After the draft on Saturday, I went to join Steph, Chris, and Brian. They were playing a board game, where Aliens were attacking them at a base. They lost that, then Steph and I played Hyrule Warriors. It was pretty much what I expected, although not as fun as I thought it would be. I felt like the levels were on a lot more of story rails than Dynasty Warriors had been. They also did a lot more of the Zelda like tricks to attack specific enemies, which was ok, but not what I was hoping for.
Andrew, Adam, Kevin, and I had another Khans draft. I was going for a build based around the +1/+1 counters, but it didn’t pan out. There just weren’t many of the necessary cards in the card pool. That led to a lackluster deck that didn’t really deliver. I was able to get a few really good cards, but the other decks had much more to pull from.
Steph’s mom’s birthday was Friday so we went out to eat with them. Rangoon Ruby had amazing food. Everything was delicious except for te pad Thai which was ok. They are going to be taking a few trips soon to Fiji and Myanmar. They also gave us all the apples off their tree which we made into cider for reracking our cider babies.
Tina two others and I played dragon pets and I was great fun. I bit off more than I could chew with three pets early on. One escaped when I got too many angry food aspects. I wasn’t good at budgeting for those purposes. Tina got first by a lot and I got a close second.
For Steph’s birthday dinner we went to Chez Panisse. This restaurant was the first to really do farm to table, and it showed. The food was amazing and incredibly fresh. There were 4 tasty courses, and Steph got some amazing vegetarian substitutes, that were just as good as the meat dishes. We also were able to take a tour of the kitchen and freezers. They had some pretty neat equipment. The only thing I didn’t like was the candied grapefruit peel. It was very bitter and sour, which I didn’t care for.
Steph and I went to Eliot’s place to watch a documentary and have dinner. We took over some berries we got at the farmer’s market. The food was delicious and the documentary made us think. We then had an interesting discussion on the topic of the documentary; the ownership of exotic animals as pets. The documentary focused on a man who had 5 lions, and all the troubles he had to go through with them, and all the things they had to go through being owned by him. The lions had the much shorter end of the stick, as they were kept in really tight confinement.
The major questions that the film brought up were, what animals are ok to keep, and why?
One reason that was discussed is that the animals could be dangerous to humans, like venomous snakes, and large predators. This one I don’t think is significant due to the very low number of people that are killed or injured each year by pets. This isn’t being insensitive about those people getting hurt, but there are a number of reasons I don’t find this significant. One is that the death rate from exotic pets is less than that for dogs. Dogs kill 25,000 people per year estimated, with lions coming in at 100. The next reason is that most of the people who die from these exotic pets are the ones assuming the risk of owning them. That is a little bit of Darwinism at work. The last, and most important, is that the death and injury rate from exotic pets is so much lower than that of other forms of preventable injury and death that the returns on addressing it as an issue simply aren’t there. We have bigger fish to fry.
The second issue they bring up is the environmental factors. The people who don’t properly contain their pets and the people that “free” their exotic pets can create large problems around invasive species. The boa constrictor in the Everglades is a great example of this. They have started breeding in the wild and now are all over the Everglades. This is a major problem and one that would have to be addressed at a large systematic level.
The third issue, is one of animal rights. This is to say that animals should have a certain minimum level of care and freedom. Lions should not live in a horse trailer for 6 months. They need significantly more space than that. Animals should also not be left alone for long periods of time. When done to humans this treatment is called solitary confinement and is looked at as a form of torture or punishment. This is one of the reasons that I have 2 cats as pets, instead of just one. Many shelters are also moving towards not allowing single pet adoptions. With exotic pets there is another level of care that sometimes must be given so that the pet can have a healthy life, and this requires specialized knowledge or training (can be attained from google usually but the effort must be put in).
The fourth that is touched on is the legality and certification issue. Dogs require tags, but lions and wolves don’t. This is just that there are no laws regarding lion ownership, but it would be much easier to do a categorical list of animals that require certifications. E.g. animals that have an expected full grown weight of over 10 pounds must be registered as pets, then keep a list of animal weights when full grown. This works much better now that we have the internet and databases.
I look forward to going to the documentary night again.
I had a rough time today getting back from Seattle. There are many ways I could have had it go better, but most of the bad things weren’t predictable or fixable. I went to the airport in Seattle last night, and took a nap before heading in for my red eye flight. The flight was delayed, and when we got on the plane there was an issue with the door so we had to get off. A few hours later we got on the plane and headed to SFO. I jumped on the sky train, then got on BART, then switched on BART, then waited 30 minutes for Caltrain. Once I got back to Palo Alto I noticed the distinct lack of my bike in the racks. The space where it should have been was flanked by a few lonely wheels locked to the bike racks. I then hoisted my bags and hiked all the way back home. Once I got there I again noticed the distinct lack of something, the hidy key. Steph had moved it inside after Lindsay had taken care of the kitties. Luckily she was nice enough to come by after lunch and give me the key that she still had. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be doing about the bike, but I’ll probably be buying used or from an outlet site. I’m not going to hold out hope of finding it, as the bike isn’t fancy enough to be sold as a unit; it will most likely be parted out.
Candice was nice and picked me up for a trip to the Fremont GameKastle. We got a group to try out the multiplayer app version, and got some really good feedback. It worked really well, and they were able to understand it pretty quickly.
I had a good time at PAX Prime. We spent most of our time on the floor at the Indie Megabooth as well as the PAX 10 booth. These are mainly the indie games, which are the games doing the interesting things. I really liked the games we played, although some were not well done. The ones that weren’t well done were at least pretty. The puzzle games I found to be a little simple, but I can’t expect too much out of them, especially in the demo. I look forward to playing a number of them when they come out, and I need to buy a few now.
Steph and I went to a few panels about Kickstareter and indies. They were pretty good, but we left the Kickstarter one early since it was pretty much the same as the PAX Dev one.
Steph and I also took Sunday morning off, and walked around the Aboretum in Seattle. It was very peaceful and relaxing, especially after the people and noise of PAX.
I had some delicious food from Piroshky Piroshky to How to Cook a Wolf. I also got to play some Super Fight with the Google Games Services team, as well as some MTG Drafting.
The early morning flight out was a little rough, but not too bad.
I went to Seattle for PAX Dev and PAX Prime. The PAX Dev part was really great, and I was able to learn a lot. I especially learned a lot about how I can use the Google Play Games Services. I’ll take a closer look at that when I get home, and start incorporating it into the login system. The only part that I’m not sure about is the login, but the rest should be pretty simple. I got to spend a good bit of time with the Google Play Games Services group as well, and hope that I can keep close with them, they are pretty cool guys.
It's an Exciting World 