Category Archives: Activities

Life, games, TV shows

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Life goes. Rather busily, in fact. It hadn’t occurred to me how busily until Chloe asked about dinner plans last Sunday and I had to stop before automatically responding that I was free “any evening”. My schedule now consists of climbing two evenings a week, board games one evening a week, and Tartan on Monday afternoons and all day Sunday, in addition to other random things that come up (like dinner plans, impromptu board gaming, or parties).

The benefit of all of this, at least, is that I now am guaranteed to leave the house at least once every 48 hour period. It’s a big change from a few months ago where I would often not even change out of pajamas most days, but really nice. (Yeah, yeah… working from home makes you lazy. :P)

For Christmas, we acquired the new board games Ticket to Ride, Yspahan, Hey That’s My Fish, Bananagrams, and Word-A-Round. Euphoria also arrived recently. Each of these (except for the new Euphoria) have been played many, many times. Yay for new board games.
(There was a mishap with The Agents where I both entered the wrong shipping address, and the package also didn’t arrive at the wrong address… so I need to figure out whether it’s worth my time and money to hunt down a new copy of the game. Le sigh.)

I received the first three seasons of The Walking Dead for Christmas and have watched through the first season and half of the second. It’s a really, really well done show, and I can see why it gets all of the acclaim it does. It provides a really character-centric focus on the zombie apocalypse (much like World War Z [the book] provides a global view of the disaster). I’ve also finished through season 4 of Supernatural and should start season 5 at some point. At least all of these DVDs are getting some use. :)

The hunt for houses has begun. It’s looking like houses with our constraints in the neighborhoods we want are going to run between $350,000 and $450,000… a bit more than I had expected. It’s not like we can’t afford that, but it just feels weird to be spending so much on a house. We went to two open houses last weekend on the opposite ends of the spectrum (a modern 4-bedroom house by CMU at ~$470k and a townhouse in Squirrel Hill at ~$280k), so we’re getting a better idea of what we can get for the money, at least. At some point we should figure out financing and find an actual agent to work with. Argh I wish buying a house was easier.

Work… has been work. In general, I tend to come back from breaks feeling like I want to quit my job and just travel, rather than feeling refreshed. This was particularly true coming back from this Christmas break, and it feels like I still haven’t gotten back into the swing of things three weeks in. I’m stressing out about really minor things, irrationally irritated at bugs, and generally feel like I’m getting less done than I should be doing. Sigh.

Climbing, board games, TV shows, card games

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Life has been pretty uneventful lately.

I recently celebrated 80 months of companionship and love and awesome. I guess in some ways it’s silly that we still track months together, but it’s also nice. So yay relationships.

There was a Thanksgiving. There was lots of tasty food and lots of fun games.

I’ve started climbing again after Groupon had a $70-for-a-three-month-membership deal. I actually haven’t gotten too much worse (finished a couple V2s yesterday), which is nice. A gallery of December climbing photos will be posted in about a week (since I batch together all related photos from a month).


There has also been copious board gaming, which is always fun and awesome. Eight Minute Empire Legends recently arrived, and it was played, and it’s a really nice filler game. For some reason, all of the recent Kickstarters I backed seem to have all finished production early November, so they’re all shipping around Christmas time. I’m expecting the Machine of Death card game and The Agents card game soon (or, I guess, when I get back from Christmas break), and Euphoria is arriving in January (but only because I used the “delay shipment” option, since it would otherwise arrive Christmas week).
(More board gaming photos will likewise be posted in about a week.)

I’ve become re-addicted to the show Supernatural, after Amazon had it on sale for Black Friday and I bought the seasons I was missing (7 and 8). Watched through season 2 in a few days and started on season 3… and I don’t know why I ever stopped watching. Yay awesome TV shows.
Also bought the last two seasons of Smallville that I was missing (9 and 10), as well as the first three seasons of The Walking Dead. Have a lot of TV to watch now. Maybe at some point I’ll get re-motivated to work on the Investigations card game. I’m thinking of making a tweak to the game where every deck card has a “conspicuousness” value, and every character provides conspicuousness, and exceeding a random conspicuousness value makes you automatically fail the investigation. (Would provide another value to tinker with on cards, and some more strategy in deck building to get good abilities with low conspicuousness cards or worse cards but be able to throw more characters at things.)

