Category Archives: Activities

Food, Kickstarter, cards, and thou (but not really)

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Life goes. Yay life.

I’ve started cooking again, which I think is a sign that I am generally happier. This is a good thing. Here’s a couple of the things I’ve made in the past few days (when I, unfortunately, neglected to get pictures of any of it). I’m still using organic and local ingredients when possible, so I made it all with organic chicken, organic eggs, organic carrots, and locally-grown zucchini. I feel like I’m eating better that way. Yay.

Chicken “Parmesean”

2 chicken breasts, sliced in half lengthwise
1 egg
1c breadcrumbs
1/2 jar pasta sauce
1/2 box whole wheat spaghetti
4 slices of cheese (I used extra sharp cheddar)

Dip chicken breasts in egg, then liberally coat with breadcrumbs. Brown both sides in a skillet over medium heat. Move to a baking pan, top with a little sauce (not enough to even cover each piece) and place cheese on top. Bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. Serve over spaghetti with remaining sauce.

Chicken and rice and veggies

2 chicken breasts, sliced in half lengthwise
1/2 package frozen mixed vegetables
1c dry rice
1/2 zucchini, sliced
2 carrots, peeled and sliced
Spices to taste (I used an Indian Curry blend from Giant Eagle)

Cover chicken in spices and bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes.
Add frozen vegetables to rice with 2c water. (You can also add some herbs and it comes out very tasty.) Bring to a boil, then simmer on low heat for ~20 minutes until done.
Put carrots and zucchini in a bowl, add a little water, cover, and microwave for 4 minutes on high.
Serve chicken with rice and vegetables.

They’re both really low effort to make (throw stuff together and surf the web while it all cooks) and are much healthier than eating out due to lack of added oil, salt, and sugar.

In other, non-food news, I have been exploring the awesomeness that is Kickstarter recently. I’ve already pledged to three board games (all of which succeeded), and am contemplating pledging a fourth.

  • Ground Floor looks kind of like Puerto Rico, except it has elements of placement like Agricola, which are two of my favorite games. It also looks like it has a good theme.
  • My Happy Farm is a *lot* of fun, and I’m sad it didn’t get more support. I already received and played the print-and-play version, and it’s a very cute, very entertaining game that is a good time-filler while you’re waiting for people to show up or finish other games.
  • Pixel Lincoln looks like a very interesting deck-building game. I tend to like deck-building games (Dominion is good, Rune Age is better, and Ascension is… interesting), and this looks like a very interesting twist on one.
  • Currently looking at Flash Point, which Greg has apparently played at Yubin’s before, and which has excellent reviews online. Still I don’t particularly need to spend another $65. We will see. The only cooperative board game I’ve played previously is Pandemic, and I find that to be a little too fiddly.

Each game also comes with a lot of awesome extras (like Ground Floor coming with an entire extra game, or Pixel Lincoln coming with a bunch of extra cards), which makes supporting through Kickstarter more than worthwhile.

Also been starting up on People Wars again, after a hiatus following Carnival (and the last expansion). I always like working on my card games, and always find it interesting to look back at my card game history and seeing how they’ve evolved.
In particular, since People Wars represents the fifth iteration of the same basic game, it’s interesting to see how it’s been refined over the years (8 years now!), and to look at how certain things have worked (dual characters, storage cards, working on GPA/tasks) and other things haven’t (trigger text, group nodes, division of characters into primary affiliations).
I suppose it’s kind of sad, but I still consider the PPA TCG/Student Wars/People Wars game series to be one of my most fulfilling accomplishments. Sometimes I wish I had the skill (or luck?) to work on card games as a career, but I also enjoy my current job, and my current job probably pays the bills far better. (Likewise with photography, although I haven’t felt urges to do that professionally for a while.)

So yeah. This post has gotten far too long and contains far too many words. Have a picture of My Happy Farm

and a card from the upcoming People Wars expansion

Meme: KoL and board games

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There was a Pittsburgh marathon a while ago. I failed to post photos from that. Here’s a Chris and bblum.

Continuing meme topics, we have KoL and board games.

