jl8e

Very silly ideas

2009-11-19T03:33:31Z

A children's bedtime story book about particle physics: Goodnight Muon

Dominion: Seaside

2009-10-26T00:16:12Z

So, it came out on Monday, my copy arrived Friday, and I played it some Friday and a lot today. I haven't seen all the cards in action yet, but I can give an opinion.

It's very good, better than Intrigue so far.

The primary new mechanic is "Action - Duration": an action card that sticks around and does something for you at the start of your next turn as well. They're not as immediately strong as a one-off Action card, but they give your deck consistency. It adds some bookkeeping load, but not much once you get used to it.

The overall theme of the set has been described as setting up your next turn, and it does that fairly well. In addition to the Duration cards, there's quite a few cards to manipulate the top of the deck.

None of the cards looks useless or overly specialized. (I'm sure there's another Thief in the set, but I don't see any Coppersmiths.) Treasury sticks out as likely overpowered, but it may actually be that Market is underpowered. Still, it feels like I'd be willing to pay six for it.

It plays very well. The games felt closer to plain Dominion than to Dominion plus Intrigue -- more straightforward constructive play, less screwing the other players. (Although there was still plenty of that, especially in the game with Throne Room, Cutpurse, and Sea Hag.) Things seemed to move faster, and I'd say the set is more friendly to new players than Intrigue -- there are fewer effects that are complex or require decisions once played.

It also make Intrigue better, just by diluting it. (Don't get me wrong; I like Intrigue, but it's better in smaller doses.)

The production values remain high: the art is better overall than Intrigue, though perhaps not as consistent as the original set. The tokens and play mats provided for some of the card effects are solid, and the mats are small enough to pack in my card boxes with no trouble.

My biggest complaint about the game is that it's getting heavy. I've condensed the sets down from their huge (but nicely-designed) boxes into 400-count trading-card boxes. (Three sleeved sets plus four players' worth of money and VP takes four boxes.)

Dominion Variants

2009-10-17T21:37:03Z

I've been playing a lot of Dominion lately. (Shocking, I know.)

We've been playing locally with a variant where, when the game ends, you still finish the round, so everybody gets the same number of turns. This reduces the advantage of going first.

Another idea to make things fairer is to mandate the 3-4 money split in the first two rounds. The 5-2 is usually way stronger, and it's pure luck.

(It would also be a handicapping method -- give the stronger players 3-4s, and the weaker 5-2s.)

Mulling Smartphones

2009-10-15T20:04:18Z

So, after the massive clusterfuck that was the Sidekick over the past two weeks, I'm going to be switching to a new phone.

Currently, I'm looking at either an iPhone or an Android with a keyboard.

I don't want to change phones -- for most purposes, my ideal phone is a Sidekick. The big purposes it's not ideal for are "trusting it to work" and "trusting T-Mobile not to discontinue it".

The tradeoff is pretty much keyboard vs. better software. Current Android phones are kind of underpowered, but that'll hopefully be corrected in the next generation, which are hitting the market around now. Sprint and Verizon have phones coming at the end of the month that look good, but I'd want a hands-on first. (I'd also prefer to stick with a GSM carrier -- I like the ability to swap SIM cards around.)

iPhones are more expensive than T-M Android phones, and both are more expensive than the Sidekick plan. I haven't checked Verizon or Sprint's pricing yet.

A new meaning of the word "friendly" with which I was previously unfamiliar

2009-07-15T03:55:01Z

Chase now has "DepositFriendly" ATMs, which do not require envelopes in order to deposit -- you just insert checks or cash staight into the appropriate slots.

...or you would, if they had a "make a deposit" menu item.

Origins 2009

2009-07-14T21:23:17Z

Been a while since I posted here. I blame Facebook. It's so much easier to toss out a quick status update than to write something that feels worth posting to LJ.

(This will be lacking in detail, since I don't have any notes beyond my event schedule. If I played something I didn't write down, I may not remember.)

I set out for Origins the day before, spending the night at ladymondegreen and akawil's place, which is conveniently right by the PATH to Newark.

Made my flight easily, picked up my hotel key, went to pick up my badge...

Oops. They didn't have it. Fortunately, after waiting an hour on the customer service line, they were able to find me in the system.

I looked through the event catalog, registered for a bunch of events (preregistration? Is that a useful idea?), ate food (probably at the North Market, where I try to eat all of my meals at Origins while it's open.), visitied the Board Room where I bought a copy of Dominion Intrigue and saw my first ever Pepsi bottle with this year's summer promotional caps (free Rock Band tracks!), and made my first event:

D&D 4th edition. Turned out to be a variant setting with at least one new class, which I ended up playing -- a paladinesque striker who uses firearms. It would've been nice if they'd been able to provide me with my powers earlier than right before the first real fight.

The scenario itself was kind of meh, but I finally got to play 4th ed, and I like it.

Thursday:

I had a noon game of InSpectres in space (an indie ghostbustersesque RPG). I came up with a Spock-esque character, who ended up being the semi-sane one in a crew of lunatics and idiots, trying to hold things together while oozing sarcasm from every pore.

Later, I tried to play Cosmic, but it was full so I drifted into Andy Looney vs everybody, where I beat him and the event-runner in one out of two games of Chrononauts.

Next up was Dread, a horror game using Jenga as a resolution mechanism. (If you need to do something, pull from the tower. If you fail, you die.) At some point, one of the players had to make six pulls from an already-rickety tower to save himself and the rest of the party. Or he could've left us to our own devices. He pulled. It didn't fall. In fact, the tower never fell until somebody took it down in a noble sacrifice. I have photos of that tower. It's scary.

I should think about running Dread sometime. I have the book, if not a Jenga set.

If I played anything else thursday, I forget what. It might have been the night I got persuaded to sit in in a game of Werewolf, but I don't remember.

Friday:

Got to play Cosmic in the morning, Pillars of the Earth in the afternoon (a fun game in the Agricola genre, but not one I'm necessarily going to get for myself), and the uberchrononauts tournament in the evening.

I think this was the day I tried the new Looney Labs game: Are You the Traitor. It's a smaller, quicker game in the Werewolf genre, which I find to be closer to being a game rather than a social activity than Werewolf is. When the Lab closed, we moved to the boardgame room and played some more, including a very odd run where I and one of the other players were the wizards most rounds, and one of us was every round.

Saturday:

I played in the chrononauts tournament in the morning, and the XXth Icehouse Championships in the afternoon. I continued my record of not winning a single game in the qualifiers since I won the whole thing in 2006.

I have many photos of the tournament which I shall link to later.

I don't know what, if anything, I played afterward. I may have gone to the Board Room and actually played something there. (I only did so once, making the ribon a bad investment).

Afterwards, I think the AYTT? I described above happened.

Sunday:

Not a clue what, if anything, I played. I ended up helping the mob of Looney Labs folks do booth teardown, which is so much easier with twenty sets of hands than with about four. (At a Gencon a few years back, Zev, Paul, and I had the same early flight, and we managed to pack up the booth in about an hour, somehow. We may have had another helper or two, but that's it.)

All in all, a good con, with no significant low points other than my inability to operate the Board Room. I spent more time in the Looney Labs room this year, and played no Shadowfist. (The only event I was willing to play and had a deck for clashed with Icehouse.)

A Windows security question

2009-06-21T06:27:23Z

I have a windows XP partition on my Mac, and I want to start using it to play networked games on occasion. (Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 at the moment.)

Currently, it only gets to speak to the internet when running in VMWare, but it'll need to run solo to play FPSes.

If I'm never running anything else (like IE), I keep up with security patches, the Windows firewall is on, and it's sitting behind a wireless router doing NAT (an Airport Extreme -- I am still a Mac geek, after all), how secure is it in practice? What other security tools will I need?

It feels to me like it ought to be secure enough as-is, but I don't trust Windows not to find new and exciting ways to screw up.

Things I am none too fond of

2009-05-16T06:07:45Z

The bus driver driving aggresively and likely illegally. (That's not what the shoulder is for. Especially when you're as wide as a bus.)
The fact that if he weren't, we'd be barely moving at all.

I'm going to be eaten by zombies

2009-05-01T20:38:15Z

A 24-hour free trial period today, and a 40% discount for the weekend on Left 4 Dead, and Valve has successfully sold me a copy of the game.

Anybody already playing?

Oddly appropriate

2009-04-25T19:55:14Z

My bookmarks list is full of lots of clutter, some of which is organized into folders, so I don't see exactly how much crap I've bookmarked over the years.

I was bookmarking a web site that has patches for some of the old Ultima games so they can actually work on fast machines. (Also improving the graphics and music.)

When the Add Bookmark dialog came up, it was defaulting to the last folder I added a bookmark to, which was "Avatar builders".

The all-time vaporware award

2009-03-31T03:48:09Z

Reminded by a conversation with ladymondegreen the other day, I thought to get around to checking on the status of Cliff Johnson's The Fool and His Money.

It was announced in the closing credits of The Fool's Errand, released in 1987. The website says it's in final beta testing.

Having enjoyed both the original and 3 in Three, I'm probably going to get it when it comes out.

Post-LARP

2009-03-07T07:15:34Z

The game ran. There were some bumps, it could have used at least another week to write it.

But it was good. Not as good as Ghost Fu, but good. We had good players and a solid foundation. We know a lot of what we did wrong, and it's fixable.

Can I panic yet?

2009-02-27T17:19:08Z

We'll be at Intercon in a week, where we're running two LARPs.

One of them isn't yet written. Yeah; it's mostly written, but I don't think it's as finished as Ghost Fu was at this point last year, and that one was finished at close to the last minute. (Though, to be fair, Ghost Fu had a lot more components to generate.)

An exercise in will

2009-02-23T06:33:38Z

It's late. I'm tired. I've been away from most of the internet since Thursday evening. I don't need to screw my sleep cycle up again.

When I get home, I am not going to check my shiny new Facebbok account. Really.

jlighton @ 2009-02-21T14:10:00

2009-02-21T19:22:12Z

I'm in a six-player RPG. We have a Julian, a Julia, and a Julie.

This could get confusing.

facebook

2009-02-19T23:32:22Z

After a few incidents in a row that suggested I might want to be on Facebbok, I took advantage of my wasted afternoon and sat down to play with it.

Last I looked, I had five friends, had made requests of a bunch more, including several people I'd lost touch with, and had one friend request from somebody I sort-of knew in high school, who appears to have detected me by magic.

I'm still figuring out the interface, but it's not completely horrid.

I also still need to add a picture to my profile, to help differentiate me from the other Julian Lighton out there.

And I just realized I can make a dedicated email address on jl8e.org for all the notification emails.

One of these things is not like the other...

2009-02-15T06:23:56Z

From visiting a few Circuit Cities today, I ended up with five new CDs:

Disturbed
Nine Inch Nails
Disturbed
Still more Disturbed
and...
Paramore

Maybe nostalgia is what it used to be

2009-02-14T20:41:58Z

Even though I live in the town I grew up in, I very rarely run into people from my school days here. (Maybe one every couple of years, not counting the one reunion.)

This year, I've had three so far, and the two where I know who I ran into are with people I liked. (The other one was too brief , and since he told me to say hi to my brother, I assume he was a couple of years above me.)

I may actually do something about looking people up. It helps that it seems like the first step is to get a Facebook account, since I'm getting the impression that everybody's on Facebook these days.

Not the definition of "fun"

2009-02-13T22:30:08Z

Being on a bus heading toward the Lincoln Tunnel, sitting right above the squealing brakes, which are being used every 5-10 feet.

Ow.

Coraline

2009-02-08T05:23:17Z

No spoilers here, but I make no promises about any comment thread.

It's very good, whimsical and creepy. The 3-D is well-used. When it goes out of its way to draw attention to itself, it's used to good effect.

The writing is well done, the animation as well.

There were quite a lot of kids in the theater with us, and they were pretty quiet -- it didn't seem like they were either bored or traumatized.
Well worth seeing, probably the best movie I've seen in theaters recently, which is, admittedly, not that many. I don't think it's as good as the first half of WALL-E, but better than the entire movie.

Potential for irony

2009-01-28T05:38:27Z

On my way home, I walked past a building that had, in preperation for the coming storm, scattered enough rock salt on the sidewalk to melt a small iceberg.

This made traction on that stretch of sidewalk rather poor....

Brownies

2009-01-27T22:00:25Z

Since it looks like my standard means of communicating this recipe ("It's on the back of the Baker's Chocolate box. Use more and better chocolate.") is no longer accurate:

Hardware:

9x13 baking pan
Parchment paper
Microwave-safe bowl or a double boiler
Mixing bowl (if using a double boiler)
Mixing implement (I like a slicone spatula)
Cooling rack

Software:

Dry goods:

202 g all-purpose flour (1.5 cups)

Wet goods:

420 g sugar (2 cups)
0.5 cups milk (or buttermilk)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract (or other extract. adjust quantity downward depending on what you're using (orange and raspberry are fine at 1. I'd only use a half for mint.))
1.5 sticks unsalted butter
5 oz unsweetened chocolate, in small enough chunks to melt easily

Extras:

8 oz (1 cup) chocolate chips. (I've used blueberries with some success, other berries with less success. (Raspberries and blackberries worked ok, though the latter needed cutting up. Strawberries didn't work, though I may have used too many.) Make sure they're as dry as possible, and add a bit more flour to help absorb the moisture. You could also use nuts if you're so inclined.)

heat oven to 350
line the pan with parchment (a little non-stick cooking spray on the pan will help the parchment stick)
beat eggs and extract
melt the chocolate and butter in double boiler or microwave
mix sugar and chocolate mixture
add milk and eggs and stir until combined
add flour and stir until you can't see any more white powder (it doesn't need to be smooth, and would probably hurt the texture if you did stir that long)
add the extras late in the previous step
pour into baking pan, and bake for 35 minutes (a bit longer if you used berries)
wash the dishes while the brownies bake
remove from oven, cool in pan on rack for about 10 minutes
use parchment as a sling to remove brownies from pan, and cool on rack at least 20 minutes more
cut into 32 pieces (a pizza wheel is ideal for this)

I'm still too vulnerable to shiny things

2009-01-21T23:28:15Z

Did I need my own domain? Not really.

Will it be useful? Yeah. Wikis, mailing lists, non-isp web space, source-control repositories, etc. If LJ folds I can host a blog there.

It was, at least, pretty cheap. The host has a special offer that comes to $4.44 a month.

Bonus points for anybody who isn't mnemex who guesses the domain (It's in .org)

Words of Wisdom

2009-01-07T07:10:34Z

Just because it wasn't the forecast freezing rain in the city, that doesn't mean that it isn't paying attention to the forecast out in the suburbs. (Also: Ow.)

When the glove you pulled off on the porch to fish out your keys seems to have vanished into thin air, it's in your umbrella.

My year, the short version

2008-12-31T05:18:18Z

On new year's eve last year, I got smacked upside the head with a two-by-four.

This has made my year vastly better than it might otherwise have been.