gaming – Page 13 – dangermouse.net

First day of 2023

It felt like a fairly lazy day. I worked on writing lesson plans for my online ethics classes, which resume on Tuesday, and I made a new Darths & Droids comic. But I felt like I didn’t get a lot done and it ended up being late this evening while I still had things I wanted to get done today.

Of course, being New Year’s Day, we got up later than normal, after staying up late last night. And I went for a 2.5k run, the first of the new year.

I spent some time playing Azul: Queen’s Garden with my wife – our first learning game. As is traditional with Azul games, she beat me handily.

We also took Scully for a long walk in the early afternoon. The weather was warm but a bit cloudy, so it wasn’t too hot.

Oh! And we finally had showers again today, after a week of using the bathtub. I let the silicone sealant cure for 72 hours, and we should have been able to use the shower yesterday, but my wife suggested we leave it an extra day just to be sure. Besides using the shower, I also cleaned the stall with disinfectant and cleaned up the glass screen so now the whole thing is sparkly new.

New content today:

Shower repair, day 3

The ongoing battle with the shower continues. Today I applied another coat of the grout sealer first thing in the morning. Then I looked at the silicone sealant to check the instructions. It said to use mineral turpentine to clean the surfaces before application, and also for cleanup after application. Fortunately I have some turpentine stowed away in the garage, so I went down to get it.

The bottle was ancient. I must have bought it over 20 years ago. The price label (from back when everything had individual price labels) said $2.50. The same amount of turpentine from the hardware store website today costs $5.95. The bottle was a little over half full – I would have used the rest of it years ago for cleaning up painting work.

I wiped down the surfaces with turps (common Aussie abbreviation for “turpentine”). And I remembered just how powerful turps smells, and how much I can’t stand that smell. It pervaded the whole house. The rag I used to wipe the surfaces I put outside on the balcony to avoid having it in the house and emitting more smell.

I wiped the surfaces clean with a dry cloth and then applied masking tape to make sure the silicone sealant had nice clean edges. And then late in the afternoon I tackled the hardest part, the actual silicone sealant. I needed to bring in the turps-soaked cloth for wiping up excess. I made some plastic spatulas by cutting a thick plastic yoghurt lid into round-ended shapes, and I used those to smooth the silicone into the grooves. It got a bit messy and I got silicone all over my rubber gloves, so I ended up just using a gloved finger to do a lot of the smoothing.

As soon as all the crevices were sealed, I peeled off the masking tape. Hopefully I got it off fast enough, before the sealant skinned over. Now to let the silicone cure for… the instructions said 72 hours!! SO if we wait that ling until we can use the shower again, it will be Saturday evening (it’s Wednesday today). By then we’ll have been nearly six days without a shower. Lucky we have a bathtub!

I forgot to mention yesterday that the family of the boy who I was sorting out Magic: the Gathering cards for came by to pick them up. They were headed off for the day and driving past so dropped in yesterday morning. I met them out the front of my place and handed over the heavy shoebox full of cards. The mother and the boy got out to greet me (leaving a father and a slightly older girl in the car). The kid was super excited, and he gave me a hand drawn thank you card, on which he’d drawn a cool picture of a dragon:

He’d written a thank you message inside. The mother gave me a paper bag which turned out to contain a bottle of port and a small Christmas cake. They were both very grateful, and I was happy to see the boy so excited to get the cards.

The other main thing I did today was go through photos from my first day in Amsterdam back in June. I edited selected photos and tried to figure out where exactly I’d taken them all. A lot were of random canals and bridges and I had no idea what they were when I took them. But I retraced our steps roughly on Google Maps, using identifiable landmarks to establish waypoints, and used Streetview to identify the intermediate locations. But doing this, I managed to locate the site of every photo. This was satisfying, as sometimes I’ve returned home from trips and have no way of figuring out exactly where some of the photos were taken.

I posted the photos to my Flickr album for the trip and incorporated several into my travel diary for that day, which I also updated with some of the now-identified locations.

New content today:

Made my bed, now I have to lie in it

Today we went shopping for a new mattress. Our old one is showing age with some depressions forming in it, so it’s time to upgrade. Scully came along too and charmed the sales staff at the bedroom furniture place. My wife and I tried various mattresses and we joked that Scully should try them too to make sure she’ll be comfortable on the new one.

We selected a mattress and arranged delivery, which will take 2-4 weeks. They’ll also take away the old mattress, which is good, because otherwise we’d have no way to get rid of it.

In other news, the woman I met at the game shop yesterday with her daughter who wanted to start playing Magic: the Gathering e-mailed me. She said yesterday I met her and her son…

Okay, wow, I could have sworn she was there yesterday with a girl not a boy. Honestly, the kid had a hoodie on and I didn’t get a good look at him – I just saw some long hair sticking out. So I guess I misidentified. Oh well, fortunately I didn’t actually say “daughter” to the woman at any point. And though I was excited to help a girl get started in the game, helping a boy isn’t bad either. So I’m still going to give them some cards.

