The group completed quests 12 and 13 of our Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall story. Both completed victoriously. Quest 13 was clearly set up as a major battle, but with fortune on our side and complementary decks we were able to deal out 80 damage across the enemy team with just 3 attacks and then mop up the remnants from there.
At a board game meetup I jumped into the tail end of the silly game Hot Streak. The players are compulsive gamblers betting on the outcome of a race of sports team mascots as well as various propositional bets along the way. I lost.
After Hot Streak, we played a game of 7 Wonders. I lost that too.
And closing out that night was a game of the rather odd Frenemy Pastry Party. In this game the only way to earn points is to either bake a cake or help someone else bake a cake. Baking a cake alone is suboptimal as it uses up your own ingredients. Contribute ingredients to someone else’s cake earns you points, but they will earn more points for the cake than you will for the ingredients. So the goal is to try to get all the other players to evenly contribute to your own cakes so the points for ingredients are diffused across the other players and cake points are concentrated on yourself. But once every figures this out cooperation is likely to deteriorate. I lost by a point once another player realized what I was doing and rallied the rest of the table to prevent me from winning.
An exploration of a future in which an artificial intelligence singularity has occurred (sentient AI systems self-developing beyond human comprehension). It starts off way too over-the-top cyberpunk, but settles down.
Uses the evolving singularity as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
Livesuit by James S. A. Corey
A novella set in the Captive’s War universe in between books 1 and 2. Humanity has a new weapon in their interstellar battle, bionic humans who are faster, stronger, and more resilient, but at what cost?
Kind of a parallel exploration of the Spartan units in the Halo universe.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Speaking of bionic humans…this novella explores a bionic, human-based security “drone” which evades its governor module and begins exploring its own free will. “Human based” in that it’s mostly robotic, but uses a human brain to provide the intelligence to the system (the details aren’t fully described in the book).
It wants to protect the people it was hired to protect, but it also mostly just wants to be left alone to watch TV shows.
Wings of Fire books 1-5
During our Pacific-northwest roadtrip we listened to audiobooks of the Wings of Fire series. We got through books 1 through 4 and partly through 5 (which I finished in paper form once we returned home).
It actually lined up oddly well with our trip. We listened to book 2, taking place mainly in the sea kingdom, as we drove up the coast. Book 3, taking place mainly in the rain forest, as we visited Hoh Rain Forest. And book 4, taking place mainly within a volcano, as we visited the Cascade Volcanic Arc including Mt. St. Helens and Crater Lake.
Books 1-5 make up a unified story arc of the “Dragonet Prophecy.” Five dragonets destined to end the Sandwing war of succession and bring peace to the continent of Pyrrhia.
Day 10 (7/20) – Breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel lobby, Abode. Walk along the harbor up to the Vancouver Aquarium; with a free preview of seals on the way.
Intentionally left the aquarium trip for Monday hoping it would be less busy and it wasn’t too bad. Far less busy than some trips to Monterey Bay Aquarium that we’ve done. Special exhibits on dragons and axolotls, so it was pretty much designed for our girls. Heather got to hold a gecko.
We ate lunch at the aquarium’s cafe, out through the gift shop, and back to the hotel to crash and rest. Corinne did some swimming in the hotel pool and I rested my feet in the hot tub again. Dinner was on the corner across the street at Coco Rico Cafe. Then to the other side of the street to try Japanese cheesecake. It’s fluffy in contrast to the American smooth/dense variety.
The view of our hotel from the plaza across the street:
Day 9 (7/19) – Having spent more than a week on the road we were now out of clean clothes. I had hoped to find ourselves at a hotel with guest laundry available (either self-serve, or possibly willing to splurge on a service), but that hadn’t happened yet. The hotel on day 8 did have a guest laundry facility, but it was out of service. And here, the Blue Horizon, has a laundry service, but it only operates Monday through Friday and we needed clean clothes sooner than Monday evening.
So I packed up all the dirty laundry into two duffel bags and carried them a half-mile to a laundromat when it opened at 9:30. Fairly nice walk, much of the way was streets that had been closed to vehicle traffic and had trees. Got there early enough to grab two washers–which fit all the laundry with room to spare. With the washers running I walked next door to a cafe for breakfast. My order flag was this classic T-rex toy:
By the time I finished breakfast it was time to move the laundry. On the washers you pay for a wash cycle, but for the dryers you just buy 3 minutes per quarter. So I asked the attendant how long a full load usually takes to dry. She told me about 40 minutes, but it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to her. I put them each in for 27 and they were both almost entirely dry. So I combined the few things that were still damp for another 12 minutes while I folded everything else.
