hot seat vacation blogging

virago's classes are done for the year. i had enough vacation time left over that i'm taking the next two weeks off work. while i'm on vacation i might not have a lot of blogging time, though i'll try to make an appearance every couple days at least, and hopefully soon i'll have time for a big post about antisemitism in bibleman.

now that connie is on winter break, i thought i'd give her an early xmas present: her own copy of civilization 4. i knew she'd want to play over break, and with her own copy i wouldn't have to sit and watch her play on my computer. also, i figured, with multiple copies we would be able to play multiplayer.

only then did i bother to read the "multiplayer" section of the civ 4 manual. so only then did i discover what "hot seat" meant.

i'd seen the term on the box and knew civ 4 supported it, whatever it was, but it hadn't occurred to me to look it up. turns out you can play civ 4 multiplayer using only one computer if you play in hot seat mode. it works just like you expect: i take my turn, then when i'm done, an alert pops up saying "VIRAGO, it's your turn!" then she takes her turn, and so on.

while i've heard it argued that a single-player game at standard speed is too short, that could not be said about two-player hot seat, which unsurprisingly takes almost twice as long. it's a pretty good game length.

but we're not only playing the game. friday night we went by local's only to see lunar event and infinite number of sounds. saturday night we went to a great dinner party. yesterday we made xmas cookies with my family. and pretty soon we'll be running out to do some gift shopping. so i'm getting some stuff done, just not blogging necessarily.¶