Games and sketches

Played one game of San Juan last night; old hat by now. The other game I played was new: Pirate’s Cove, a German boardgame. Each player gets a pirate ship and sails around looting and pillaging, collecting and burying treasure, gaining fame, and blowing other pirates out of the water. The game play is simple yet challenging, the chrome is fun, the mechanics suit the theme, and the game pieces are all attractive and (mostly) well-designed. If it wasn’t a great big boxed game (and $40) I might buy a copy.

I’ve been doing more sketching again, and getting back to linework and cross-hatching. Though I do think the slightly grainy drybrush look of the Pentel Color Brush worked nicely for the leather jacket in the last sketch.

( Much sketchage! )

Used CDs

The first-best thing about buying used CDs is that they’re cheap — I just got three disks for $18.

The second-best thing is that they don’t have that annoying strip of tape across the top of the case.

I may be wrong about which of those things is first-best.

Even red-staters get the blues

Georgia man kills himself at 9/11 site in fit of post-election depression:

A man apparently distraught at the outcome of last week's presidential election, climbed into the pit marking the spot in New York where the twin towers once stood, and shot himself, the authorities said at the weekend.

City police told reporters the body of Andrew Veal, 25, of Athens, Georgia, was discovered in the restricted area around the wreckage of the World Trade Centre on Friday night with a shotgun and a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey by his side. He is believed to have died from a head wound.

Mr Veal left no note, but his colleagues from the University of Georgia, where he helped oversee political polling, said that he was a passionate opponent of the war on Iraq, and of George Bush.