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It's an Exciting World

The life and times of David Geisert

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Games at George’s

Last Tuesday we played some Gloomhaven at George’s.  Steph was in China so I took over her character.  Adam started up a new character that is interesting.  I don’t think the style of play on Adam’s new character suits him, but I’m sure he can adapt to it.  We did a side quest that was a good bit of fun, lots of demons and golems.  George had a key trick that saved us when he walled off a group of enemies.

Random kitty picture:

20180418_143908.jpg

Wednesday we met up for tacos at Speedy’s.  Irene was playing it risky again, and had tacos despite her GI issues.  We played some Castles, with Irene getting two massive purple room scores.  I was able to get a lot of the overall goals putting me in a solid second.  I watched the others play towerfall after that.

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Mage Knight Sunday

We had a Tina, Adam, and Brian over for Mage Knight on Sunday.  I got to play the crystal dragon character, and did well with it.  We did a hybrid scenario with 4 cities plus Volkaire’s camp.  It turned out just fine, and we won with little effort.  I got two training cards, so burnt 11 total cards in upgrades.

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Book Club: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

This was an odd book.  The true account of a research experiment of three schizophrenic patients who believed themselves to be Christ/God.  They were put together for daily discussion sessions over the period of a little over 2 years.  This was one of the shortest discussions we’ve had on a book, and the person who wanted to read it originally didn’t show up to the meeting.

There were some major ethical issues with the research.  The biggest one in my opinion was when the researchers wrote letters to one of the men pretending to be his wife.  The man had never married and clearly had major problems around women.  The then manipulated him into doing things by having his wife ask him to do it.  They also had him wait around for the wife’s visits and had the wife write she was disappointed he didn’t show when he did show up and the wife didn’t show up.  It was a horrible situation.

There were plenty of other odd things they did, but nothing quite as bad as that.  It was a strange book, with a strange format.  I wouldn’t recommend it, but I would say reading the wikipedia on it is worthwhile.

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Easter with the family

I went back to Atlanta for Easter to spend time with family.  Stephanie stayed in the Bay Area.

I got in early Friday morning and my mom was nice enough to pick me up from the airport.  We got a great sunrise as we headed to their place, and the drive was pretty much traffic free.  I got a good nap in before heading downstairs to say hi to everyone.  Dad was up and Kim and Grace had come over.  Grace was a lot more interactive than the last time I saw her.  She was walking and able to make noises, but not quite words.  I gave her the early gift for her first birthday which was a brightly colored xylophone.

We then went to the botanical gardens, and walked around for a bit.  I talked to Kim for most of the time, and played with Grace some.  She gave me a nasty look when I pretended to take one of her Cheerios.  Jeff and Katie joined us for dinner.

The next morning mom and I headed to Birmingham to see Nana.  Mom was nice enough to drive the whole way.  I was glad to see Nana, and she seemed to be doing ok.  Coleman was moving around some, which is better than how he had been from what I’ve heard.  We had lunch there, which was a really tasty tomato and shrimp dish from Coleman.  On the drive home we stopped by the park where Steph and I are thinking of having a wedding celebration in the Southeast.  It was nice, and we couldn’t go to the exact building because there was currently a wedding going on in it.

The next day was Easter and everyone came over for a big lunch.  Benjamin came by and we got to talk a little about his plans to do a PhD in machine learning.  I pointed him to several good resources that I used for my first glimpses into it.  That evening I worked on a website for my dad, so that he could show off his guitars: http://geisertguitars.com.

the next morning mom dropped me off at the airport and I had an uneventful flight home.

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Karaoke

We joined a lot of people at Karaoke at George’s and had a good time of it.  I did a few songs and then let others sing theirs.  The list grew rapidly, and I was happy to join in on a few.  I did the Zazu from ‘Just Can’t Wait to be King.’  We also played some codenames.  I got to be codemaster and finished in 2 clues.

Tina organized the Gloomhaven box and I helped a bit.  It was well done in many ways, but had a few oversights.  She found the ‘Open when you feel you deserve it’ card under the insert.  We will probably open it next time we have all 5 people together.  I had a good time and I think everyone else did as well.

Maker:0x4c,Date:2017-9-27,Ver:4,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar01,E-Y
Maker:0x4c,Date:2017-9-27,Ver:4,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar01,E-Y
Maker:0x4c,Date:2017-9-27,Ver:4,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar01,E-Y
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Gloomhaven and Grilling

We had a very social Saturday.  We first had dim sum with Steph’s family.  Then went over to George’s to play some Gloomhaven.  I had a good time, and played the second of the two rounds.  I was using Adam’s character and had some fun with multipliers and buffs on the boss fight.  I did 33 damage in a single turn (normal is 1 to 6).

After gloomhaven we went to Lost Colony for grilling.  They had some wagyu steak and we each got a little bit.  It was delicious.  We also had some ginger beer and run, which was amazing.  We should have more ginger beer around, as it is so good.  I also want to try ginger infusing some rum.

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Creating Reality Hackathon

I took the week to go to LA for the Creating Reality Hackathon.  It was a lot of fun and I decided to do some prep work around find an idea and a team.  I put up the idea on the Slack channel and a few people showed interest.  It worked out pretty well in that the people who showed interest were competent and good.  The team came together with three engineers, one of which was also great at sound design and music.  We also got a good character artist and a director.

We chose to do the flicksync idea from Ready Player One, which a lot of people at the conference already recognized.  We started with a list of works in the public domain, and that led us to the tea party scene from Alice in Wonderland.  The choice turned out to be better than we could have hoped as it was fun to interact with the silly characters.  The short lines also lended themselves really well to the tech.  We built it out using Watson as the speech to text service.

In the end we won two of the six categories: AI and Entertainment.  We didn’t make the finals because we had an issue with the mic during judging, but I feel that had we made the finals we would have won.

We are going to finish it up and put it on Steam:

http://store.steampowered.com//app/827170?beta=0

And all the details are in our Dev Post on it:

http://devpost.com/software/flicksync-upjg7q

It was a ton of fun and I think it is good for understanding the market and networking to go to these events.

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Wandering Wednesday

I met Adam in Sunnyvale before heading to lunch at Sourdough Eatery in San Jose.  His promise of it being a strange and unique place wasn’t idle chatter.  The whole place was filled with paintings by the proprietor of pin up girls and ocean scenes.  There was also a fantastically friendly kitty that crawled into my lap and sat there for 2 hours while we ate and chatted.

Debby joined us, and after eating we went to the Egyptian Museum close to the Rose Garden in San Jose.  It was a pretty neat place to just sit around and work.  My computer ran out of power just as we were wrapping up.  Debby and I then went to BJJ and Andrew showed us some more moves.  I picked my bike up from Sunnyvale and joined people at George’s place.  We finally tried the Mysterium cards for Codenames.  It worked, but not great.  We then played some codenames pictures and had a few really fun rounds.  The best one was the last one with my clues being Liquid 4, Liquid 2, Liquid 2.  Adam made comments about the first clue that let me get away with it.

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Gloomhaven and Indian Street Cafe

MVIMG_20180304_190110

On Sunday, after lunch with the Lees, we went to George’s to play some Gloomhaven.  I brought my computer so I could work as the full 5 people were there.  I helped to set up the scenarios and put in a little about which ones I thought they should choose.  They did pretty well on the first one, and struggled a bit more on the second.  In both cases I think nobody got exhausted.  In between the two scenarios we stopped by Indian Street Cafe for dinner and I got a massive bread plate.

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