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Weekend -- Aladdin and stuff
As usual my flight to SFO is delayed, so I figure I might as well use the 30-40 minutes I think I have right now in order to update LJ.
Saturday afternoon we went up to Bothell for our RPG groups. My half finally had all 4 of our players actually there and playing (Konstantin missed the first time and Zach missed the second). Carl thinks we don't get nearly enough done in our sessions, although I'm thinking it might be in part due to just feeling out the system and feeling out the characters, along with the fact that Django's kind of set up a situation where there are many different valid ways we could approach solving the problems, so we end up talking about them a bit rather than just going in and destroying things. I honestly thought we were doing okay, just that we could have played for a bit longer to resolve the current thing that happened. Shrug.
Two games of Seven Wonders after that. I sucked at both. Not sure if I'm just starting to get bored with the game or what, maybe I should try new strategies. As it is, there's an expansion, which Django picked up on our way to dinner, so I still haven't seen it.
Dinner was at a Mexican place called Mi Tierra. I had fajitas, as did Dave sitting across from me. They were good, but MAN did I eat too much food on Saturday, between those and our bagels for lunch and Carl's brownies and so on.
Spent the evening watching Japanese highschool baseball over the internet. Sigh. Wish I could be there. Sanko won their first game, yay, as did Saga Kita, as did Teikyo (with Teikyo crushing 20-1. Takuro didn't pitch but he did hit a home run). Shutoku and Rikkyo Ikebukuro play today and Kanto Daiichi plays tomorrow. (Unfortunately, KD1 is in one side of the bracket and the other 3 are on the other side, and I don't think it can even be a Shutoku-Teikyo match for anything less than Best 8...)
Sunday, we went over to Microsoft for a WHO postmortem. It ended up lasting like 3 or 4 hours, as people went over all the puzzles and voiced the good and bad things about each puzzle and each location and so on and so forth. Yeah, I know I didn't write anything here about it, because we're still in this "it's gonna be rebroadcast" situation, although from talking to Jett it sounds like the Bay Area version will at least be somewhat noticeably different.
We didn't have lunch beforehand but one of the guys brought a whole pile of leftover snacks/etc from the event -- Pop-Tarts, chips, candy, etc. So I ate two poptarts and some chips and called it lunch.
Afterwards Mike and I played catch for a little while, and then drove to Ballard to get Carl, and the three of us had dinner at Pagliacci's in Queen Anne, which was good, I like how you can get a few slices there and salads and so on.
Then we saw Aladdin at the 5th Avenue Theater. It's a stage adaptation of the movie. There are good things and bad things about it. There are several new songs, which are both good and bad -- I mean, the songs aren't bad but it's weird how some are clearly THIS IS ALADDIN and others feel like HEY GUYS WE'RE ON BROADWAY. I felt like I could almost pick out which were actually Ashman-Mencken extras and which weren't.
The set, well, it was quite nice, they managed to pull off some scenes very well, although the flying carpet was disappointing. The Genie was pretty good all things considered -- there's only so much you can do when you can't draw him to fill the entire frame. I thought that some of the "magic effects" of simulating 2394283948239 people in Aladdin's entourage was done pretty well, and some of the other things were done quite well too.
They had to change the plot around a little and I'm not sure how much I should really say about that incase I'm spoiling it for anyone. The big thing is that all the animal companions are pretty much gone (Iago is in the show but as a little sidekick guy instead of a parrot). Aladdin became a guy in a band with 3 buddies, who are the narrators of the show. A lot of the Jafar stuff is kinda cut out. The weirdest thing is how totally meta they made the thing -- the characters often refer to the audience, the intermission, the "hey, we're just singing this before the next cut scene", etc. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn't. I think they really tried to make this a show that adults could enjoy and could also bring their kids to.
Anyway, if you think you would have enjoyed a live concert of the Aladdin music with a full orchestra and people in costume, without anything else, then you will enjoy this show. If adding Broadway-style dance numbers and other crazy stuff will make you happy, then you'll like it even more. If nothing else it's interesting to see how they adapted it. I think it is musically my favorite of the Disney series, so I did enjoy the music at least. You can't do anything about the fact that the Genie is not Robin Williams, so.
Afterwards we gave Carl a ride home, and then drove around the lake because 520 was still out.
