gaming – dangermouse.net

Games night and a fast run

Friday I picked up the weekly grocery shopping in the morning. I order online, a habit I began during COVID, and continue because it saves me time wandering up and down all the aisles of the supermarket. When you order online, you can select a checkbox for each item saying whether it’s okay for them to substitute an alternate brand or product if the one you selected is out of stock. After some early experimentation with this, I simply set it to “no substitutions” for everything. Because sometimes I’d get stuff I really didn’t want.

But when I pick up the order at the supermarket, often they have still substituted something. But at least they let me know about and give me the option to reject the substitution and get a refund for the missing item. Yesterday I ordered a particular brand and type of bread. They had the exact one I ordered, and another different type, and asked me which one I would prefer, as if they were substituting something. But one was the actual correct product I’d ordered, so I pointed to that and said, “That’s the one I ordered.” They questioned again, asking if I’d prefer the other one. I had to say, “No, that’s the one I ordered, I want that one.” 🙄

I had a bunch of ethics classes. One had a returning student – I knew he was returning as I’d made a personal note about him in the private teacher’s notes section, just recording the country he lived in. I said, “Welcome back, you’ve done my classes before, right?” And he looked surprised and said, “No…” I said, “I’m sure you have, maybe a while ago.” He said it must have been a couple of years or so ago, which may well have been true. I think maybe he was impressed at my memory!

My wife and I went out to our local pizzeria for dinner. And then when we got home I joined online games night with my friends. It was just three of us this week, as one was away and another was busy moving into his brand new house (where we played last week, but he finally had his furniture moved on Friday). I won two games of Jump Drive quite dramatically – I was very lucky with drawing into strong synergies in each game. Then we played Luxor, which I came second in. One guy went to bed early, and the two of us remaining played Root on Steam. He played cats and I played the Alliance, with AI Eyrie and Vagabond, and I managed to win.

Scully slept better overnight. On Friday I wrote a note and put copies under the doors of all our neighbours in the building, asking if anyone had any new electrical devices running overnight that could be causing some high-pitched noise or other humming or whatever that might be disturbing Scully. Our neighbour directly below us responded and said they’d started using an automatic cat feeder on the weekend, and offered to turn it off to see if Scully would sleep any better. She did, but still wanted to leave the bedroom once soon after we went to bed. After wandering around the house for a bit she came back and then slept through the night, which was a lot better than the past several nights.

I think the experiment is inconclusive. I’m sceptical that a cat feeder would make a constant sound that would disturb Scully, and her behaviour seems more consistent with whatever is bothering her still being present, but maybe she’s getting used to it. Anyway, I reported back to the neighbour and they agreed to keep the cat feeder off for another couple of days to see what happens, and then maybe we can test it by trying it switched on again. If that makes Scully more agitated again then we’ll have some strong evidence.

After breakfast I went for a 5k run. I pushed a bit and recorded 26:38, my best time since back in March. So that was pretty good. It didn’t feel too hard either, like I still could have gone a bit faster.

This afternoon when out walking Scully past the small group of local shops, where the fish & chip shop is, we were lamenting that nothing there was open for dinner on a Saturday evening. But we noticed a new sign at the cafe, saying that it was now open for dinner from Thursday to Saturday! They only started this this week. So maybe in a week or two we might try going up there for dinner.

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First play of Arcs

Firstly one thing I forgot to mention on Thursday: While waiting for my iPhone appointment at Apple, after having some lunch I went to the new Lego store. This one in the heart of the city is supposed to be the biggest Lego store in the world. Although honestly I’ve been in the Lego store in Cologne, and the one here isn’t really that much bigger; maybe 20 or 30% bigger in floor space. They had some cool giant models. I would have taken some photos to show, but I only had my old phone and it was about to be wiped when trading it in for the new one. (I suppose I could have uploaded them somewhere or emailed them to myself, but I couldn’t be bothered.)

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. This particular occasion was special because one of my friends just got given the keys to his brand new house by the builders. He had his old house demolished and a new one built on the land. We got to christen it with a games night, even though he hasn’t moved in yet. He brought over a table and some chairs and some ice to throw in a sink to keep drinks cold (no refrigerator).

We played Arcs for the first time. We decided to make it a learning game and not try to play too seriously, and just see how far we got before we decided we’d learnt how to play, then stop ready to restart a proper game next time.

