#oneaday Day 732: Last Night on Earth

So I’m back in the UK after a long, turbulent and ache-inducing flight. A necessary evil when dealing with international travel, of course, so I’m not going to complain too much.

Andie and I both fell asleep for a bit in the early afternoon once we got back. I know they say that’s a bad idea but we were both exhausted to the point of mild delirium. I awoke a short while later relatively refreshed but still zombie-like, had a shower and prepared to head off to my good friend Sam’s abode for some board gaming goodness. His wife is away, so he wanted to take advantage of the situation with a “boys’ night”. Our definition of “boys’ night” doesn’t involve drinking and going out on the pull; it involves playing board games until 3AM.

And that’s what we did. We got in some good time with a number of new titles, including Last Night on Earth and 7 Wonders.

The latter was a pleasant surprise. Many building and resource management games are very time-consuming and complex, but this one is very straightforward. The relatively simple mechanics belie a wealth of strategies, and the card-based nature of the game means that there’s a pleasing element of randomness.

Last Night On Earth is at the other end of the spectrum — “Ameritrash” to 7 Wonders’ “Eurogame”, if you will. (For the uninitiated, “Ameritrash” refers to board games with strong thematic content but simple mechanics that are light on the head-scratching strategy, while “Eurogames” are the opposite, focusing more on mechanics and strategy, often presenting their thematic content in a somewhat abstract way. Both are fine uses of your time, despite the disparaging implications of the word “Ameritrash”, but many gamers typically gravitate towards one kind of game or the other as the situation demands.)

As it happened, Last Night on Earth is a good game for the end of the night. Its mechanics are simple and straightforward, but it encourages you to imagine the movie scenes of the virtual zombie horror that you are playing out on the board in front of you. Instead of simply collecting cards and following movement rules, you’re imagining, say, Jenny the farmer’s daughter fleeing for her life through the cornfields as she is pursued by a relentless horde of zombies; Sheriff Anderson boldly protecting his son from harm by blowing a zombie’s head off with a shotgun at point blank range; Jake the “drifter” stumbling around in the darkness, barging shambling zombies out of the way. (Kudos to the game for covering all the zombie movie tropes along the way, too, including a card which implies two opposite-sex player figures inhabiting the same space will want to shag each other, causing them to miss their respective turns.)

Now it’s 3.27AM and I should sleep. There’s more gaming to be done tomorrow. And then more sleep. Lots more sleep.

Oh, also, I’m now officially into my third year of daily blogging. Go me!

#oneaday Day 728: Lag

I’ve had a somewhat inconsistent experience with jetlag on this particular trip. The other night when I was playing Ascension until 1AM, I was absolutely fine. Yet tonight, it’s 9.30PM and I’m knackered. Doubtless I will sleep shortly and awaken at approximately 4AM, when it will be freezing cold. At least it will give me some time to get some work done ahead of visiting the fine Mr Whittington tomorrow.

Part of this evening’s tiredness can probably be attributed to a fairly busy day, however. We took a trip into San Francisco, rode the cable cars and walked a whole lot. I discovered what the hell “taffy” is (chewy, and available in a huge variety of flavours) and enjoyed some calamari and fries by the Bay.

As with so many trips away, time is passing far too quickly. There’s only so much you can do in a week — particularly if you have a bit of work to do along the way — and it’s easy to get to the end wishing you’d done more. Ideally we’d have had the chance to stay over here a bit longer, but that’s not really practical at the moment, sadly.

On that note, I feel I’m going to have to bid you all farewell as I can barely keep my eyes open. Time to sleep early, and wake up at stupid o’clock in the morning; an inversion of my usual habits back home!

#oneaday, Day 326: Time Zone Trauma

It’s rather late, I know. Although it’s not late where I am, because as I may have intimated rather subtly above and in a post a few days ago, I’m in the States. Yayness, as Recette might say. In local time back home, it’s currently 4:30am, while here it’s 8:30pm. I have been up for over 24 hours. Hardcore.

Time zones are a bugger at the best of times, let alone when your own body clock is buggered beyond all recognition. There are a curious mix of influences at work here, as a combination of insomnia, stress, depression, lack of desire to go to sleep any earlier and friends in time zones other than my own all conspire to bugger up my sleeping patterns. In fact, I’m actually anticipating that I’ll sleep better and at more “normal” times here than back home.

Before I left Southampton, I got chatting to a very lovely person online who happened to live in mountain country in the US. We were frequently up until 4 or 5am GMT talking about things, and that made getting up the following morning rather more difficult. However, being jobless and, at the time, shortly to be homeless, there didn’t feel like much of note worth getting up for in the mornings. So, well, I didn’t. Actually, I haven’t heard from her for a while, so after writing this post I will email her, you see if I don’t.

This had both benefits and drawbacks. Benefits included the ability to play Alien Swarm online with people I didn’t normally have the chance to play online with. Which was nice. Drawbacks included going to the local shop in the afternoon, the man with the smelly armpits behind the counter asking “how my day had been” and me being able to answer quite honestly that it had been just fine, conveniently omitting the fact that I’d actually spent most of it asleep.

A mixed blessing, I’m sure you’ll agree. But at least the shop was open until 10pm in the evening, so even though my day was 6 hours out of sync with everyone else, I could still, you know, buy bleach. Exciting is the life of the unemployed.

I’m actually quite looking forward to (hopefully) getting back into some semblance of normality if (when) I get a job. That or I should just move to the States, which I know there are a number of you currently reading this would be a plan you could firmly get behind. Well, I’ve got nearly a month to enjoy being on Pacific Time, so we’ll call it a test run or something.

So then, who wants to sponsor my visa application?

[If the comic looks a bit different, it’s because I forgot to bring my template with me. Whoops. Ah well. I got it near enough.]