Hey, it's boarding soon. Hooray?
Saturday afternoon we went up to Bothell for our RPG groups. My half finally had all 4 of our players actually there and playing (Konstantin missed the first time and Zach missed the second). Carl thinks we don't get nearly enough done in our sessions, although I'm thinking it might be in part due to just feeling out the system and feeling out the characters, along with the fact that Django's kind of set up a situation where there are many different valid ways we could approach solving the problems, so we end up talking about them a bit rather than just going in and destroying things. I honestly thought we were doing okay, just that we could have played for a bit longer to resolve the current thing that happened. Shrug.
Two games of Seven Wonders after that. I sucked at both. Not sure if I'm just starting to get bored with the game or what, maybe I should try new strategies. As it is, there's an expansion, which Django picked up on our way to dinner, so I still haven't seen it.
Dinner was at a Mexican place called Mi Tierra. I had fajitas, as did Dave sitting across from me. They were good, but MAN did I eat too much food on Saturday, between those and our bagels for lunch and Carl's brownies and so on.
Spent the evening watching Japanese highschool baseball over the internet. Sigh. Wish I could be there. Sanko won their first game, yay, as did Saga Kita, as did Teikyo (with Teikyo crushing 20-1. Takuro didn't pitch but he did hit a home run). Shutoku and Rikkyo Ikebukuro play today and Kanto Daiichi plays tomorrow. (Unfortunately, KD1 is in one side of the bracket and the other 3 are on the other side, and I don't think it can even be a Shutoku-Teikyo match for anything less than Best 8...)
Sunday, we went over to Microsoft for a WHO postmortem. It ended up lasting like 3 or 4 hours, as people went over all the puzzles and voiced the good and bad things about each puzzle and each location and so on and so forth. Yeah, I know I didn't write anything here about it, because we're still in this "it's gonna be rebroadcast" situation, although from talking to Jett it sounds like the Bay Area version will at least be somewhat noticeably different.
We didn't have lunch beforehand but one of the guys brought a whole pile of leftover snacks/etc from the event -- Pop-Tarts, chips, candy, etc. So I ate two poptarts and some chips and called it lunch.
Afterwards Mike and I played catch for a little while, and then drove to Ballard to get Carl, and the three of us had dinner at Pagliacci's in Queen Anne, which was good, I like how you can get a few slices there and salads and so on.
Then we saw Aladdin at the 5th Avenue Theater. It's a stage adaptation of the movie. There are good things and bad things about it. There are several new songs, which are both good and bad -- I mean, the songs aren't bad but it's weird how some are clearly THIS IS ALADDIN and others feel like HEY GUYS WE'RE ON BROADWAY. I felt like I could almost pick out which were actually Ashman-Mencken extras and which weren't.
The set, well, it was quite nice, they managed to pull off some scenes very well, although the flying carpet was disappointing. The Genie was pretty good all things considered -- there's only so much you can do when you can't draw him to fill the entire frame. I thought that some of the "magic effects" of simulating 2394283948239 people in Aladdin's entourage was done pretty well, and some of the other things were done quite well too.
They had to change the plot around a little and I'm not sure how much I should really say about that incase I'm spoiling it for anyone. The big thing is that all the animal companions are pretty much gone (Iago is in the show but as a little sidekick guy instead of a parrot). Aladdin became a guy in a band with 3 buddies, who are the narrators of the show. A lot of the Jafar stuff is kinda cut out. The weirdest thing is how totally meta they made the thing -- the characters often refer to the audience, the intermission, the "hey, we're just singing this before the next cut scene", etc. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn't. I think they really tried to make this a show that adults could enjoy and could also bring their kids to.
Anyway, if you think you would have enjoyed a live concert of the Aladdin music with a full orchestra and people in costume, without anything else, then you will enjoy this show. If adding Broadway-style dance numbers and other crazy stuff will make you happy, then you'll like it even more. If nothing else it's interesting to see how they adapted it. I think it is musically my favorite of the Disney series, so I did enjoy the music at least. You can't do anything about the fact that the Genie is not Robin Williams, so.
Afterwards we gave Carl a ride home, and then drove around the lake because 520 was still out.
Hey, it's boarding soon. Hooray?