Canyon Week

Jul. 13th, 2025 09:15 pm
l33tminion: (Default)
Erica is away with Julie's parents this week, on a road-trip to the Grand Canyon.

On Thursday, I had a birthday dinner with Julie at Bogie's Place which is a tiny steakhouse tucked between jm Curley and The Wig Shop in downtown Boston.

I went to a concert with Julie on Friday at Sonia , one of the music venues at the Middle East in Central Square. Hadn't been there before, though I'd been to some of their other stages. Was EDM, the headliner was Shingo Nakamura, the openers were a B2B (collab set) with Cloudcage and rshand, followed by OTR. Been a while since I caught live music, and also a long while since I was out late in Central. Lively place, was a good time.

I watched a bunch of the runs from SGDQ this week, but I still feel like I want to catch some of the replays. Not as much stood out to me this year of the things I caught. The Super Metroid race is still always a good time.

Yesterday, managed to get out to Ingress coffee get-together in Arlington for the first time in a while. Saturday evening, we had dinner at Black Ruby, which was pretty cool. This evening, I got together with gaming group at Xave's to play more of The Far Roofs.

Random favorite thing from the last few weeks: This video titled What is PLUS times PLUS? about the Lambda Calculus. The visualization for that used in the video (Tromp's Lambda Diagrams) are a really striking way to look at that mathematical system. I was familiar with the concepts in the video before, but it's still a mind-blowing foundational piece of computer science that all you need to do literally any computation is just the simplest sort of function definition and function application, nothing more, that's it.
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Somehow Made it to Here

Apr. 16th, 2022 12:49 pm
l33tminion: Mind the gap (Train)
Kid bedtime changes are doing well. Still high intensity, but at least we're getting more sleep. Work has been high intensity, too, but overall going well. Had a nice team week onsite at our office for the wider Android Stylus Team.

Anyways, I keep putting off writing and then trying to reconstruct my thoughts instead of just, you know, write about what's going on, so skipping over a lot of things to about the present.

We're currently all in Cleveland for kid's April break, visiting my parents, and it's been 2.5 years since we were last all here. Nice to be here for Passover. And my sister, Melissa, is visiting with her family, too. So I get to spend some time with my new baby nephew, Simon, which is really great!

Travel went smoothly. Nice to take the new Green line connection on our way to the airport. We ran into one of Eris's school friends in the terminal, which was cool. COVID situation still looks very alarming, though how bad is still TBD. At least we escaped getting sick pre-trip. (Very much hope during as well!) I'm very glad to be here, but also feeling very exhausted. Travel is always pretty tiring for me, and I was pretty tired to begin with.

All right, I guess I'll loop back to some recollection:

My indie tabletop RPG group has been playing Sig: City of Blades (a Blades in the Dark-style with a setting that's a bit of of off-brand Planescape). It's been fun so far.

I've been able to have some fun playing Magic: Arena, though I can't build all the decks I want to and I've been perma-stuck at Platinum rank in constructed.

I finished watching Eighty-Six, and thought it was pretty good. Doesn't overreach with it's ending, but I think it earned a little dwelling on its epilogues.
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More Vaccinations and Other Stuff

Nov. 13th, 2021 11:34 am
l33tminion: (Default)
Eris got her first COIVD-19 vaccine on Monday.

Your Local Epidemiologist had an interesting post about rubella, as a case-study of a disease that's been suppressed through widespread vaccination for the sake of a particularly vulnerable group (pregnant women), even though it's mild for most (less severe than COVID-19).

The lack of quiet leisure has been driving me mad. Eris is anything but quiet. Julie did finally get her out of the house today to play some of Niantic's new Pikmin walkabout.

I did get some time for media etc. I finished Beastars, which was pretty good. I watched Weathering with You, which is for sure one of Shinkai's best, and very much captures an aspect of the present mood. The new Magic set is out, and it's pretty fun (for the first time in a long time it shares a common setting with the last; after last set's warewolf Halloween, this one centers around a vampire wedding). I've been really enjoying the webcomic Sleepless Domain, though it has the usual hazard of narrative webcomics, as you start getting invested in the story you start to notice how much the pace of publication is glacially slow. (Still, it's a good one and the first collection is out in print now if you like that sort of thing).

My indie TTRPG group finished a run of Urban Shadows. Don't know what we'll do next. Maybe Dreampunk, now that it's out.

Maybe I should watch the new Dune movie?

Have some cooking plans for this weekend, and getting ready for Thanksgiving at home next week.
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Taking Care of a Small Child

Oct. 26th, 2019 01:33 pm
l33tminion: (Cookie)
(With thanks/apologies to Jenna Moran.)

Quest flavor:

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest when:
• Suffering from a disease you haven't had for many years prior
• Intentionally throwing a game of skill
• Attempting to recontectualize a repeated action or event
• Experiencing a sense of amnesia, or a keen awareness of the rapid advance of time
• Being genuinely impressed by a mundane accomplishment
• Enjoying (possibly vicariously) pleasures you'd normally be too sophisticated to seek out (or maybe even enjoy)
• The child assists you with a task
• The child attempts to persuade you to believe something they believe
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Beyond the Matrix

Apr. 9th, 2016 09:48 pm
l33tminion: (Error)
This short story by [livejournal.com profile] kihou, based partially on the Nobilis spin-off tabletop RPG Beyond the Wall got me really wanting to play a similar spin-off of that game, even though the game itself doesn't fully exist yet.

I wanted to try to flesh out a bit how that would work. Note that the text below copies much of the text of the posts about Beyond the Wall wholesale, with minor modifications, in order to show that it's just that system, applied to a somewhat different setting. All I'm adding are minor tweaks to fit the setting, a bit of flavor, and some examples. All credit to Elaine "OJ" Wang who created Beyond the Wall, Jenna Moran, who created Nobilis, and the Wachowskis and everyone else who created The Matrix. (Basically, I think this is fair use, but hopefully everyone whose creative work I'm creating this derivative work based on will either think that this is awesome or at least not worth objecting to.) Somewhat obviously, I'm both twisting the system a bit to fit this setting and twisting the setting a bit to enhance the congruence. This probably only works for those a bit familiar with The Matrix (probably a lot of you) and Nobilis (probably far fewer), but I think it ends up being pretty amusing/compelling.

(For those not familiar with Nobilis, the necessary context is this: Nobillis has antagonists called the Excrucians, who believe reality is a lie and seek to destroy it. Beyond the Wall has those characters as protagonists instead. For those not familiar with The Matrix, the necessary context is that the protagonists are similarly trying to destroy what most of humanity would consider to be reality.)


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