It’s a space battle game over a set of planets in different systems. There are several different strategies for scoring points, some more aggressive and others more passive. We ended up playing 3 “chapters” of the possible 5 that makes a complete game. We were enjoying it, but felt it was getting a bit late and we’d learnt the game well enough by that point. Several players had made what later turned out to be strategically awful moves, so rather than play to completion we called the game done. In particular I tried attacking very early and aggressively, and ended up losing enough ships that I had to spend a long time simply recovering my position. Next time we’ll be prepared and ready for serious competition.

Today (Saturday) I got up a bit early. The sun is rising before 05:30, and the birds make noise way earlier. This changes tomorrow when daylight saving starts, so sunrise will be at a more sane 06:30. I went for a 5k run. It was already warm when I started at 8 o’clock. The day was a warm one. I made a new Darths & Droids comic.

In the afternoon my wife and I went for a long walk with Scully over to Cammeray. There’s a Mexican place there that does good margaritas and we had some during their happy hour, with some chips and guacamole. After relaxing for a bit we ordered some dinner. I got a plate of pork with corn various spicy bits and pieces, my wife got halloumi with broccolini and patatas bravas. Each plate came with tortillas to make little taco-like handfuls. The food was good and very filling.

Then we walked all the way home again as the sun went down. Venus and a super thin crescent moon were setting in the western sky, which was glowing orange. A nice way to end the evening.

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Arcs has arrived!

Friday was online board games night, and also I received delivery of my preordered copy of Arcs, a new board game that is all the rage at the moment. Naturally I opened the box and flipped through the rules quickly, but it was left for today to read the rules thoroughly and punch out the cardboard tokens and stuff. It looks very interesting, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to try it out with my friends at our next in-person games night next Friday.

For the online games we played a bunch of the usual suspects. Earlier on Friday I taught my 4 ethics classes. I also picked up the groceries from the supermarket.

In the evening my wife messaged that she had gone somewhere after work and was on her way home on the train, and asked if I wanted to meet at the station and go straight from there to dinner. I grabbed Scully and walked straight up, arriving right at the same time that she emerged from the station entrance. We went to Xenos, a Greek place that’s been in the neighbourhood forever. I had a veal schnitzel, with vegetables and mash and mushroom gravy. Not especially Greek, but still pretty good.

This morning we dropped Scully off at grooming. I went for a 5k run, managing a much better time than my last one in the cooler weather. I’ll have to see if my times get generally worse in the warmer weather over summer.

I also did a big clean, vacuuming everything, cleaning the bathroom, washing out the shower cubicle. I had a bit of an accident with the vacuum cleaner. The dust collector cylinder was full after the last three or or so cleans, so I detached it to empty it into a bag… and the latch opened and the whole contents spilled out onto the carpet… and onto the vacuum cleaner, including into all the nooks and crannies that are normally covered when the dust collector is attached. So I couldn’t put the dust collector back on and vacuum up the dust now inside the cleaner… So I had to wipe it all down with a damp cloth. And then reassemble and clean up the mess on the carpet.

Finally, a couple of photos I took on Thursday in the rain, while crossing the Harbour Bridge on the train:

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Local council election day

Today was election day in the New South Wales local council elections. We have three levels of government in Australia:

Federal: Covering all of Australia. At this level we elect the Parliament of Australia and (indirectly) the Prime Minister.
State: Each state elects a state government, generally a Parliament similar to the Federal one, led by a Premier. The contiguous territories also elect their own territorial governments. I live in New South Wales, so vote in the NSW state elections.
Council: The states are divided into Local Government Areas (LGAs), usually called “councils”. For example, the state of New South Wales currently has 128 Local Government Areas, 33 of which are within metropolitan Sydney. The smallest covers less than 6 square kilometres, and the largest over 53,000 square kilometres. Voters elect a small group of councillors, who elect the Mayor of the LGA from among them.

I’m in the North Sydney Council area, so today I was voting for councillors for this LGA. My wife went to a yoga class first thing in the morning, and after that we met up at a local high school which was set up as a polling place. It wasn’t very busy, the queue in front of us was literally only two people, so we were in and out after voting in just a couple of minutes. While I was waiting there for my wife to arrive, two men approached and one went in to vote, while the other waited outside. A polling place worker came over and asked the waiting man if he was here to vote, and he said no, he didn’t live here, he was visiting from the USA. This sparked a conversation between the poll worker and the man about the differences between our electoral systems.

