| No bullet points for you |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|11:17 pm] |
Today:
Joined gym
Worked out at gym
Paid off car*
Reduced car insurance bill
Paid bills
Mailed things
Banked money
Authorized partner for credit card use
Got new credit cards**
Finally used birthday gift cards***
Acquired 4e Eberron book & new Culture novel
Waited out torrential rainstorm
Looked at art by people I know
Also looked at art by strangers
Had interesting thoughts about art
Didn't watch pretty sunset clouds while driving
Delegated cloud-watching to partner
Grocery shopped
Grocery shopped some more at different store
Was nagged at to "Go eat something!" in stereo
Made gazpacho for tomorrow****
*Technically this happened on the 30th, by autopay, but today was finances day, so I count it as an accomplishment. Soooo looking forward to not having a car payment!
**We feel clever for having done this today and avoiding potential hosage of doing it while Jerry is off in Japan.
***Had to be spotted $0.76 by Black & Read counter staff, because I had a gift card and a credit card but no cash on me, and running the card for less than a dollar is a lose for them. D'oh!
****Yum.
And all this after a relatively low-key and lazy morning. No wonder I'm tired! |
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| My brain on parade |
[Jun. 28th, 2009|06:31 pm] |
I've been out in the sun a fair amount this weekend. Yesterday for Jeff & Alice's twins' birthday, and then today for Denver's Gay Pride parade.
I think being in marching band starting in 7th grade may have spoiled me for parades. Groups of random supporters walking along cheering & clapping always seem a bit... disorganized to me. I also wonder what the announcers do when certain of the parade participants pass by the reviewing stand. "And now... a guy in a car! Hello, guy in a car!"
We decided to just pay for parking, and so found a spot only two blocks from where we met Chris & Todd. We were at Colfax & Lincoln, basically, so by the time the parade got to that point, a number of gaps had developed, and we were often left wondering whether that was the end of the parae. But it actually ended with a bunch of people carrying a gigantically long pink feather boa for a fundraiser. I was inordinately pleased to see a guy at the very end pulling more of it out of a box and handing it to parade-watchers to join in. (I thought before he showed up how awesome it would be if there was a machine at the end, just manufacturing more boa, so that eventually everyone watching would just join in the parade at the end of it.)
Pride tends to bring out the exhibitionist in people. There was quite a bit of bare skin on display. And here's how I can tell my tastes are non-mainstream, because there were certainly some folks that I found attractive, but for probably 90% of them, my first thought was "Ooo, honey, I hope you put on sunscreen."
Do you ever wonder if there are people who attend the parade not because they care about gay pride one way or the other, but just because they really like rainbows? I wondered that. I also wondered if I should be worried that I could recognize the dance music coming from the middle of Civic Center park just from the bottom two octaves and the drum line.
Walking past all the booths afterwards, Kuma & Monkey bought things like bear-themed shwag and jerkey. I signed a petition and filled out a survey, for which I got a $2 bill and a pocketful of condoms. "I'm participating in demography!" I proclaimed.
Yes, I really said that. Out loud, even.
"Next up... Beemer's brain! Hello, Beemer's brain! You seem a bit... disorganized." |
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| Wet and green |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|09:05 pm] |
Wow, it is raining again.
It has really been an unusually wet spring / early summer around these parts. It's almost unnatural how green things are; normally the grasses would be starting to turn brown by now.
I went for a little walk this afternoon to clear my head. Still lots of flowers up in the hills. Oh, and I've been hearing hummingbirds while walking to the car in the evenings. Always a sign of summer in the foothills. |
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| DWS3 |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|12:18 am] |
Finished S3 of Doctor Who tonight. It had some moments of cheese, but overall I thought it was a very solid season finale. Enjoyed it muchly.
Martha remains my favorite companion for being so very SENSIBLE.
And Derek Jacobi and John Simm were just stellar in their guest roles. Comparing Simm with his role in Life on Mars... Wow! He is quite an actor!
Oh, and I didn't mention it at the time, but I also quite liked the episodes "Human Nature" and "Family of Blood". Excellent work from the baddies, and, of course, they have Jessica Hynes. I realized, watching them, that she's actually only middling-attractive when she has a serious expression. It's the way her face lights up when she smiles that makes her stunning. |
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| No brain; I has dumbing |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|03:53 pm] |
Argh. I have a very mild headache that isn't even all that unpleasant to deal with, but is completely destroying my ability to focus or do any... brain-thingy...
