In Which We Find Awesome Costumes

Today I continue with my MN Renfest posts. For the post regarding all the delicious food, check out yesterday's post

The MN and the TX Renfests are the biggest in the nation. One has the most land and one has the most attendance. I forget which one has which. Either way, both are awesomely huge.

One of the best things about the MN Renaissance Festival are the myriad of awesome costumes you can find. I personally own three different costumes, and Twin and Brother each own two.

Typically we just wear our current favorites and use the others to lend to friends who want to go dressed up. Dressing up is awesome because you don't get hassled for "modern clothing" and junk. Also it's fun.

Here we are with our current costumes:

Me, Twin, Brother

I'm always jealous of Twin's ability to look good in hats, and therefore her ability to buy awesome hats.

Twin says "how dares you take a photo of me..."

But she says she gets jealous of my ability to buy awesome hair pieces.

The key to looking really authentic (blending in with those who work there) are the little pieces. For example, here's what I carry on my belt:

my pouch

fox tail

wooden bowl with wooden spoon/fork

wooden mug

flask

here's a close up of the inlay

Here are some pics of street performers and the occasional visitor with fun costumes.

mug shot

the best pickle guy

I rushed over to take a pic of this baby since I love babies in period accurate costumes, and then when I got over there I realized I knew this guy. Hannah, Teebore and I used to work with him at Barnes and Noble. Awkward...

This little girl was too adorable not to take a picture of her

Greenman

This fairy (one of many...) blows bubbles with her fingers

The king got married this year. This was before the ceremony (held at the renfest, of course)

nose flautist

Brother's eyes look freakishly pale in this pic.

I LOVE this faun!


she really gets into character. But not in a creepy way like some people. More like an adorable way


she (Twig) gets into character in a creepy way. Does she look familiar to you? She should. She's my drunken muse, just sober. To be fair, the kids love her


mud girl


she made it hard to take pictures of her


Beer harpist


Jesus


Buddy Christ


Buddy death?


The Queen Marm














If you pay this guy $1, he'll kick himself in the back of the head

It's as amazing as it sounds

That's all for now - tomorrow, the myriad animals that can be found

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?