hollyqueen and I have hosted generic game day events before. However, this time we have a few board games that I would like to play. So instead of a generic invitation we'll be playing three specific games. The games are: Hacker, RoboRally and Arkham Horror. As you can see that gives us a wide variety to play.

This Sunday, July 12th, I'll open the doors at 2pm. (Being a lazy Sunday who wants to get up earlier than that?) Come play games, socialize and have fun.

Also, note that the next Crafty night is the day after. Monday July 13th at 7pm. I'll be varnishing a boat. What will you do? :)

I've just finished Mass Effect and before that Fable: The Lost Chapters. I enjoyed both games and am looking for another to fill the void. I like RPGs but wasn't fond of the FPS elements in Mass Effect. (Ok, I really (really) enjoyed using the sniper rifle.) This makes me concerned about the amount of FPS combat in Fallout 3, but what I have seen of the game looks fun. Fable II is also on my list of possible games.

The question is what games might I be missing? I used to play a lot of RPGs on the PC and PlayStation but I've been out of the loop for a while so I was hoping my friends could point me in the right direction.

I posted before about enjoying card games and wanting to host some. Well its past time that I should have, so I am. On Wednesday March 18th I welcome people to join me at 7pm to learn and play Whist.

As I mentioned before Whist is similar to Spades. The differences are the trump suit changes each deal and there is no bidding. I think it is easier to learn Whist before Spades because there isn’t any bidding and the scoring is simpler.

For your amusement here is an article from the New York Times from July 1912. I used the picture of Horatio Hornblower as he was known as an avid Whist player in the books by C.S. Forester.

I enjoy socializing over a game of cards. A long time ago I used to play quite often with friends. I joke about majoring in Spades when I was in college but I certainly studied the game more than I did my classwork. I’ve missed it and I want to play again. I want to play enough that I’m willing to host games, teach games and learn any new games people would like to play.

Some of the games I know and like to play are Spades, Whist, Hearts, Gin Rummy, Rummy. My favorite is Whist, which is very similar to Spades, but I enjoy them all. I find Pagat is a great source for rules and information about card games.

Would you be interested in getting together once a month for an evening of cards? A group of four can play a round of games in a couple of hours which fits nicely into a week night which might otherwise be idle.

If you want to play go ahead and join the_leber_expd. We're having discussions to help everyone get started and answer questions. Don't worry about being perfect or ready to send your letters right away. Not everyone would start at the same time if this was a real society anyway. What I do want is to make sure you get the help you need.

M’mselle Chatton,

Warm greetings and my compliments to you. I hope this humble missive finds you in most excellent health and wellness. I was honored and pleased to receive your letter requesting more information about The Leber Expeditions. Without further ado, I shall endeavor to explain my purpose.

Spending the winter here in München I longed for the days when I traveled the world. You might have heard about my younger days in India. Traveling around the countryside I was amazed by the wonders I beheld. Having nothing at home to keep me from wandering I began preparations for a new expedition. The problem that crops up is how to enjoy all this world has to offer? Age brings wisdom and the knowledge that my time on this globe is not great enough to complete a great expedition. The inspiration struck. An epiphany one might even say.

Why not use my fortunes to sponsor others of like mind and proclivities? So began the formation of The Leber Expeditions, a society of explorers. They are tasked with the mission of exploring the world and mailing journal entries back to the society. These entries shall be bound into a book for all to read and enjoy. With this in mind I’ve founded The Leber Expeditions and posted the following advertisement.

People wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, harsh weather, long hours. Safe return doubtful. Honour in event of success. Apply to Herr Leber c/o The Leber Expeditions, München.

My hope is that, as you have done, people will mail in their applications to tell me about themselves and where they plan to explore. I will review each application and those of good character, such as yourself, will be welcomed to the society, sent their traveling papers and the first stipend to fund an expedition.

Without further ado, allow me to welcome you as a full member of The Leber Expeditions.

I beg to remain, M’mselle, your obt. svt. &c.,
Herr Remig Leber
The Leber Expeditions

This is the secret project I've been hinting about for the past few days. A letter writing game I've devised for our mutual amusement and enlightenment. Please go look at the_leber_expd for details. You can ask questions here or there, but there would be the preferred arena for out of game discussions. I'm very excited about this.

Blizzard owns my soul. Yes they do! There’s still some time to wait but at lunch today I picked up Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War. Now I’ll have something to occupy my idle moments while I’m waiting for StarCraft II and Diablo III.

Have any of you picked them up again, or still play, and want to meet up on Battle.net sometime? I should be all installed and ready to go tonight. hollyqueen was a meanie and wouldn’t let my play sick to go home after lunch. (She takes such good care of me.)

After the "fun" on Friday the weekend was much better. Saturday hollyqueen and I spent the day together shopping for craft supplies. I was exhausted but happy as we spent the evening working on projects together.

