San Francisco, climbing, Kickstarter games, and People Wars

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Christmas, tech ranting, and Greyhound poop

Posted on by

It seems all I ever write anymore is rants about technology gone wrong. This won’t be any exception.

I’ve already ranted about how Facebook logs your search history and when you untag yourself (despite already making it really difficult to do so). This combined with the inability to actually see things you’re tagged in now (recent change?) means I’m once again contemplating deactivating Facebook. I would probably just leave it inactive until I need to contact someone, at which point I would pop on, grab the email address (or I guess send a message?) and deactivate again. Argh blargh why is Facebook so bad?

But the thing that has been bothering me lately is the new version of iTunes, especially since I took my personal laptop (running iTunes 11) for the holidays and was very unhappy with its interface.

Here is iTunes 10.

Along the left side, under “Library”, there are various filters for your library. You can view all of your music, shows, etc. You can also filter down by playlist, or things like recently added or recently played. You can sort the music in the usual way (clicking one of the named headers in the music view). This makes sense.

Here is new iTunes 11.

The sorting of your media type (music, shows, etc) has moved into a drop down, which is reasonable. However, all of the sorting options have moved into the top bar (but you can still sort the old way by selecting “Songs”), where they are somehow treated the same as playlists. These seem like fundamentally different things to me… sorting all files is different from filtering down on files via playlists. Apple, why did you do this? This non-intuitive sorting also means iTunes needs all sorts of special tricks like temporarily showing the playlist list when you start to drag a music file (so you can actually add it to a playlist).
There’s also a bunch of changes that don’t make any sense to me. Previously, shuffle/repeat were specific to a playlist. Now, it seems to be a global state. That means, for example, you can’t just click from a playlist (that was shuffled) back to your full library, since you’ll be shuffling songs in your full library as well. (This was useful when you purchased a new album and wanted to listen to it straight through, but your usual playlists shuffle.)
They have also, for some bizarre reason, decided to treat music in iCloud the same as local music. That is, in your library, you’ll see greyed-out music appear that indicates it’s not downloaded. Which would make some sense except it shows EVERY song in iCloud, even ones you have already downloaded, resulting in many being shown twice. (Yes, you can disable this functionality, but you have to unintuitively go to the “Store” tab in preferences.)

I guess this, in particular, bothers me because Apple is known for being extremely user-friendly. The changes to iTunes don’t seem to make much sense to me.

In any case, this has been 500 words of rant, so I should perhaps talk about nicer things.

I had a Christmas. It was nice. Greg got me a copy of the Wheel of Fortune expansion for Carcassonne. This is awesome since it means we’ll now have super Carcassonne with 15 meeples per person and close to twice the number of tiles (and, most importantly, a larger start tile that starts with 3 separate fields). Woo. He also got me a copy of Thurns and Taxis for my birthday, but let me open it early. Awesome game.

I also received an iTunes gift card that I used to buy some new iPad games. Plague, Inc is very similar to the Pandemic II flash game, and just as difficult. Cytus and Groove Coaster Zero are music games, which I generally like. Surviving High School and Cause of Death are “visual novel” type games, although SHS also has some minigames inside it.
I’ve also been playing Sake Visual’s visual novels since I had lots of free time over the last week. They’re really, really well done (even the free ones). Highly recommended.

Also received an Amazon gift card that I used on their $1.99 albums sale to pick up Red River Blue and Red. I actually haven’t listened to the latter yet, but if it’s anything like the singles she’s put out, I won’t like it. Seriously, why did Taylor Swift veer so sharply into pop? (“I Knew You Were Trouble” is closer to R&B than Country, but it’s definetly pop.)

