Author Archives: Alan V

Life, Carnival, Boston, Glee, and things

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Well, it’s been more than a month since I’ve updated, so I should probably write something here. (This actually makes the first month I’ve skipped since I started keeping my journal back in high school in 2003. Huh.)

Since it is now after April, my photojournal and stats have been updated. Not many changes this time in stats… people mostly look the same. I also updated my photojournal with thumbnails a while back, so it’s a bit nicer to browse now.

There was a Carnival and it was awesome. My goal to spend less time on Midway was somewhat successful… I still made it out to Midway every day during build week, but I didn’t spend much time there. Next year perhaps I should forgo the hardhat so I have no excuse to go. KGB built an awesome booth (and reportedly won second place in the independent category) and there was the usual Fairfax crowd around (minus Mars, Mars-Dan, and Al-Tim this year, unfortunately) for lots of games and merriment.

Buggy and the picnic were rained out on Friday (but, amazingly, not Mobot), so it was a little less eventful than it perhaps could have been… we braved the cold on Saturday for the Buggy finals instead and just generally had fun times.

Photos of such things are at my photos site.

Also happening during Carnival week was the Boston marathon bombing, which is rather relevant now given that the Pittsburgh marathon is happening tomorrow. Reportedly the post office has gone through and removed all mailboxes along the route (and will replace them afterward), which is a rather interesting decision.
I generally have a lot of feelings about this, but I’m not really sure how to put them into words. I tend to get more freaked out than I should by upsetting things, but I also hope this doesn’t get used as another point against liberties… after all, terrorist attacks kill far fewer people every year than lightning, car accidents, or drowning.
Even more so than the terribleness that happened, to me, was the reaction from the mother of the suspects. I can understand if you believe your sons were framed, or that it was a government conspiracy, or something (because you love your kids and maybe you want to believe they aren’t capable of such things), but to outright deny there was a bombing is completely disrespectful to everyone that was affected by it. That is not okay.
Bah.

Another thing that has been bothering me in the news lately is this. I think CMU is handling it completely the wrong way and the Catholic church is making a much bigger deal out of it than it should, especially when they compare the event to the recent frat suspension due to alleged sexual misconduct. Again, no, that is not okay. And you wonder why I am so against organized religion sometimes. :\
Meh.
(Also, KDKA seems to be horrible at actually researching and reporting stories, as usual.)

But related to The Tartan though, you should read this awesome article that Greg put together for the CMU presidential transfer happening this summer.
Yay The Tartan.

I recently purchased the first season of Glee. I haven’t watched the show since the end of the second season (when the slow season-long decline ended in the horrific New York episode that was terrible enough to turn me off from the show forever), but I caught up a bit on the plot summaries and musical performances online. And I have to say… even the worst of the first season (“Funk” and “Theatricality” come to mind) is far better than the entire second season. And the show only seems to have gone downhill from there (“Plot? Why would we need plot when we’ve got singing and dancing?”). Even the pregnancy storylines, hated as they were, wove some semblance of continuity throughout the first season. It’s really a shame… I really liked the show, and really enjoyed rewatching the first season. I hear it has been renewed for two more seasons (5 and 6)? What is wrong with TV nowadays? :\

The weather in Pittsburgh has been rather bipolar lately as the city decides whether it wants it to be winter or spring. After some bizarre weeks (record low then a tied record high a couple days later), the weather seems to have mostly settled on “nice”.
Today Chris arranged a nice picnic in the afternoon in Friendship Park (followed by Doctor Who and sherbet [which apparently isn’t spelled “sherbert” despite everyone pronouncing it that way? O_o]), and we had Yubin, Max, and Owen over for lasagna out on the patio for dinner. I’m looking forward to the nicer weather ahead, but am very much not looking forward to the humidity that will soon be upon us.

June and July will involve lots of travel (that I’m looking forward to) and plane trips (that I am also not looking forward to). It’ll be nice to take a break from work… it’s been kind of a rough release cycle for us.

Things have been nice but uneventful lately. There has been the usual game nights and usual climbing (less so lately, as I haven’t gone since before Carnival).

Life goes.

Edit: Marathon photos, because I know people will ask about them. Yay marathon.



Tea cupcakes, People Wars, climbing

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I made tea cupcakes today. Om nom nom nom. I wanted something light (especially since it was tea), so I didn’t want the usual buttery cupcakes. After mixing everything, I realized it needed something to make it moist (usually the butter or oil), so I added some applesauce. I think they turned out decently, actually. I would probably use something less flavorful than applesauce next time (vegetable oil?).

Brew teas, leaving in a little longer than usual (I did green tea and chai tea). Reduce each on the stove by about half to about 1 cup liquid total (so 1/2 cups each if you’re doing two like I did).

2 c flour
1 c sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 c reduced tea
1/4 c applesauce or oil
2 egg whites

Combine dry ingredients. (Separate into equal amounts for each tea flavor if required.) Stir in tea and applesauce and egg and mix well.
Bake at 325 for 20 minutes.
Makes 18 cupcakes or two cakes.

