/var/log/orava

We have regular VTES (Vampire: the Eternal Struggle) games every week, alternating between Wednesday and Thursday. The schedule is here and the site is the pub “Kaisla” near the Helsinki railway station – they have lots of room and a good selection of beer.

From now on I’ll be bringing along a bunch of basic “demo” decks to the games, and if some newbies show up I’ll be teaching people the game; if we get enough new people we can run a separate newbie game table. We usually start playing at about 5pm, but play typically continues until 10pm or so – people are welcome to show up whenever.

So… if you want to learn the game, show up tomorrow (or some other game night) and join up. You don’t need to bring anything or know anything, an interest in learning the game (which is quite complex) is enough. The learning curve is well worth it. And hey, there’s beer available from the bar, always a good thing.

We’re back. Not much luck gamewise and caught a nasty flu on the road, but otherwise a great trip. Prague was nice but very touristy and starting to be pretty expensive.

Thursday: we fly in around noon, and manage to get to the hotel eventually. The hotel (Hotel Dum) proves to be a soviet-style 19-floor concrete monster of a building way in the outskirts of town. Not a dump, though, and well suited to running the EC. Us Finns quickly christened the place “Khobar Towers” after a VTES card (which was in turn named after a Saudi apartment block which got hit by a bomb in the 1980s). Some of our hosts (Karel, Martin & Martina, thanks once again guys!) have organized a city tour for us, so off we go. Prague proves to be a very pretty city absolutely crawling with tourists; we wend our way through the crowds and see the sights. The tour ends at a cellar pub where the EC welcome party is held, and the rest of the evening is spent in the company of lots of people, beer and some pickup games. Back to the hotel via metro + bus sometime before midnight.

Friday: up sometime before 9am, and then off to see if breakfast will help fight hangover. It helps, but not totally. EC registration is next. I decide to play with my Settite + Baali Mute voter – it’s not my strongest deck, but I’m already qualified so I decide to give it a try. Tuukka decides to go hardcore and shaves off most of his hair and gets into costume as a Nosferatu, eliciting lots of “wow!” comments. The rest of the day goes to playing in the Last Chance qualifiers, and my deck nets a round zero VPs – it’s not that it’s a bad deck, but it’s just too unreliable and slow in its current form. In one game I get back-ousted by Robyn, because she (quite correctly) sees me as a danger for her. All three(!) games feature Alamut on the table, a card that my current deck can’t easily handle. After the games someone (don’t remember who, sorry) suggested looking into New Management, which I thought was a great idea; lots of cards that are a danger to that deck (Ventrue HQ, Alamut, etc) can be stolen with that. Fun games, in any case, and I got some good ideas for improving my deck. I think the basic idea is sound, but making it flow properly and be dependable is a challenge. The rest of the evening goes in pickup games, with lots of usage of the friendly hotel beer tap (pint of beer for about one euro). Got to bed at around 2.30am or so.

Saturday: up again at around 9am, feeling both sleep-deprived and a bit fluish. Breakfast helps a bit, and then there’s time to rest for a while in the hotel room before the EC Day 1 tournament begins. This time I’m playing my best deck, a Toreador-antitribu + Daughters tap & bleed thing which uses Art’s Traumatic Essence a lot. Things go a bit better this time around, but only a bit – the day nets me a total of 1.5 VPs. Both of the first games were pretty tight, but in the last one I’m ousted in half an hour by a fast !Malk Kindred Spirits bleeder, did not draw into much bounce at all and that was that. The deck still needs some tweaking, maybe a bit more bleed power and definitely some more defense (bounce). Teemu also (later) suggested looking into using Blind Spot instead of Misdirection, which sounds like a good idea (though the requirement for the target to be younger or an ally may be a problem). This is one more deck that I’ll continue to try to tweak, the basic form is quite sound but it needs tweaking to make it more robust. Again some pickup games, but by evening I feel a bit too much flu coming on and I retire to sleep sometime around 1am.

