Thing to avoid:

1) Getting five wisdom teeth and a sinus-cavity cyst removed all at the same time.

2) Following this up with a food/medication combo that results in the worst heartburn ever and recurring fits of hiccupping that prevent sleep in greater than 20-minute increments that night, all night.

3) Following this up with a food/medication combo that results in the next day being spent in a constant chorus of the most absurd gut-blasting sound effects ever. Seriously It was ridiculous.

I think I’ve narrowed 2) down to the spicy thai soup, and 3) to the ice cream. I wasn’t previously lactose-intolerant, though, and the notion that I can no longer eat a big-ass bowl of ice cream without becoming a symphony of intestinal detonation is just about the saddest thing ever, so hopefully it’s actually ice cream + antibiotics or something like that.

I am still on the Percocet, because my jaw is still sore, so I’m not gonna worry much about editing this for rambling or spelling.

Didn’t play much Pokémon Black; decided I should finish Radiant Historia instead. I did play Pokémon as far as beating the first gym, though, and my mini-review is:

• Pokémon Black is much prettier than previous Pokémon games.
• Pokémon Black is otherwise exactly the same as previous Pokémon games.

I am now 36 hours into Radiant Historia, and have uncovered 170 out of 236 of the little time-map nodes. One thing I am starting to have a problem with is the increasing difficulty of finding which node you need to be in in order to do a side-task. The timelines are getting confusing, and the map doesn’t give enough information on where a given node will put you, under what circumstances.

Also — and this is vital if you intend to play this game — I cannot believe that they don’t actually say ‘Push START to skip cutscenes’ anywhere. If I hadn’t found that, I would’ve given this game up as unplayable long ago. You can hold down X to fast-forward through dialogue, they tell you that, but you still end up basically watching the scene, and you will just go mad if you try to play that way. There’s a node I go back to over and over because it’s early-game access to a convenient inn; there’s like three long cutscenes when you warp there. Every time you warp there, you have to watch them again, if you don’t know to push START. Jeez.

Percocets are nice, but they make me scratch at my arms like a junkie.

Played a trial-run game of Mansions of Madness last night, to see if I knew the rules, could explain them to someone else, and then actually play a game while hopped up on prescription narcotics. It went okay, but it was a good thing we did a trial run, because I learned something very important: MoM is not like Betrayal at House on the Hill, in which the “Investigators” and the “Traitor” know different things and can be surprised by things that they don’t know. It’s more like D&D, where the Keeper knows everything and plays according to that complete knowledge. See there’s these Clue cards which the investigators are hunting, and I was under the assumption that a) they were entirely flavor text, with no rules or game event activations on them and b) that it would be more fun, as the Keeper, to not know what was on them until they were discovered.

It turns out that some of those cards have important things to know on them. “Wait… I think I just lost. Was that madman you killed the named one? Was that Walter? I don’t see anything anywhere that says how many madmen there are and which ones have names?” And then I had to find and read all the little cards I should have read when setting up. But hey that’s why you do a trial run.

Actually, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this game here previously. It’s a boardgame. It seems pretty fun. It’s certainly very evocative of HP Lovecraft. There’s a trailer for it here somewhere… here you go.

I am eager to play a game of it some time, without my brain wrapped in cotton-wool. I’ll do a for-real review of it when we do.

So ummm yeah. That was oretty much my entire weekend: Radiant Historia, percocets, and farting. More-or-less normal service will now resume, though it’s still going to be a little incoherent for a while.