This book was a bit slower than the others at the start, but it made up for it with how the book came to a conclusion. Tavi was able to take command of a legion and fight off a Cane invasion with very amusing tactics. I was surprised when some of the tactics weren’t reused, but I suppose you can’t have a super-weapon appear like the light cannon he used.
Steph and I have been playing some board games in the evenings this week, outside of games night. We played a couple games of Race for the Galaxy, where we are about equally skilled. We also played one game of New Era, but I am much better at that game than her, and she gets upset when I continue to pull ahead. I got some of the best card draws I’ve gotten in that game, which also helped. I was able to get three cooperate from hand card draws each turn. We also played a game of Fish Cook with Candice, where Steph won by one dollar over me; Candice took a close third.
This was a very good book, and part of an excellent series. I like Kitai’s part in this book, as she is a very fun and interesting character. The Cane are also very interesting, and are introduced here. The way Jim Butcher shows the logic of the Cane is very astute to the differences in philosophy of ethics.
After the movie we all went to downtown Mountain View to have dinner. We tried a few places before settling on Niji Sushi, since they didn’t have a long wait. We got some tasty tasty food, then headed over to Riley and Wit’s house for the Game of Thrones episode. The episode was the start of the battle at the wall, and was the first episode to stay in a single location. I was kind of surprised that they would do that, but wholly understand. The battle at the wall is one of the biggest events in the entire series, and they will certainly continue the battle in the next episode.
I enjoyed the movie. Before going in Steph found a thread on reddit that suggested the movie was pretty much an analogue for how video games work with die, rinse, repeat. This was most certainly true as the main character had to get past hard spots in the fighting and memorize specific actions to take as specific points. The ending was a little off, but that is to be expected. It seemed like they had one ending, but it didn’t play well since people wanted the main character to live. I thought he didn’t do nearly enough random goofing off with the ability. We went to see it at the Mercado AMC 20, with Jeremy, Riley, Wit, and Rong.
Iliya and I went to the Dance Libre performance that Tina was a part of. She did a great job in the dancing as did the rest of her group. The plot was very much separate, and related to the rest of the performance only slightly. The plot was vegetarian zombies turning into flesh eating zombies. The secret to keeping them vegetarian was the rutabaga. That said it did provide a decent amount of comic relief and segues. There were also lots of comic relief points in the dances, and I was most impressed with how well they were incorporated, while the dancers didn’t miss a beat. I was satiated at about an hour of the dancing, but the rest of the performance was still quite good. The thriller dance at the end was a nice finish to it.
The kitties have been wonderful, and very cuddly. They have been especially good about going on their walks. Lana got scared of John when she saw him one day, just like Archer was scared of the Google delivery guy. I am also trying to feed them more of a meal schedule and less of them eating whenever they want.
The Heir of Novron was a great book, and I happened to read it out of order with Rise of an Empire. The character development in this book was very nice, and the way in which the story twisted and turned was great. The lost city adventures were fantastic, and I especially liked the way the magic was used.
We got up early and waited for Rose to come by. Rose is one of Stephanie’s teammates, and she is new to the school. She joined us on the ride up, and we grabbed coffee before hitting the road. We got there a little before the Filipino festival started. I was hoping to do some Filipino arts and crafts, but it was conspicuously absent. I sat down and watched the matches once everyone had shown up and gotten started. They were very fast, but there were quite a few of them. Stephanie only did two rounds:
Video of round1 , Video of round2
After the festival we went to a restaurant nearby and had a relaxing lunch. I drove back to Beachhead and we relaxed for a bit.
It's an Exciting World 