Sunday: last day of the EC, and this time I wake to a full fever plus the flu. Fun fun. I borrow some tabs from Antti, and after that “better life through chemistry” operation I stagger downstairs for breakfast. The chemicals plus food helps a bit, and I decide I’m not too sick to play. The side tournament has been switched from the initially-planned team format to a normal constructed, which is declared to be the first qualifier for 2009 (lots of cheers when that was announced). I decide to use my Osebo intercept toolbox – it’s not my strongest deck, but at least it has combat and intercept, and I figure it can’t suck any worse than my other decks. Well, that proves to be correct – despite a first game in which things looked very bright for a while (and which featured four Laibon decks!) I net a grand total of one VP for the whole day. Oh well. Kudos to the Hungarian player who gave me a chance to grab a second VP just because I had helper him earlier; the attempt failed because I didn’t draw into either my Dragonbound or more bleed, but the gesture was appreciated. After the games I went to watch Taija play in the finals (of the First Chance), and then talked to various people (Robyn, LSJ, etc) before they retired to prep for their morning departure. All in all, a fun EC and I didn’t encounter any unpleasant tables or players. Maybe next year I’ll actually score better. Maybe not. We’ll see. Before we retired we grabbed some extra beer from some friendly Icelanders (thanks!) and went to play some more casual games. Sometime in the morning hours it was sleepy time once again.

Monday: most of the other Finns, and most of the other EC players in general, left in the morning. After saying our goodbyes to them, we headed towards the city, on a mission: to find ourselves a hotel room for the last night. The EC hotel was booked full, and despite our trying they had not been able (or willing) to pre-book us a room for an extra night. So off we went. Our first try at a hostel used by some other Finns got us a “ask us tomorrow” answer, so aided by advice from Lonely Planet we headed to the train station to talk to a tourist agency. That proved to be a good plan, the very friendly lady there got us a really nice hotel room in Mala Strana, within walking distance of Prague Castle. After this was done, it was time for some tourist stuff: a visit to the Mucha museum, and then some general shopping and walking about. I was feeling pretty crappy, to be honest: a combination of fever (kept sort-of in check with chemicals), sleep deprivation and beer kept me in a weird, muzzy floating state of mind. An ok day, but I was pretty wiped out when we got back to the hotel. That evening we managed to play one more pickup game with a Spanish player who (like us) was still staying at the hotel.

Tuesday: a great day, especially since my fever was gone (though I was still a bit down with the flu) and the sun was shining. We check out of Khobar Towers and make our way to Mala Strana and our new hotel. When we get there we hear that we’ll have to wait till 2pm to get our room, so we leave our bags at the hotel and head for the castle. We arrive eventually, after taking a “short-cut” that was anything but. The castle was pretty cool, though I wouldn’t rate it a must-see. The church glass paintings were quite impressive, and the whole place was worth seeing – especially since the weather was nice, and the view across the city was appropriately scenic. Back to the hotel and check in, our room proves to be really nice – the difference between this and hotel Dum, both “three star” hotels, is pretty extreme. We take in lunch at a nearby pub/restaurant which provides me with the best food I’ve had so far in Prague, a truly excellent stroganof with a side dish of green beans, bacon and garlic. Yum. With that and some good dark beer under our belts, be stagger towards the center. Janne wants to visit the Mucha museum gift shop again for a poster, and then we go see a Jan Saudek gallery – I had almost forgotten that Saudek is Czech, suddenly seeing his name on a sign made me go “hey, I must go see that!”. The show is nice, and I manage to buy two high-quality poster prints from the gift shop, yay! Saudek is a long-time favorite of mine, I really like his work. Back to the hotel, stopping for some dessert and some more beer on the way, and then it’s time to get a proper night’s sleep for once.

Wednesday: after a very classy hotel breakfast (borsch soup! different types of coffee! stuff! more stuff!) it time to catch the morning flight back home. We get to the airport via public transport without problems and the flight is one time. Pretty exhausted by the time I actually get home; it’s a hot day, I’m carrying a ton of stuff, and the flu is still wearing me down. Good to be home. The cats and wife muchly agree.

Some pics from the EC (by Petr Tarcinec) can be found here.

Fortunately I’ve done PC upgrades often enough to expect trouble automatically, so when I upgraded my home computer with a new motherboard, new memory and a new graphics card I wasn’t expecting a smooth ride. The cause for the upgrade was my desire for more gaming graphics power, and since my old mobo had AGP/DDR connections this seemed like a good time to also upgrade to a modern PCIe/DDR2 motherboard. So I did.

Installation went fine mechanically, though my microATX case is a bit cramped. Still, everything fit after some tweaking. When I booted up to Win XP I got what I was halfway expecting: a boot failure, due to the changed chipset etc (boot gets going, then stops and the thing reboots). So I’ll need to try and repair the rig with a Windows XP install disk in repair mode, fair enough – and if all else fails I have backups of the important stuff and can always do a clean reinstall.