As for getting home, the Greyhound yesterday was miserable. My bus was scheduled to leave at 12:10. We didn’t leave until after 3 when two buses came and went because they were full (with passengers from Cleveland). Seriously, Greyhound, you know how many tickets you’ve sold. Why is it so hard to get enough buses with enough capacity? The part that really bothers me is that their ticket explicitly states, “Seating is first-come, first-served. In case of insufficient seating capacity, passengers will be placed on succeeding schedules that have available seats.” So they don’t even have to take responsibility if they planned poorly and don’t have enough buses… they just have to push you to the next one (which might not and, in my case, didn’t have enough room).
Never again. I think I’d rather pay to fly home than deal with such a mess again. At least, with airlines, they have to compensate you if they bump you due to capacity (and they have ways to check whether your flight has been cancelled or delayed other than showing up at the airport and waiting).

Yay life. Yay games. Yay music. Boo Greyhound.

Edit: Facebook deactivated again. Good riddance. I really wish people still blogged or used email, because I dislike being unable to contact some people. But Facebook is not worth it.

New phone, new lens, same old Facebook

Posted on by

I still exist. Things have happened, but I’ve been less interested in writing about them and more interested in just doing them. However, my photojournal has been updated through today and photos has a couple new galleries, so you can hit them for all the details.

The last few days have involved new toys. Last Wednesday, work upgraded my old Blackberry (bleh) to an iPhone 5 (meh?). This was a decent thing, except I quickly found that the iPhone fails at its namesake… that is, it’s a pretty terrible phone. My first day of using it involved lots of “huh?” and “what?” comments from both ends of the conversation, whereas I’d never really had issues with my Blackberry. I suppose the iPhone is better for things like GPS (but not maps? well, at least it has maps…) and apps, but that’s not what I use my work phone for. Both of my primary usages of the phone (email, which was better with a physical keyboard, and the phone itself) have actually been downgraded. As such, that “upgrade” has been a large disappointment.

However, I was recently convinced by Greg to (finally) purchase the 35mm f/1.8 lens I’ve been wanting for several years. It arrived just before Thursday games, which gave it a perfect opportunity to be broken in, and it worked pretty awesomely (for low-light, indoor photography), and continued to be useful every day since (as there have been events every day since). In fact, since I took my first photo with the lens at 5 PM on Thursday, I have taken 1050 photos with it. It’s super fast, it’s super light, it’s wider angle than my 50mm f/1.8, and it’s also super quiet (since it’s a SWM lens).
My only real problem with is not an issue with the lens but with how I use my camera… I always shoot in single-area focus mode, and I tend to leave the selected area in the center and reframe rather than moving the focus point. As a result, when I’m shooting wide enough to get more than peoples’ faces, I tend to focus on the person’s torso rather than their face. Which worked fine with my old (f/3.5 and up) lenses, but fails with my f/1.8 lens since the depth of field is often too narrow to get their face and torso both in focus. (This wasn’t an issue with my 50mm f/1.8 because I can’t frame much more than someone’s face with it.)
So, overall, I’m extremely happy with my new lens. It literally has not left my camera since I first mounted it (even when I had taken my 18-200mm lens along as a backup).

Besides that, as I mentioned in my last post, I reactivated my Facebook account with the goal of using it as a contact directory (and not actually updating it or checking it), and it’s actually working out well for that purpose. However, in even the brief time I spend on it to click through to someone’s profile, I discovered that Facebook now logs (and shows in your history) every search you make (including click-throughs to profiles where applicable). On the one hand, I’m sure they kept this information before, so at least they’re showing it now. But on the other hand, WTF, guys. I’m tempted to once again deactivate my account, but instead I’ve been wiping all information from my wall (“Timeline”), removing all uploaded content, leaving all groups, and wiping my messages inbox. If I’m going to be forced to use you to be able to contact certain people, you’re going to get as little information as possible from me.

Anyway, boo walls of text, so here are some photos with my sexy new lens.





Edit: Okay, Facebook, what the hell?! It’s bad enough that it’s difficult to untag yourself (has to be from the activity log and not from the original post item), but you track when you untag yourself too?! I swear, you’re logging every single click I make *somewhere* and you’re going to regurgitate that information at some point in the worst way possible. :\
Also I can’t find any way to untag myself from recent tags (like in photo album descriptions).
Time to deactivate again? The creepiness of Facebook is seriously overwhelming its usefulness as a contact information directory for me.