First on the list of never-agains...

 Wow, school is officially back with a vengeance!  I do, however, have excellent intentions for the remainder of this break in which I will work far ahead and thus free up lots of time for me to write more frequently.  Okay, it's really so that I can devote more time to figuring out what the devil Homer and Vergil are saying, and we all know that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  If that is so, then my intentions are used for the foundation stones of the gate at the end of the road to Hell.  But every road needs paving, right?


 Anyhow, the latest nonsense running through my head was sparked by an interesting flaw I've observed in myself and many others.  Since I've experienced so much in my nearly twenty four years of life, I have a rapidly growing list of things that I promise to never do again.  While there's a postable story for each of these, I choose not to focus on eating lasagna, going on blind dates, taking math classes, or trying to fix printers.  Instead, we're going to talk about Risk.  


 I hate Risk with a burning, unholy passion.  No other game, even the dreaded Monopoly, has the power to stir such a degree of caustic loathing in the souls of men.  There are three constants in every game of Risk I have ever played, starting with my inaugural game at age nine. 1) The game was never actually finished——everyone just agreed that someone was probably going to win and gave up after a number of what were invariably some of the most frustrating hours of their lives.  2) At least one person cried, yelled, or became dangerously silent while avoiding eye-contact and communicating only in furtive, murderous, sidelong glances.  3) At the conclusion of the game, I have always wanted the last 4+ hours of my life back.


 To you poor, deluded souls who like Risk and can't possibly believe that anyone could hate it so, I offer the following grievances.  You are probably the same people who always say, "you've just got to have a good strategy, man."  Sadly, Risk is probably the least strategic game in the history of strategic games.  Sure, you may have thirty troops camped out on the only access to your continent.  Your opponent may only be attacking with ten troops.  Two minutes and about 15-18 rolls later, he has eight troops and you have zero——what happened?!  Well if this were a case of actual strategy, you could attribute it to the attacker's good use of terrain, clever troop movements, and shrewd tactics.  Unfortunately, the closest our friend ever got to shrewd tactical maneuvers was to blow on the dice before throwing them.  He calls them Hot Wheels.


 And that's what really makes me want to tear my hair out.  Risk pulls you in with the promise of engaging battles for world supremacy, but it's all completely founded on luck.  But life is all just based on chance, right?  While there are factors in life that I can't control, there are a lot of things that really are completely up to me.  I am currently wearing clothes because I chose to put them on, not because I successfully rolled a four or higher that allows me to wear a long-sleeved shirt.  While this is a really basic example and there are plenty of you mathematicians out there ready to tell me all about probability and game theory, you get the idea.  


 If you want to witness ridiculous bouts of good and bad luck, see grown men scream and bicker like seven year olds, and have a totally unrealistic experience pretending to be a military commander——by all means play Risk.  If you make it through the game without wanting to disembowel one of your opponents or to never use dice again for anything (perhaps a good object lesson for the futility of gambling?), then you're a better person than I.  In the meantime, I'll be playing Go, in which if I lose, it's simply because I suck...