Category Archives: Activities

Life

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I mostly just wanted to post that life has gotten an update, since I said I’d post when it does. It’s a small-ish one (a month and a half) but meh. Yay life.

I received my awesome new 50mm f/1.8 lens on Monday, and shot some portraits of Will on Tuesday with it (which can be viewed at portraits). I’m really happy with it… I get awesome shutter speeds indoors and awesome depth of field to boot. Yay lens.

This weekend should be fun. There will be games and awesomeness and I’ll hopefully get to take more photos. Yay fun.

Work has been fun this week. I’ve been doing a bit more dev work this week (the past few weeks have mostly been writing automated tests or working on issues related to the recent release), and it feels good to be writing new code (rather than testing code) again. Yay coding.

I’ve also been attempting to get more exercise, and I think I’m doing pretty well. I’m up to 15 minutes straight running at 6.2mph now, improved from approximately 6 minutes when I started a few weeks ago. I should start doing more of the weight machines and stuff too. Yay exercise.

I’ve been working on a new card game. Right now it’s just the templates for the game, but I’m pretty happy with the way they came out (thanks to Ian, Tim, and Ben for giving feedback). Yay cards.

This turned out to be a longer entry than I was expecting. Yay rambling.

Edit: I was bored and felt like some photoshopping.
Original here.


I’m a fan of the blue background.
The metal in his zipper is bothering me. I should do something about that.
I also think that it’s funny how his face looks so much lighter against the yellow than the blue background, even though I made no changes to anything other than the background.

Liek ZOMGZ cards!

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I feel like listing all the different TCGs I own here, just for the sake of doing so. Alphabetical order, for ease of searching.
A (Yes) next to the game name indicates that I have played the game at least once. Plusses indicate how much I play the game (beyond “once”).
A (C) indicates I own additional cards for the game (i.e. bought more than a box of starter decks) and plusses indicate large additional purchases of cards.
A (ND) indicates a game that I don’t have decks for (usually because starters are randomized and I haven’t built decks yet).

  • .hack//ENEMY TCG (Yes+++) (C+++)
  • Austin Powers TCG (Yes; but it was so bad we didn’t finish the first game)
  • Babylon 5 TCG
  • Battlestar Galactica TCG
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer CCG
  • Case Closed TCG (C+) (ND)
  • Clout Fantasy CTG (Yes)
  • Dragon Ball Z CCG (Yes+) (C+)
  • Dragon Ball Z TCG (Yes) (C++)
  • Fullmetal Alchemist TCG (Yes)
  • Genio Card Game
  • Gundam War CCG (Yes)
  • Harry Potter TCG (Yes)
  • Hecatomb TCG (Yes) (C)
  • Inuyasha TCG
  • Knights of the Zodiac TCG (Yes)
  • Neopets TCG
  • Pokemon TCG (Yes+++) (C+++)
  • Rifts CCG
  • Spycraft CCG (Yes)
  • Star Trek CCG (Yes+) (C++++)
  • Star Trek CCG Second Edition (Yes+) (C)
  • Terminator TCG (Yes)
  • Tribbles CCG (Yes)
  • UFS (Yes) (C)
  • VS
  • WARS TCG
  • X-Files TCG (C) (ND)
  • X-Men TCG
  • Yu Yu Hakusho TCG (Yes)

Additional games that I’ve played but do not own:

  • Magic: The Gathering TCG
  • Redemption TCG
  • World of Warcraft TCG

Given that my goal is to play every TCG that I own at least once (what would be the point of buying starters otherwise?), anyone up for some of the ones not marked with (Yes)? I have all of them here with me in SF with the exception of X-Files and X-men.

Additionally, games that I’ve created:
(C) is how much I worked on the game, lack of one means I’ve only hammered out basic rules for the game and haven’t actually created cards.
(ND) indicates that I don’t have printed decks.
(I) indicates that the game was never finished to the point of being playable.
(P) indicates the game is still in the process of being created.

Descriptions of the older ones can be found here.

Christmas and Life

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Christmas this year was amazing. I think it was the first time I’ve had a real (where “real” implies a tree and presents and various Christmas-y things) Christmas since early high school. It was nice just being able to do nothing all day and play games with people… and there was lots of tasty tasty food and wine (the kind I like) and sweets.

