some disparates

On Sunday afternoon, while finishing off my Farscape dvds, and enjoying the almost-stormy weather, I decided to use my spare time to finally play some Cashflow. I really don't think it's a game for everyone; it's less a boardgame than a kind of fun educational tool. But if you're interested in a SimCity type deal but with personal finances, it's great - for an archetypical example of a benefit, one might experiment with behavior one would never do in real life.

I made two 'players' - Jinn, and Dove (incidentally the name of the main character of the erotica I've written, so it was kind of like playing with an ex-pornstar). Grabbing randomly out of the profession choices, Jinn became a teacher (low salary) and Dove became a doctor (high salary, but also higher expenses). Long story short, I found it intensely interesting that I made poor investment choices with Dove, knowing she had more money to spare, and then we she had bad luck, I ended up having no savings. With Jinn, however, whom I was more careful with, I ended up my playing time with him having an inordinate amount of savings, several well paying investments, and able to weather the downturns-by-luck quite easily. Basically, what I'm getting at is that I learned in inordinate amount by playing this game for a couple hours, and just the opposition of each invented player's relative position barely scratches the surface.

Man, for as good a film as Fight Club is, and as skillfully as it is scripted and put together, it's kind of a downer in a sense. That is, after we watched it at the Loft on Friday, I was in a mood for at least a little bit where I was distrusting all sorts of aspects of my life, or my desires for them, just like the characters in the movie. Maybe that's a good thing, in a sense? In other news, the screenwriter, who was there for question-and-answer after the film, seemed kind of a jerk at first, but was ultimately an interesting guy, in the end.

Again, makes me think of vampires...

And from Ms Connie (herself quoting out of an article), "If Star Trek is a utopian civics lesson, in a surgical theatre, Farscape is anonymous sex. In a sewer."