Setters of the Stone Age...is more fun than I expected

When it comes to games, I'm biased against expansion sets and variations. We have Settlers of Catan, it's nice, it's simple, it's time-tested, people love it, I already know how to play it. Why would I want to play a variation?

Especially when the variants are bigbox games like Settlers of the Stone Age, which can cost as much as $50, though it looks like you can get it for more like $25 from Amazon.

But...we bumped into a copy at a Goodwill for practically nothing, and I have to say that the changes in this version of Settlers of Catan are pretty interesting. The big ones boil down to this:

• No roads; instead, you build and move explorers. These guys can go anywhere, but it costs you resources to create them and to move them.
• Instead of buying development cards to get random advantages, you pass through special spaces on the board with your explorer.
• There are four technology ladders you participate in. Every turn you can purchase advances in these. At first these really put me off, but they're really simple.
  
• Hexes become desert and stop producing resources. This is a huge difference. The permanent destruction of spaces means old settlements must be moved to new places However, the victory points for creating settlements don't go away, so the game introduces counters that you pick up when you build a new settlement.
• There's no promotion of settlements to cities. Instead, there's one kind of settlement, a camp.

I'd say that the game is a bit more complicated than plain Settlers, but contains some very fun ideas. The game's rules cooperate to push you out of Africa, where you start out.

Someone decided this guy was the Zodiac killer, from afar

Today I am fascinated by this article from the Washington Monthly, Confessions of a Non-serial Killer, where a professor explains how some nut decided that he must be the Zodiac killer, and has been harassing him ever since, long-distance. The professor's name fit some initials that the nut had decided were significant.

If you bought a caster board and you have failed to learn it

...then you should contact me, because I'd love to get a used caster board. It seems like the sort of thing people would buy and then not actually learn to use and then sell in a garage sale along with the roller blades.

I've got a battlesuit and you don't

I came up with this on Monday. It's the title for a video game. I imagine a game in which the player bounces around in a powered-armor suit with blasters and a short-range jet pack. You would buy the game because of it's name, mainly. Therefore I'm done with the creative part of this, anyone wanting to purchase the rights to design a game with this title can contact me.

The ravens: the poetic impulse

The seven ravens rode down from the tower on the hill on kameels of azure and scarlet, as bold as the breaking day that urged them on. From my perch atop the mill tower on Farnham street, I could see them leaving a dust trail in their haste. I marked the leader as he weaved through the scattering of travellers on the dirt road, then slowed as the road became cobbled near the town. 

I was working with my elf refugee setting, worrying about whether calling my races "elves" and "goblins" was problematic. They're pretty alien, not much like the traditional fantasy genre labels (I hope), and yet I am going for an inversion of stereotypes that doesn't make sense without the labels. So I'm sticking with the labels so far. But I experimented with using other names, and the first thing I came up with was Ravens and Skinks. 

The elves have some birdlike qualities, while the goblins have some reptile and amphibian ones, so that's where the labels come from; these labels at least evoke the right image. The text at the start of this post is an experiment at using these labels. I also tried simply taking a story and replacing the words "elf" and "goblin".

This was worth doing, but the main thing that came out of it was that the label "raven" is highly evocative for me, and apparently makes me want to write epic poetry.

I have no idea what happens to the ravens next, though. That's as far as I've gotten. 

Retyping a story from scratch

As I've mentioned, I've been doing an exercise where I daily retype chunks of an existing story by a known writer. I've found this to be enlightening and a good antidote to the tendency to just get absorbed in a good story when I'm trying to analyze it.

I'm considering applying this to editing, by retyping a story from scratch. 

It seems kind of crazy, having worked with a word processor for so long. I've had access to a computer since my first high-school essays, so I've rarely been forced to retype anything.  When I first used an Apple II when I was small, I even tried to make a simple text editor, before I quite knew what I wanted. 

I'm pretty willing to try other things, though. I often work with a paper notebook to generate new prose, and it surprises me how often people often comment on that. It's got lots of advantages: nothing is more portable, the save function is amazingly foolproof, and the lack of editing tools pushes you towards forward motion. It's a different process, and that's a good tool to have. 

At the same time, I credit the word processor and the computer for first making me believe that it might be possible to create something so labor-intensive as a novel. The idea of retyping every last thing to fix a simple typo would be maddening.

But editing can be a crutch. Sometimes you need to start over. I'm working on a rewrite of a very old story and I feel like every word needs a good hard look; retyping it from scratch might be the best thing for it, if I'm willing to commit the time. 

Chloe paddles upstream

Yesterday Tanya went to run some errands and I stayed home feeling blah with allergies. Chloe was off at a Dragon Dance performance. 

She returned determined to build an oar.

I just wanted to take a nap, but I had Chloe coming up to me every five minutes. 

'Can I use this plastic container for my oar?' 'Can I use this metal rod'?

She knew she was going to swim at her grandfather's apartment the next day, she had a new inflatable raft, and she wanted an oar to propel it.

I decided I could either yell at her until she cried, or get up out of my chair and help her out. I found a piece of thin plywood, she drew an oval shape on it, and I cut it out with the scroll saw. Then we cut a broom handle down and nailed the wood to it.

I wanted to cut a slit in the broom handle to hold the ply, drill holes, and bolt through that, but neither of us had the patience for it and my hand saw wouldn't cut a thick enough slit, so we just nailed it on. I dunno whether it'll hold. 

We spray painted it silver, because silver and black were the only spray colors I could find.

This reminds me of the many things I made as a kid from scrap wood I found around the house, and how firmly I believed all such scraps were free for the taking. Now when my kids go hunting, I have to fight my own proprietary feelings for my scraps.  

Saw the tiniest fawn yesterday when biking to work

I couldn't believe how small this fawn was. No more than 18 inches tall. I saw it stepping carefully along on stilt-legs, and was able to creep within 3 feet to photograph it. No angry mother appeared.

Pocket wifi router uses cell signal and battery

Here's an interesting piece of tech: a router (NY Times article) that gets signal from the cellular network, and can sit in your pocket, giving you wifi access wherever you want to sit with your laptop, and without a card protruding from your laptop or dangling off of a cable.