In Which The Board Game Takes Shape

So we worked on the board game a lot this weekend. We got a prototype built enough for us to give it a run through.



The first game was more or less a disaster. Brother died almost immediately. So we took notes, made some changes in the game play and tried it again.

It was much better the second time around but still needs a lot of work. Still I'm pretty confident we can fix a lot of the issues by adjusting a few aspects here and there.

One of the things our game has is character cards. Everyone picks a character and depending on who you choose your skills and starting items differ.

We have ten characters, each one with a backstory.

Twin and I worked on the backstory for each character on Friday evening. It was almost like writing a mini query for each character and some of them turned out great!

Here's an example of a few of the fun character backstories (more or less, why they're stuck in the game)

The Nurse:

Nancy Wu has been an End of Life nurse practitioner for five years. So when the evac comes, she volunteers to stay with her patients, especially since the DRRT (disaster relief response team) officials promise her help will arrive shortly.
But when the days pass and all her patients (and patience) expire, Nancy is left to find a way through the city herself. Before she meets her own end of life.


The Military Officer:

Lt. Matt Olson is on his way back to the base after a week of leave when his car breaks down outside of town. He radios the base for assistance, but no one answers.
Set on a long trek back to base, Matt is worried that perhaps an “incident” has occurred. It would explain the radio silence.
Matt needs to get back to base ASAP, before everything winds up FUBAR


The Athlete:

Adrienne Ramsey has been training for the Olympics since she was fifteen years old. She runs six miles a day, lifts weights Monday, Wednesday, Friday and takes a night swim at Lake Ruth every Saturday.
Normally after her swim she rewards herself with a hot cup of coffee at Sal’s diner but this time Sal’s is closed, along with the rest of the city.
Adrienne needs to get out of town as fast as possible or the race out of the city could become a race for her life.


Fun times!

Also this is a reminder that next week I will be on vacay at a cabin on the lake. There were be some posts, but I won't be able to respond to comments until I return.

In Which We Find More Critters

I don't know if I've mentioned this before (I thought I had, but I couldn't find the post in a cursory looksee through the blog) that we have an egressed window that animals like to get trapped in

Typically it's just voles that get stuck down there. (actually we always assumed they were voles, but after some research I've come to the conclusion that they're probably Northern Grasshopper mice)

(UPDATE: turns out, after more research, they're actually short-tailed shrews. but all the details are the same)

They're awesome because they looks so cute and soft with their velvet grey fur, but they're take no prisoner carnivores and will EFF YOU UP if you give them a chance.

Once we had three mice (shrews) in there at once, 2 alive, 1 dead. We got one out and released it but the other one was NOT LEAVING. At one point he turned and looked at twin and opened his tiny mouth to issue the highest pitched little shriek you've ever heard. Freaked us out.

Turns out northern grasshopper mice howl and eat other mice (as do shrews).

Also turns out the way to get them out of windows is by putting the other dead mouse (shrew) in the bucket, and live, crazy mouse (shrew) will panic that you're stealing his food and will run into said bucket to try and get the dead mouse body back. Then you can just scoop him up and let him go in the park with his precious dead mouse meal.

Anyway, aside from shrews we also once had a baby bunny. Which was clearly the cutest thing we've gotten down there.

The egress window leads to Brother's bedroom in the basement and he's the one who lets us know when something is trapped in there because they scratch at his window and make a racket.

Saturday morning, Brother came upstairs and told us we had one guess as to what was in the window, and it wasn't something that had been down there before.

Our guesses of squirrel and bird were not correct.

No. It was a Muskrat!

He was kinda cute looking. We grabbed our usual bucket and twin climbed down thinking we could just scoop him up (she always does the animal wrangling since she helped with the wild animal SOPs at her shelter. And in case you're wondering, muskrats can't carry rabies)

Turns out muskrats hate buckets. A lot. He kept attacking the bucket, which was kinda scary since he filled it.

Finally he attacked the bucket, landing inside, and didn't jump back out. Twin lifted the bucket up and he hopped into the yard.

Then there was a tense few moments where the muskrat glared at Brother and I and we glared back. It was totes a "it's up to you what happens now, muskrat" but instead of attacking us he decided to go on his way.

right here he was deciding if he should rush us or not...

Of course his way meant he'd calmly walk across the patio and contemplate the weather.

We finally managed to shoo him out into the park. There's a pond about 6 houses down and I'm sure that's where he came from (though why he came all the way down to our house and all its doggy smells is a mystery)

In Which We Become Board Game Designers

So besides the arcade and eating a lot of junk food this weekend, myself, Twin and Brother also spent a HUGE amount of time on our new awesome-o project.

What is the project, you ask?

We're making a board game. And it is going to be epic.

