| GMing |
[May. 13th, 2012|01:23 am] |
Second Star Wars gaming session tonight.
After a full day of prep, we sat down and went through only the first layer of what I had ready. Which is exciting! Because now next time I've already got a bunch of stuff ready, and I can just work on cleaning it up and making it a little deeper, rather than needing to come up with lots and lots of completely new encounter concepts.
Home base has been established. Plots were thickened and mysteries exposed. Also, following the Gumshoe model / Alexandrian method, I didn't make the PCs roll to find clues, I just had them find everything that was there to be found by looking. This works REALLY WELL. I recommend it. |
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| Wood for Sheep |
[May. 11th, 2012|12:48 am] |
Now I remember why I stopped playing Settlers of Catan...
Second Thursday Games Night at Chris's tonight. We played a round of 7 Wonders, and then I was in the game of Cash & Guns which *Rose* also played in, which was pretty awesome, and then finished off with a game of Settlers. Now, I did have fun, don't get me wrong, but about halfway through I started getting a familiar feeling from it, and I was finally able to identify what I don't like about it. (Other than "playing with insanely overcompetitive people", which is thankfully no longer a factor.) Basically, the structure of the game has lots of points of frustration in it: resource scarcity due to tile placement, getting your development blocked by other players, dice not rolling the numbers you need, finally rolling what you need but getting nothing because of the robber, and so on and so on. The way they add up makes the game feel, to me, like a long string of not quite being able to make a good play, so I spend the whole game feeling like I'm playing poorly and being frustrated over and over. Which really brings out the worst in me as a player, and I don't like being the poor sport that it threatens to turn me into. So I'm gonna work on remembering that in the future... |
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| Avengers |
[May. 8th, 2012|10:01 pm] |
So Saturday, Jerry & I met up with Jason & Gideon to have dinner at an excellent middle-eastern place down by DU, where we were joined by their roommate Mythica and her girlfriend, after which we zipped over to the Continental to sit on the stairs for a long time so we could get really good seats to see The Avengers in 3-D IMAX.
Which we did. (We were the second group in line. It was a long wait. I was glad I put a copy of Space Fluxx in my pocket.)
Anyway, the movie! I liked it. A lot. And I want to talk about what I liked in spoileriffic detail, so all the rest of this is ( behind the cut. )
I'm sure there are more things, but yeah. I liked it, is what I'm saying. It was really good.
My last note is that I think I'm over 3-D. They did a good job with it, but still I spent as much time being distracted by it as I did feeling it was an enhancement, so I think from now on I'll just see the 2-D versions, thankyouverymuch. |
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| Playing A Scientist On TV |
[May. 4th, 2012|08:07 pm] |
So it turns out I don't totally loathe the sound of my own voice when it's not being recorded on an answering machine. (Dunno what the phone lines do to my voice, but I *HAAAAATE* to listen to myself on phone messages.) Recorded with a for-real lavalier mike? It's fine. (I mean, it doesn't sound like me, but it's not horrid and loathsome.)
Three weeks ago I gave a 2.5-hour seminar on using data from my project. It was webcast to a couple dozen viewers, and it also got recorded.
I watched the whole thing last week and was generally pleased. I say "um" a lot, and I do some weird things with my hands from time to time, but overall I'm happy with it.
Which is good, because just today I finished adding it to our website for all the world of future users to see, and it would really suck to have to have it up there if I hated it... |
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| Leftovers |
[May. 3rd, 2012|10:48 pm] |
So we had a party on Saturday and there was so. much. FOOD.
We're mostly out of things that just need to be eaten as-is, but we've still got plenty of things to use as ingredients. (Bits of cheese log, for instance, make nice omelet filling in the morning.)
Last night I made quiche for the first time.
...Mostly because I was able to use up some of the crackers by turning them into pie crust. |
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| Tunicates |
[May. 1st, 2012|05:01 pm] |
Holy crap, tunicates! Have you heard of these critters? Primitive little filter-feeder jelly-blobs that live in the ocean. Except they are WEIRD.
Sea squirts digest their own brains when switching from larval to sessile forms.
Pyrosomes are bioluminescent colonial organisms.
Larvacea shed their skeletons every four hours.
Salps have two forms that alternate generations. The solitary form reproduces asexually by spawning a chain of hundreds of sequential hermaphrodites (female at first, male later on) that are all attached together. The hermaprodites release little embryos that grow up into solitary asexuals.
And Doliolida have the craziest life cycle I've ever heard of, where you basically get a "factory" form (complete with conveyor-belt organs!) that attaches some of its offspring to itself, to grow into feeder forms; some to its stalks, where they grow into "carrier ships"; and then some offspring to the carriers, which carry them far away and release them to reproduce sexually and generate more factories.
