'Tis the season to be shopping

Tomorrow is Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the American retail year.

I don't want to go shopping tomorrow, if at all possible. I know that several groups out there on the tubes advocate less consumerism: Buy Nothing Day comes to mind.

Right now, I support not buying useless crap. I can't promise that I will not spend a dime tomorrow, but I do not plan on camping out at Best Buy the previous day (no lie, this is happening), but I may still need to go to the grocery or hardware store to get things done.

But: 'Tis also the season to get presents! How do I reconcile these two opposite desires? With compromise, of course. For my circle of friends, I want to do a Secret Santa/Kris Kringle/buy one present event. This gets people giving, which is allegedly the point of the season; prevents un- or intentional snubbery by not including someone in gifting; and is an excuse for a party.

Happy All Saint's Day

Brief Halloween report.

Cat was "A Hahcky Mahm from Minnesohtah, don'tcha know." She stayed in character the whole evening, freaking many people out.

I was fucking metal. (I later realized I went to work with a t-shirt that said "Metal Up your Ass.")






You can't see Cat's lovingly hand-painted vintage Danzig scene on the jacket. Best quote all day: "Mischa, a toasted bagel isn't very metal."

Greek Festival!

No, it's not a fraternity/sorority thing. It's the 35th annual Greek Festival here in the city, celebrating food and dancing and Greek culture and carnival and shopping and food and the whole everything! I haven't been in years, but I hear they have several whole roast lambs. Maybe I'll remember the camera. My mouth is watering, just thinking of the possibilities.

I don't know of any actual Greek games off the top of my head expect for those that are merely Greek-themed. No, the Olympics don't count.

An end to Mardi Gras; a return to normalcy

Chris Rose sums up life after Mardi Gras:

I love this time of year. I really love this time of year in this place. It's like nothing else in America, and we say that all the time around here, but this time -- this time -- we really mean it.

This is our first Mardi Gras since the hurricane, no offense to John's parties back in Austin. It's such a damn relief to actually be back to normal in New Orleans.

If you don't understand, ask me. I'll do what I can to explain.

Everywhere else, it's just Tuesday

I'm aware there's some sort of American football game happening either yesterday or today, and there's something about the Presidency this week.

Happy Mardi Gras!

Winter-een-mas, Mardi Gras

Hello and happy Winter-een-mas, the best gaming holiday you've never heard of.

W-E-M is the last week of January, the 25th through the 31st. Originally a video-gaming only holiday, it's really more accurate to say that it's a celebration of gaming and people who game.

This WEMas, I want to get in more gaming than usual. I want to play a different kind of game each day. Tonight, I played some board games: Ricochet Robots, Manhattan, and Hey That's My Fish. What about the rest of the week? Video games? Sportings games? Invented games? Imaginary games?

Oh, and don't forget: it's Carnival season! Mardi Gras is super early this year, falling on February 5th. Don't forget: Mardi Gras itself is the last day of the holiday, so don't show up and expect fun things to happen on Wednesday. Show up the week before and leading up to Mardi Gras; come spend your money. "New Orleans: closer than Rio!"

Day 365

Fire. Food. Friends. Fun.

Happy New Year!

Hello, computer

Back in NOLA, back on the 'tubes. Hope yours was jolly.

Presents

For a variety of reasons (Holiday shopping, BGG Secret Santa, Birthdays), I just realized that my Amazon wishlist still had my Austin address on it, not to mention an email address I haven't checked in more than five years. I sure hope nobody has bought me any surprises in the last three months.

Now I really need to go through and prioritize things.

Italian Thanksgiving

What better way to celebrate the holiday than with family and good food?

I had turtle soup with a very nice roux; the Brucciolone, which at Salvatore Ristorante in Fat City is tenderized veal wrapped around cheese, vegetables, secret-who-knows-what-spice and an egg all over penne; and warm bread pudding with an unusually delightful cinnamon sauce.


What did you eat?

Wishlists

Curses, I missed a day! But I shall persevere and continue trying to keep my output up.

