I had a pretty good time on Thursday playing a coop board game, Xenoshift, with Steph and Brian. The game was a bit longer than expected, and we won, which also wasn’t expected. The game design was a little sloppy as the order of operations wasn’t clear in many cases. There were also a few really confusing points around when certain cards could be played. We got overrun early on, but eventually got a good buffer built up for the later waves, which was completely necessary. The ramp up of difficulty was a little odd since turns 1, 4, and 7 were the hardest, with turns 3, 6, and 9 being the easiest. I still had a good time playing.
We had a great time Tuesday evening when we had people over to our new place for a time around the fire pit. There were a few bumps in the road, but nothing too bad. Dana said we couldn’t use the pit, but we had already checked with Ramone. Some people called to complain about the noise, but we weren’t being bad, it was before quiet hours, and we weren’t playing music or anything like that. We got to meet some of the other residents of the complex and they were pretty cool. We had a good number of people come by including Nima, Caryn, Liana, Ryan, Andrew, Debby, Jeremy, Brian, Adam, Kevin, and Lindsay. We met Tory and Gi. It was a great time, and had some delicious drinks and delicious food. There were some good baked potatoes, salad, and meat. I didn’t have any smores, and we have a lot of them left, so we will have to have another small fire. We still have a bit of wood too.
I really enjoyed the opening of the season on game of thrones. Steph and I took Caltrain to the city and went to Nick’s place. I chose the one big hill instead of the three small hills, but Steph wasn’t pleased. The food at Nick’s was really good as always. We brought some misir wot and shiro wot. People tried the misir wot, but by the time we got there everyone had pretty much finished eating. We tried to stream the show from HBO, but the quality of the stream was terrible. We ended up downloading a version of it and that was much better. We didn’t really check when the last train was, assuming it would be after 10, it was actually at 9:15. We grabbed a nearby zipcar and took that home. We chose one that could fit both bikes in the back, and I just brought it back in the morning.
Steph and I went shopping Saturday morning at REI, Petsmart, and OSH. There was an interesting setup of paintings outside of REI, but none of them particularly struck a cord with me.
Steph’s coworkers had a barbecue that afternoon that we went to. They were all pretty cool, and we’ll probably go hiking/backpacking with a few of them. I really enjoyed the conversations. There were four children there, all about the same ages (2-4), but they were mainly well behaved, or at least distracted. The food was particularly good, especially the cherry cider.
Steph and I went to Rooster T. Feathers this Friday with Liana and Ryan. We had a pretty good time seeing Paco Romane. He was the Feature act, the one in the middle, and he was hillarious. I really enjoyed the entirety of his stand up. The host, David Nguyen, was pretty good, but he made some jokes that were not very funny. I think he was trying to hard to touch on sensitive subjects, and doing it in a bad way. The headliner, Brandon T. Jackson, was funny, but in a way that Steph and I had a hard time relating to the humor. Liana and Ryan seemed to love it, and we hope to do it again with them. The downside of the evening was Steph leaving her phone at the club and someone picking it up before we could get back there to pick it up. She had a bit of a freak out, but she calmed down and got a new one the next day.
We had a great discussion on Ringworld. We decided that the representation of women was sorely lacking. The population control models they put forwards with Humans, the Ringworld, the Kzinti, and the Puppeteers was very interesting. The story had a lot of holes, and the plot was contrived in a number of points, especially around Tila.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2259779-ringworld-thought-questions
We’ve been hanging out with Nima and Caryn every now and then. We’ve had them over twice now and gone to their place once. They are in the same complex as us until they move into their new place. I was also able to play squash with Nima once, and it was a lot of fun. I’ll have to try to do it more, but it will be hard to get home regularly. I should just set a schedule and stick to it. As long as I’m not a blocker at work I should be able to keep whatever hours I want.
I really liked the story in this book, it had a typical setup of magic that was long lost coming back, but it was especially well done in that. The magic of the world is very interesting, with it pulling from the life force of the user, or those around the special users.
The lore was decently developed, but it ended at a huge cliffhanger. I’ll have to wait for a while for the next one to come out.
I finally got around to taking a video of the new place. You can see the dragon head door knocker, the new big red couch, and the nice dining room table.
