Parentheticals

You all know that I play Nethack. Recently I have been playing Unnethack as well. The reasons for this are that Nethack has not been updating for a while, and Unnethack has added some interesting features. One thing that I like about both games is that when your character dies it is dead for good. An interesting add on to that is that the game sometimes saves the level of the dungeon where a character died so that future characters can find it and interact in some way with the other adventures in the dungeon (looting their corpses). These save files are called 'bones files'. On multi-user systems the bones files that you meet will often belong to other players, but on modern windows boxes you almost never have two players playing on the same installation of Nethack. This means that all of the bones files you meet are boringly going to be your own files. Enter Hearse. Hearse is a program that takes your bones files and replaces them with bones files from other pe...

We are home from California. It was fun, but I am also glad to be back. We asked Andrea what she wanted for Christmas, and her list was as follows: 1) Hershey's Kisses 2) Wet wipes (to play with) 3) A "Mommy's hand" toy (whatever that is) 4) More picture scripture books Sounds pretty easy to fulfill. I am looking to get a new cheese fridge for Christmas so that I can up my cheese production in the spring when both of our goats are producing milk. During the stay in California apparently Lala had more problems with her udder - they appear to have gone away since we got back, but she is producing far less milk than she did up until recently. Now the question is: To cull or not to cull? I have ordered another printing of Polynesia. We played some games over the holiday that cause me to want to retool trading, but that is being put on hold until at least the end of November as I am still working on dancing robots. Dancing robots is fairly si...

We went to California this week. So far we: Went to the beach (it was a little too cold to swim without a wetsuit, but Alison had one, so she did it). We looked for shells and built some sand castles. I climbed over a rock outcropping and found the grave of the lobsters. I found two entire dead lobsters and the parts of at least eleven more. It was pretty cool. We also went to the Poulson's ward building on Sunday. I never knew any of them, but it was fun for the Poulsons. We went to the zoo and saw all of the animals (except, as Andrea will tell you, the rhinos). She liked the 'Unicorns' best (which were actually freaky looking goat-antilopes named Takins). She also loved the bones (in the labrea tar pits exhibit) which were, according to her, 'in the walls'. We also played some more games of Dancing Robots (one game with Alisons mom who is completely not a gamer). She seemed to understand fairly well what was happening, and she pulled off...

What a snow storm! In Sandy we got over 2 ft of snow. Additionally Alta (The ski resort east of us) just opened up this morning (which is earlier than usual). We pretty much just stayed home on Saturday and enjoyed our warm house (I walked off our property once to shovel the end of the driveway, but other than that we were home the whole day.) It seems like Lala (our goat) has mastitis. She has been spraying milk in all sorts of crazy directions when we try to milk her. I am going to buy a test today to see if she really does. Until then we are pasteurizing our milk (which makes it stronger flavored.) Andrea and Sara are doing well. Andrea made her own pizza the other day. She didn't really flatten it enough, so it was more like a roll with pizza toppings. She likes to help her little sister Sara out, and gives her hugs often. She also offers Sara to ride on her rocking horse (we have a movie of that, but I forgot to pull it off the camera.) The other day Andrea did...

Rea: "I want juice" Me: "Then drink all your water" Rea: "Rea is pretending to drink her water" Me: "Dad is pretending to pour you juice" Rea: "I don't want pretend juice!" Also: A month long blog about Dancing robots .

This week: For Halloween we went to my parent's house and Andrea trick or treated at perhaps 15 houses. November 1st marked the first day of both NaNoWriMo and NaGaDeMo. I am participating in NaGaDeMo, and Alison is in NaNoWriMo. NaNo is fun, but I didn't want to take that much time away from developing Polynesia. The game that I decided to make is "Dancing Robots". So far I am not too far along. I have a basic rules doc, but not even all of the rules are defined, and most of the cards are not yet created. I read Harry Potter and the Natural 20 this weekend. It was pretty funny (though it is not a complete story yet). D&D folks - you will find it a fun read. I also have been reading a fair amount of HP Lovecraft recently, and decided this weekend to have a Halloween RPG one-shot campaign. We used the Inspectres   Unspeakable  micro supplement for rules, and 'The Dunwich Horror' as a starting point for the story. The gamepl...