I’ve noticed certain weird characteristics about the cities around here — Pullman has a lot of butch lesbians in it and Moscow has a lot of people with physical deformities. I have no explanation for the former, but I’ve seen something like the latter elsewhere; Coos Bay (in Oregon) has an unusually high concentration of retarded people. (Seriously. I’ve heard there’s actually some kind of state or county mental health funding condition that makes the area especially supportive of the developmentally disabled.)

Brett and I played a short game of Heroscape last night. 200-point armies — Raelin and Grimnak (the angel and the dino-riding orc) on his side, Agent Carr and Finn (the MiB and the viking) on mine. I won, mostly by luck and the fact that it’s fairly easy to maintain height-advantage on non-flying two-hex units. I like the system.

I’m so tired right now. I’ve been getting up pretty early lately. This morning I woke up at 6:40. Tried to get back to sleep, but I just felt too awake. I think I might take a nap after I finish this post.

I’m about 85% done with Teranesia. I take back anything bad I said about it before; the story really picked up in chapters five and six. Now it’s really focusing on the big genetic regression mystery, occasionally veering off into some interesting subplots concerning Prabir’s various relationships. Egan’s really talented; he does the hard SF/physics stuff very well, of course, but he’s also surprisingly good at the soap opera-y stuff. I guess I never really noticed it that much in his other books because the exotic settings and crunchy bits were so captivating.

TotD:

A giant enemy crab approaches. What do you do? There is only one right answer.

The HackMaster Hacklopedia of Beasts, Volume II: Cats, Small to Efreeti imparts the following on this subject (p. 44):

COMBAT/TACTICS: Crabs, Giant: Always hungry, Giant Crabs sneak up on their prey (-3 to opponent’s surprise roll), catch it in their pincers (2-8 damage), dismember it and eat it. Once they have caught something edible, they will stop to eat it. If attacked while eating, they scuttle back into the water with their prize.

So, obviously, the proper course of action would be to push the most useless party member into the crustacean’s path. Then, once it’s begun devouring the poor clod, you can just throw a rock at it and it’ll flee into the ocean. Problem solved.

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