A lovely vacation

I've been too busy having a wonderful time to write about it until now.

First, I went home to San Francisco for a week. I spent time with my parents, which is always lovely (apart from the inevitable Incident — one per trip, like clockwork, but we're getting better at handling them). We went to good Asian restaurants, met with friends, saw lots of movies, and attended the new Cirque du Soleil show, Corteo. Live CdS is always a treat — this is my fifth.

The highlight of Corteo was the part where the dwarf lady acrobat (who, with her partner, appeared in many scenes) was carried out suspended from six 4' helium balloons, giving her a net weight of probably 3-5 pounds, or about ¹/₁₀ g. After balancing her on his finger and letting her walk from hand to hand across his shoulders, the head clown lofted her over the audience for a game of, you know, that thing you do with a balloon. Only, with a person. Don't try this at home — you don't have super-strong balloons and a precision-engineered gimballed harness, and your kids don't have Dex 18.

On the screen, we saw The Chronicles of Narnia, Good Night and Good Luck, and King Kong. Omitting full reviews in the interests of brevity, I will say that I heartily recommend all three.

Then, back east, to Swarthmore, for ( para-Hogmanay )

Lots of gaming happened. ( Vespucci )

( Age of Steam )

A roundsing happened. Transcendent beauty drove away the cold, and I played Annie Patterson's ( recording of my round )

Then back to Waltham ( in a rented minivan )

But why a minivan? So I could go to ( IKEA )

Then in to Cambridge with fiddledragon to visit rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and company (whom I have much in common with and must get to know better), and then to spend all afternoon and evening at the Museum of Science. Mobius model train tracks! Dinosaurs depicted with feathers! Hatching chickens! (Same thing?) And, of course, the company of a true and dear friend.

So, it's been quite a couple of weeks :-).

Ba orvat ybirq

When fiddledragon and I decided officially that we were very good friends, we hadn't actually seen each other for five months. We spent some time together at Philcon, but I was pretty busy. But, in the past week, we spent essentially all our time together...

It was wonderful. She helped me brainstorm ideas for strategy games. She helped me assemble bookshelves. She appreciated my presence, my music, my cooking, and my taste in chocolate. She held my hand when I was dysphoric. And she murmured matter-of-factly about a strong inclination to move to Boston after graduating from Bryn Mawr. So, for the curious, we are still very good friends, but the increasing plausibility of our someday being more than friends has not escaped our notice.

The practical upshot of this is that I am going to stop stressing about finding someone. Really.

Games in progress

It's also been a good week for game development.

Advanced Civilization has already been developed by Avalon Hill, so I don't have to. However, as much as SWIL loves to play Civ, we don't play that often because we're widely distributed and don't always have big, solid blocks of free time available. Why don't we play by email? Answer: because the in-person interaction is why we love Civ in the first place, but, setting that aside, we'd need some way to share or exchange the game state online, starting with the board.

Yes, that is a giant HTML <table>, decorated with some very elementary CSS. Yes, I typed most of it by hand (okay, I used copy/paste for the repeated elements). Yes, I am crazy. Who wants to play?

Age of Eats is my working title for a game in the same broad thematic universe as Civ, in that each player follows a civilization from the dawn of history through thousands of years of development. However, Age of Eats is ( primarily focused on cuisine )

*werð is a new game concept which I started working on with fiddledragon this week. It, too, is a game with broad, historical scope — in this case, ( historical-linguistic scope )

The Longest Road

is a 32-bar contra dance for a circular set of six couples:

(1-4) Even couples lead in, take hands, and set. Meanwhile, odd couples turn once around by the right.
(5-8) Odds arch while evens lead out through them with their neighbors and cast back to places.

(9-12) 1s and 2s, 4s and 5s half-pousette while 3s and 6s set to partners and turn single.
(13-16) 2s and 6s, 5s and 3s half pousette while 1s and 4s set to partners and turn single.

(17-24) All balance and swing neighbors.

(25-32) Grand chain half-way round to end progressed.