I sprinkled green tea on the green tea ones and cinnamon on the chai ones before baking.

In other news, the latest People Wars expansion has also been completed and posted. You can download it here. One of the expansion’s themes, other than the “give and take” of the various abilities, was to further highlight the specialties of each subject trait. Of all the cards in the set, there are a couple I think are particularly interesting.


This card (and the Program variant) can be really good for task decks if you get them out early. This may be weakened to only place on one task, pending playtesting and balance.


This card grants a powerful skill that reduces an opponent’s kill counters while increasing your own. It’s expensive, but can be really strong. To help meet the item requirement, we have


and the Fine Art variant “Modern Art” that can turn into any item you want (similar to “Crab Cakes” from the Activities expansion, but without the discard).

And here’s a couple examples of the give-and-take effects in this expansion (which is the theme for BayArea characters):

It’s also exciting that, after the next expansion, People Wars will have more cards than Student Wars, which currently holds the distinction of largest card base with 963 distinct cards. (This will be true even if you exclude the re-released item cards and event cards in the Exchanges and Starter sets.) Yay.

In other other news, I went climbing this week on Monday and Tuesday. This ended up being a terrible idea, and I spent most of Tuesday doing VBs and V0s because my arms were incapable of holding myself up on a wall. And then I spent most of yesterday unable to grip things with my fingers. So climbing is great, but doing it too much is not so great. Hopefully I’ll have managed to recover enough by Friday that I can do V2s again… there are some awesome new routes going up that I want to try.

Yay life.

San Francisco, climbing, Kickstarter games, and People Wars

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It’s been over a month since my last update. Given I keep telling myself I should write in here more, doing so at least once a month seems reasonable.

I recently traveled to San Francisco to check in at work… given I hadn’t been there in 10 months, it was about time. It was mostly an uneventful trip. Managed to see pretty much everyone except for Sharon, which was sad. Afterward, I did my usual stop in Phoenix to see my parents. Our travel plans were cancelled due to both of my parents being sick, so the week was also uneventful. Went to bar trivia and played some games with Isaac, but no one else around was answering emails.





There are more photos of the trip here.

I’ve also been climbing regularly for the past couple months. A group of us first went for Michael’s birthday back in December, and we’ve been going weekly since then. After starting with VBs and V0s in December, I’m now pretty comfortably into V2s and looking at attempting some V2/3s. It’s nice to see improvement from week to week.



More rock climbing photos are here and here.

In other fun news, the Kickstarter games I backed have started arriving. Ground Floor arrived while I was in San Francisco (like two days after I left), and My Happy Farm arrived today. Here’s the unboxings.

My Happy Farm had previously been played many times (as a print-and-play game) and enjoyed. Ground Floor met a bit more resistance.
Our first attempt at our weekly games night ended early when it was 11 PM (about 2.5 hours in) and we were still only 2/3 of the way through the game. The second attempt the following week was about a 3 hour game (quicker since half of us had played before) and went fairly well.
I think Ground Floor accomplishes what it set out to do very nicely. It’s a much heavier game than My Happy Farm, or even many of the other Eurogames we play. But I like that it’s so open ended, and there are so many decisions you can make each round. I also like the trade off between more actions (employees) and money, since it’s not a matter of “get as many actions as you can” like most worker-placement games end up as. (In fact, at the end of our game, not one player had the maximum number of employees, despite having had many chances to hire and despite the job market being at the cheapest possible level.) That’s a good sign.
It actually reminds me a lot of Through the Ages, even though they’re entirely different genres (moreso than even Agricola, which is also a worker-placement game). It’s a fairly long game, and it has so many things you can do each round, and it’s about planning well but also reacting properly to other players’ actions and the changing nature of the game (the row of cards in TTA, and the economic forecast in GF).
Definetly enjoyable for me.

Both games also came with Kickstarter bonuses.
Ground Floor came with a dice-rolling game Skyline, which we found very light and enjoyable once we started playing it correctly. (Note for other people playing that don’t read the rules carefully: When you complete a building, the dice used all move to the construction yard. They don’t go back into the supply.) It fills the same niche for me as Farmageddon or Malta!… a quick game to pull out when waiting for people to arrive or when people are tired and have started leaving: quick to learn, quick to play, and not much thought required.

It also came with a bunch of different small expansions, like a Great Depression economic forecast card, various “event” cards, and a new game board area. We haven’t played with those yet, but it looks like it’ll be fun to break them out.

My Happy Farm came with four new animals to play with. I was expecting enough copies for all four players to use, but it only came with one of each. Still, it’s a cute little extra for the game. I’m looking forward to playing the real version, hopefully at the next games night.

We’ve also played a few games of the print-and-play of another Kickstarter game, Viticulture. I’ve really, really enjoyed this one, although I admit the wake-up track mechanic ended up being less revolutionary than I was expecting it to. (Most people ended up taking the #1 spot when they were first to pick, and the winner in the few games we played were the people that were first or second to pick in the last round of the game, when competing for wine order spaces was most important.) The only issue was with our print and play… it was black and white, meaning the different card icons were very difficult to distinguish, the board was hard to read, and the white and blush wine glass icons looked too similar. But that aside, the game itself is awesome, and I think everyone that played it enjoyed it.

We had a rather interesting game where Austin decided he wasn’t going to make wine and would win by other means. He actually came very close… he managed to cause the end of the game (by hitting 20 victory points) with only his starting three workers and without having made a single bottle of wine the entire game. Yay for breaking games?

In other, other news, I’m finally continuing work on the next People Wars expansion (last talked about here) now that I actually have more up-to-date photos of San Francisco people. (This makes sense given it’s an expansion themed around Bay Area people.)

The set is also going to have new versions of the twenty basic item cards, because it’s bothered me enough that they don’t match the new card design. Here’s Board Game, which features Michael playing (and eventually winning) Ground Floor.

Other things have been happening too (like awesome AoJ in KoL and awesome vacation planning for this summer and another SF trip in June), but I’ve probably rambled on enough for now. Yay long-but-infrequent journal posts.

Birthday and budget

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I had a birthday! It was awesome. There was dinner at Szechwan Gourmet, tuxedo chocolate mousse cake, and board games with friends. I blew out all 26 candles in one go… does that mean my wish comes true? :D

Anyway, it’s a new year, and I’ve compiled my yearly budget overview (from my monthly spreadsheets that track every dollar I spend). It’s quite interesting.

This year’s total expenditures is $12,356.83, which is a slight increase from last year’s $11,664.02. It’s a bit more than half of 2009’s year in San Francisco, which was $22,757.64.

The largest average category of expenditures (besides rent, of course) is food at $281.57/month, followed by “Transit” (airplane tickets, bus fare, train tickets) at an average of $86.58/month.
Naturally, that category also has the largest variance, ranging between $0 and nearly $600 in different months. Food ranged between $226.11 and $457.59 (if you ignore June, which I spent in Thailand, resulting in a $0 food expenditure for the month).
The lowest variance is my “Personal” category (DVDs, music, card games, KoL donations), which averages $49.97/month and ranged between $49.63 and $50/month. (I limit this category to $50/month, so this is not a surprising thing.)

It’s actually amusing to look at the differences in averages between this year and 2009 (my last full year in San Francisco). Rent is now $491.71, from $1587.05, but food is now $281.57 from $110.96. This is probably because I’ve been eating better plus the higher food prices in Pittsburgh.

Yay spreadsheets. I guess I’m over $1000/month on average now, but it’s good to know I’m still around that.

Life, Carcassonne, and Zeke

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It’s a new year. I guess I should probably write something here.

My photojournal and stats page have both been updated through the 1st. People haven’t changed much in the last 4 months. It also seems like most of my time has been spent with Owen (and Greg, obviously), which also makes sense given we’ve been doing more board games and general wandering things.

I mentioned in my last post that I got Carcassonne Wheel of Fortune for Christmas. One of the green meeples in the set was the wrong size (a larger meeple, normally from the Inns and Cathedrals expansion; proof that even they can’t tell the two sizes apart). I contacted Rio Grande and they sent me a replacement normal sized meeple. It was super simple, and I’m glad Rio Grande is awesome and stands behind their games.

So we attempted a 6-player game with all of the tiles (base set, Wheel of Fortune, and Inns and Cathedrals) and all of the meeples (15 a person, plus the scoreboard, plus the large meeple). The result was kind of insane. No one ever ran out of meeples, despite placing almost every turn, and the game lasted many hours. Here’s the final result.

Since then, we’ve figured the normal 7 meeples is much more reasonable, and we’ve played a few games with all of the tiles, including this one where we managed to make a 99-point city (and made Greg sad because he didn’t get points from it). (It’s in the upper left of the photo.)

I also ordered two additional colors of meeples (orange and pink) from Meeple Source. They’re slightly different from the standard meeples, and seem to be inferior quality (and weren’t cheap either), but it’s nice to have the ability to play 8-player Carcassonne.

I really, really like the wheel though. Not only does it provide a better start tile (automatically split into three fields; although there seems to be a tendancy for at least two of them to join up as the game progresses), but the wheel spaces themselves are really interesting. In particular, plague is useful as a way to take back pieces that are no longer useful, and all of the various point scoring spaces mean your people stuck on the board are still worth something throughout the game. Yay.

Keith also got us a copy of the Catapult expansion (from Austria; so it’s in German). We haven’t tried it yet, but I’m trying to figure out some house rules for the fair tiles in the (likely) event that the catapult itself isn’t any fun to use. We shall see.

In other fun things, Zeke came to visit for a few days after Christmas, and there was much board gaming and Ke$ha.


As you can probably tell from all of the above, I’m still loving my 35mm f/1.8 lens and wondering why I didn’t get it sooner. It has pretty much been my exclusive lens since I got it, only coming off the camera a couple times when I needed the 18mm end of my 18-200mm. (Surprisingly, I don’t miss the ability to zoom in at all, like I thought I would. And 35mm is wide enough for most things.)

Life has been full of people and photos and board games and is generally awesome for it.