I have a high-class problem. How do I let people know that I want this as a present without accidentally getting more than one? Perhaps I should wait until I have a better address.

Speaking of presents, BGG is doing a Secret Santa. This is awesome with the downside that I might have to ship internationally. Oh well. I suspect that I'll just order from a foreign FLGS and have them ship locally.

Other things I need to do before it gets too close to the holiday/birthday/gift-giving season: Update my wishlists at Amazon, FunAgain, and ThinkGeek.


NaNoWriMo word count: 2877 (way behind)

I love April Fool's Day

Seriously, it's like the national holiday of geeks everywhere.

Google's in on it.

So is BoardGameGeek, not to mention that classically forgotten game, Poisson d'Avril.

Slashdot gives us a good article on top pranks.

Who could forget the quaint Kremvax?

Or IP over Avian Carrier? (That's teh webbernets flying around on little birdies, kids.)

The day is young! Do you have Prince Albert in a can?

Happy Mardi Gras!

Haydel's includes porcelain figurines with their King Cakes. What you see here is a two-inch FEMA trailer. Ain't it cute?

So far, nobody in the office has gotten the baby. It's a little odd to have to explain what King Cake means; not only are my office mates not New Orleanians, but the majority (and the plurality, for the record) were not born in the United States. We often discuss America (I am an American) and Texas (I'm not a Texan) and their foreign perspective. It's fascinating to expose and be exposed to other cultures.

King Cake 101:

1. They're delicious.
2. They taste a little like cinnamon coffee cake, but heavier.
3. Icing and colored sugar(purple for Justice, green for Faith, and gold for Power) cover the top.
4. You get the baby, you get to buy the next one.
5. Sometimes they're filled, with cream cheese or apple or the like, but usually they're plain.
6. Buy from Gambino's, Haydel's, or Randazzo's. They all make good King Cake.
   

Any questions?

We've had a friend from back home stay with us over the last few days, and the weekend has been full of golfing fun. Between virtual golf on the Wii and real live miniature golf (sadly no windmill), I've played more golf this weekend than you can shake a club at.

Geekily, this xkcd comic still makes me grin.

Dinner and dessert

My grandmother shipped us muffulettas and king cake!










Josh and Megan came over to eat with Cat and I; we had a veritable feast. Truth be told, my grandmother shipped us three muffs for four people, which is enough food to last us for days. I'll probably bring the leftover king cake to game night, since the office is getting their own on Tuesday. Nobody got the baby.

What did you have for dinner?

Valentine

Valentine's Day is today, which you should already know if you're even vaguely connected to any kind of published or broadcast media. Chances are, you fall into one of five categories with respect to this holiday.

1. Love it
2. Hate it
3. Looking forward to a nice evening
4. Indifferent
5. Self-consciously indifferent to avoid crying alone in the dark

It's also pretty likely that you've belonged to more than one of those categories in your past.

If you're in the "Love it" category, plan for next year to remail your mushy stuff via one of the small towns in the States named Valentine.

Whoops, I nearly forgot your obligatory link to Wikipedia.

Birthday roleplaying

Scott and Jen hosted yesternight's RPG session, and they surprised me with a chocolate birthday cake!

"Hieronymous" ran a one-shot of Hystoire de Fou, an RPG by French author Denis Gerfaud- the same fellow who created Rêve. The premise is something out of Terry Gilliam's idle nightmares, where characters are suddenly in an alternate world of surreal madness.

At one point, we all rolled on a chart to see what sort of strange clothing we were wearing in the mad world. Someone quipped: "An RPG with a fashion accessory table? That's how you know it's French." One of us had on ice skates, another had yellow high-heeled shoes that fit perfectly, and I had some weird kind of sock with traction rubber on the sole. (Yes, evidently there's a word for such a thing in French.)

The session itself was a little off-kilter, since it had been a while since we'd last roleplayed. The game has a few interesting things going for it: Character creation is done on-the-fly, so it feels sort of like the Matrix when Trinity needs to pilot a helicopter. "Of course I can climb! Even though I'm a distinguished surgeon, I have a rock-climbing hobby." "Naturally, I can fight! Even though I'm a dirty hippy slacker, I once took Tai Chi." It was fun to make up in-character justifications for why you suddenly have the skill to do things that you might not normally.