After voting, we walked home a long way, via the shops at Waverton to pick up a loaf of bread and so my wife could see the new Bay Brew cafe that has opened up in the premises of the old Waterview Cafe.

At home I worked on a couple of new Darths & Droids strips. I also played a game of Root with my wife. We haven’t played this game for several weeks, so it was good to pull it out again. This time I played the Eyrie (birds) while my wife played the Alliance again, and we used the bot players for the Marquise (cats) and Vagabond. It’s the first time we’ve used the Vagabot, and it was surprisingly effective, racing to the lead mid-game. But my wife managed to haul it in and overtake to win, with everyone else just a few points behind.

For dinner tonight we drove over to Four Frogs crêperie and had galettes. They had a special with Swiss cheese, gorgonzola, bacon, walnuts, and fresh figs, which I tried. It was pretty good! Rather than have a dessert crêpe, I had a second savoury one, with chorizo and mushrooms, which was also nice.

I didn’t do a 5k run today, since I did one yesterday evening, before the board games night started.

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Home made pizza and games night

This morning I went out to pick up the grocery shopping. I wasn unable to order any eggs in my online pick-up order, so while I grabbed fresh fruits and vegetables manually I also went to the egg section to get some there. But that section of the supermarket was completely bare – there wasn’t a single pack of eggs to be had. We’ve been having an egg shortage which I believe is because of a bird flu outbreak in Victoria. So I had to go home without.

But later in the day I took Scully for a walk up to the local shops and there’s a small grocery store there, and they had some eggs, so I bought a dozen there.

I had four ethics classes today. I was a bit worried about how heavy this topic on Hate would be after the first one on Tuesday. But it’s become easier over the week and today’s classes were kind of fun actually, discussing various things that the kids hated and why.

For dinner I made a potato pizza, rather than us going out to a restaurant. And tonight is online board games night. We have slightly fewer people than usual since one of the gang is going to see Iron Maiden in concert tonight.

We played a new game for me, called Mountain Goats. It’s an interesting dice combination game sort of like Can’t Stop, but with some new twists. It’s quite enjoyable.

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Hot games night, and a cool change

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. I picked up Thai food on the way at Faux Hun (previously explained).

There were five of us and we played games of Carcassonne, Ra, and For Sale. I came last in Carcassonne, but finished second or third in the other two – I forget exactly.

Friday was very warm, feeling more like summer than early spring. Today dawned warm after a warm night, and it was almost 25°C when I went for my 5k run at 9am. But a cool southerly change came through and by early afternoon it was down to 21°C, and then chilly in the evening when we walked out to get some dinner.

We went to a different pizza place, which does calzones and arancini, which we like.

But mostly today I worked on writing new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I want to get a batch of 30 written by tomorrow so I can photograph them no later than Monday afternoon, so the first one is ready by Monday evening.

I also learnt a whole bunch of Italian vocabulary words watching a YouTube video about English words that have been borrowed into Italian, but have different meanings. I learnt that golf has two different meanings in Italian: (1) golf, (2) a jumper (or sweater for Americans).

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Almost no-games night, and an exhausting Saturday

On Friday I had my usual online teaching classes, and in between took Scully for a walk. The weather was hot, up to 29°C in the city, and reached 31.6°C at the airport, which set a new record for highest temperature ever recorded in the Sydney suburban area during winter. It was nice, but everyone is dreading the summer to come.

We went out to our local pizza place for dinner. They do a Nutella pizza served with vanilla gelato for dessert, which we occasionally get if we’re in the mood and not too full, and we felt like it last night. Really nice.

I logged into our online board games night, not quite in time to join in a game of Codechains, which is a game one friend invented and implemented on our Discord bot. It’s a word association game a bit like Codenames, but different and fully cooperative between all players.

Then we started a game of Distilled, which one player had read the rules for and taught us all how to play. It seemed like a good game, but we got annoyed by the Board Game Arena UI, which forced us to do actions sequentially when we could easily have performed them simultaneously, so it dragged on and after getting about 2/3 of the way through the game in 2 hours or so we decided to quit and play something else.

So, after about two and a half hours of doing stuff with my friends I still hadn’t played a full game of anything! We moved on to Just One (which we completed), then Can’t Stop Express before calling it a night.

This morning I got up a bit earlier than usual. The sun is rising earlier as we head towards the spring equinox, and the warmer weather is definitely making it easier to get out of bed. I did a 7.5k run today, pushing myself beyond the routine 5k. I felt like I took it a bit easy, but managed to record 42:32, my best time for 7.5k.

