This was a delightful book of schemes, good fake science, and ethical dilemmas. The most interesting part was the ethical considerations around the release of the intelligence enhancing drug, the time factor of it, and the life prolonging drug. I do wonder what would happen if these drugs were to actually come out, and also what would happen if they weren’t made publicly available should people know about them.
I played Xia again, and it wasn’t as fun as last time. The game went wayyy to slow, and the explanation took a long time as well. I got ahead and had to slow down a bit. I also noticed that getting ahead made you start accelerating, so there was a runaway effect. We all called the game early, but I think I could have won it if we played it all the way out. I was able to get a big gun and kill everyone with it.
Jeremy came over a little early, and we started prepping the kitchen and he started cooking his famous dip. Once Steph got home we started cooking the plated meals. She was cooking a nice Indian dish, palak paneer. I was cooking the other dish, mushroom dredged steak with cauliflower and turnip mash. The mash was better than I had expected, but not as good as I had hoped. The steak on the other hand was fantastic. Nicely crisped on the outside and juicy in the middle. When taking a bit of the mash and steak together it was to die for. We had some technical difficulties with getting the episode to play, but once we got it going it turned out to be a decent episode. There was a lot more drama than normal, but that is kinda what made it great.
Nick set up a dinner at Lazy Bear last night, and it was amazing. The food was soooo good, and we had an 11 course dinner that lasted from 8pm to 11pm. There were 10 of us there including Nick, Steph, Wade, Chrissy, Adam, Brian, Jeremy, and two of Nick’s coworkers. I had a great time. I especially liked the egg appetizer, the pork, and the duck. The chef gave us a bottle of champaign for being the largest group they’ve ever had. Steph was silly while talking to the chef when he came over.
While walking the kitties this past weekend Archer got a little bit too playful, and managed to temporarily capture a yellow jacket. Needless to say the insect was not pleased, and stung Archer on his little paw. He was so sad looking limping around, so Steph and I decided to hang out with him for a bit to make sure he was ok. We tried to get him to eat 12mg of Benadryl, but couldn’t get him to take it. After a few hours he seemed fine so we decided it was ok to head out and get some food for cooking. He was fine the next morning, even though it was still possible to tell the difference in size between the paws.
Iliya, Steph, and I played a game of Ad Astra. I started with a water world, so I set my aim towards the terraformers. Iliya and Steph were getting pretty good synergies from each other on production and scoring, but I was able to just barely outstrip them by building 4 terraformers, and scoring that card twice. I won by 14 points, which is a pretty big margin.
David B. invited us to come with him to the opening of a Cat Cafe in Oakland. It was really fun and I think the idea has merit as an addition to a cat adoption agency. They will need to work a bit more on the cafe part of it, but the cat part was great.
Steph and I made some Indian like food, tikka masala and samosa filling. We went to mi pueblo and got all the things we needed, and most of the spices were already at Beachhead. It turned out really well, and when we had it again this morning it was extra delicious since it had more or less been marinating. We served it up by making a ring of the samosa filling and putting the tofu tikka masala in the middle.
I really enjoyed this book, as the powers were very mundane, and something that could actually happen. I did think that the extreme delineation for the brilliants and the normals was more distinct than would be in real life. I also thought that the way all the brilliants were smart didn’t quite make sense, since there should have been a wide array of intelligence going along with the special attributes. The book was good and I’m looking forward to the next one in the series.