New content today:

A new game company

I picked up groceries this morning instead of my usual Friday, because tomorrow I need to drop the car in for annual servicing, and then walk back home in time for an ISO Photography Standards ad-hoc group meeting on depth camera experiments. (Held online via MS Teams.)

I grabbed more mangoes, which are even cheaper this week. We’ll be taking advantage of his mango glut for as long as it lasts. The past two weeks we’ve had R2E2 mangoes, but today I grabbed Calypso mangoes, which are probably my favourite – they’re smaller than R2E2, but sweeter and with a stronger “mango” flavour.

I spent much of the day writing new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I want to photograph a batch tomorrow, after my meeting. I’ve got all but one written, which I’ll polish off quickly tomorrow before I start photographing.

At lunchtime I walked over to my wife’s work to pick up Scully, who she took to work today. I stopped to get some sushi at a place near her work where I hadn’t been before. They made it fresh and it was really good – I’ll have to go back there again. I took Scully home a longer way, via the bakery at Naremburn, where I stopped for a custard tart.

This afternoon on our group chat, I posted this logo which I found on the university staff admin website:

Logo that looks like: workfgrce software

I was commenting on (a) how it looked like “workfgrce SOFTWARE”, (b) the fantastic kerning, and (c) the beautiful grey on graduated grey background colour scheme. A friend of mine said:

If I ever start a company, I’m going to call it something dumb like workfgrce or disnep (but not those since they’ve been done). But then make a logo that makes it look like a normal word with some stupid font. But the dumb thing it looks like is the real name of the company.

Anyone else want to work for a place called GreafGgmes? OMFG that would absolutely never get old. It’s almost enough to motivate me to get off my arse and start a business just to do that.

Another friend replied:

Greafgmes. The two ‘G’s should be one big G.

And so I made this logo for our new company:

logo that looks like: Greaf gmes

We’ll be publishing our new gmes soon!

New content today:

Standards meeting and gaming

This morning I had a meeting at Standards Australia, the follow-up to the recent ISO international standards meeting on Photography that I attended in early November. But first I had to drop Scully off at doggie daycare, and then head into town on the train.

The meeting was routine and not especially notable, except that we had a new project manager from Standards Australia taking care of the administrative stuff. This is the third manager we’ve had in the past three meetings – the previous one only lasted one meeting. I assume because she got moved onto some other committees, not because there’s anything particularly nasty about ours. In fact I think our committee is an easy one for new staff to get used to the drill, as we are fairly consensus-based and non-contentious. There are other Australian standards committees who are much more tricky to handle, as they have representatives from competing companies.

After the meeting, I headed to the game store in town to pick up a couple of board games I’d ordered: the new edition of Camel Up, and Camel Up: Off Season. The guy looked for the games in the area set aside for customer orders to be picked up, but didn’t find them. After some rummaging around out the back he returned with a copy of Off Season, but no Camel Up. He said there’d obviously been a mix-up and a copy hadn’t been set aside for me. So I’ll have to go back another time to get it.

Immediately back home I went to pick up Scully from the daycare. She really loves spending time there, and she is super tired after spending a few hours playing with other dogs.

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. We’ve played some games of Jaipur, Jump Drive, and Just One, and will continue with some others as the night progresses.

New content today:

The man who held our apartments together

Today I received a message from a neighbour. She informed me that there had been a death in the apartment complex. Not just any resident, but one who has lived here since we moved in when the place was newly built, 25 years ago. This man, R.N., had served as the chair of the owners’ corporation executive committee for many years, and continued in other important roles up until his sudden passing yesterday. He was still the person that everyone went to when they had an issue with the building and needed help.

Just a couple of weeks ago I had contacted R.N. myself for an issue with our front door, and he had organised a handyman to come around and fix it. I saw him around often, always saying hello as we passed in the grounds, the garage, a corridor, or wherever. And I think I saw him yesterday morning. I don’t know the circumstances of his death, but my neighbour’s message said it was sudden. I had no knowledge of any health issues that he may have had, so this has come as a big shock. He leaves his wife, who must be devastated. I presume there will be some sort of memorial organised by the residents. It’s a small and fairly closely knit group in these apartments – many of us know each other and socialise together. R.N.’s loss will be sorely felt by many people here. Someone will take over his role as the main curator of the building, and I hope they do as good a job.

In other news, yesterday I had games night at a friend’s place, and I took Scully with me. We played games of Apples to Apples, Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, and Ingenious. One of the host’s young daughters, about 10 years old, joined in for Apples to Apples. She’d never played before and as we were explaining the rules to her, she said, “Oh, it’s like Cards Against Humanity!” (Which, if you’re not aware, is basically exactly the same game in a truly obscene, R-rated, adult version.) Someone said, “Wait, how do you know about Cards Against Humanity?” and her father had to explain that there’s a new “family version” that she’s played.

