I went to dinner with Stephanie, Adam, Jeremy, Lindsay, and about 6 other people. We went to Agave on Castro Street, and the food was decent. this was mainly to celebrate Lindsay being back in town. After dinner we went over to Lee’s place and had some of the Japanese candy that Lindsay had brought back from her trip. She had a few really good ones, and a few strange ones. Everyone else settled down for two movies, but I went to Amit’s for poker. I lost pretty quickly, but got to show off the system, and the reaction was very positive.
This was a fun game, with Dan, Adam, Tina, and myself. I ended up winning, but by a very narrow margin. I was Russian, and that made it easy for me to steal techs. Since I was able to steal techs I got ahead, and people didn’t question me getting my armies close to other peoples cities, since that is how I could steal. The end of the game came about when I dropped everything and got military bonuses. This game me a total of +16 on the attach, and Dan didn’t have much in the way of defenses. I was very close to a tech victory as well. It was a fun and well played game of Civ.
More of Sanderson, and I must say that I’m still really impressed with his writing. This story was nice, although not as complex as the others. This was also much shorter than the others contributing a good bit to it. There are points in the story that show a less developed idea of motivation than in the later books, and there is only one bad character that is redeeming. The evil characters are pure evil, which is something he gets over in his later books, giving them the concept of doing something evil for some ‘greater good.’ I like the ‘greater good’ idea since it is morally ambiguous. In this book there was a clear evil and clear good, with a character converting from one side to the other being his transformation. I like the dead city concept, as it was very refreshing.
Steph and I joined Lindsay, Jeremy, and one of Lindsay’s friends for a dance cardio class called U-Jam. It was a good bit of fun, and I was able to keep up once I saw the patterns of repetition. After the class we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch and got lots of American breakfast food since Lindsay had been in India for a couple months and wanted it. She was nice and got me a very pleasantly scented piece of soap.
This is a very interesting take on the question of god and done in a unique way. There is a great story set around aliens making contact, and their beliefs in god. The style of belief seems very strongly correlated to Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. The god here follows a strange belief that I already held, that god can collapses the wave-function; meaning that god chooses the outcome of uncertain events. I had previously held that this was on an event by event basis, but the belief put forward in this book is that it is done on a ‘frame’ by ‘frame’ basis. These ‘frames’ consist of a single instance in the entire universe. It is a different take on why bad things happen to good people in that the god entity can’t make everything good, but can only choose the next frame of the universe to have the best possible outcome.
I joined Steph’s family today in a Qingming, which is paying respects to dead ancestors by burning items for them to receive. The items are representations made from paper. They burned lots of money and clothes. We then went to Golden Wok in San Mateo and had some tasty food. Most of the Bay Area based family was there.
While I really like this game, it goes way too slow if people are trying to optimize, they are new, and there are five people playing. This is what happened on Thursday making a game that should have taken 1.5 hours take 3.5 hours. We didn’t get to sleep nearly early enough, and it made the game not as enjoyable when there was 20 minutes between your turns. I think a more synchronous style gameplay is needed for this game to work. That or faster players.
I really enjoyed this book, especially once all the main characters got together in the same place. The interactions of the main characters and getting to hear parts from both sides was hilarious, and incredibly well written. I can’t wait for the third book to come out.
Steph and I went to SF on Sunday to meet with lots of people. The first group we met with was one of Steph’s friends from her robotics team. We had a tasty lunch of east Asian style sandwiches and then went to the Asian art museum to see the exhibit on yoga. The exhibit wasn’t what I was expecting as most of the history of yoga is a mix of Buddhism and Hinduism, without much in the way of taking care of the body. Most of the history of yoga was in fact focused on acetic life, and not having a particularly well maintained body. The body part of yoga came about from a westernization and reaction to scientific thought. This was almost completely separate from the religious part of the practice. The westernized yoga was then taken back to the west and westernized a second time to get what we would think of as yoga. This big change was unexpected, and there was surprisingly little about why it changed. I was a little disappointing at the lack of historical context given to most of the exhibits at the Asian Art Museum. Most of the time there would be a sentence or two on the wall when entering a room, and a description of each item that amounted to “this is a vase from the Han dynasty.” I was hoping for something more along the lines of a read documentary where it would say what things were used for, how they would be seen in daily life, what kind of person would have them, and so on. I still enjoyed the time.
We then went to an ice cream place and met up with Jeremy. This liquid nitrogen ice cream was from a small stand by a park, called Smitten. It was tasty, but there wasn’t as much choice, and a much longer wait.
We then went to Nick’s place to watch some Game of Thrones. It was nice to see Simon again, and I really enjoyed watching more Game of Thrones. The story did a lot of re-introduction, but that is to be expected in a season opener. I brought up the series over time breakdown of ratings, and we had fun pulling up different series, and seeing how they changed over time. Breaking bad had by far the most impressive point, with a 10.0 on an episode with 48,000 votes. Nothing else came close.
