complexity

Imagine a card game where there are an ever growing number of cards, at last count, around 5000. People buy them, collect them, obssess over them, hoard them. End up with sometimes 20 to 30 thousand cards in their personal collection. Create decks of 60, go and meet other people and play. Sound bizarre ? That's Magic the Gathering. I went to a meetup last night and had a very interesting (although quite bewildering) time of it. Remembering cards is near impossible. There are also card colours, mana points, life points, abilities, stackable abilities, interacting abilities and a whole host of things which I couldn't even track. It looked like fun, but seemed to have a steepish learning curve. On the flip side, my hair length made me blend right in with those folks, so no one noticed I was a spectator.

In other news, addiction can be a hard hard thing to beat. The first step, they say, is admitting you have a problem. Does an alcoholic who resorts to getting an enema of sherry have a problem ? I'd think so. You can't really say I drank it for the taste after that, can you ? Well, a couple of weeks ago, a man died after being administered a sherry enema, allegedly by his wife. Umm. I'm not sure about the origin of the toast Bottoms up, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't cover this eventuality. Now it seems that there was more to enemas than just alcohol. Is this a good time to revive the Richard Gere story ?

And I will write a review of Ubuntu sometime soonish for anyone who's interested and finally put all the technobabbling on the blog to rest *grin*.