Said goodbyes. Need to set up a blog to keep everyone up to date.
I always love listening to the history of ancient Rome. It was a great book on the subject of Augustus, with some good details before and after his life. I think that if I ever really want to know the history of Rome I’ll need to sit down with a mapped version of the events. All the places and islands and people get really confusing for me. I’ll need a visual basis for it to really sink in.
Last night for board games night I showed up early and Riley let me in. I got some of the Gyros Gyros falafel wrap for dinner, and it was delicious. Riley decided to make some pizza, which was also really tasty. I grabbed an angry orchard cider with elderflower, and it was really really good.
Chris showed up a little early and we played a game of Neuroshima Hex. I was Blue and he was Green. It was the first time I had played the game and I really like it. Chris got an early lead, but once I got the hang of it I was able to get good traction and take him down. The game went really well for me in both luck and figuring out the mechanics quickly. BGG Link
Nima and Caryn then showed up and we played a round of Shadows Over Camelot. The game was going really well, and then I decided to show that I was the traitor when we were all gathered around the Picks and I was supposed to put down the 5. Nobody else had a 5, but they were all there. They managed to get out of there, and even managed to finish the Picks since it didn’t come up for a while. I was able to really hit them hard in a number of situations and the game ended when they lost the holy grail. They weren’t doing very well in any other area either. It would have been a close game even without me turning traitor. BGG Link
Nima and Caryn left, and then 10 of us decided to get together to play a few rounds of Avalon. It is just like the card game mafia, but with some expanded rules. I think it makes the game actually fun since you can somewhat piece together who is who. Chris was the Merlin character and he knew that he was going to be assassinated no matter what, which was right. I think the game is fun and would love to play it again. I was loyal both times, won the first, lost the second. BGG Link
I liked this walk through the periodic table, and it works well with the book Quantum. I liked some of the smaller facts that they go into about the elements and how they were discovered. I wouldn’t recommend this book to many people, but it is better than Quantum for all of those who aren’t looking for something specifically about physics.
Brian had Hanabi with him, as he tends to always have. We played a 5 person game and got pretty far. There were a few mistakes and we are also working on convention of what to do/understand. With some of these conventions the game will get much easier, and it will be fun to finally get the whole thing without making any mistakes.
Last night Tina, Chris, Steph, Brian, Nick, Riley, and Amit were at Beachhead for dinner. I brought over some berries and wine, but ended finishing off most of the Riesling by myself. Tina was making spaghetti with her grandmother’s sauce, which was really tasty. Chris brought over a rum chocolate cake, which was delicious. The cream cheese icing always gets me.
This book had a lot of good tips to keep yourself free of distraction. I was very surprised at how much they pulled on the Buddhist teachings about mindfulness. The entire book is rife with the Buddhist teachings and the practices that are taught in this book are just modernized versions of them. The goal of Buddhism isn’t really brought up, but the practice of mindfulness is key to the core fo the book. The book bases it’s teaching on a story of two people, a husband and a wife. They play out the scenarios in bad ways and then in good ways. The good ways have pretty much everything go right, and many times in serendipitous ways, which bothered me a bit. I think they should have done only outcomes that were resultant of being mindful, and using the techniques, instead of having everything go right even if it was mostly unrelated to the core tenants of the book.
Robert and I had a very nice meal at Curry Up Now and we talked about art styles and all kickstarter. I took it upon myself to start an analysis of kickstarter campaigns based on the top campaigns in the games category. I’m looking at the tiers and how many people backed them, at the stretch goal spacing, and at the qualities of the posters.
We watched this movie with Candice and Brian while waiting to go to the Sabercats game. It was a really good movie, but the starting premise was lost along the way with the main character being able to talk to all these ghosts that were around the city. Then zombies come along and the ghosts are completely forgot for the next 50% of the movie. It was a decently dark movie, and in some ways surprisingly so. I really enjoyed it and the end was pretty spectacular.