Work continues on People Wars: Gatherings. The theme of the set is “dual characters”, so I’m adding a bunch of dual characters along with abilities and skills that key off of them. Also, in an effort to make hybrid decks more feasable, I’m adding cards that reward working characters with kill counters as well as tasks that can provide items and attacks/skills. There’s also new abilities to help score tasks late game, and to help deal more damage early game. (Also notice the new “Climbing” and “Game Group” attributes, which I’ll flesh out in later expansions.)

Work has been super stressful lately. Not much to really say about that. I need to get better at separating work and life, and stopping work when it’s not work time. Hopefully that will come.

So yay for life, at least.

Duck!!!, Renaissance wedding, games, race, Tartan, People Wars, and macarons (phew)

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Life has been full of lots of awesome things recently.

In probably the biggest (ha ha) thing, a giant rubber duck is in Pittsburgh! It is super cute.

Greg, Eric, and I went to see it on the night it arrived, at which time they were throwing a huge bridge party for the duck.

Yay duck! I was actually expecting it to be much bigger (not having read anything about it beforehand), but apparently it’s only 30 by 40 feet. It’s still extremely awesome.


I think downtown is enjoying the attention the duck is bringing. Here’s Noodles & Co at Market Square that evening. It’s significantly more packed than usual. (The soda machine was constantly out of ice as well as many kinds of soda. And it’s one of those newer ones that has hundreds of varieties of soda and that makes its own ice.)

So yeah. Greg’s undergrad friends Eric and Dan were in town for the wedding celebration of Vicki and Brett. It was held at the Pittsburgh renaissance fair, which was an interesting venue.


Besides the usual wedding food and things, we had access to the fair with things like jousting (which turned into an “attack the good guy and force a ‘joust to the death’ tournament” thing), strength testing, hatchet throwing, arrow shooting, and fire manipulating.




Naturally, there were also board games.

In other recent board game funness, I acquired the Leaders, Cities, and Wonders pack expansions for the game 7 wonders. I also printed the official Catan board, the “official” Cupertino board, the official Stevie and Esteban and Louis leaders, and some boards from the fan-made Empires expansion. The result is an awesomely complex, awesomely large, awesomely 23-wonder-ful game that I am really enjoying.
(More photos of this, and other board gaming adventures in September, can be found here.)

This morning was also the Pittsburgh Great Race. Eric, Dan, and I went to watch Greg run.

The best outfit was a guy running in full Penguins ice hockey gear. Yes, including ice skates. (Word on the internet is that this is actually Tom7, who I actually know [but only in the ‘I have met him once or twice’ sense], so that’s awesome.)

There were also people with awesome signs cheering on the runners. (My favorites were “Worst parade ever” and “Why do all the cute ones run away?”.) They also cheered on the ambulance, police car, and bus at the end of the long line of runners, which was awesome.

There was also Tartan production today. The situation there is rapidly improving, which is awesome. Swathi is doing a good job as the new layout manager and leading a good group of layout staffers. The section editors have started getting their shit together (well, mostly). Papers are slowly (and sometimes painfully) becoming longer than 8 pages. Let’s keep going like that.

But in fun Tartan things, there was also a Kate tree constructed, which rapidly turned into a Tartan ed staff tree. It’s pretty awesome. (More photos of it, as well as general Tartan stuff from September, can be found here.)


I’ve finally started working on the next People Wars expansion, Flashback. It’s themed around PPA students (and general effects that look at the discard pile or add traits), and should be fairly interesting… but what’s getting me in making it is how amazingly young everyone looks.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised given I’ve been tracking this stuff on my photo stats page for years, but it’s still kind of weird whenever I actually go back and start looking through high school photos. Baby friends! ZMONGS!

Speaking of photos, June 28, 2014 will be the date when I’ll have been taking (digital) photos for exactly half my life. It’s kind of awesome that, in about 9 months, I will have over half my life documented in photos. I plan to keep up with my photo journal, so it should be an interesting adventure.

Last, but not least, a nice new French bakery opened in Squirrel Hill by Greg’s work. I stopped by and couldn’t resist getting some macarons. They’re a bit pricey at $2.25 each, but so very worth it. Their French bread is also very, very good.

Yay awesomeness.

Summer

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I guess summer is coming to an end.