Thinking. That's the word.
There's an LJ advisory election on. Based on what they've said about their candidacies (both the substance of positions, and how the information has communicated), I think ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kylecassidy, webquatch, and vichan look like the best candidates. Voting location post thing hyar
I haz poler bar in WoWcraft! Deserves full post when word-making thing is more going-y.
I can barely string words together coherently, but I can still punctuate properly. Is that noteworthy? Or just dumb?
Allergies-or-maybe-having-a-cold are/is teh suckxor. |
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| Three unrelated thoughts |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|11:04 pm] |
I was going to blog about philosophy, but I have sinusy things giving me a headache, and since philosophy makes me cranky anyway, I'm going to punt. I will simply note that starting with the assumption that the correct answer to any philosophical conundrum or paradox is "that is a stupid-ass question" is surprisingly productive.
Spent 13 hours at work today for a colleague's celebratory retirement colloquium. Tasty dinner, some interesting discussions, utterly failed to get anything accomplished working remotely during talks. See 'sinusy things', above.
Ran the 4e DnD one-shot again last weekend, for Greg & Jerry & Mel & Nick. Had a good time; took about how long I thought it would, given all new players. Definitely liked the improvements I made. (Stealth monsters make for lousy boss fights; much better now that I changed it.) I'm still liking my homebrew skill challenge system (just a series of linked skill checks, with suitable outcomes defined for total number of successes/failures), although I need to figure out what to do with really high rolls. By the numbers, you should just count success or failure and ignore degree of success, but it feels wrong not to reward somebody when they manage to roll a 30+. Maybe count it double? I should probably count horrible failures double, too, then. Must ponder. |
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| The power of geometry |
[Jun. 17th, 2009|07:59 pm] |
So like I said the other day, my friend Peter presented me with a problem when we had lunch. At first I thought it was some kind of complicated optics problem, but as I thought about it, I realized it's just geometry. And fairly simple geometry, at that. I thought I'd share, because the answer is a kind of neat "hooray for science!" puzzle. (Plus, well, I wanna let other people double-check my thinking -- just to make sure I'm not being dumb...)
Also, I will get to use the word 'penumbra'.
Anyway, Peter works in solar, and when you're putting solar panels up, you want them to be in the sun, not in the shade. Now, an object that's far away is going to block less light than one that's close up, right? Eventually it gets so small it doesn't block the sun at all. So the question is, what's the equation that describes how much clearance you need to minimize your energy loss?
And the answer is: it doesn't matter, actually. ( Beware, trigonometry behind the cut! )
Isn't that interesting? Hooray for math! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 17th, 2009|07:56 pm] |
Whoa! I'm guessing I've turned the corner on the cold.
I still feel kinda tired, but on the way to my car in the parking lot this evening, I suddenly felt alive again. I noticed the world having details.
Hi, how are you? |
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| Shadows of Dominion |
[Jun. 11th, 2009|12:41 am] |
Three rounds of Dominion at Chris's this evening. Tom won once, I won once, and we tied once. (Jeff lost thrice and was sad.) Fun! So much replay value in that game.
And yesterday I had lunch with Peter (Frost, formerly Shmalcs), whom I hadn't seen in ages, and we had a great time catching up and eating pho. He's working in solar, and posed me a question about mathematical equations describing power loss due to shadows. I was going to see if I could think of someone at work who knows optics to refer him to, but I think I have figured it out on my own, which is keen. I may post my solution here to let my smart friends double-check my thinking, but I have to figure out whether I can explain it without a diagram. (Or else draw the diagram.) |
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| WoW: OH GOD RUN AWAY |
[Jun. 8th, 2009|09:14 pm] |
So Greg & Jerry have started playing World of Warcrack.
And I have been persuaded to give it a shot as well.
Now, there are two things to know about this game. First, there is a lot of running from place to place. A LOT of running. The game is as much about exploring the territory as it is about fighting the bajillions of monsters that inhabit the territory. And the second thing is that, due to the aforementioned bajillions of monsters, eventually You Will Die. And when your character dies, you reappear as a ghost in a nearby graveyard. You can either get raised from the dead there (for a small penalty), or you can do some more running to get back to your corpse and not have a penalty.