Next up, boot to Linux. That failed too, complaining about failure to detect (SATA) disk. After some cursing (I was sure I had remembered to compile in the needed drivers), I discovered that the BIOS defaults to non-native SATA mode for backwards compatibility reasons. Duh. After fixing that, Linux booted fine to text mode. Hooray! X11 didn’t start up, but that was to be expected.

The next day I tried to get X to work, and finally had to revert to the base “vesa” driver – the current incarnation of the Gentoo “ati” and/or “radeonhd” drivers don’t support the 4850HD yet, and the ATI binary drivers aren’t compatible with the recently-released xorg 1.5.0 I’m running. Oh well, at least I get X/KDE via the vesa driver, it’s not like I need accelerated graphics in Linux much anyway right now.

Whle I was doing this the machine froze up a few times, which started to worry me. So I did the first thing I always do when random freezes happen: I fired up memtest86+. Lo and behold, it started showing red “memory fail” results almost at once. I tried with the memory in different slots, and with different memory timings. No go. In the end I had to concude that the memory was just plain bad. That, or there’s some wierd incompatibility with my new motherboard which should support DDR2 800 dual channel according to specs.

…so today it was back to Verkkokauppa. After explaining the situation I got a refund on the memory and grabbed a replacement 2GB from the store – this time “plain basic” DD2 667, in case it’s some motherboard bug with the 800’s or something. Tonight, if I have time, I’ll try things out again.

“If I have time” because my flight to Prague for the VTES EC tournament leaves pretty early tomorrow morning and I still have a ton of prep plus packing to do for that. Looking forward to the trip; I have three more or less tournament-ready decks with me and intend to quickly put together a few more decks for casual play. Never been to Prague before, I’m told it’s a great city though I hear varying opinions about how expensive it is nowadays. I guess it can’t be too bad since I’m coming from Helsinki, one of the most expensive cities in the world at the moment. Hell, even Paris didn’t seem bad in comparison.

Very nice weekend, Teemu & Tuukka organized a repetition of last year’s VTES miniqualifier tournament weekend – in other words, 2 days of VTES tournament and casual play, with beer, sauna and the option to swim in the sea. Huge amount of fun, and the sea wasn’t that cold anymore… at least not after enough alcohol in the bloodstream, to keep things lubricated.

Did poorly in the first day’s tournament, but that was no big surprise; I was playing my Daughters anarch voter, which isn’t really a tournament deck (I’ve been forced to conclude). When it works it works great, but it can and will fail in so many ways. In other words, it’s much too fragile. Had fun playing, though, and the casual games in the evening were entertaining also. Tuomas went on to win the first day tournament with his Mind Rape + Tupdog deck (which he in vain tried to claim wasn’t actually a Mind Rape + Tupdog deck).

Second day went much better, I tried out my newish Osebo combat toolbox and it did surprisingly well. After a table sweep and some extra VPs, I make it to the finals. Things actually looked pretty good there for a while, but then I ran out of intercept and Tuukka’s Malks swept over me. Was largely my own fault, I fouled up by transferring out the wrong vampire by mistake; if I had gotten the rush-capable Massassi out (as intended), things might have gone differently. Oh well. In any case, I was pleasantly suprised by the performance of that deck, even though it has lots of weak points. Need more Preternatural Strength (doesn’t everyone?)…

The last tournament round ended in a draw, with Tuomas and Tuukka both betting 2 VPs and Jukka getting one – but Tuukka got tournament win due to higher preliminary round totals. Score one more for the old-school Malks (though Tuukka’s deck didn’t use Dominate and was a pretty interesting take on the Malk S+B concept).

I think I’ll dismantle most of my current decks (barring the Osebo one and a Toreador one I’m working on) and build up some new ones with ideas I’ve been gathering.

We had the “postrelease” tournament for the new Twilight Rebellion VTES set on Saturday. I’ve always found pre/postrelease tournaments a lot of fun, and this was no exception – about 20 players, and lots of new cards to try to figure out. We made decks from 5 drafted Anarchs boosters plus 5 drafted Twilight Rebellion boosters, so it was a low-resource game for everyone. No pool gain, very limited intercept, etc. Tuomas took the tournament win once again, with Tuukka coming in second place, proving that some people are just better players than others. No surprise there.