I know I've mentioned our love of board games before. And we're not talking about Monopoly and Sorry or Risk

I'm always the Hat

I love pushing someone's token back to start. But only 4 players is a crap move, Sorry

Damn you Twin and Brother and your inevitable betrayals!

(though all of those are fun games. Also I always win when we play Monopoly. It's weird.)

We're talking about games like Agricola, Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror.

Agricola - I love you and your little blocks and tokens

frickin unwinnable

Dear Cthulu - I hate it when you drive me insane. or devour me of course

We've talked for years about making our own board game. Getting rid of stuff we don't like and adding in stuff we do. But then Twin had an awesome specific idea, and the game plan (pun intended) began.

We're in the proto-prototype stage. Which is to say, we're making a crappy version that will let us test things out, before we make a less crappy version for beta testing. We've actually got a board built and about half of the cards crafted.

Turns out publishing a board game is a lot like publishing a book. Who knew? Not me, which is why I had to do some research.

We hope to have the proto-prototype built and tested a bit before family vacay. Because we play A LOT of games while on family vacay, so it would be a perfect chance for the whole fam to test out the game.

There have been arguments, oh yes. But there have been a lot more moments of "This game is going to EFFING ROCK". I'm actually surprised there wasn't more arguing. And I'm really surprised at how easily the game came together. I think that mostly has to do with the three of us having almost the exact same taste in board games.

So how about you? What's your favorite board game?

In Which The Interwebs Makes Me Happy

So normally I try to write a few blog posts on Sunday, so I can be ahead in the week. But this weekend I only wrote one. We spent the rest of the evening playing Halo until our Xbox offered us up the red ring of death again.



Damn you Xbox. Why do you make it so hard to love you?



So then yesterday I was super busy at work which led to a range of consequences:

1. I didn't get to comment on as many blogs as I usually do. Though I did manage to read most of them

2. The super busy amounts of work, combined with crazy dogs that were trapped inside until the lawn fertilizer dried, left me in a super foul mood.

• Also, co-worker that I don't even know: If I tell you I can't help you with something and I don't know who you need to speak with, don't keep pressuring me to give you a name. And when I cave, certainly don't tell that person I gave you their name.

3. Which in turn left me with no idea on what to write for a blog post. Mostly I just wanted to take a bath, read a bit, and then go back to bed. Steaks for dinner notwithstanding

So what all this means is that today's post is going to be a random post of fun things I like on the interwebs.

Yay!

Do you read
hyperbole and a half blog? I swear, if you don't, you will regret it. Check out this post which may be my favorite. So. Funny.

We were discussing on Hannah's blog the wonderfulness of The Silence of the Lambs and I mentioned to her the wonderful Lego musical version which she has not seen. So here it is in all its glory.

WARNING: there is language in this video, much like in the real movie. You. Were. Warned.



I know we've talked a bit before about the kind of music I like (rock. A bit of metal thrown in as well). Lately I've been re-listening to Twin's Fair to Midland CD (shhh, I stole it from her...) and I had forgotten how much I LURVE them. Their song Dance of the Manatees is awesome, but my favorite is the below: (unfortunately the video is just the lyrics but you can still hear the song)




Here is Brother's, Twin's and my all time favorite LOLCat

Here's another fav


And that's all I have for today! Hopefully you found something that made you smile.


PS - I'm off all next week from work. Since Twin and I will be doing hella gardening and yard work, I probably won't be as present on the interwebs as I normally am. But I will be back in full splendor the following week.

In Which I Read Web Comics

Do you read webcomics?
I do. A few anyway. I used to read a lot more but reading blogs took over that free time.
But I still keep up with a few of my favorites.

A few of them update every day but I like to save them all up and then spend and hour or so reading months worth of comics. It's awesome.

One of my favorites is Questionable Content.

Per the page "Questionable Content (or "QC," as it is frequently abbreviated) is an online comic strip that is ostensibly about romance, indie rock, little robots, and the problems people have."

It has an ongoing storyline which is great for long time readers, but the individual comics are typically stand alone.

click on the comics for a zoom in option

One of my other all time fav web comics is Girl Genius. Its tagline is "Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!" And if you like steampunk even a little (or want to explore steampunk a bit) I HIGHLY recommend this comic.

Unlike Questionable Content this one is pretty much a straight storyline, so you would have to start from the beginning. But the art is awesome.

Twin, Brother and I also enjoy reading VG Cats, which stands for video game cats. Since this one tailors specifically to gamers it's really only funny if you play a lot of games. It's not updated very frequently but when it is, it's usually hilarious.




Finally, the last one I read on a regular basis is XKCD.
There's nothing like a comic about romance, sarcasm, math and language that's done with stick figures.