So now you can appreciate ( Tale of Thargen, Brave Orcish Hunter )
The question is, why is this so much fun? |
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| Lately every weekend involves food |
[Jun. 7th, 2009|03:24 pm] |
Yesterday Jerry persuaded us layabouts to go to Van & Ron's big brunch, and I'm very glad he did, because we had quite a good time. They had an impressive spread, and lots of interesting guests, and the view from their apartment is amazing. Van's a good guy, and it was nice to get to know him better.
Today is Chris's birthday barbecue. So I have made blueberry ice cream, and lime sherbet, and roasted cauliflower with cocoa, and some thai pesto to use up the basil and put on grilled vegetables, and prepped onions and asparagus and eggplant and squash and possibly some nectarines for the aforementioned grilling.
Because I am, as has been well-established, insane.
There was also some fighting with my laptop about disk space and burning things to DVD, but now WoW is 97% installed, and in another, oh, five hours, I should finally be able to play with my sweeties, woot!
I could stand to have more hours in the day, but life is pretty good. |
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| Tartlets |
[Jun. 4th, 2009|09:51 pm] |
There were good tomatoes at Sprouts the other day, so I tried making the yummy tomato-mozarella-basil tartlets that Thomas & Karen made on Saturday. Only without the puff pastry, so they were really tom-mozz-basil... slabs?
Anyway, the recipe says bake for 10 minutes at 400, and they turn out really juicy and runny. So I decided to try doing that with half of them, and just running them under the broiler until toasty with the other half. The broiled ones definitely have great texture, and the cheese got nice and brown. But it seems baking may have brought out the basil a bit more, and made the flavors meld better. So the jury's still out.
(Also, I salted the tomatoes and let them sit for a while to draw out juice, but they needed more rinsing. The end slices, which only got salt on one side, were definitely better.) |
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| Chance encounters in the produce aisle |
[Jun. 2nd, 2009|10:37 pm] |
On the way home from work today, I stopped by the grocery store at the bottom of the hill to pick up tortillas (because I forgot them when I went shopping yesterday) and ran into one of my best friends from grade school, Ryan. He looked vaguely familiar, but I know Way Too Many people, and there are a LOT of people who look vaguely familiar to me. It was up to him to recognize me and call me by name.
It was awesome to see him; we haven't talked in ages. We exchanged phone numbers, and I'm really looking forward to getting back in touch.
It's a happy coincidence; I almost skipped stopping at that store and went to the grocery store in Broomfield instead. If I had, would I still have run into him some other time, because the world is small? He does live just a few blocks away now; that's his local grocery store, and it's the one on my way to work. Would we have reconnected at our 20th high school reunion next year anyway? Or was this the a lucky chance that wouldn't have come again if things had gone differently? Just how contingent are our lives? It kind of gives me vertigo to think about it. |
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| Filling friends' houses |
[May. 31st, 2009|10:27 am] |
Dan & Daniel are here, hooray!
Yesterday we went off to the Nevilles' for an extended brunch that stretched into early afternoon. Karen & Thomas fed us acres of delightful food (the ginger-lime honeydew and watermelon with scallions & pancetta made my mouth especially happy) and hosted hours of entertaining conversation. We were going to head home around 3 to play Descent, but then Thomas said "well, you could play here", Jerry & Dan & Sarah & I zipped back up to Broomfield to pick up the game stuff and Mel, and we just had the game at their place. Got home at 1 in the morning. Which is a pretty good way to spend a Saturday, I have to say. |
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| The Playability of 4e DnD |
[May. 28th, 2009|10:39 pm] |
I would not call myself an expert in 4th edition D&D. I've now played two one-shots, one ongoing playtest, and one campaign. And I just recently ran my first game (a one-shot). Still, a couple people were interested in knowing my thoughts on how changes in ease of play in 4e DnD relate to changes in amount of depth, so I thought I would oblige.
I think the short answer to that question is: it depends on how you play.
The jump from 2nd edition to 3e was definitely about revitalizing the game by discarding accumulated cruft and fixing things that were broken. No more THAC0, yay! And then 3.5 was an incremental improvement to 3e that fixed a bunch of bugs and tweaked things to make them run more smoothly.
