Parentheticals

I had a dream that I was playing a game where Alison was seriously kicking my butt. It was like playing Othello against her for the first time. I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down the rules of the game. The brain dump, and my responses to it are below: Players take turns. Duh Tiles are laid out in matrix. I recall that the tiles were rectangular and colored as if they were fields. They are called in my notes "Kingdom Tiles" later on Level starts out at 0 As I recall, the level was kept track of with a token on a level track, with each level corresponding to a specific resource. The following are options I enumerated for possible turns 1) destroy opponents Kingdom Tile based on Level  current As I recall, you could only destroy tiles from the outside of the opponents matrix, and you also could only destroy the tile that corresponded to the current Level  (so, if the Level  track read 3 you could destroy their leftmost (o...

I just installed a new version of Emacs, and found that my beloved copy to the clipboard via mouse selection was removed. I really enjoyed this feature. made it so that when I was copying info out of an emacs buffer to another program I would just have to select it with the mouse. It was that easy. No keystrokes, no other clicks, just select it with the mouse. If you want this functionality back it is possible to get it back by modifying your .emacs file with the following: (setq mouse-drag-copy-region t)

Apparently there is some interest in how I made my dungeon generator. As of yet it outputs pretty basic maps, but there is enough there to build off of (in my opinion). The code is in C#. It is supposed to simulate a human picking up square tiles that are one of the following: passageways (dead end, straight, turns, Ts and intersections) or rooms (vaults, one exit, two exit, three exit, or four exit) and placing them in an  n by m grid configuration so as to make a maze of passageways and rooms. The call to generate a map looks like this: MapBuilder mb = new MapBuilder(); mb.Build(6, 4, 1); And the output looks like this: │╔═╗┬═ ├╝╦╬╬. │$╬┼└┤ ╠┴╬╬═┘ That translates to this: The input that I gave for this example was larger than I would usually give. if you cut off the right two columns and the bottom row: │╔═╗ ├╝╦╬ │$╬┼ It gives a far more nethack like dungeon (7 rooms + a vault on a level would not be unusual.) Having u...

Early last week I mailed out another set of playtest copies of Polynesia. I didn't get a ton of feedback from the last set I mailed, but perhaps this time will be better. The girls have been sick recently, and Friday I even fell ill. I usually don't get sick, but apparently being in close contact with three sick people was enough to push me over the edge. I ended up with a sinus headache, a fever, and general tiredness. By Sunday I was feeling fairly well, but Andrea had a fever, pink eye, _and_ an ear infection, so we kept her home from church. It was pretty miserable. We had a visit from Mom and Dad. They came over and dropped off food and treats since we were sick. It was nice, and Andrea is doing better today. (I am feeling much better myself.) During the weekend I coded a small program that generates mazes that are topologically similar to 'Rogue' levels. I am thinking of making another card game - this one based on Nethack and other roguelikes. You will d...

I thought that I would put together some thoughts about owning a goat (to share the wisdom that I have acquired in the months I have had since I have gotten goats.) If your goat gets something blocking it's teat (in our case that caused either the milk to not come out or the milk to spray in all sorts of directions) then you can place the teat in warm water for a minute or two before milking and that will probably clear the blockage. Pour your milk into mason jars and put them directly into the freezer for ~40 minutes to chill them really fast (it makes the milk milder in flavor) Instead of using a big stainless steel pail to milk into, you can milk directly into the mason jars that you are planning on chilling the milk in. Just milk directly into the filter, using a metal ring to hold the filter in place Use coffee filters instead of the expensive filters. They drip slower, but they are 20 times cheaper (if you buy the basket shaped ones they even fit a mason jar almost perf...

Things are going well over here. The holiday season is on its way and we are taking it fairly easy. This last week we discussed with Andrea the Poulson's family tradition of having a new years eve talent show (to show off things that you learned this year). Andrea said: "Sara learned to grab, and Rea learned to take things away from Sara" This has recently become a problem. Sara will grab everything and try to bite it, and Rea doesn't like her toys being grabbed. Rea is getting better, but still she sometimes dislikes her toys being bitten. We told Rea that she can buy Christmas presents for her family members, and she liked the idea, so she pays us 3 'tokens' (which she gets by going to bed without any trouble, cleaning up, and using the potty) to take her to the store. She then gets to pick out one gift. So far she had bought a package of cinnamon bears for Alison, a plush turtle (from the DI) for Sara, and a bunch of plastic grapes for Me. The turt...

We had our church Christmas party this week. As we were getting ready for it we dressed andrea up in a Santa Claus suit. I was narrating as we strapped Sara into her car seat "With this coat and this hat, Rea looks just like Saint Nick. All she needs is a reindeer... Rea looked around" She did start looking around for a reindeer as I continued to quote: "But, since reindeer are scarce, there was none to be found." She cut me off at this point. She had grabbed the decapitated horse head on a stick toy and triumphantly raised it over her head: "Here is a reindeer!" She then began to ride the new reindeer around the room. the 30th marked the end of work on Dancing Robots. I think that I will polish it up a bit and release it as a PnP game. Here is a link to the current rules document. This Saturday we made another cheese. it was a derby. I swear that it is far bigger than 5 lbs (but I have not yet weighed it.) It is the biggest cheese we ...