Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

So, the exams are over--the very last one was yesterday afternoon--and already I'm quite bored out of my mind with nothing to do. Well, technically I do still have a roomful of items to catalogue and boxes to obtain and pack it all away in, but I've three or four days yet to do that in and I'm in no hurry. I've still got the best part of 35 centiliters (about 350ml, or roughly 3/4 of a 500-ml bottle) of liquor yet to go--it's about three months old really since I bought it in late February and it's now almost May. I don't really plan to let it last longer than the next week, which means about three shot glasses a day of Creme de Bananes (as it is labeled) a day for the next few days after dinner before bed: I should have some interesting dreams. I've also got a lot of other comestibles to polish off, which shouldn't be so much of a problem either as long as I've got water to wash everything down with--or so I think. ...I'm bored. Very bored. ...

So, I've had a lot of time and conversations recently, mostly over MSN but one or two in my own head, and at least one over Facebook and one over the phone. And over the course of all this talking, I find myself... expressing opinions of intense dislike of certain, shall we say, habits of people. In fact they're not so much habits as character traits (flaws, from my point of view, but who's to say the handkerchief was supposed to be spotless?), and... I simply cannot allow my views on these things to go unannounced any further. Not many people will read this, I'm certain, so it's safe to assume I shall not be offending anybody; and anybody who manages to plough through the entirety of this post will almost certainly be intelligent enough to understand my arguments. Not that I flatter myself that my blog attracts intelligent readers, but that the lack of photos and the proliferation of verbiage are sure to drive away all but the most perservering of readers. We addr...

...it's surprisingly difficult. Of course, the creators of D&D, and the creators of pretty much every tabletop RPG, know this by now--that's why they have so many door-stopper-sized editions in which every action and spell and ability takes up rules that go for pages (I almost typed ages but that would have worked equally well)--just in case they accidentally overlook something and players everywhere immediately snigger with malicious glee and set out at once to take advantage of hapless DMs (who then, presumably, set up house rules to more than counterbalance that advantage). However, I refer to Monopoly, a game where three factors at most are at play: 1) human choice, as far as trading goes, or whether to build or hoard or even to buy the property in the first place; 2) the game's intrinsics, such as the credit card debt or income tax or property values; 3) sheer dumb luck, which is what you get from the dice. By simply playing all four sides by myself, the first fac...