Whereas 4e is not so much about fixing the previous version as it is shifting and tightening the focus. I'd say it backs off from doing a huge variety of things adequately, in a mostly simulationist, way and instead does a few things quite well, in a somewhat more narrativist way.
4e works a lot better with structured adventures than it does with free-form improvisation. The skill challenge system still may have some mathematical issues (I'll post my homebrew version once I've tested it a couple more times), but the idea behind it is really solid. It doesn't really support adventuring with a party of five 0th-level cooking students, but it makes sure that in a standard party, everybody's got something fun to do most of the time. You may not be able to fake up a tengu ninja as easily, but boring old human wizards are now a functional option -- even at 1st level. Et cetera.
For some people, that adds up to a huge improvement. For others, it's a big lose. A lot of people will be somewhere in the middle until the find their footing and figure out whether they're comfortable with a play style that's suited to the game.
I what a prospective GM needs to do is to read through the books with an eye toward understanding what the design is aiming at. Run an adventure that actually follows all the advice given, to see how the system drives. And then think about whether that's a good fit to the kinds of game you want to run and your players want to play. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 27th, 2009|10:25 pm] |
Just got back from a lovely dinner with Bryree & Marty. They fed us salmon with maple-soy-ginger glaze, and it was yummy. Also, the somewhat antisocial cat seems to have taken a liking to me, which made me happy.
People expressed interest, so I have some thoughts to share about 4e DnD, but I don't think I have enough brain this evening, so this is an IOU.
I don't suppose anyone knows of handy online tools for calculating hypothetical planetary orbits? |
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| And wuv, twoo wuv. |
[May. 26th, 2009|11:17 pm] |
Some signal boosting of things I found illuminating relating to Prop 8, marriage, and all that, presented mostly without comment because I don't have brainage to actually say anything coherent at the moment.
Lawyerly interpretation of what the Prop 8 decision means. (Daily Kos) It sounds like the CA Supremes may have limited the impact of Prop 8 to ONLY affecting use of the word 'marriage' as a label, not to anything substantive. I move we just call it 'mawwidge', ala Princess Bride, instead.
Some math relating to marriage bans. (Five Thirty Eight -- from back in April, when Iowa legalized it.) I like trying to predict the future with math; even when it turns out to be wrong, it's still kinda interesting.
Red Family, Blue Family. A 2005 essay by Doug Muder about the differences between liberal & conservative understandings of family & marriage, and why some people get wigged-out by something that seems perfectly reasonable to others. Wrong in many ways, I'm sure, but I felt like I understood a little more after reading it than I did before. |
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| Back now |
[May. 25th, 2009|10:27 pm] |
My online interactions dropped significantly over the last two weeks because I was putting together a one-shot 4e DnD game for my friends Jay & Laura, who were in town this weekend. An idea jumped very insistently into my brain, and compelled me to pay attention. That was not so much the time-sucking part. It was generating 19 different characters (one of each race & class, plus a couple extra) for the players to choose from. Because I am a fool.
But anyway, last Thursday was the evening, and it went well. The players had a good time, and now I'm all set to run the game again for more groups. (And I even have some thoughts on how to improve it a bit. Like, monster special abilities that amount to "ha ha you can't hit me" may be balanced in terms of game mechanics, but are not very much fun. "Stuff happens when you hit me" is much better.) I have to say that I really like how easy 4e makes it to file off the serial numbers and repaint monsters into something that sounds totally weird and unique.
Since then I've been doing a lot of nothing to catch up, which I kind of needed. Jerry and I have watched a lot of Green Wing, and I played a lot of Galactrix, and... that's about it, really. Some visiting with people (more Jay & Laura, a bit of Slayerfest at Kate's) on Saturday, and otherwise, I've been quite lazy. |
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| Twitter |
[May. 20th, 2009|03:12 pm] |
So who's Twittering? I have just realized that (1) it's basically the same thing as Facebook status updates, and (2) there are interesting things happening there that aren't happening elsewhere, and I hate being left out.
...Hunh. It's not really all that different from zctl sub eit \* \*, is it? Just with, y'know, the whole world. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 18th, 2009|07:12 am] |
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It's always kind of nice to wake up and realize that the thing your dreaming brain was worried about has no basis in reality whatsoever. (In this case, coming up with addressee lists for some kind of graduation announcement and making sure the announcement cards were gilded properly. Oh, and catching the subway to work.) |
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