The Mad Schemes of Dr. Tectonic

Since last week:

Already went and voted, last Friday. Also registered my car.

Saturday, I helped k8cre8 take all her Mom's stuff out of a storage unit and stuff it into a truck. Whee! I'm apparently relatively good at this game. I can't tell whether that car is coming at me slowly enough for me to make the turn (30 seconds later: yes. Yes, it was.), but by god I can tell you whether that box will fit into that space and hold everything in place! Greg and Jerry took themselves and Jerry's little brother up to Greeley to visit family while I was doing that, since Jerry's mom was in town because Jerry's new nephew was in the NICU with slightly underdeveloped lungs (he's doing fine now, and I think was coming home today). Went over to Chris's in the evening and played the new boardgame by Bruno Faidutti, Mission: Red Planet. It's about Victorians colonizing Mars, and it's fun. It has some mechanics similar to Citadels. The board wasn't as dynamic as I expected it to be, but I won anyway thanks to luck and judicious use of my secret bonus cards.

Sunday I was reminded that I'm now in my 30s and my body finds moving furniture to be a more objectionable activity than it was a decade ago. Urgh. Mostly just read and dinked around with RPG stuff.

HOLY CRAP was that a good sunset! I just ran out and took a bunch of pictures. Yay for bits being cheap!

Anyway, where was I? So I finally had that meeting with my boss to find out about proceeding with this, that, and the other today. It went well (and quickly; she praised my organization and approach to checking-in, woohoo!), though I have to wait for another week or two before we can discuss my ideas for new projects, but that's cool.

I would tell everyone to vote, but either you already have or you're rushing to the polls before they close, and my contrarian streak is rearing its head, so instead I will tell people DON'T VOTE! GO FIND PEOPLE WHOSE HEADS ARE FILLED WITH BAD IDEAS AND STOP THEM FROM VOTING INSTEAD HA HA HA!

Monday evening, the three of us went down to Karen & Thomas's (through a pouring rainstorm) to play Talisman with Thomas. My first character got royally hosed on the very first turn, so I managed to get him killed off in fairly short order and started over with a new character. It was pretty clear that I wasn't going to win the game, but I managed to make up some new plans and goals for myself, and had a good time wandering around the board trying to accomplish them, so I regard that as a victory.

Talisman is kind of weird that way, because it doesn't have very deep strategy -- most of the time, the only decision to make is "left or right". But it's still fun, and I think it's because you spend a lot of time encountering novel, colorful obstacles and getting involved in the game's narrative. So the entertainment is mostly about flavor and identification, which means it's not very far from tabletop RPGs where making up your goal is par for the course.

Yesterday I worked a good chunk of the day from home (too much to do this week, ack) until heading over to the Floyds' for our now traditional barbecue and sauntering over to the high-school football field to watch fireworks. Jerry was super-tired, not having gotten much downtime this weekend, so he stayed home and slept, but Bryree came along with us. It rained again, and we nearly missed the fireworks (they were delayed by an hour), but one of the nice things about being an adult is that you know that there will be a 4th of July next year, too, so it's not a big deal.

We're suddenly to the "I have to get how much done by Thursday?" stage of planning for travel. Ack.

I spent most of my day today doing math to figure out how to twiddle around various parameters to make some things in the hurricane game show up more often and others less often, all while leaving a third set of things untouched. I think I was successful. It feels kind of weird to be plotting histograms to balance a game, but it also feels kinda studly.

Went over to Keith's and talked gaming book this evening. It's coming along, and I think we're going to have a really good working partnership.

We watched the last two discs of Madlax last night. Revelatory, still confusing, ultimately pretty satisfying. There were a couple things that never really got explained, but the things that were explained were sufficiently weird that it made up for it, I think. Still with the power of crazy.