Then it was a busy day of housework, cleaning chores, and more inventorying of Magic cards. And in the afternoon a longish walk with Scully. The weather today was cooler and very windy, but it’s supposed to get back up close to 30°C again for a few days next week.

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I totally forgot to make a comic

Oops. Yesterday I was so busy with other things that I completely forgot to make a new Irregular Webcomic! strip. I had a script and the photos were taken ages ago. I just had to assemble it and upload it into the buffer. But I was busy with ethics classes, and in between I had to work on some other Outschool admin stuff, and I also put some lots of Magic cards into eBay. And I took Scully for a walk. And after my last class had a shower and got ready to go out for board games night at a friend’s place.

And making the comic just slipped my mind. And because I was playing board games into the night and went straight to bed when I got home, I didn’t even realise I’d forgotten until I woke up this morning and had multiple emails and forum messages and Discord chat messages telling me and wondering if something terrible had happened to me.

No, I just totally forgot.

So today I made the new comic and buffered it up to replace Saturday’s usual rerun strip. I feel like I need to take a week’s break making new strips though, because I’ve been run off my feet doing other things and I really don’t want to spend all this weekend writing a new batch of strips when I have other things I need and want to do.

Anyway, at last night’s games night we started with The Shipwreck Arcana, a cooperative deduction game which I described once four years ago. Then we moved on to Heat: Pedal to the Metal with 6 players. We played the USA track, and one of the guys tried a risky move on the first turn, double upshifting to third gear and using a stress card to try to get a quick start, and ended up drawing high and overshooting the first corner, thus spinning out on the very first move! It was hilarious and he spent the rest of the game trying to recover and catch up to everyone else who were at least a turn ahead.

After this we played a new game: On Tour. Each player is in charge of a band, planning a tour around the US (there’s also a Europe board in the game). It’s kind of like a travelling salesman problem, except that you roll two 10-sided dice to assign numbers—representing the day of the tour—to each node (the nodes correspond to either a large state, or a group of small states like on the east coast). You can put the numbers where you like, with some constraints specified by random cards that everyone must follow – for example you can only place numbers in the southern half, or western third of the country. The goal is to form a connected route through monotonically increasing numbers, showing how your tour progresses as the days go by, and visit as many states as possible.

It gets hard because the dice are unkind. You might have a node with 15 and a node with 20, separated by an empty node and be hoping the dice roll a 15-20 so you can fill it. (You can do multiple concerts on a single day.) When the dice betray you, inevitably, you end up having to cut off chunks of your optimistically planned grand tour. It was a right mess! When you roll doubles on the dice you get a wildcard number which you can fill in as a star on your board, which would have helped immensely, but nobody rolled doubles for the entire game!! You also get a wild star if the three region cards are identical, which also never happened! We ended the game with no wild stars at all. So my grand 40-state planned tour ended up only visiting about 12. But it was fun and interesting.

Today my wife went into the city to see a matinee performance of Sister Act, the musical. Meanwhile I took Scully for a walk to get some fish and chips for lunch, and spent the afternoon working on Darths & Droids strips. In the morning I did the grocery shopping and a 5k run.

I met my wife at the new Metro station near us after 5pm and we went straight to Salmon & Bear restaurant for dinner. I had a nice fish pie, with vegetables and mashed potatoes. Very filling!

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Games night and a warm day

Friday was online board games night with my friends. I had four ethics classes during the day. I had an amusing answer from one kid when I asked what was good about video games, and she said they were good because parents can use them to keep their kids occupied so they can have some quiet time.

Scully had her grooming and haircut in the afternoon. Last regular grooming my wife decided not to have her har cut, since it was cut pretty short the last time, and it’s winter so she figured she can grow her hair a bit longer. By yesterday Scully was very woolly. But after her grooming she looks very svelte and sleek.

We went straight from picking her up at the groomer to grab some dinner at Organica, the new place we’ve tried a couple of times. I had a chicken parmigiana which was pretty good, and grabbed a slice of carrot cake to take home for dessert while playing games.

We played King of Tokyo, then 7 Wonders, then some Just One, and Scattergories. We had an epic moment in Just One, when five people gave clues, but four of them duplicated and so were eliminated, and the guesser only got one clue: solstice. And he correctly guessed the answer was “winter”.

This morning I went for a 5k run. I don’t know why, but it felt like very hard going today and my time was not great. I guess some days your body is just not ready for it.