It’s been a fairly quiet summer, except for the trip out West. I didn’t really pay attention to the freshmen moving in this year, and didn’t bother with Playfair or House War photos. Meh.

I also kind of ragequit The Tartan (at least its senior staff) recently because I was unhappy about the way things were (or, I suppose, weren’t) getting done. Not much to discuss there. We’ll see if things improve.

I’ve been playing a lot of board games lately, which has been awesome. We recently got 7 Wonders (during a board game sale on Amazon), and I’m really wanting the Cities expansion now.
All the board games!

Ground Floor

Nertz

Carcassonne

Viticulture

7 Wonders

Ingenious

Thurn and Taxis

The basil plant cutting Yubin gave us has grown into a full plant, and yielded some tasty results.

Also the burgers finally happened. They taste disgusting, although they’re also a few months expired so that might be a contribution. Chris tried eating one of the french fries and had an unhappy stomach that night. (Whether those things are related are not, who knows?)

In sad news, Anna moved away this past weekend to start a job at the York Dispatch in York, PA. She’s doing copy and pagination for the sports section there, which is awesome for her. She had a going-away party where there was lots of Nertz and also Cranium.


Yay for life and people and games and things.

Life, walks, travel, and games

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I suppose it’s time for another update.

Today we went on a 12.5 mile walk to Riverview Park north of the city. It would have been longer except it started raining by the time we hit downtown on the way back. After taking the T from the north shore, the rain really started picking up, so it made more sense to bus home. It was a nice walk though.






I recently went on a trip to San Francisco for work followed by a trip to the Northwest to visit Ben in Seattle and to attend Patrick’s wedding on the Oregon coast. Photos of the adventures can be found on my photo site.




Also, as followup to the edit on my last post, Southwest never sent me a voucher as promised for the baggage issues. At this point, I’m mostly apathetic (and I certainly won’t stop flying with them because they still do a better job than pretty much any other domestic airline), but it’s still a rather unhappy end to a terrible flying experience.

My Kickstarted game Pixel Lincoln finally arrived (almost 7 months after its initial delivery estimate). The shipping experience was a huge mess, and has pretty much convinced me never to back another Game Salute game again, no matter how interesting it may be. The games sat in their warehouse for two weeks before they event sent out information on paying for shipping. It then took another week after payment before the games started shipping, and it took three days after receiving tracking info for them to actually get the game to Fedex to ship. Overall, it was over a month from the time the game arrived at their warehouse to when it got to me… which wouldn’t be as terrible if it wasn’t for the absolute lack of explanation from them.
Combined with the already-sketchy expansion Kickstarters they ran before we got the game, it has really been a bad experience.
All of this would be less terrible if the game itself was awesome, but I can’t help feel like I got ripped off terribly. After $49, I got fewer cards than a basic Dominion set and a game that somehow feels not as fun as I was expecting it to be. It seems that there isn’t enough variety in cards (despite me getting a couple expansions offered during the initial Kickstarter) to make interesting enough levels (especially since you need to make two). The characters, mini-boss, and boss cards have no flavor (and no abilities that differentiate them from any other character, mini-boss, or boss card). The rulebook is terribly written and editted, and several important things (like using cards for symbol abilities) are not explained at all. The game itself therefore plays rather clunkily.
Meh. Lesson learned, I suppose. At least I only lost $49 on it.

KoL has been going rather well. The BIG! challenge path that was recently released has made getting the full sea outfits much easier (yay for immediate level 16 aftercore), and I’ve also managed to get down to 3 day ascensions reliably. My last run was a 702 turn run as a Sauceror, which I feel good about (especially given that I do 100% familiar runs).

I’ve been watching quite a few Smosh videos lately and as Zeke says, “Alan’s Law: Anything he spends over 30 hours consuming, he shall make into a card game.”
I’ve hammered out some basic rules and general cards for the game, which is turning out to be a customizable shared-deck game (so a card game where everyone draws from a single deck, but where that single deck can be customized as desired). The rules are drawing from Bohnanza and Investigations, where the goal is to collect cards to complete episodes by trading with other players. Hopefully the player-interaction and fixed deck aspects of it will make it more readily playtestable with my usual Thursday gaming group.
We’ll see if this project actually manages to get anywhere, or whether it’ll fall prey to my laziness like the RPG Get! revamps and the Investigations CCG.

Yay life and things.