Saturday, 31 July 1999:

It's a Party!

Well, I don't want to brag too much - but I do want to brag a little. :-) I had a highly successful day of games yesterday.

I've mentioned before that we play foosball sometimes at work. My boss has been out this week, so we haven't played our 2-on-2 games for coffee. But I have played 1-on-1s with Daryl, one of my opponents, and have been winning pretty consistently. After doing so yesterday, his usual partner, Ray, challenged me to a 1-on-1, and yes, I managed to win against him as well, which surprised me since Ray is quite good. (He has a better power shot than either me or Daryl.) So I seem to be coming along pretty well.

In the evening, Ben and I played Starcraft with the Brood War expansion for a few hours. (Yes, I quit around 10:30 pm.) We played a few 1-on-1s where I was able to beat him consistently as Protoss and Zerg, but lost badly when I played Terran. Very badly. Terrans are quite hard to play, and I haven't played them often enough to get good at them. Obviously I need to practice. We also played a couple of games against the computer, lost one of them badly, and won the other two.

I'm pretty pleased with how my play of the Zerg is coming along. I ramp up production quite quickly and do quite well with the sea-of-hydralisks approach. Ben needs to be more aggressive about expanding his resource base, but will be a tough opponent when he does so.


Today I got invited to a mid-summer party thrown by Mike and Karen, a couple of friends of Bill and Julie who I met at Julie's birthday dinner a few weeks ago. The party mainly consisted of fannish folks, a couple of whom I'd met before, a number of whom I'd seen (but not met) at WisCon, and many I'd never seen before.

Fandom is - for a variety of reasons - getting older over time, as fewer young fans are joining the group. Excluding the kids who were there (presumably because their parents brought them), I'd guess I was close to the youngest person there, which is pretty much the way it was in Madison. As you might expect in Silicon Valley, these fans are very techno-oriented, working for startups or the big computer companies or whatnot. Which made for a few interesting conversations (like the guy who's advocating getting private enterprise into space travel).

So I did meet a few people. One fellow asked if I'd be interested in a weekly dinner group consisting of some techies he knows, so I gave him my e-mail address. We also chatted about SF for a little while.

No single women of about my age there, though!

But, I had a good time. Good food. Mike and Karen are nice people and fine hosts. And they have a pretty impressive house. I dunno if I'll end up hanging out with this group like I did with the Madison fans, but maybe.


Previous Entry Month Index Next Entry
Back to the Main Index
Michael Rawdon (Contact)