Today I was a bit tired from the late night and didn’t do too much. I edited some more photos from that Europe trip in June. Here are some ladies from a bakery stall at a small farmers’ market that we checked out in Cologne early one morning. We had a big chat with the older lady and she gave us lots of free samples of various types of bread, which was all delicious.

For dinner, my wife and I walked a couple of suburbs over (about 3 km away) to a new Mexican restaurant that we wanted to try. It was good – a lot more authentic than most Mexican restaurants in Australia (which tend to be much more Tex-Mex), but also rather expensive. We’d go back there again, but maybe not too quickly.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Ark Nova

Today was games night, at a friend’s place. A few people couldn’t make it, so we only had four – which was perfect for a game of Ark Nova. I’ve played this once before, about six months ago, and wanted to give it another go. It’s a long game, and we began about 7pm, and didn’t finish until around 10:30. I came third, but had fun playing, so that was good.

The reasons I’m still up tonight writing this afterwards is that I made a loaf of sourdough this morning and set it aside to prove during the day, intending to bake it around 4pm before I went out for games. But my wife got home from work just before 6pm and said, “When were you going to bake this bread?”

If I let it prove overnight and try to bake it in the morning it’s going to be a mushy mess, so I had to bake it when I got home from game – now. Which means I need to stay up for an hour after I got home, rather than fall straight into bed.

Earlier today I started marking the final project reports for the university image processing course. I haven’t had time up to now, but I need to get them done over the weekend, as the professor has set a deadline for the marking to be completed. So guess what I’ll be doing all weekend?

New content today:

And another quick late night post

I think I still need to catch up a little on sleep after that ISO meeting a few days ago where I was waking up before 4am each morning. But I’m getting there.

This morning I had my weekly face to face ethics class at the local school with my Year 6 group. Half of them were away today, doing an orientation day at a nearby high school, since they’ll all be moving on to high school next year, after the Christmas holidays. (This is different in some countries, but here in Australia primary school is Years K-6 and high school is years 7-12.) Anyway, the remaining kids suggested that because half the class were away we should do something different and just have a general conversation about some topic of their choice. Not wanting half the class to miss the conclusion of the Determinism topic, I indulged them, and we actually talked about high school for most of the lesson. I made sure to steer the discussion to thought-provoking questions, like asking the kids if they thought they’d keep contact with friends who were not going to the same high school, or if they thought that expectations of behaviour and maturity would be different there, and so on. It was actually really interesting.

I asked the kids what they wanted to do after school as a career. One girl wanted to be a lawyer. Another girl said, “Three things. Number one: an artist.” Now, before the kids arrive, I get their early and set up the classroom by moving desks and making a circle of chairs so we can sit around it and talk with no distractions. I often have a few minutes to wait for them, and I’ve looked at the artwork they have pinned up all around the classroom, and I had noticed that this particular girl’s work is good, possibly the best artwork in the class. So I mentioned that I’d seen her artwork on the walls and thought it was good.

She continued, “Number two: A YouTuber.” So then we had a discussion about the realities of being a YouTuber, and how likely it was that you’d actually make any money out of it. Most of the kids were fairly realistic about it, saying you have to be really lucky to get subscribers and then the pay rate is pretty low per view, so you need millions of views. They actually seemed to know more about the details than I do! And then one of the boys said that he is currently making about $300 a month doing Twitch streaming of games! Wow.

Anyway, after this diversion I asked the girl what her third career choice was, expecting something else along similar lines, and she said, “Number three: a neuroscientist.”

After getting home from the class, I took a train into town to pick up a game I’d ordered: Azul: Queen’s Garden. My wife and I enjoy the first three Azul games, so I wanted to get this fourth one in the series. I browsed around a bit looking for any other suitable games to buy for the fortnightly games nights with my friends, but didn’t find anything that struck my fancy.

I got home just before midday and then went for a long walk with my wife and Scully, over to the Italian bakery at Cammeray (this is different to the other, closer bakery at Naremburn that we go to more frequently), where I had a slice of pizza and a small pastry with custard and raisins in it. This place makes the best pastry.

This afternoon I tuned into the live NASA feed of the Artemis 1 launch. I was a little worried that the countdown delay would push the launch into my online ethics classes for the evening, but they managed to launch it just before 6pm my time, so I got to see it take off just before beginning my classes.

New content today:

Games night and housecleaning

Friday was games night with my friends, and this week I hosted at my place. A few of the guys couldn’t make it, so we only had four of us, but that was good because we got stuck into a nice four-player game of Viticulture (Essential Edition).