Do you read any webcomics? If so, any you would recommend?

In Which We Have A Ghost...?

So typically myself, Twin and I (and our Mom if we're around her) like to partake in April Fool's Day festivities. Many a shirt has been soaked by the sink's spray nozzle being rubber banded and no one will forget the "short sheeting incident of 2009" in which a new prank combined with Brother's exhaustion resulted in hilarity.

But this year we all forgot about pranks. Brother had just gotten back from visiting Youngest Sister in Oprahland and Twin was in San Diego for work. I was busy with work tasks and just didn't have the energy to come up with any pranks.

On my lunch break I was feeling stressed and wanted to read something, but not Manuscript Makeover. I decided I would take a break on that and read one of my YA or MG book sitting on my TBR pile.

In fact, I wanted to read Incarceron, which has been sitting on the top of my pile since it arrived in the mail.

So I walked to my room to get the book. Except it wasn't there.
I checked every single book in that pile (even though I had seen it on the top of that pile the night before) and none of them were Incarceron.

So first I was confused. Perhaps I had already had the plan to read Incarceron and had carried it somewhere? (this was highly unlikely as my memory skills are pretty great. My memory for events is almost a lame super power) So I checked the kitchen, the dining room (where things accrue) the living room, even the bathroom, in case I had had it in my head to take a bath and read it.

Nothing.

So then I started to wonder if perhaps Brother had not forgotten about April Fool's Day like the rest of us.
I texted our mom and asked her if Brother had mentioned playing any pranks on us to her. She texted back that she hadn't heard anything and that she, too, had forgotten all about it.

I texted Twin in San Diego, wondering if perhaps she had borrowed it, even though I knew she was reading Under the Dome because it took up so much space in her carryon.

Nope.

So then I went downstairs and poked around Brother's room, looking for anywhere he might have stashed it.

Nothing.

I finally broke down and sent him a text. I thought about asking him if he had it, but I knew that if he had, indeed, hidden it, he could deny actually "having" it if it wasn't in his possession.

Instead, I asked if he had hidden it.

I didn't expect a response since he was at work, but I had done everything I could. I went back to work, a bit miffed and frustrated.

That night, Twin came home and Brother denied that he had hidden the book.

I argued with him, there was no other explanation. I certainly didn't hide my own book and Twin was hours away.

He pointed out that he revelled in his pranks and certainly would have taken credit for any prank he pulled. Instead, he began to think that I was pulling a prank on him, by hiding my own book and blaming him.

I don't like to play mind games like that.

So I was left with a mystery - I didn't want to believe brother, but he seemed sincere and he would certainly want to claim his prank victory if he had hidden the book.

That night when I was fixing the sheets on my bed, I found the book stuffed underneath Yvie's dog bed. Underneath my own pillow I found my pedegg - it had apparently been missing as well, though I had seen it the night before right next to Incarceron on my nightstand.

I was completely flummoxed.

I mean maybe, MAYBE, I had grabbed Incarceron that morning, planning to read it, and suddenly decided to fluff Yvie's dog bed and set the book on the bed and accidentally put Yvie's dog bed on top of the book, and then forgot all about it. But all those events seem a bit ludicrous.
Also, I certainly wouldn't have stashed a pedegg under my pillow.

So what happened? I have no idea.

If I truly believed we had a ghost in the house, I'd be a bit freaked to sleep at night. And really nothing else has happened in the almost 3 years we've lived here (not counting a time I saw a ghost Yvie...). But I have no explanation as to how the book and the pedegg were "stashed away" amongst my pillows and bed.

hello brown lady of raynham hall

So - anyone have any unexplainable things happen to them? Even though I'm terrified of ghosts, I'm also extremely fascinated by them. So spill!

In Which We Like To Cook

So in my house, we rotate cooking duties. Brother cooks Monday, I cook Tuesday, Wednesday we go to our parent's house for dinner, Thursday Twin cooks and Friday we rotate.

We allow ourselves to eat out on Saturday and Sunday Twin and I rotate because brother is off doing super ultra nerdy things.

I decided recently to start taking pictures of some of our meals, because, you know, food is good.

Last week Brother made Tempura.

we just stuck with sweet potatoes, shrimp and onions, our favorite tempura options

Not that he wanted to, but Twin and I hounded him into it. Otherwise he makes a lot of soups and Asian dishes.

Tuesday I tried a new recipe: shrimp pot pies. It was so frickin' delicious that Twin and I had it again on Sunday (which was both a genius and terrible idea...)

Then on Thursday Brother and I told Twin that we wanted her baked mac and cheese. This time she wised up and only made a half a recipe so we didn't have so much left over.

it actually reheats pretty well

So how about you? Do you cook in your house, or is it a lot of take out or dining out?