With most video games, I tend to go through phases of obsession followed by periods of general disinterest (and, if they have enough social pull, I go back to being obsessed). I went through this with PSO, and I go through this with KoL.
KoL, as a game, is awesome, but extremely repetitive (much like PSO, actually)… once you get reasonably good at the game, you just do the same few things over and over every 5 or 6 days. But a couple things make it worthwhile… first is that the devs are extremely involved in the game and therefore new updates (or world events) happen fairly frequently. These are usually extremely fun and interesting and break up the normal grind of the game. And there are also seasonal challenge paths which change the core of the game (either slightly or drastically, depending on the path). And those are always pretty awesome.
Second, it’s always fun to talk to people about the game. My periods of inactivity in KoL roughly correspond to times when I know people that play. For example, I played a lot in undergrad when most of the housing group played (at least casually). And I play a lot more now since I know a few people that play (and talk to them about new paths and items pretty regularly).
I suppose sometimes the world events bother me though, because I somehow feel obligated to participate or I’ll miss a one-time item. I was burned out of the game back when they released the Haunted Sorority House clan dungeon for Halloween, and somehow forced myself to finish the run I was in and get some dungeons completed. In retrospect, I’m glad I did, because there were a bunch of awesome things that can no longer be obtained, but that probably just reinforces the requirement that I play when I sometimes don’t want to. That’s the downside of having invested so much time (and real-life money in the form of donations) into a game, I suppose.
But in general, I think KoL is pretty awesome. It also limits the number of turns you have per day, which means I don’t have to obsess over it and spend as much time as possible playing.
I think I’m approaching a period of inactivity again in the game, since the new challenge path isn’t too appealing to me and I’m going to be out of the country for a month. But it was still fun.

Board games are one of those things I wasn’t really into before college. The group of friends I lived with liked board games, and they were fun, and I liked being social, so I kind of got into board games. (In high school, I was much more about video games, but those seem to hold little to no appeal to me now.)
I suppose they’re good because they involve a lot of social interaction and are (usually) short (so you can play a lot of different games in one sitting) and there are so many options so you’ll always find something that you like.
With the absence of Tim, I’ve been trying to build up a meager board game collection so I can have people over to play them. It’s unfortunate most of the good ones are so expensive.
I’m not sure that I really have a preferred type of game, or even a favorite one. If you count card games as board games, then I generally am a fan of TCGs (creating and collecting and playing). But as far as actual board games, I’ll play anything from quick pointless games (Pokemon dice game!) to long strategy games (Through the Ages) and enjoy pretty much everything inbetween.

Meme: The Tartan

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The year is a third over, which means life has been updated both with new photo stats and with new main life updates. Yay.

Continuing Jess’ meme topics for me, we have The Tartan, CMU’s student newspaper.

The Tartan is one of those things I wish I had done in undergrad, because it’s just *fun*. I had previously tried joining their photo staff during an activities fair my freshman year, but no one ever emailed me or anything, so I joined The Thistle (yearbook) instead.

After I moved back to Pittsburgh, it came time to put together the Orientation issue of The Tartan. Not having much to do on weekends, I tagged along with Greg to help lay out the pages. We pulled some crazy hours (finishing and sending pages to the printer as the sun was rising), but got it done, and I was kind of hooked.

After that, with permission from the editor-in-chief and publisher, I joined the staff mostly to do layout. At some point, I got copy certified and started doing copy editing as well. And at some point I submitted some photos (because they needed last-minute ones and I happened to have some on me), so I kind of joined photo staff as well. I wrote one opinion piece last Carnival on the new hardhat requirement, so I guess the only thing I haven’t done for the paper is ads-related things. And apparently, they like me, because they gave me the title of senior staff.

I think the best part of The Tartan is the people. It’s not a social organization, because everyone is there to get things done and everyone has a job to do, but sometimes it feels like it’s as much about being around awesome people as actually producing a paper. And you pick up a lot of good skills too. (And, if you’re still in school, it’s excellent stuff to put on your resume.)

Not really sure what else to say about it.

San Francisco

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I am in San Francisco through Friday. Yay San Francisco.
Photos!


Plane. Yay plane.

Southwest in Vegas has these nice ceiling-mounted boarding signs instead of the poles they have at other airports. I think these are nicer.

There’s a tech company ad on the BART based on insanity wolf. This is rather… bizarre.

Sunday dinner, as always, was all-you-can-eat pizza at Local. This time I went with Ian, Trisha, Ben, and Mark.

Afterward, we went to Jeremy’s for games.

Monday dinner was Stone with teisenbe and Kempy.

Dinner tonight was Xanh in Mountain View with jgrafton, Jack, Krieger, Ben, dfontain, Gopi, Raphael, and Erik.