Category Archives: Trips

Recovery

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Got back from San Francisco last night. Woke up this morning at 10:30 (!) and immediately felt like crap, so I decided to take the day off. Best idea ever. I managed to sleep in (some more), run KoL turns, process and tag all 1871 photos from the trip, and have meals on time. (Only 1871 photos? I’m getting more restrained with photos. Kind of. At least compared to my Carnival 2009 trip where I took 10840 photos and my Carnival 2010 trip where I took 6733 photos.)

As such, photos are now posted to photos. It was kind of an awesome week.
life has also been updated.


I owed Sharon some money. I decided to give it to her entirely in $1 bills (as per an earlier email conversation). It was awesome.

A couple photos also deserve a bit more explanation.


That’s the most oblivious cat ever. It always sits in exactly the same pose with a big goofy smile on its face. No wonder its owners left it behind.


San Francisco constructions sites cause cancer. Too bad there’s construction sites everywhere.


Poor Koyel. We didn’t think she would stop talking on the phone. Well, at least Shawn and Sharon didn’t. Or something. I was kind of out of it at the time.


It’s Andrew with Andrew! Afterwards, we tried to draw him in Crayon physics. It didn’t work nearly as well.


ZMONG best tofu ever :O

San Francisco

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I’m in SF for the week for work. If you want to do things, ping me soon, as the rest of my week is getting pretty booked.

It’s been a fun week. Dinner every night has been with someone… Local all-you-can-eat pizza with Mark and Ian on Sunday; Stone for tasty Bi Bim Bap with Mark, Andrew, Jeremy, and Ian on Monday; Ironside for mediocre mac and cheese with Sharon, Charles, and Ian on Tuesday; and Delancey Street Restaurant with Ian yesterday.


Yesterday was a dev team outing to Sonoma to go ziplining. It was actually pretty awesome despite my fear of heights. I think the knowledge that I was always tethered to *something* (even when we were walking up the spiral staircase in the trees and across the suspension bridges) helped a lot.



The weather here is also a really nice change from the horribly humidity and heat of Pittsburgh. Normally I’m not a fan of Bay Area weather, but summers I could get behind.

The rest of the week is filled with awesome plans, starting with games night tonight.
People are awesome. I wish there was this much to do in Pittsburgh. But still, as a whole, I am much happier in Pittsburgh. And the only reason I’m so busy is that I’m trying to cram in as much as I can during my week here.

Yay life.

More photos will appear on photos at some point. (Subscribe to the RSS feed!)

Walk and KoL

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I seem to have gotten into the habit of posting at the beginning of months. Well, here’s continuing that trend.

Today Keith, Greg, and I walked from Bloomfield to Keith’s house in Ross Township for a total trip of about 19.4 miles. Hopefully the fact that things weren’t too bad (except for my shoes and socks interacting to make my toes blister) means I’ll be fine for the annual West Virginia walk this summer (almost 40 miles).

We had lunch at Joe’s Rusty Nail, and it was excellent. My $12 crab cake dinner had three huge (and meaty) crab cakes, a good-sized helping of pasta, and a generous side salad, and came with free bread and butter. Recommended if you’re in the area.

Haven’t done this in a while, so here’s a dump of photos from the hike.



It’s thinking Keith!















In non-walking news, I have finally ascended again in KoL after a hiatus of 4 years (most of it away from the game completely). The recent Valhalla revamp, prospect of doing a 100% run with this month’s new familiar (volleyball + fairy + item drops for a new area!), and the Bees Hate You path finally pushed me over the edge
And I’m glad, because the game is so much more interesting when you’re doing quests than when you’re stuck in aftercore trying to find ways to spend your 200+ adventures every day.
My first run in 4 years is a Turtle Tamer Hardcore “Bees Hate You” run with no clovers (setting up for a BM Kitty run) and 100% Li’l Xenomorph. Should prove to be interesting. Let’s see how long it takes me.