I also got presents: a nice t-shirt, a photo album with sticky pages, a ton of tasty gummies, and one giant spherical squishy shark (which is quite possibly the best thing ever). His name is Cat because I have a blue stuffed dog named Poop, and Greg suggested the name so I could tell him to “Eat Poop, you Cat”.

I also bought myself another $70-ish of card games. There’s starter decks for WARS, Rifts CCG, Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) CCG, and Babylon 5 TCG. There’s also a standalone Tribbles CCG box (which got some play over Christmas and is a very simple, yet surprisingly fun, game), a box of Hecatomb starters, and 5 boxes of .hack//ENEMY booster packs (one of each of the five sets; mainly because I love opening and sorting cards and these were cheap, since I already have a nearly complete set of all 5 expansions). These games should get played at some point, if anyone around here is interested.
Also, I think I am now getting hooked on Nertz–a variant of Solitare that involves players playing on each other’s Ace piles–after playing lots of games of it over this past week.

Also, someone sent me a fetus-shaped cookie cutter in the mail. This is probably the most bizarrely awesome present I’ve ever gotten, but I don’t know who it’s from. Who sent me this? Thank you!

Tomorrow I have work again. This is going to feel really weird.

Tomorrow after work will be grocery shopping. I need to get some spinach and mushrooms to make frittata with my remaining eggs. I’ll probably get some chicken to marinate and bake too.

I still need to post photos from Big Basin and the PPL Potluck party. They’re batched and processed but I’m being lazy in transferring them over to this computer and uploading them. I’ll try and do so tomorrow.

Card prints?

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A friend referred me to a site where you can print a deck of customized cards for $5. They’re meant to be a deck of standard playing cards (54 cards), but you can fully customize both sides, which means I could potentially print Student Wars decks or Cluster card game cards or such.

I’m tempted to make new, nicer Cluster TCG cards and print a nice deck of them to play with. 108 should be enough… 98 unique for the deck and the 10 Objective cards, even though the website currently suggests 3 copies of each of the 67 deck cards (this seems excessive though… and 152 deck cards also seems high).

I guess I could also print one nice copy of each of the cards in the first two Student Wars v2 sets, but I feel weird spending $50 on something that’s just going to sit around in a binder. I would rather print two 54-card decks (or maybe four, one for each of the game’s primary affiliations), but that turns the game into a fixed-card game which seems to go against the entire point of making it a CCG.

Any thoughts/opinions/suggestions?

Edit: How’s this for a card back?

Tim made the comment that it’s really subdued, but that’s kinda the point since the card fronts are OMG COLOR.

Blorp

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I seem to have been growing chronically lazy lately. I don’t do much in the evenings after work anymore except browse the same few websites, eat dinner, and sleep. I don’t really do anything on weekends except go to Safeway and vegetate in the bookstore in front of the SciFi or Humor sections and maybe, if people are up for it, play board games.

I have three card games that I really should be working on: Student Wars v2, RPG Get! TCG, and the Supernatural CCG (the latter of which is more difficult since my season 1 disks are back in Arizona).
I have a main AlanvDotOrg rewrite nearly finished, missing only the code to allow comments. However, it’s been in that state for approximately 6 months.
The online Student Wars Java client project has stalled due to lack of interest.
CMU Adventures additions or rebalancing have yet to happen.
I’m not really even interested in playing PSO anymore (although, to a certain extent, that has been replaced by KoL).

Meh.

Photos from Thanksgiving are up at photos 2.

Also, yay cards.
As promised, here is what $50 of DBZ boosters looks like (120 base set, 72 expansion packs)

Whee.
If you add in the 5 starter boxes (4 of which remain unopened), I probably have enough DBZ duplicates (defined, for me, as a copy beyond the third of a given card, as uniqueness rules for most games are either 3 or 4 copies per deck) to literally wallpaper my room. If you add in the various duplicates from Star Trek, X-Files, Gundam War, and .hack TCGs (all of which are, unfortunately, back in Arizona), I can probably also do the bathroom, the ceiling, and the living room (especially with the Star Trek… I have way too many Star Trek cards).
That would be rather amusing…