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.

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…

Finished opening 3 boxes of DBZ expansion today. Apparently I got really lucky (or I got three boxes that were from the same run) because I got exactly one of each of the 36 rares in the expansion, leaving me with one complete set of rares (and almost 3 complete sets of commons and 1 complete set of uncommons). Awesome.
Distributions, however, are still extremely skewed. I’m now up to 6 copies of some of the Black and Blue styled uncommons, but I only have a single copy of each of the Namekian uncommons, and one copy of three of the four Red uncommons. Similarly I’m up to 5 copies of some of the uncommon Alien characters but only have one copy of the uncommon Frieza and Vegeta cards. Commons are even worse, but I at least have two copies of each common.

Apparently you can buy single rares from this site. I should buy #182 Black Dragon Support and #187 Black Z Warriors Support. That’ll complete my DBZ base set and makes more sense than buying $5 boxes of 12 packs for a 1/61 chance per pack of pulling the right card… it just feels weird paying $3 for a single card (since that’s basically the retail price for a booster pack of 10 cards). I suppose I can get myself a Christmas present or something.

I’ll post a photo of all the opened boosters once I get through the last 3 boxes of expansion. 192 booster packs of epic win.

I suppose I should write an update.

Downloaded David Cook’s new album today. It is good. Very good. You should get it (from Amazon to protest DRM-infected iTunes and Rhapsody). Highlights of the album (for me) are Declaration and Permanent. Also, thanks to Greg for all the pepsi points that let me download the album for free. Awesomeness.

Been opening DBZ expansion boosters. I now have a complete set of uncommons after 2 boxes (the past 3 packs contained, of the 9 uncommons, the 9 uncommons that I didn’t yet have) as well as almost-3 complete sets of commons. I’m also on track to have a complete set of rares, but we’ll see how that goes. Distributions seem to be skewed the same way as in the base set… lots of the uninteresting cards (Black and Blue styles, human characters) and few of the interesting ones (Saiyan and Namekian styles, Saiyan characters). ’tis unfortunate.

Work is going. Last week was Apex/Visualforce/Development training, which was useful. This week is lots of bugs.