This is a board game in which each player operates a vineyard and competes to fulfil wine orders in order to gain victory points. To fulfil an order—which are given on cards that you draw from a deck—you have to have the correct wines of the required quality. To make wine, you have to have grapes. To get grapes, you need to harvest from fields that have grape vines planted. And so you need to plant grape vines in your fields as the first step. Turn sequences go in years – you plant grapes in summer, and harvest and make wine in winter. You also have access to decks of cards that provide special people who give you the ability to do extra things or combine actions in useful ways. Other things you can do include training extra workers, or building various structures to help your vineyard become more efficient in various different ways. So there are lots of options.

İt’s fairly intricate, but straightforward to learn and understand. We all had fun playing it, and it was a moderately tight finish, although I think I concentrated on the wrong thing early on and ended up coming last.

After this we played a game of Welcome to the Moon. This has multiple different boards, but we actually played the same tower building one I’ve played before. These two games pretty much filled the evening.

Today I got stuck into housecleaning work. I cleaned the shower and bathroom, vacuumed the house, washed the kitchen floor, changed the damp absorbers in the closets and storage chests, cleaned all the spider webs off the balcony, and swept and cleaned the balcony of leaves and dust.

This morning I did the grocery shopping, and saw that fresh basil was o special, so I got some and for dinner tonight made pesto from scratch for pasta.

New content today:

Games night, and a very special lunch

Friday was online board games night with my friends, so I didn’t have time to write a blog entry. I took Scully for the usual couple of walks, had two ethics classes, and completed another week of Irregular Webcomic! strips assembled from the photos I took a couple of weeks ago.

For games we played Fruit Picking, Can’t Stop Express, Point Salad, CuBirds, Kingdomino, Just One, Stella: Dixit Universe, 7 Wonders. I managed to win the games of Fruit Picking and Kingdomino. Which is better than I usually do!

Today we dropped off Scully at doggie daycare and my wife and I went into the city for a super special lunch, to celebrate a major wedding anniversary. We went to Nel, a very fancy restaurant. It’s a fixed degustation menu – you just show up and they serve you – there’s no choice of different dishes, though they do cater to dietary requirements, so we forewarned them that my wife is vegetarian, and I don’t eat anything with coffee or tea in it.

The current menu is “A Night on Broadway”, inspired by Broadway musicals. Each dish was named after a song or feature from a stage musical. Here’s what we had:

The Book of Jesus Christ. A sweet potato tuille wth smoked eel cream. (My wife had a vegetarian cream.)

Is This Your Wand? Cheese and onion eclair with mushroom tapenade.

Frosty’s Diner. Beef brisket croquette with burger sauce, tomato water and basil oil shots. (Wife had a cheese croquette.) This was really good. The croquette was tender and juicy, and chasing it down with the tomato/basil shot was amazing – very flavourful.

Hakuna Matata. Pineapple glazed brioche with beef fat butter. (Wife had plain butter.)

Masquerade. Kingfish tartare with native plum jam, macadamia cream, apple and cucumber sauce, freeze dried rose petals. (Wife had smoked tofu tartare with the same toppings.)

French Revolution. Cheese soufflé with cauliflower soup.

Please Sir, Can I Have Some More? Pan fried salmon on tomato pearl barley porridge, pecorino, chives, black onion. This was really good. (Wife had marinated eggplant replacing the fish.)

Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina. Seared Murray cod, charred onion, mushroom, beef au jus, coriander parsley mojo verde. Reading the menu, I assumed this course would be beef, as it came in the right place, and that’s what Argentine is famous for, so I was surprised to get fish again. It was delicious. When I got home, I saw on the restaurant’s Instagram that this dish is indeed supposed to be beef, but it is cooked with coffee – so my dietary requirement kicked in and they replaced the beef with fish. (Wife had confit carrot instead of the beef/fish.)

Wicked Witch’s Hat. Pistachio daquoise, lime sorbet, passionfruit mousse, apple tuille. This was a really amazing dessert. It looks just like a witch’s hat! lots of good flavours and different textures.

Milk and Kibble. Toasted barley gelato, milk and dark chocolate pearls, sugar crisp, warm chocolate milk.

L’Amour: Petit-fours of chocolate, raspberry sauce, vanilla cream.

It was an amazing lunch. We spent 2.5 hours there, and had a really lovely time. On the way home we popped into a few shops to look at some things we wanted to check out. I bought the 6th and final volume of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England, finishing of this history series that I started reading several years ago.

Back home, I spent the rest of the afternoon working hard at housecleaning. I vacuumed, and then I did a task I’ve been putting off for months – sweeping and washing the balcony. It still had autumn leaves on it! And lots of spider webs and dust. I swept it all up and then washed the tiles down with soapy water before rinsing it off. Much better now. I really should clean it every week, but it gets nasty during winter.

New content yesterday:

New content today: