I played a game I hadn’t before at games night with Brian, Tina, and Adam. Bios was an interesting game, with many different facets. The parts we were in control of were really fun, but the random events could completely decimate a player. There were points when a winning player would be taken completely off the board by an event. This made it very frustrating to play. The building up of the species was a lot of fun, and it worked really really well.
Steph and I joined George, Lindsay, Adam, Debby, and Andrew at Kevin’s Parents’ house. It was a really amazing dinner with some tasty dumplings. By some dumplings I mean hundreds of dumplings. Steph, Lindsay, and Kevin bet against me in the ‘how many dumplings will Andrew eat; contest. I took the low end at 1-17, with Andrew coming in at 10.5. We also got a lot of the red envelopes for Kevin and stuffed them with all sorts of money, and a lot of mtg cards. It was hilarious to see him walking up the stairs getting red envelopes rained on him. The video is pretty bad but it gets the point across:
After dinner we went to see Kung Fu Panda 3 as a group, and it was entertaining. I’d have to say it was better than I’d expected and pretty good for the third in a series.
Steph, Kevin, Lindsay, and I went to Manresa for a nice dinner. It was amazingly delicious. We took Kevin and Lindsay as a thank you for Lindsay showing us around India. Here are the courses that Steph had, mine were a bit different since Steph was eating the vegetarian option.
Saturday was a great night, besides the head wound. We had a nice group of people join us at Redwood Coast Cidery in San Carlos. Adam, Tina, Amit, Riley, and Rong were there. The cidery was lively, and we got to have some good conversations with the bartenders/brewers. We then went back to beachhead where we played a bit of codenames. I did really badly since I wasn’t sober, and then on the way out I banged my head on the security system that was sticking off the wall a bit. It turned out fine, and now I know that the cider is a bit stronger than one would expect.
Rocket had a happy hour on Friday and we went to a neat brewery called Black Hammer Brewery. It was really good beer, and really good food. Bo was able to join me and we got to chat a good bit. There were a few stragglers, myself among them. We chatted, had a few more beers, then things at the brewery shifted to the burner crowd and I decided to try to catch the next train. I missed it but caught the one an hour later, and got some work done in the meantime.
This book was very light, and the story itself wasn’t that involved. The major concept of the book ‘the practice effect’ was fun to think about.
Stephanie had some really good points in the discussion, mainly that any civilization that has such a strong value of man-hours would have incredibly large families. They would also have spread out and settled pretty much all the land in order to have the most number of people possible.
I thought that there wasn’t nearly enough sharing and offering of services to keep tools practiced.
The discussion was really great and the food was taken pretty well (it disappeared pretty quickly). I made some of the Vegetable Kofta, which was a lot more involved from the start than I was expecting. The prep that the teaching chef had done was a good deal of the time that was needed, even if it wasn’t the skill part of the cooking.
I’m really enjoying this series. It’s reading level and story complexity is clearly for a much younger group, but I still really like it. The book has an amazing mix of humor, magic, and light science. The political environment, and the people in charge being foiled over and over is written so well.
This book was nice, but a little too anecdotal. The points she makes about happiness are good, but the backing she gives to them isn’t all that great. I understand that this book was meant for a different audience from myself, and it does point in a great direction for getting more information. I just wish there were a book or paper on happiness that was deeply involved, and well backed by scientific studies.
This book was great. The second book was good as well.
The story is really interesting in that the augmented reality is helping people become more potent as individuals. They can be good or bad, but they become more potent. They can also choose to be less involved in things that they do, or more involved. The whole thing being run by a millionaire game developer was pretty cool as well.
It's an Exciting World 