I made a Darths & Droids comic, and went for a long walk with my wife and Scully. We walked past the two cafes that closed recently over at Waverton to see what was up with them. Botanica is just shuttered up and looks dead and abandoned, with no signs of anything happening there. But the old Waterview Cafe which closed more recently is almost open again, with signs up proclaiming it to now be Bay Brew. The inside is new and shiny, with new counters, tables, chairs, and a huge new coffee machine. It looks like it could open any day.

In other opening news, the delayed ew Sydney Metro line that was supposed to open on 4 August is now scheduled to open on Monday 19th. So I might get to try it out on Thursday when I travel into the city for the next image processing lecture at the university.

Today was pretty warm, getting up to 21°C. It feels like winter is ending. It should be getting even warming during the next week.

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Missed shopping, a day out, cold winter, and thouls

Yesterday was board games night online, so I didn’t write up my blog post. The day was pretty ordinary, starting with the usual morning pick-up of the groceries that I’d ordered online. I always grab fruit and vegetables manually before collecting the reminder of the pick-up order. My wife requested a loaf of bread to got into the freezer to replace our backup loaf that gets used when we run out of home made sourdough. I grabbed a loaf and took it to the checkout with the fruit and veg, but not wanting to squash it on the bottom of the shopping bag I set it aside and scanned all the fruit and veg first. And then forgot about the bread! I only realised today that the bread wasn’t here, and remembered that I must have left it at the self-serve checkout in the supermarket. Oh well.

We had an epic online board games night. Because the Olympic Games are currently on in Paris, we had a medal tally board, listing everyone who came first, second, or third in all of the games, and we played a series of short games to get in as many “events” as possible. We also each represented a country, chosen by rolling randomly on a table and following some amusing directions. For example, one of the table entries was “find the top-leftmost item in your fridge, and what country it is most associated with”. If I’d rolled this, the item was cheddar cheese, and my country would have been Great Britain. As it happened, I rolled “What Olympic sport have you played the most? What country has won the most medals in that sport?” it wasn’t entirely clear, but I chose tennis, and it turns out that Great Britain has won the most medals in that, so that was indeed my country for the night. Others got France, Costa Rica, Georgia, Sweden, and Australia. We played a total of eight different games, and won one gold, one silver, and two bronze medals, coming 4th in the tally out of 6 countries.

Today I found an article in the news that began:

The word on the street seems unanimous — it feels like one of the coldest winters in living memory.

It’s true… I’ve been commenting about how cold it’s been this winter, and everyone I know has been saying the same thing. We’re all freezing here in Sydney and saying how unusually cold it is.

Only this news article points out that Australia has experienced a June and July 0.7°C above the long-term average baseline. And Sydney in particular has recorded a June/July 0.9°C above average. However, this is the second coldest winter in the last ten years. The problem is the baseline has shifted and we’ve become used to warm winters. Last year, for example, we had a winter 1.7°C above average. Climate change, huh.

Today my wife and I went to her mother’s place to pick her up and take her to the nursing home where her mother (my wife’s grandmother) has moved into. She’s 101 years old and only moved out of her own home a couple of months ago, after having a fall. We didn’t visit since it required COVID tests and my mother-in-law only wanted to stay an hour or so. So in the meantime we drove a short distance to a new bakery we’d found, called Flour Shop, where we had some lunch. They had truly amazing sausage rolls, with pork, fennel, and apple. And we got a loaf of sourdough fruit loaf to bring home.

And tonight I learnt something fascinating about an old Dungeons & Dragons monster: the thoul. I knew that the thoul is a classic monster from the 1981 (Tom Moldvay) Basic Dungeons & Dragons rules, described as:

A thoul is a magical combination of a ghoul, a hobgoblin, and a troll. Except when very close, thouls look exactly like hobgoblins, and they are sometimes found as part of the bodyguard of a hobgoblin king. The touch of a thoul will paralyze (in the same way as that of a ghoul). If it is damaged, a thoul will regenerate 1 hit point per round as long as it is alive. [like a troll]

But today I learnt that the thoul began life as a typo in a table of monsters in the Original 1974 D&D rules. It was intended to be a Toad, as listed in the first printing, but was listed on the line before “Ghoul” and somehow in a later printing became “Thoul”. In subsequent printings the publishers at TSR decided, instead of correcting the typo, to double down on the typo and invent a creature to fit the name. This is documented on this blog. I always wondered about this wacky monster that made no sense!

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