I can already say that my best investment thus far is the VIP Key, because full HP recovery (already have Tongue of the Walrus permed) from the hot tub, +muscle stats from the shower, MP regen from the pool table, and screambats from the fax machine have made the first two days so much better than they could have been. The Pen Pal kit has, thus far, been mostly useless (Box of Pokemann Band-Aids is useless in Beecore and the shield was only useful until I got a cola shield). My snowcones and candy hearts haven’t helped too much either (ran orange for extra stats and purple for some MP on day one, but would have been fine without them).

The Xenomorph has also been excellent. Got its equipment today, and the fairy aspect is proving very useful. The space area also provides good quality food and booze, which I otherwise have trouble acquiring (beers from Tavern are useless in Beecore, and I don’t have cocktail crafting permed due to my love of teet runs). The +stat buffs from the maps are also useful. I think tomorrow will finally get me up to reagent pasta (got some hellion cubes and knob mushrooms today), which will combine nicely with the pumpkin pie and fortune cookie.

So current status there is level 6 at the end of day 2, having completed through the level 5 quest with a reasonable stock of food. I think that’s the best I’ve done in *any* run (all of which were pre-NS13) but, more than that, the game has gotten much less annoying to play due to things like the VIP room and pumpkins. I suppose part of that is also the 100% run preventing me from having to mess with familiars (no He-Boulder anyway, so already have that working against me). Perhaps future runs will also be 100% runs.

San Francisco

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I am in San Francisco. It was a rather frustrating trip here, but has been a fun time thus far (due, in no small part, to the holiday today).

Travelwise, I spent most of yesterday on planes. Got into San Francisco about 30 minutes late, and had some slight panic when I made it to the bus stop at 12:16, with the 292 scheduled to arrive at 12:15. Fortunately, it was a little late, and I barely made it on… which was fortunate, because BART had stopped running and the next bus was at 1:15 AM. Made it to the hotel at around 1:30 and managed to get some sleep. Meh.

Jeremy, Shawn, Ian, and I spent the day wandering San Francisco for Unpresidents’ Day.
What is Unpresidents’ Day? I’ll let the video tell you. (NSFW for language.)

Video editing done by Jeremy. My DSLR apparently delivers decent quality audio, despite all the background traffic.

There were also tasty Mission burritos (oh how I missed you) and Korean food at Stone (highly recommended).

Mark and Tim playtested People Wars for me, and it seemed to go well. It looks like attacking and tasks are mostly balanced now (I worry a bit about attacking being overpowered, actually, because of the constant difficulty of task playing, but lower difficulty as the game progresses of using more powerful attacks), but the main issue is (as I suspected) with the limited pool of task cards. This will have to be remedied before the game is released.

Now I should sleep so I can go to work tomorrow. Yay work.

Travels

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The past few days have been an adventure.

We started Thursday evening when Greg flew into SF to help me move. We had a last session of games that turned into more just hanging out and talking, which was just as good. At least I got to see everyone before I moved.

Friday involved driving to Phoenix. Packing the car was kind of fail… I ended up leaving a suitcase and 3 boxes behind (thanks, Andrew!) because we couldn’t fit them in the car. Also the car was already extremely heavy and Greg was worried about the rear wheels.
It was a 765 mile drive, but Greg managed to make it in one day. It was also a really pretty drive.

Sunday was going to the Titan Missile Museum and Tombstone. The former was awesome, the latter was kind of dead (especially given it’s Sunday… maybe the recession was especially hard on this tourist-centric town), no pun intended.

Besides that, there was seeing random people and catching up. It was nice. I drove for the first time in 2.5 years (hopefully didn’t give Greg a heart attack or something) and also got to see some friends for the first time in just as long. Makes me feel like I should go back to Phoenix more often.

Now we are back in Pittsburgh after a flight that routed us through Tampa Bay. The weather is kind of horrible (it’s really not the heat, it’s the humidity… over 90 in Phoenix was totally fine), but there is an air conditioner that is making things okay. San Francisco has really ruined my weather tolerance, apparently.

Photos coming at some point in the future (psst… you should subscribe to the RSS feed or the LJ syndication).