We met up with Jeff and Patty at Boudin SF for breakfast. We didn’t realize there were multiple locations, and we ended up showing up to the wrong one. We then drove down to meet them and had a very tasty breakfast. The bread was decent, but not as good as I was hoping. We talked about a lot of interesting things with Jeff and I’ll be meeting up with him again on Friday.
Steph and I slept in and walked the kitties Sunday morning. They were super cute.
We got to Kublacon a little after noon, and caught the end of James’ lecture on Kickstarter. We then got to play both of the games that were from the Suburbia group, and I liked them both(Subdivision and Castles of mad king ludwig). We also attended James’ talk on randomness in games, and it was quite good. It made me think about how agency relates to games.
I had a really good time at the convention, learning a good number of new games. There was one card game that was very simple, but very deep in strategy. I really enjoyed playing it. The game Java that was very similar to Tikal was way too complex. I enjoyed listening to James’ lectures, and they had a lot of information I didn’t already know. The one on probabilities I already knew most of, but that was to be expected. I’m really looking forward to his lectures on Kickastarter and randomness.
I met up with Michael and some of his friends in SF for dinner at Le Colonial. I got there a little early and worked until they showed up. The food was very tasty and the conversation was lively. The kind of people that hang out with Michael are the kind of people I like to be around. I’ll miss him when he moves to Chicago. On the way back there was a line going around the block at the Caltrain station, since the Giants game had just gotten out. I was able to make the third train with my bike on board, but it was annoying to have to wait in such a crazy line with drunk people. When I got back Steph and I tried to go watch a meteor shower, but there was too much cloud cover and city lights.
We were able to convince James Ernest to come to games night, and I got to play Seasons with him. We didn’t do very well, and he had the good point that it was hard to pick up since there was no real world basis to start the understanding of the game from. I then played a round of Tzolk’in with Adam, Candice, and Nick. Adam was able to get the 40 point monument in the first quarter of the game, but he sacrificed a lot of his momentum to get it. I got a lot of techs very quickly and then used that to build a ton of buildings. It worked out really well with the building upgrades and resource upgrades. I was able to win by one point over Adam in the end, 94 to 93. James broke out several of his games and played them with the others, and I think that he enjoyed coming by.
I grabbed dinner with Nima, Caryn, and Michael at Mardini’s Deli Cafe. The food was very good, and the conversation was excellent. We talked about the automation of life, and how that relates to the ability to express yourself, especially when relating to others. We didn’t come to any solid conclusions except that more automation would be nice, and that we look forward to when we can easily have more things taken care of for us without thinking about them.
This book is another where the topic wasn’t quite what I was expecting. The focus on healthcare made it not quite as useful as it could have been, however it was still very good. I liked the culture building focus that it had, and I know I need to do more of that.
I need to start reading the descriptions before deciding to try some of these books. This one was a lot more fundamentalist and fringe that I was expecting. The ideas espoused in this book were along the lines of ‘find God on your own, and continue to develop a relationship with God.’ I like that it is anti-religious-hierarchy, but the way in which they dismiss the structure for a personal relationship with God isn’t the direction I would go. I lean much more towards the reasoning reflection on what God could be and want with the world, instead of the vague notion of a relationship. There must be some sort of structure to the beliefs.
This was a really nice temporary ending to the series. I’ll pick it back up when the next ones come out. The wars in the title make up a very small part of the book, with a lot of politics and movements of the major characters playing a bit bigger of a role. The fires from the last book are featured heavily, and drive most of the action in this book. My favorite part is the understanding that Climbs-Quickly has of the human situations, even more than most of the humans involved.
It's an Exciting World 