The set looks solid. Lots of powerful cards for the Anarchs, just what they’ve needed in order to be tournament-level viable. The balance looks good; while there are some very powerful cards in there, they also have suitable restrictions; I didn’t spot any immediate this-will-become-a-problem cases yet. We’ll see, once people start building decks from these. It becomes legal for tournament play on June 27th.

Sunday was a lazy day, which was nice and much-needed. We had one of our semi-regular movie weekends, with some people coming over to watch stuff with the theme “virtual realities” – which meant Matrix, The 13th Floor and ExistenZ. I’d seen all three before, but they stood up well to second (or third) viewings. Read a bit, ate lots of good cabbage soup, did some more Rails coding… nice and relaxing.

The next VTES expansion, Twilight Rebellion, will see daylight (figuratively) near the end of May, and as has been the tradition we’re organizing a tournament around it. This time around it’s a “post-release” event, where players build decks from 5 Twilight Rebellion boosters and 5 Anarchs boosters. These events have been lots of fun, traditionally, and I don’t expect this one to be any different. Always cool to play around with brand-new cards when everyone else is in the dark about them, too.

More info on the VTES page.

“… time, Doctor Freeman?”

While we’re not in Big Brother -ville yet, it’s a slippery slope, as the recent censorship idiocy here in Finland shows. Ah, the good old “won’t anyone think of the children!” argument, where silly little things like freedom of speech and due process get trampled by the obvious demons of “child pornography!”. Of course, if you’re against this censorship, you’re a supporter of child pornography! Sigh. The fact that this is a secret list, which apparently contains lots of non-child pornography pages too, seems not matter too much to some people. History has shown us where things like this tend to lead – but knowledge of history doesn’t feature very high on the list of these people, either. “We have to save the children!!!”

I could write lots about this, but better writers than me have already done so. It should not come as a suprise that so many people are ignorant of the real implications of all this – but the fact that one of those (willfully) ignorant people is our Minister of Communications, Suvi Lindén, is sad. I get some little satisfaction from the fact that as of now, over 10,000 people have signed an address asking for her resignation, while only about 4500 people voted for her originally. The sad fact of democracy is that now and then, utter morons get elected into office. Usually they do no harm there. Usually.

In an alternate reality we’d have a Gordon Freeman clone with a huge arsenal storming the senate and kicking ass. Here and now, we’ll have to do without gravity guns and general mayhem. Maybe that’s for the best.

Speaking of dystopias and firepower…

…yes, I finished Half-Life 2 this weekend. Quite a ride, and the end cliffhanger was nicely done. Now all I have to do is resist the temptation to buy the Orange Box until I have time to actually play Episodes 1 & 2. Not this week, at least – I have an Exalted game to prep and some other stuff to do. Next week, maybe. I can resist. Yup. No problem. Sure.

That took care of Sunday. Saturday we had a VTES tournament run by Teemu; was a lot of fun, and even though my Anarch Daughters voter failed in the first two rounds (in first because of bad table seating, in second because of abysmally bad card draws), it did manage to get me a game win in the third round. Not enough for the finals, but still, a game win is a game win. I have some small tweak ideas for that deck, but nothing major; I suspect it’s close to as good as I can make it, without totally changing some major focus.

After the game I shambled to a friend’s place where a blini party was in full swing. Blinis plus bubbly wine, wonderful combo.

Added a bit later: this post cuts right down to the heart of the censorship debate, tongue-in-cheek as it may be (in Finnish).

Ever since we moved to the new house, we’ve had intermittent problems with our ADSL connection. The connection is a “ServerLink” 8/1M connection from Netsonic (includes static IP, the critical component), with the actual connection being provided by Elisa. In the beginning what happened was that every now and then, the line would drop and stay down until the ADSL box was rebooted – really nasty if you’re running a server. We switched the old ADSL box for a Telewell one, and that one is able to recover from the drops; now all that happens is that the line drops every now and then, and then recovers some 30 sec - 1 min later. For a lot of uses this is quite ok, but since it usually kills ssh connections and (most critically :) kills Eve connections, it’s still a headache.

I’ve tried looking over the ADSL connection settings, and while I don’t understand all the switches there everything seems ok. The logs just say “carrier dropped” or something like that. Hmph.

