"This is the weakest weapon in IKEA"

Ikea considered as a video game:

As you enter the SHOWROOM, perform a rolling dodge to the left. Grab a free PAPER TAPE MEASURE and a handful of IKEA EMBLAZONED GOLF PENCILS from the kiosk near the entryway. The PENCILS serve quite well as ranged weapons, but it will take some time to master their use. Before venturing further in the world, stand at the kiosk and practice hurling GOLF PENCILS at patrons as they enter the SHOWROOM. Remember: Hitting the eyes does triple damage.

"Reformed Balneist Church of Pas, reformation of 320." "Die, heretic scum!"

I think I’ve been reading Exodus from the Long Sun for about a week now, and I’m only halfway through it. I’m not enjoying it as much as the rest of the series. It seems like Wolfe is taking every opportunity to slow the action down by having the characters talk about how they know this, or how they’ve figured out that, material that I’d have happily elided over.

And at some point I started hearing Patera Incus’s dialog in Emo Phillips’s voice.

Smoky and Scrabbly

Hung out at Ground; played Scrabble for the first time in I-don’t-remember-how-many years. Came in a close second. This is also the first time I ever played with the formal challenge rules — I challenged the player who made the first move, and won, making her take it back. Later I refrained from challenging the player on my right, even though I had strong doubts about her word, because her play opened up a triple-word-score space for me (though as it turned out, I didn’t have the letters to reach it; instead, I played to make it tough for others to use).

Scrabble rules I didn’t know about:

The starred pink space in the center of the board, the one the first player has to use, is a double-word-score space.

The game ends either when no more plays are possible, or when all the spare tiles are gone and a player uses her last tile.

Your leftover tiles at the end of the game are counted against you. And if one player ended the game by using up all her tiles, she also gets the points for everyone else’s leftovers. (This is how I could have won. I was 9 points behind, and one of the other players has a leftover Q, worth 10 points.)

If I start playing regularly, I’m gonna have to devote some effort to memorizing all those obscure two-letter words that haven’t been used by anybody but Scrabble players for two hundred years.