Talking to thin air

So ... this weekend I played in a Dominion tournament. I played a 4p game, against one extremely good player, one quite good player, and one decent player. I was in the low end, in terms of rating; not completely out of the running, but likely to win one game, if any.

I won all four.

I literally spent half an hour going, "what the hell just happened? what the hell?" I beat a player ranked 42 four times in a row.

I ... was more than a little bit stunned. To be fair, I had some awesome luck; to start off, none of the spreads had devastating attack cards, which favored me greatly, as I hate those cards. So, I had a lot of experience with the cards and the best players didn't buy many of the attack cards that were available (i.e., Fortune Teller). And then I also had other types of luck: for instance, in two games, other players could have ended the game but didn't because they either would have lost the game or tied (with me!), and I managed to get to 8 in time to buy the last Province—obviously I played well, but I also got lucky. It wasn't that I necessarily that I had good shuffle luck, or always got 8 and never 7 or 9; but that my opponents didn't end the game because they just happened to have a tying score, that sort of thing. Subtle, but somehow it ended adding up to me having four wins. Yay!! It was awesome, I must admit, even though I didn't really deserve to play in the semis!

On the other hand, when I played in the semis, I got crushed. :P Not that it was unexpected; and I certainly learned a lot. I also shouldn't have been crushed quite so much—there was a mix-up with turn order that resulted in me playing 4th position twice, and another player in 3rd position twice; but, neither of us had any chance of moving on in the tournament, so we all agreed that it didn't matter. That mix-up resulted in changing the results of the last game we played, such that I would have done slightly better than I did; but I still would have been a distant last.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I got to play even though I didn't have any hope of going on to the finals! I will certainly look over the logs for the final match, though. Maybe next year ...

In other news, I went to Boston to see the tall ship show. I almost didn't get to see it, because I thought I remembered from two years ago that the docks were all swarming with people and that it was really obvious that there was an event going on. But this time, there wasn't anything anywhere until the fish docks, and there weren't tons of people, so I got really confused. But! I got to see a ship from Ecuador, one from Brazil, and one from Indonesia. I didn't go on the Colombian ship because it was extremely crowded. :P The one from Brazil was probably the coolest, although the Ecuadorian one had pirates on it, so.

That's about it. Back to obsessive counting! And I'm going to try to find out if I can apply for an NSF grant to fund my research next year—someone in my house did that for the summer, so I'm going to ask her how/what she did.

So, I attempted to find the Finnish aviation history museum, but I failed. :'( I attempted to follow the instructions, but basically just walked around the airport parking lot. It was a nice walk, at least—it is very cold here, so I appreciated getting a good winter chill in my bones before heading back to the Land of Heat. There was snow, too, so I will at least have seen some snow before going back to school!

I have a few pictures, but my only real impression of Finland is that it is a lot flatter than I anticipated. At least, the airport is flat ... unsurprisingly, since it is an airport. That's about all I've got.

Okay, so today has been a very interesting day. Or whatever a day counts as when it's currently 4:15pm and completely dark and I'm not entirely sure which day of the week it is much less what time zone I'm in much less how many hours I have slept in the past … some unknown number of hours. Also, I really need a shower and would love to change my clothes, but my bag is not, apparently, actually going to emerge in the Helsinki baggage claim.

I arrived at my gate going to Nagoya, and the guy there said that my bag would be in the belly of the aircraft, and that I could pick it up in Nagoya. Normally this would reassure me, but when I asked if he could check the number of my luggage to see whether it was on the plane, he said 1) he couldn't do that yet, because they hadn't loaded the luggage on, and 2) the two numbers I already had were, neither one, correct, so he gave me a third number. And then he said if I couldn't find my bag in Nagoya I should give them that third number in the hopes of finding it.

All of a sudden, I am seriously hoping that I have clothes to wear when I get to Japan.

Also, I randomly got the chance to translate. It was exciting. He was a native Chinese speaker (or so I assume, since he spoke Chinese to his son; Cantonese, I think, though I suppose it could have been Thai or Vietnamese or Cambodian. It definitely had tones, and it definitely wasn't Mandarin, and he definitely looked East Asian.) who also knew Spanish and was coming from Madrid; I translated his Spanish into English for the Finnish-speaking (and English-speaking) agent at the ticket booth. It was like language telephone except with only three people!

Also, the Helsinki airport is leagues ahead of all other airports I have ever been to because it has completely free wireless.

Warning: much ranting and linguistic nerdiness to follow.

Ranting: ( The internet is not as useful for travel plans as you might think. )

Linguistic nerdiness: Although this is potentially not really PC, there was a sign outside the station that said "Ah & Ah: For out-of-towners, that's R & R." It was advertising "upperclass" travel to London, I believe; but it was pretty funny. Of course, the vowels aren't quite right, but most people reading that probably wouldn't think of that. The Boston non-rhotic dialect(s) has (have) a slightly different vowel than the British non-rhotic dialects, so I think it was trying to play off of the superficial similarity (as the sign was in Boston). It would be more interesting to see if the sign occurred elsewhere where there is no local non-rhotic dialect—maybe they were trying to make fun of and/or imitate both the Boston non-rhotic and the London non-rhotics. Anyway, it was entertaining and thought provoking.

( The great geek vs. nerd debate. )

I am now lamentably finished with the second season of Merlin.  I say lamentably only because 1) there is only one more season to go, and 2) I really ought to have been doing homework instead of watching 26 45-minute episodes of a TV show about magic and dragons.  I most definitely like British science fiction / fantasy TV a lot better than American sci fi/fantasy, but luckily I think I've started to exhaust the typical British canon, especially since I have tried Torchwood and don't like it.