Another interesting aspect of the game is that you can disbelieve nearly anything, and if you roll successfully while your insanity word (mine was "ISOLINEAR"), you can reveal a new shape to whatever it is. So instead of being beaten with baseball bats, we could've been beaten with cotton candy instead. The whole session felt a bit like a fever dream.

At any rate, I had delicious cake in reality.

It's my birthday

So far, I got: gift cards, cool geeky toys, and Cat got me a cool German mechanical metronome! Woohoo! I busted out a didj last night a played for a little bit and it really helped me keep my rhythm. I can't wait to practice in earnest.

Oddly enough, I received two pirate-themed birthday cards in a seemingly uncoordinated fashion. Maybe they're trying to tell me something?

Later tonight is dinner with my bro and our respective ladies at Katz's (a 24-hour deli), with possibly a game or two to round out the evening. I also believe the Renegades are having a roleplaying game this week for me.

Can you guess how old I am? Hint: it's a power of two, which is geekily awesome in and of itself.

New Year Resolutions

This year, I resolve to:

De-clutter. I'm going to craigslist or eBay one thing a week, minimum. This includes trading/selling any media I have: books, games, CDs, etc. This also means actually throwing crap away and unpacking/sorting boxes of stuff I've been hauling around, getting rid of clothing that doesn't fit me, and trying to simplify. I'm a packrat by nature, so this is a big one.

Publish. By the end of the year, I will have at least one game available for purchase by strangers. If this means revamping 1984 Prime and going through Lulu, or finding a printer and putting out a card game, or photocopying the back of a napkin and handing it out with pencils on the street corner, I'm going to get at least one game out there.

Blog. I will blog more regularly, focusing on at least one movie review a week and more timely game session reports.

A few other bloggers I read have posted their resolutions.

I'm using these tips to come up with a few resolutions I'll actually keep instead of dozens of "to-do" style items that I'll let slip. Like most of us, I have a good number of other hopes/dreams/desires/self-improvement things on my (to borrow a term from GTD) Someday/Maybe list. Some of these things I'm already making significant progress on- particularly in the realm of personal health (yay, insurance and Diet Dr Pepper), but I'm going to try and focus on achieving a few resolutions this year. As my mom says, "Done is better than perfect."

Steve Pavlina and Alexander Kharlamov also have New Year's articles worth reading.

In the shadow of the year

Pleasant news! I do not work on Monday. Happy New Year to all!

broadband

This marks the first time I'm on broadband since I left Austin for California. I'm in a coffeeshop in oldtown Salinas, drinking an average hot chai and killing the ton of spam I've managed to collect.

I could rant about airports and the loss of privacy in the wake of false security, but the bile isn't fresh.

I could take about the first day of actual sunshine we've had on our trip since New Orleans. Rain in Houston, rain while flying, rain while driving, fog while flying. We wound up circling San Jose for an hour and forty-five minutes waiting for the weather to clear. For a while, we didn't know if the pilot would land us in San Fran, San Jose (where Cat's parents waited to pick us up) or Oakland (of oak.oakland.edu fame).

I have a camera full of pictures, precious few of which are of Carl and Jackie's wedding- sadly, we left the camera in the car.

I would like to mention that I've played twenty-plus sessions of Wits and Wagers (BGG, BUY ME!) since Monday. Beyond passing the "Let's Play Again!" test, it has also passed the "Can we play without you?" and "Are we playing tonight?" tests. I'm a little floored- I suspected the mix of trivia and gambling would go over well, but How could I suspect I'd play so many games? I'm starting to need more question cards.

I have a new didgeridoo! A present to myself with courier servies courtesy of Cat's cousin, holidaying in Australia. Pix soon.

We will soon return to your irregularly scheduled game blogging, complete with a list of presents.

I've got some productivity and lifehackery things in store for the New Year, too.

I am not an Internet addict.