Author Archives: Alan V

Tartan, games, People Wars, photo firsts (Owen, Charles, Mark, Justin)

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Today was Tartan production. I was supposed to do layout for sports. What this meant, in practice, was staring at the intranet and its distinct lack of sports articles that were ready for layout. I did manage to get the first broadsheet page to copy though, but that’s because it was a page 3/4 full of ads, so I just filled the remaining 1/4 with a sports commentary and submitted it. Instead, I did some copy and some photography and did some early layout for the special section. Because, oh yeah, the TOC is this week. (I’m not going, thankfully… but this means that some awesome people are back in town and hopefully I will get to see some of them again.)

Afterward, Keith, Dan, Marina, and Owen came over and we played games.

I won the game of Ingenious against Owen in a tiebreaker… up until my last play, we were completely tied (lowest color at 9, next at 11, next at 12, next at 14, and two maxed out). I ended the game with a play that increased my third-lowest color by one and won the game. It was amusing.

Won the (very short) game of CMU Chrononauts when other people patched the timeline to my character’s desired state. It lasted less than four times around.

Lost the game of 6 nimmt to Dan by one point (16 to 17, with Greg in third place at 34).

Then I won the game of Bohnanza by tiebreaker (cards in hand). Dan, Marina, and I all had 14 gold and Owen had 13 gold.

So it was a night with many (very) close games, which was a lot of fun. Friends are awesome, and games are awesome, and I’m glad that games with friends are becoming a regular part of my life.
(There was also an awesome gaming marathon with people last weekend.)

There was interesting funness Friday night when there was a party celebrating Patrick’s successful thesis defense. There will likely never be photos posted from that, because yeah. It’s amusing to me how much grad students can act like undergrads when it comes to alcohol and partying. But there were board games at that too, so I have played lots and lots of board games this month (plus the usual Thursday board games at Yubin’s), and it’s not even 1/3 of the way through the month.

I’ve been working more on People Wars’ new expansion set: Exchanges. The theme of the set is effects that hurt you but grant some larger benefit (like reducing your hand size to 1 but letting you play more items each turn, or reducing work on tasks by 1 but not working when exhausted and letting other players use the character to play cards). I’ve been really happy with how People Wars is coming along… as a game, it feels more mature than its previous variants (PPA TCG, Student Wars), and I also feel like each expansion set has a distinct theme and feel.

In any case, it occurs to me that I never bothered posting the first photo I took of Owen, Charles, Mark, or Justin even though I added them to photo stats, so I should remedy this.

First photo of Owen:

November 2, 2007 in Scotland Yard (with Sully, Sam, and Josh)

First photo of Charles and Mark:

April 27, 2006 at the SCS BBQ (this was before I knew them; can you find them both?)
My first photos of them after actually meeting them were in San Francisco on July 12, 2009 and August 4, 2009, respectively.

First photo of Justin

August 31, 2008 in front of my apartment building (when he was coming over for games)

Life, hike, (hopefully lack of a) rant, and foo

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It’s the end of another four month period, so life (both stats and life) has been updated. Yay more life. There are also some photos up at photos.

Things have been funness lately. Today we took a bus and the T down to the Montour trail for a 10-mile hike. The original goal was to hike it for 10 miles, to Clairton, then continue upward to McKeesport (another 5 miles) to catch the 61C home. However, we didn’t get to Clairton until after 5:30 and I was feeling really unhappy by that point (due to the heat, humidity, and dehydration from my stupidity of not bringing drinking water), so we caught the Y46 bus to downtown, ate at the Golden Palace Buffet that wasn’t a buffet due to the dinner and weekendness, and came home to collapse.

I have also now surpassed 300,000 tagged photos. Photoshop album reports 300,951 photos tagged. This is lower than the actual number taken, since I now go through photos and delete many before saving the rest (for example, today’s trip was reduced from the 261 taken to 181 to keep). But it’s still a fun statistic. The 300,000th tagged photo was of New House (Stever?) getting ready for House Wars.
In another fun milestone, my D90 has broken 100,000 tagged photos (100,874 right now). It should overtake my D50 (105,067 tagged photos before it died, after being repaired once) at some point in the next few months.
I’ve also been noticing how more (most, even?) of my photos are now taken portrait style, rather than landscape style. I think this was prompted by the template redesign of People Wars (where card photos are portrait style now), but it’s spilled over into my general photography. Not a bad thing, just something that amuses me. (Even my portraits used to be landscape.)
Speaking of which, I released the next People Wars expansion a couple days ago, and also added a way to list cards by expansion (since the old card database was only useful for listing by type). I need a good “E” name for the next expansion. Any ideas?

I got a raise at work. Apparently I’m doing good work. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it and it feels like I don’t get nearly as much done as I should, or as other people do. But apparently that isn’t true. I’m trying to work better (9-5) hours, given my habit of just working from when I wake up until the evening. So far it’s kind of working out?

KoL continues. The new challenge path (Zombie Slayer AKA become a zombie and eat brains) has managed to get me addicted to the game again. Currently nearing the end of my second run (with good luck, I can be done tomorrow. But this is rather unlikely.) and it’s enjoyable in the same way Boris was enjoyable… less fiddlyness, more of a sense of success after each run, and more being able to push my normal character abilities. The new IotM looks amazing too. Perhaps it is time to break into the horde of Crimbo meat I have to get one.

Not much else is happening. Life continues. Life is good.

New music lately includes Alexandra Burke (sadly not available in MP3 format in the US), Josh Gracin, and Alanis Morissette (which was free after my $3 album credit and $5 coinstar credit). I have managed to keep myself from spending much more money on Kickstarter lately. This is a good thing.

Greg has convinced me to get a bike. Being the sort of “meh whatever” person I am, I will probably pick one up at Costco the next time we’re there for food. We shall see.

I kind of want to write a rant about how “social justice” and content warnings have been turned into these horrible (offensive, in a way?) concepts for me because of things that keep appearing in my (few remaining) social media feeds. But I will refrain from that for now because it will not do anything productive and probably just get me flamed by everyone.
I understand and sympathize… really, I do. I just feel like people take things way too far sometimes and overreact, which in turn makes the entire thing something I am more inclined to disagree with. And, as a concept taken too far, it really clashes with my “personal responsibility” (or lack thereof in current society) view of the world.

Perhaps this has much to do with what I consider my general movement towards being more moderate and generally trying to be more understanding of differing views. …something along the lines of, “People that disagree with you are not wrong and are not unreasonable. They just disagree with you.” Which I suppose is also dangerous because it’s an absolute (yes, sometimes people are actually just “wrong,” like if they’re arguing that the Earth is flat), but it’s closer to what I feel than the opposite.
That part is what I alluded to at the end of my last post, but I still haven’t really figured out a way to put my thoughts into coherent words, so they shall continue being unwritten.

I’ll leave you on a more positive note with photos from today’s hike because I like photos and I like hikes and I like posting. Yay hike.






Meme: Cooking and music

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There have been nice bits of music lately.
First off there’s Little White Flag and the related kickstarter for a full album. It’s a good song. You should help fund their album if you like the song.
Second, Kelly apparently wrote a new anthem for the Dallas Cowboys called “Get Up”, which you can download for free here. It’s very happy and upbeat and dance-y. I am a fan (even if I’m not a fan of the Cowboys).
Third, Incorporated Elements did an awesome remix of “The Day We Fell Apart” from Kelly’s last album, which is also up for download here.
Fourth, I downloaded Bangarang back when the EP was on sale. Dubstep is awesome. Too bad good dubstep is so hard to come by.
Fifth, I also downloaded Amaryllis back when it was on sale. A few of the tracks (Unity, Miracle, Through The Ghost) are standouts and they’ve been on my standard playlist since then.
Also grabbed a few random tracks like God Gave Me You and Something To Do With My Hands using free MP3 credit. My musical tastes are rather eclectic.

Anyway, I’m making food for 5 tonight (kind of an impromptu dinner party), so it seems like an appropriate time to cover the last of Jess’ meme topics for me.

