odds and ends

[cellio]

I haven't been posting regularly. Oops.

I've been baking bread about once a week. This past week I finally scored some rye flour (that was not exorbitantly priced), so I made a rye sourdough for the first time. I think I prefer less molasses than this recipe called for, so I'll adjust that next time or try a different recipe. The bread is tasty, aside from the molasses overwhelming the caraway. Most "rye bread" recipes I've seen use rye for only one third of the flour, which sent me searching for "all rye" rye bread, which apparently works and tastes good but might not rise as much? I'll probably try it at some point, especially since I had to buy four (small) bags of rye flour to get it.

Dani and I play board games every Shabbat now, and occasionally we have two other friends (who are also careful, and I guess this is a "pod"?) over to play. We play Pandemic in every session because, well, pandemic. Yesterday we pulled out Kings and Things, a game we all had vague memories of, and by the end had concluded that while it's appealing it's also kind of tedious and maybe sort of a shorter Titan, a game I like in principle but dislike actually playing. Ok, now we've refreshed our memories...

A friend has a game called McMulti, which is an economic game (oil/gas theme)... in German. There are lots of places where text matters, so when we've played we've used cheat sheets since none of us read German. We recently became aware of an English-language derivative, called Crude, and got it recently. They've changed some of the mechanics and made one really annoying change to how the board is laid out, but other changes are positive and the game's a little faster. I like it, but am tempted to figure out how to print my own board. The game is really strongly designed for four players, but there are rules for a two-player version, which Dani and I have played once, which seen to work ok.

Codidact, the project that consumes most of my spare time, is in the process of incorporating as a non-profit. We've got our lawyer on our Discord server and having conversations about incorporation documents via Google Docs comments. It looks like we will be able to clear an important hurdle soon. Neat!

On the project front, I'm not writing code -- I keep feeling like I should learn Ruby and the dev environment so I can help, then concluding that I probably won't be helping because I'd be taking time and attention from the developers who are actually being productive. But I've taken over bug-wrangling -- some analysis and testing, clarifying vague reports, and, especially, triaging. I was surprised to find that GitHub counts filing issues as contributions. I think that's new?

We just had our first birthday, counting from when the project founder set up a Discord server to talk about maybe building an alternative to Somewhere Else. We've still got a lot of work ahead of us, both technical and community development, but I'm pleased with where we are.

I've been reading a lot of fiction, a mix of short stories, novellas, and novels, many through the BookFunnel network (and also StoryBundle). I'm "meeting" a lot of authors I didn't previously know. I should really write a separate post about that.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*beams at you*

[goljerp]

Cool. You are so lucky that you've got a partner who also games. I love Joy, don't get me wrong, but she just isn't into games. She'll do "Apples to Apples", I guess, but that's it. JD, on the other hand, does game - or I should say, "did". We were doing games every Shabbat for the first few months of the pandemic (I even bought _Terraforming Mars_ and _Seven Wonders Duel_ because we were low on 2-player games). The last few months, however, he's been saying that he doesn't want to game with me. :-(

Oh, well, maybe he'll start up again -- or Goljerp gaming can resume after the pandemic. I think part of JD's issue is that he's just playing with me, and it gets boring losing to me all the time. (He doesn't, really, but he did have a run of bad luck). In Goljerp Gaming, it's different because he's not necessarily playing the same game as me, and if he is, there are other people to interact with. (I have a co-op game, Castle Panic, which he's bored with; I actually got a new one which we haven't played - and he's not interested.)

[cellio]

I'm sorry you don't currently have anyone to game with. I remembered you writing about gaming with JD in the past, so I didn't realize he'd lost interest.

Would either Joy or JD be interested in cooperative games? That feels more like "we're a team playing against the board", so it has a different feel.

[goljerp]

JD has gotten bored with Castle Panic (a cooperative game), and is now I think just in a teenaged "don't wanna do games with Dad" mode. As far as Joy goes, she really only has time to play games on Shabbat, and she's gotten into her "read, nap, walk" routine in the afternoon after we're done davening. (Although to be sure the last few weeks she's been going to pro-voting (or vote-counting/celebrations). I guess I could ask her if she'd be interested in Apollo, a cooperative game I got before JD stopped playing games with me. (It's got a lunar mission theme, and it looks like it avoids the "one person bosses everyone else" problem with cooperatives by having one person as "mission control", who is only allowed to pass a very limited amount of information to the rest of the players.)

I could probably also get my act together on Sundays and try harder at doing something with my gaming friends remotely. (JD and I tried dominion over the phone with a friend once, and it actually worked OK... but our friend had to leave town (and her Dominion set). She's back now, I should see if she's up for it again.)

[jducoeur]

I could probably also get my act together on Sundays and try harder at doing something with my gaming friends remotely. (JD and I tried dominion over the phone with a friend once, and it actually worked OK... but our friend had to leave town (and her Dominion set). She's back now, I should see if she's up for it again.)

I'll note that the online implementation of Dominion is quite good in the single-player mode I usually use -- if you enjoy the game and are looking for a remote option, you might want to take a look at that.