I spent the first part of Sunday going to see The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) with my Little Brother. It was a good movie and we both enjoyed it. There were several trailers for movies that we both want to see. I did feel a bit of a stab when he hadn't heard of Indiana Jones. You kids get off my lawn!!! After the movie hollyqueen headed over to Nerdvana to play games with loree, sirramnis and ogremarco.

Monday was a holiday for me so I had made all kinds of plans to do some chores around the house. Instead I had a massive headache and spent the day playing WoW and getting my toon to level 66. Go me!

walbourn is good and wise! walbourn tells me happy things! walbourn was right!

Mass Effect is coming to the PC!

Speaking of games, hollyqueen picked up a copy of Zombie Fluxx yesterday. We played a few games last night and I thought it was a lot of fun.

If you've played Fluxx then you know most of the game. ZF adds Creeper cards which are the zombies. The Keeper cards include weapons and the Goals can be won only if you have zombies or if you have no zombies. For example, the goal "I'll Hold Them Off!" is won if you have a weapon and are the only player to have zombies. There is also the Ungoal which causes all players to lose because the zombies win.

Like Fluxx I think it's a great game for a casual gathering. It doesn't take long to learn the rules. It's a bit slow keeping track of what rules are in effect at first but it quickly gets easier with practice. If you like Fluxx and you like zombies I would pick up a copy. (Or just invite me over and I'll bring it along. ;)

Based on recommendations from sirriamnis I gave hollyqueen a copy of [Unhallowed Metropolis][uh] for her birthday. Now she’s lost it for the near future… We were enjoying a relaxed afternoon and I picked up the book and started reading. I didn’t put it down until bed time and I brought it to work with me to read during lunch.

So my Queen and I are looking for a role playing game to join. We have Unhallowed Metropolis and GURPS books and are open to other systems. hollyqueen would like to play in a non-fantasy setting while I’m open to anything. Anyone have a couple of openings?

Tonight: hollyqueen and I are going to my company holiday party in Renton with Hit Explosion. Free food and drinks should make up for having to drive to Renton during rush hour.

Saturday: Cleaning the house in the morning while waiting for shadowmatt to arrive. Then he and I are heading over to the Winter Beer Fest to get our drink on. We will be joined by intrepid_reason and fallenpegasus later in the day. Then it's back home to grab hollyqueen and reward her with dinner before she has to put up with the shadowmatt and I playing Guitar Hero into the early hours of the morning.

Sunday: Say goodbye to shadowmatt as he makes his way back to the heathen lands down south. Spend some time with my Little Brother. Then hollyqueen and I have a date for dinner and a movie. It's her turn to pick the movie so I don't know what we'll see yet.

Today I enjoyed: Visiting with friends. Eating some tasty turkey. Playing games. Finding a new fun game that I'll have to get for myself and generally had a pretty dang good day. I even made up for the really stupid move that cost me about 4 hours of play time in Final Fantasy XII yesterday.

That is all...

Today cheesentoast signed the papers for her own apartment which will be available on Monday. So she'll be moving out next week into her own slice of the "American" dream. On one hand I'm going to miss having her close at hand. On the other our place is cramped with three people so having more breathing room will be nice. It's not like she's flying off to the wilds of southern California or another country... ;)

hollyqueen has decided to keep her desk downstairs which means I'll have the upstairs room mostly to myself. I've been thinking of what to do with the space and here are some of the things under consideration:

• Move the games and puzzles under the stairs so they are easily accessible when we are ready to host some friends.
• File all the boxes of papers into the filing cabinets.
• Move a lot of non-clothing stuff in the bedroom closets into the office closet to give hollyqueen more room.
• Setup the old PS2 with the dance pad and the alternate input on my monitor for some DDR goodness.
• Dig out some radio gear and setup a small 2-meter station.
• Rearrange the books on the shelves to sort the books by category.
• Create a small crafting/project space and organize all my projects.

Basically I want to make a space where I can spend some time working on my existing projects and hobbies instead of going out buying new ones. One key thing I want to maintain is the ability for the room to be used for guests. It would be great if people could come for a visit and we didn't have to stick them on the floor in the corner.

I'll need a name for this area. I'm thinking about the cheesentoast Memorial Research Lab. CMRL for short. ;)

Thanks to tithonium I am again a ROCK GOD as I play Guitar Hero III!!! My allegiance to my most benevolent dictator has again been rewarded.

GH3 has a new co-op career mode so I'm looking for someone who would like to rock out with me. There are some songs that are only available in co-op career mode and they call out for release!

Speaking of players are there any aspiring drummers out there? Rock Band is coming and hollyqueen and I have singing and one of the guitars covered. We could use another guitar player and a drummer to round out our band. Actually I wouldn't mind anyone wanting to play any part. There's enough to go around with all the Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Hero and Rock Band games.

As you all should know by now I'm a huge fan of the Guitar Hero games. I've been suffering because I was only to play Guitar Hero 3 once. The next day I kept getting disc read errors. So I exchanged the game for a new copy. This time I didn't even get to play once. The first time I got a disc read error. Grrrr...