Nature is CRAZY, y'all. |
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| Birthday |
[Apr. 30th, 2012|11:37 pm] |
My birthday was actually a week ago, but Monday is a lousy day for parties, and we didn't really have our act together early enough to do anything the day before. So we had the party on Saturday.
I knew there was going to be a party, but Jerry managed to keep any other details from me. All I knew was that there would be people.
Wow, were there people! I will not attempt to summarize, but will defer to my super-awesome sweetie's super writeup and just say that it was amazing and wonderful and exactly what I wanted. Lots and lots of friends, yay!
I feel super-lucky and super-loved. Thank you all so much!
It's funny, but turning 40 doesn't feel much like a milestone. (Maybe because it was stretched out by a week.) But it does feel awesome to have so many good friends.
Oh, and before I forget, on Friday I got to meet up with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6) thetarnishedowl and have dinner with him & his sister & her family. Then I showed Bruce the Mesa Lab (he used to be an architect) and we hung out for a couple hours. So that was pretty keen, too. |
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| Family History |
[Apr. 27th, 2012|04:15 pm] |
I visited my grandmother on Sunday. She's doing well, considering. Which is to say, she's almost 97. She's on oxygen, so you have to fill up a portable oxygen tank if she's gonna leave the house. She gets nosebleeds a lot, and needs a walker, and doesn't have much energy, and blanks on words a lot, and can't hear very well. But she's still mentally pretty sharp, and will talk your ear off, and still lives by herself in her own home, and reads all the time, and gets along just fine.
We were going to go to The Egg and I for dinner, but we couldn't find it. Like most people who don't drive, she doesn't pay much attention to directions anymore. (I certainly never did before I was 16.) And once we failed to find it on the first pass, we were off in the chunk of Arvada where I always get lost because nothing goes through the way you think it should because of the railroad tracks, and Ralston Road always screws me up, and it's all just doom. So basically, we took a long scenic drive and ended up having dinner at Panda Express instead. Which was just fine. (I like Panda Express because you can get mixed veggies for your side dish and end up with a fairly healthy and low-carb dinner for cheap.)
And afterwards I got to hear lots of stories about family history that were much more dramatic than I think of that side of the family being. Like, Great-aunt V's daughter is not actually her daughter, but her cousin's daughter, because the cousin got herself pregnant in some kind of tremendously vague interaction with a renter in her parents' home one summer, and was on the bus down to Colorado Springs to get an abortion when she changed her mind, and great-aunt V raised the daughter instead because she and her husband couldn't have kids because when he was younger he got into a bar fight with a guy with a switchblade and he smacked the guy with a chair and the guy died so he did a stint in the penitentiary for manslaughter and while he was in there they sterilized him.
Luckily it's sometimes hard to get a word in edgewise when Grandma gets going, because my response was pretty much just O_O.
Also there was a whole drama storm around my grandfather's mother's house, which in her waning years she reverse-mortgaged to my grandfather in exchange for him supporting her financially, after having refused an identical setup with all three of her sons, such that when she died his brothers didn't involve him in the funeral arrangements at all and were only speaking to him enough to say "so, I guess we need $10k to cover the rest of the value of the house, then" and he was all "Fine." and wrote them a check then and there and there was just a leetle bit of bad blood floating around for a while over it all, and she wanted me to know the true story just in case anyone ever claimed that my grandfather had screwed his brothers out of their inheritance.
She also gave me a blank book to journal in, because she thought my Dad's journals were such a treasure after he died, and I didn't try to explain LiveJournal to her, but I did resolve to post a bit more often. |
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| Boarding |
[Apr. 15th, 2012|07:40 pm] |
Workshop is done, hooray! So maybe I can start interacting online again. Also, I managed to do a 2.5-hour tutorial that was webcast on Thursday without making a fool of myself, so that's good.
Anyway, our most interesting bit of news is that as of Saturday, we have a summer boarder! Bob (Rowe, if you know him) is moving back to Denver and needs a place to stay until September, and we've got a spare room, so he's renting it.
By the bye, I pondered a while over the right word before settling on "boarder". "Housemate" would indicate that we were renting the place together; likewise "roommate", which further connotes apartment living. "Houseguest" is arguably applicable but becomes misleading as time goes on and rent is paid, while "renter" carries an implication that we're not living here at the same time. "Tenant" is far too formal to describe the arrangement we've got. Thesaurus.com suggests "roomer" but that doesn't sound like English to me. "Lodger" is an excellent option, but is edged out by "boarder" because we'll be sharing groceries when he's not off in the field.
I worry about these kinds of things because I believe very firmly that Words Mean Things, and that fine gradations of meaning and nuance are desirable attributes of communication.
Further that interest, I have been enjoying reading through the archives on http://www.knewance.com . Many of the postings are on similar-sounding things that often get confused (and are thus boring if you know what the words mean), but it's neat to read about the differences between, say, clementines, tangerines, satsumas, and mandarin oranges. |
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