecting six women. Four showed up. Two who had said yes did not. I hear that's pretty typical. We also had one man arrive who insisted that he had RSVP'd yes, but neither I nor Meetup had any record of that. No big deal.

The guy was a physicist, and one of the women was a theoretical mathematician, so the conversation somehow started with imaginary numbers, and veered into multiple dimensions and intersections of multidimensional objects , and the nature of time. One of the other women was ... I'm not sure what to call her, but she sees orbs and hears spirits, that sort of thing ... so that conversation occasionally took an odd turn (I'd like to make a joke about "dementional objects", but foo, I've had experiences with ESP and "ghosts", and I believe in a kind of reincarnation, so I can't).

The service was terrible! I had called the restaurant last week to ask if I'd need reservations, and had been told that Tuesday nights were quiet. It wasn't. There was some kind of conference going on in the back room, and when that was over, the participants stayed for dinner. Every table and the bar was full. Then about 8:30, a guy started setting up speakers right next to our table. Uh oh. Turned out it was team trivia, so we played. That was fun.

At leaving, one woman urged me in the parking lot to expand the group to lower ages. Her argument was that men in their fifties and sixties always want women in their thirties and forties. Um, yeah, so what? When an older man wants a younger woman, it's often because he's looking for a nurse, someone to take care of him. Besides, there are plenty of other groups for the younger singles. He can go there. (And if a guy isn't rich or strikingly handsome, he's unlikely to find the trophy caretaker, anyway, and he should know that, and if he doesn't, he's stupid, so why would we want him anyway? But I didn't say that.)

I don't have the faintest idea what to do next. We never got around to talking about that.

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Does anyone besides me remember Zork? It was a text-based computer game. Jay and I used to play it for hours. He had a huge piece of paper on which he had mapped the underground, with locations of items and dangers.

Gathering weapons and tools and finding your way around is one level of difficulty - figuring out how to talk to the system is the other. It sometimes seems to be very obstinate.

A description, and how to play, are at http://en.allexperts.com/e/z/zo/zork.htm.

You can play it at http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php.

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This is beautiful(warning - the music may be too loud for work, turn speakers down):

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT1OX4wSBVg&NR=1&feature=fvwp]
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