You win a day (and one internets)

It’s still the secret bonus day, so I guess I should make a post.

Almost 5 years is enough time for people to lose interest, right?

It occurs to me that I angst and whine and complain way too much on the internet about things, especially about things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I used to angst about grades way too much. Now I tend to angst about feeling stressed/incompetent at work. Silly me.
Semi-relatedly, I’m generally glad I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Social media may be useful for connecting people, but it also tends to promote a lot of short-form superficial interaction over long-form meaningful communication. And it also means I don’t have control over my data.

I had a Glee-related dream last night, which is strange given I haven’t watched the show since the “New York” season finale that was everything wrong with the series combined into a horrific hour. (And I hear it’s gotten even worse since then.)

The dream involved something like Mercedes’ dad getting a job in Chicago and moving there, and Sam following her in a car. We get shots of Mercedes staring forlornly out the window of a moving truck before the truck whips a quick 360 and drives back toward its origin. Camera then switches to Sam who is driving, craning his neck backward to see the truck drive off (but not turning around himself and also not hitting any other cars). He gets a job in a strip mall somewhere between Lima and Chicago, and we then shift the story to his adventures and dealings as a paranormal investigator there.

Yay bizarre dreams. Pretty much all of my dreams are in third person, but this is one of the few I remember where I’m not actually present.

For those I have not yet poked: I will be in San Francisco next week from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon. Tentative plans include all-you-can-eat pizza on Sunday, dinnar things on Monday, and dinner in Mountain View on Tuesday. Let me know if you are interested in joining for some of these.

Automation, cards, yay

life has gotten an update that brings it up to present day. Yay life.

I’ve also posted Tartan photos at photos.

While I was batching photos today, it occurred to me that I should learn how to write Photoshop scripts to do the watermarking and resizing for me. (Previously I had been using the standard Image Processor to resize, then watermarking manually.)
The result is this script that opens the watermark files, then resizes and watermarks all jpg images in the selected directory.
Yay scripts. Maybe someone will find it useful.

In non-scripty-Photoshopy news, I’ve been working a bit on cards for the next People Wars expansion, Celebrations.


I mostly just like this image. Josh is over 6’5″ and Jen is shorter than 5′, and it’s amusing to see them together. (Yes, they’re both standing up. Here’s what happens when he kneels.)

Their individual cards are also interesting because of the effects I gave them.

I think it’ll be interesting to see how these work out in the game.

Yay things.

Life

Life has been up and down lately. Mostly down. Mostly due to work and (sometimes) feeling like I’m drowning in work and that there’s always so much work to do that I will never finish it all.
I guess I also feel bad because the poor QAs on our team are super stressed. And because Greg is super stressed. I really have no right to complain about anything given how horribly busy Greg *actually* is, whereas I have the luxury of 9-5 hours and being able to go do non-work things and keep myself from going crazy.

But that is not good to think about. So let’s not talk about that.

This weekend there were games. There was a very interesting 3-player game of Power Grid where 4 of the high-level green plants were removed from the game and all of the high numbered plants came out early. The result was much unhappiness and a resource track that actually became completely depleted at one point. There was also an interesting game of Carcassone where all of the large city pieces came out at the end, resulting in a 12-point unfinished city for Keith.

Oh yeah, which means that I bought Power Grid last week. It was a good purchase, and I’m very happy with it. I also ordered a copy of Puerto Rico‘s anniversary edition (with nicer pieces) that should be here in a week or two. Board games are nice things to buy, because spending time with people and being social is an awesome thing.

If anyone has suggestions for other games to buy, I will gladly accept them.

The new People Wars expansion set is out. I like the new templates with the larger images. Your mileage may vary.

So yeah. I guess stuff goes.