Last time, I talked about the group with whom I played Risk. By the way, if you’re reading this, then it’s evidence that I haven’t edited the blog before publishing it. As it stands, my brain is still wondering why it’s not asleep, and why someone with a Southern accent just asked me for cheese. Life is confusing, and I don’t understand it half of the time.

Anyway, I hit you with such an onslaught of exposition that I’m sure your heads collectively exploded. I apologize for that, and I sincerely hope that your medical insurance covers it. What would that go under? Emergency Room? Do ERs have the capacity to put an exploded head back together again? UK people, what’s the NHS like for exploding heads?

What? Oh, Risk, yeah.

So I mentioned Gilles before, and what I hadn’t mentioned – I don’t think – once again, rusty mind right now – is that he was in one of my courses at the University. The course was Post-Colonial Literature, and I took it because Rudyard Kipling was listed as one of the course’s main authors; I’d been reading an anthology of his horror stories, and I was desperately hoping one of them would pop up in discussion so I could seem smart and well-read.

None of them did, so I just spat out random thoughts that went through my head. Oh, Risk, yeah.

So I knew Gilles as a really smart guy. He knew three languages, and despite the fact that English was not his first language, he was much, much better than I was at literary discussion. (To wit: One of my ideas was to write a paper on how Rudyard Kipling kicked ass. I viewed this as a legitimate topic for anything other than Cracked.com.) But what I didn’t know is that we were equals on one very important level:

We’d both read a disgusting amount of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. For the uninitiated, the EU novels are a series of noncanonical (or canonical, depending on what sort of mood Lucas was in at the time of publication) plotlines about characters from the original trilogy and their offspring. The only thing you really need to know about the EU is that the Skywalkers continue to be The Most Important Family Ever and it takes

SPOILER An entire moon to kill Chewbacca

END SPOILER

This was a recurring conversation between the two of us, and when I first found out that the guy occasionally ran Star Wars Risk sessions, I had to get in on them.

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