Cooking is a weird thing for me. I generally like food, and looking at food, and contemplating food. One of my favorite websites is airline meals, where people post photos of their plane food.

That said, I don’t really have a good appreciation for “fancy” food. Maybe my palate isn’t refined enough or something, but on the occasions I get to go to upscale places, I feel like I don’t appreciate the food as much as I should given how much it costs… really, I would rather go to cheaper places and get larger portions.

So, expectedly, my cooking is rather boring, standard stuff. There’s a bunch of stuff I make in the food category of this journal. It all tends to involve a meat and a veggie or starch. I do cook Thai food sometimes, but not as much as I should given the expensiveness of “exotic” ingredients ($4/lb for bok choy? really?) at local grocery stores and distance of cheaper ethnic stores. Also, Greg doesn’t like tofu or non-standard sea creatures, which also limits the kind of things I can easily do.

The process itself I usually find relaxing and rewarding, since it’s nice to be able to do something after a day of coding that doesn’t involve a keyboard or debugging. Cooking pretty much always works out the way you want it to, and you can experiment as much as you want and (usually) still get something tasty out the other end.
Still, when I’m feeling particularly stressed about work, I tend to find the extra “chore” of cooking to be too much and will default to heating frozen things or making sandwiches. Which is odd given how much I enjoy it normally. But meh.

So yay food.
Tonight’s menu is salad (a mix of bagged salads with some fresh tomato and mozzarella; yes I’m lazy), lemon-pepper baked tilapia, green beans, rice (made with mixed veggies and spices in my usual style), and watermelon (since we have two, since they were on sale this week at geagle). Om nom nom nom.

I’ve had a lot of other random introspective thoughts bouncing around my head the past few days, but I don’t know how to put them into words, so they will remain unwritten for now.

Wedding, Boston, and things

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Tim got married last weekend. It was an awesome time, and was definitely the best wedding I’ve ever been to.

More photos will be posted at some point when I am not in Boston.

Because, yeah, right now I’m in Boston (well, Cambridge, anyway). It has been a fun time. Yesterday we did an 11+ mile walk around Cambridge and Boston. Today’s plans include more hiking. I really like this area… I think if it weren’t for the prices of everything, it’s somewhere I would be happy to live in.

MIT has a building uglier than Gates! Yay!

Moving, games, and disappointment

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Haven’t done a general life post in a while. Life goes.

People seem to like my SimSimi pillows that I brought back from Thailand.

In any case, Greg’s sister Chris recently moved to Pittsburgh for a year-long internship thing at UPitt. We spent most of the weekend helping her move things from there to here.

Nothing like helping people move to realize how much stuff people can accumulate. It’s left me and Greg with a desire to get rid of more of our things so any future move we might do isn’t nearly as painful.

In any case, after moving was done, we went to Red Robin for dinner, as I had been wanting to do for a while. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations or something for a casual restaurant, but I felt rather disappointed. Our waitress didn’t refill my tea unless I asked (and would come by and grab other people’s empty glasses and refill them), and generally seemed like she was unhappy at me. Also, my “well-done” burger came out terrifyingly red in the middle. (Not even sure how a burger that thin could manage to be that undercooked.) By that point, I was feeling unhappy enough that I just wrapped it up and took it home instead of asking it to be fixed. And then reheated burger is never that good… managed to eat it tonight, somehow. But kind of a disappointment for something I’d been looking forward to.

In any case, today we had some more board games.


Besides Ingenious, which seems to be getting popular on game nights and is one of Greg’s favorite games, and My Happy Farm, which I think has become my favorite “quick” game choice, we also played Puerto Rico for the first time in a while. There was also a lot of 7 Wonders (with Max and Yubin’s set that we’re holding on to until they return from getting married), which is quickly becoming one of my more favorite games… perhaps it will be time to buy a copy in the near future.

This upcoming week will be interesting. On call for work while I’m spending Friday being driven to a wedding in Connecticut, then on call all weekend while I’m there and on a train to Boston. With luck, nothing will happen. Without luck… well, at least I’ll always be at most 30 minutes away from an internet connection.