Monday, September 04, 2006

So many topics, so little time

Well, I'm back home after all that London extravagance, and I find that there are dozens of things I want to write about tonight. A sort of blog backlog, or backblog, if you will.

Also, I still need to iron some shirts and trousers for next week before I go to bed tonight, so I'll keep this brief.

So, I didn't win any medals at the MSO, which is a bit disappointing. I always used to aim to win at least one. But then, I wasn't there at all for the last couple of days, and they didn't have the events I'm really great at, and I wasn't all that interested in it anyway, but it still annoys me. I was hoping for a last hoorah, like a typically zoomy flukey win in a poker tournament, but even though I was sticking closely to my usual strategy of bad play and outrageous good luck, it didn't get me very far this year. Indeed, on the last night I went out to a guy who combined both those skills much more adeptly than I ever did, and won two consecutive big hands with a better full house than another player had, cleaning me out on the second. Darn it.

But I'm pretty sure I won't bother going to the MSO again. If there's a memory championship there, I'll probably go along to that but not the rest of the event. The main problem with the MSO nowadays is that the only people who bother to come are the ones who take it very, very seriously - it's just too expensive and out of the way to attract the kind of person who just wants to play games for fun. So there are a lot of people there who spend half an hour before, during and after every event arguing about petty details of the rules. Which always gets on my nerves. And no, I don't do that to anything like the same degree in memory.

That wasn't very nice of me. I was intending to be all cheerful this evening, too. Must be the impending horror of going back to work tomorrow. Ah well, it'll soon be over...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

*nods slowly, sadly and sympathetically*

Given funding and appropriate manpower (translation: sufficient certainty in advance) it would of course be lovely to try to get lots of new people to the MSO. In theory, it would seem simpler to try to get lots of old people to come back to the MSO, though that's probably a strategy to ensure it doesn't go forward.

Though this shouldn't be a battle that we try to fight one by one, what would it take for you to come back to the MSO? How about other ex-MSOers that you know?

Anonymous said...

Weirdly enough, please might I request that you kindly don't answer my question about the MSO in public? I don't particularly want to speculate about the MSO online and don't want to make it even look like I'm hinting at making changes that, in truth, I have no authority or power to do. Looking forward to your other answers, though. :-)