I finally emailed the other people who life at our house company (“taloyhtiö”, whatever that is in English). As a reply I was told that another guy had also had problems a year ago, he had contacted Elisa and had been told that since our switching center is in Hämeenkylä (quite a distance away), they cannot guarantee an error-free 8M transfer rate. They had reduced the max bandwidth for that guy to 3.5M and the problems had gone away. I’ll have to ask Elisa about this, and if the above is still true then do the same for us. We don’t need the max download rate all that often anyway, and we’d much rather have a steady, slower link than a slightly flaky faster one. A bit annoying, in any case – why do they sell an 8M connection to an area they apparently know can’t handle it?

Serves us right, of course, for living in the middle of the forest…

In other news: spent Sunday playing VTES at a friend’s place along with lots of other people, was fun. My Lasombra combat deck sucked on all too many levels, it’s going back into the redesign pile. The Samedi deck is doing ok-ish, but is having flow problems – have some ideas about that. Daughters of Cacophony anarch voter is starting to work nicely, but is suffering from master jam (understandable, since it had a ton of them). Will have to figure out what to cut.

Oh, and I have to note that even though the recent Superbowl left me cold (I’m not much into watching organized sports, and have no idea how football rules even work), I’m finding another sports event very entertaining: the US presidential race. He’s running for the finish line! But no, she has him tackled, there’s only a pile of flailing hands and feet visible! Who’s that mystery man, sprinting past the defense line? And now for a word from our sponsors!

I’m personally rooting for Barack Obama. He’s smart, has lots of views I can agree with (not all, of course), and is an excellent public speaker. For example, check out this speech about religion and atheism (40min video stream). Besides the fact that it takes balls to talk about religion’s role in politics at all in the current climate, the fact that he talks about atheists and evangelists both in a non-confrontational manner (barring some pointed and deserved digs) is a big plus. Something about his measured call for discourse, reason and moderation on all sides strikes a chord with me. As an atheist, this is a sensibly religious person I feel I could have a real talk with. Which is something.

This is all from the sidelines, of course, since I can’t vote in the U.S. elections. To be honest, all three of the current main candidates (Obama, Clinton and McCain) seem to have something to recommend them, none of them feels like an idiot. So for the first time in 8 years, there’s a real chance the U.S. might get a reasonably good president. Whoever that ends up being.

In any case, most of the world is watching.

So… Christmas and New Year. We had a nice, peaceful and sort-of-traditional home Christmas, together with my dear cute wife (artist’s depiction on right, thanks to Girl Genius), Niksu, and the girl-who-lives-in-his-bedroom-at-times. “Traditional” due to us having metric tons of traditional Finnish Christmas food, with some stuff borrowed from the Russian kitchen, and “not quite traditional” due to the glow-in-the-dark demon & pentagram we had as Christmas window decorations – and also due to us listening to “A Very Scary Solstice” and “An Even Scarier Solstice” as holiday theme music.

Everyone (including the cats) got lots of goodies to eat, and presents are always fun. I got a two Imogen Heap albums (nice!), a copy of the classic Dr. Seuss “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, (whee!) and a 100mm macro lens (wow!). I’d complain that it was way too much and too expensive, but of course Santa is above normal everyday economic concerns. Apparently Wife had tipped off Santa about what I’d like, since I got things I very much appreciated. Seems that Santa had been busy in other ways also, since everyone got lots of fun and appropriate packages. One does wonder how Santa knows what lurks in the heart of man. Is he actually The Shadow, the other 355 days?

During the inbetween days before New Year, I ran a VTES tournament with a “munch/cheese” theme, “Temptation of Greater Power I”. Went well, and a tournament report is now available.

Then it was suddenly New Year, which we spent at Jari’s. Lots of people (some just visiting Finland for a short while), lots of bubbly, lots of snacks, sauna… was a fun party. The weather was (still) dismal, but bubbly drinks cure that to a large extent.

So, now it’s 2008, first full year in our new home starting up. Lots of stuff to do, things to improve and fix… and that’s good. There’s no real rush with anything, and there’s the luxury of being able to plan for long term.

I separated the VTES wiki into a subdomain (vtes.orava.org) and set up a new wiki there. I’m in the process of moving things over, will probably take a bit until it’s all there – I have an Exalted game to run on Sunday and need to prep for that, and various things (including a Porcupine Tree concert) eat up most of Saturday.

Anyway, registration is free for all and you’re welcome to add VTES-related content there. Spammers and vandals will be deal with appropriately.