Does anyone in the Seattle area have a PS2? I would like to try the game somewhere else to see if I was unlucky enough to get a second defective disc or if my PS2 has started to suffer from the problems the rest of the early models had.

Friday cheesentoast and I went to Bellevue Square to spend money at the Apple Store and GameStop. The Apple Store was packed with folks waiting to buy Leopard, so we skipped that mess. GameStop didn’t have the game I wanted so we didn’t spend too much time there either.

Saturday started with $little and I going to the Northwest Railway Museum in Snoqualmie. Too bad I didn’t check this out earlier because we could have gone for a ride on one of the trains. Not only did we enjoy the trains and the museum, but we had a good time talking on the way there and back. The best part for me was finding out that the sailing trip we had a few weeks before was a fun time.

That evening hollyqueen and I went out for dinner and some shopping. We tried the new Herfy’s Burgers in Redmond. We both enjoyed the food, it was much better than the Chinese place that used to be there. Next we headed to Fred Meyer to look for games and a scarf for hollyqueen. No game for me, but she found a nice pink fuzzy scarf that’s long enough for three people.

After FM we went to EB Games at Redmond Town Center. Score! Not only did I find Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and Picross DS, but on a whim I asked if they were going to have any copies of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. The sales guy said probably not if I didn’t pre-order a copy. So, expecting the answer to be no, I asked if it was still possible to pre-order the game. It turns out I was wrong because I could still pre-order the game. So I did.

Sunday was a nice and lazy day for the most part. hollyqueen and I had a good long snuggle before getting out of bed. We needed groceries, I had books on hold at the library and GH3 was waiting at EB. I dropped hollyqueen and cheesentoast off at the store. I headed to EB Games and picked up the game then headed to the library. I had about 15 minutes to wait for them to open so I started playing Picross. After the library opened cheesentoast messaged me that they were done. So I grabbed my holds from the shelf and collected them and we all went home.

After a tasty sausage lunch made by cheesentoast I cracked open GH3 and worked my way through the game on the easy mode. There are a lot of dang songs. I was very happy to find out that the new developers actually made a better Guitar Hero game with this new version. There more interesting venues and the entertaining cut-scene videos. My favorite bit is that some of the songs are done by the original artists. I was able to get 5 stars for all the songs except Raining Blood by Slayer. My hands were too tired so I gave it a break.

The evening was filled with catching up on a few of our shows and a wonderful dinner of bean soup made by hollyqueen. Ah, a very good weekend.

Hi, my name is hollyking and I’m a puzzle addict. I also have an intense addiction to alternative reality stories. So I was pleased to find Invisible Games by yuki_onna and justbeast. I think it’s best to let yuki_onna explain things:

This is a collaboration between justbeast and I, and will go on for a good long while. I have never collaborated with anyone before, but this has proceeded at breakneck speed. It may take awhile for you to see where we’re going–though the title should twig at least some of you to the concept–but if you trust us, and walk with us into the dark, we will take you on a tour of a secret history and a secret future, and it will grow to be beautiful and complex and full of terrible longing. I can safely say I have never tried anything remotely like this before.

Though there will be graphics, this is not a webcomic.

Though there is fiction, this is not a novel.

Though there are rules, though there are rewards, though there are trials, this is not a game.

Updating Mondays and Thursdays.

The story is just getting started so it would be easy to catch up. There’s even an LJ feed (invisiblegames) where people are discussing the story/game.

I made it into the beta for Uncivilized: The Goblin Game! I've been looking forward to this ever since I talked to retch at PAX this year. Too bad those who rule the wires have blocked access here at the office. Now I have to wait until I get home tonight to play.

I have had a general feeling of… I’m not sure what word to use. I’m not unhappy and in some areas of my life things are outstanding. There’s just this feeling of “more” that I could accomplish. Having spent the last few nights without sleep I’ve had a bit of time to think about goals and how I spend my time.

I spend too much time playing games like WoW and EVE. The problem isn’t playing games, but that MMORPGs like that don’t end so they keep stealing time I could use for more productive things. I can play console games and give up a week or two as a break between projects. And the DS is always good for those times when I’m waiting around and don’t have enough time to unpack the laptop.

Television doesn’t take too much time because I split the time with other tasks. I catch up on some reading or work on the laptop while watching. With the Tivo I can push off watching if I have more important tasks. The number of shows I watch will probably drop as they are not keeping my interest.

With the time I’ve regained my plan is to:

1. Complete my first Perl module, Math::Interval, and upload it to CPAN. The API is set and the tests pass. I just need to write more documentation.
2. Learn about writing XS modules for Perl to expose the floating-point functions in <fenv.h>. In particular Math::Interval could benefit from fesetround() and fegetround(). I’m sure some other modules could use it too.
3. Update Math::Interval to use the floating-point module. The tricky part of this will be creating tests that correctly deal with the inexact nature of IEEE 784 floating-point math.
4. Write up a talk, article or paper on what I learned about writing Perl modules and dealing with that inexact nature of IEEE 784 floating-point math.

After that my longer range plans include getting some quality time with Parrot and Perl 6.