By this time I found myself as the new resident expert on their machines and was helping other people get their laundry going. The machines were…not obvious in their functioning and very often spit back quarters or had quarters get stuck and you’d need to smash the reject button several times to get it to spit out.
Anyway, laundry washed, folded, and loaded back up into the duffel bags for the half-mile walk back to the hotel. The girls had gotten up and eaten breakfast from the bin and with fresh laundry everyone was dressed and ready for lunch. For which we stopped at the new bakery on the corner next to the hotel and split a chocolate croissant, a caramel almond pastry, and a sourdough baguette.
From there we did a little walking tour of the city. First stop the Vancouver Public Library – Central Branch because it’s an interesting building:
Then on to the Gastown Steam Clock, which plays Westminster Chimes via steam whistles! I somehow missed that information when looking it up, so it was a fun surprise. We caught the 1:30 chimes and then looked around at some shops and ate some donuts to await the top of the hour:
More walking to reach Science World (currently dressed up as a soccer ball for the World Cup). The girls had a blast. Lots interactive displays–in working order!
One favorite was the generative-AI system which was seeded with your motion. You could select a prompt as to what kind of images to generate. The girls preferred the kittens and the flowers.
And the other big hit was the responsive, Winter wonderland room. It also responded to your movement with ice-skate tracks, blowing snow, and such.
We closed down the museum and our legs and feet were shot. Fortunately, there was a SkyTrain stop just outside which we would get us to ~2/5 of a mile from the hotel. Showing my American-centric viewpoint, in planning the trip I hadn’t even looked at intra-city rail options for getting around. So it was a nice shortcut to take and straightforward to use. Though Jess somehow lost her ticket in the 3 stops we took and had to buy another one to get out.
The girls were beat at this point and ate dinner from the bin and rested their legs. I went for a walk and had a slice of pizza for dinner. Then rested my legs and feet in the hot tub for a little while. Sunset from the hotel window:
Day 8 (7/18) – Breakfast provided by the hotel today! It just so happened that the previous weekend they held a sand sculpture competition in town and, though the competition was complete, the sculptures were available for public viewing and voting. None of us had ever seen professional sand sculptures in person. They were pretty neat. The amount of detail is pretty incredible.
Heather and Corinne both voted for the girl with the dragon. Jess voted for the owl. I voted for the big, furry guy offering free hugs.
Our next stop was the North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre. Which is a larger facility than it seems. You turn a corner and realize it just keeps going, again. Lots of injured birds. Jess enjoyed watching one of the ravens messing with the objects in its enclosure. A different raven, this one leucistic, named Opal, was working on digging a hole under the wall of its enclosure. And we saw a real life axolotl. So the girls were agog.
By the time we finished up with the animals it was past lunch time, but our next stop was the old country market known for the goats on its roof. Which…I give them credit. There’s no reason for anyone to be out at this place. Certainly if they just had a little shop selling sundries they’d be struggling. But, put up a sod roof and throw some goats up there and now you’ve got endless customers. They also have a cafe inside which is where we ate lunch. We saw one of the goats when we first arrived and it’s a good thing I snapped a picture, because we couldn’t see them anymore by the time we left.
The trip plans had an option at this point to head deeper into the island to Horne Lake Caves, but timing dictated we skip it in favor of catching the ferry and getting to our hotel before dark. Driving in cities is stressful enough, driving in a foreign city after dark sounds even less fun.
So we headed back to Nanaimo and lined up for the ferry. This ferry was substantially larger than the one we took to Victoria. I think it had 4 decks for vehicles. This was a 2-hour ferry ride and then we needed to drive into Vancouver proper–which we managed to do during peek rush hour. That was not so much fun, but we did it. We parked the van at the Blue Horizon Hotel and didn’t get back in for 3 days.
After getting the van unloaded through the maze of passageways at the hotel we headed out on foot to look around and find something for dinner. I had read that for the World Cup (and then extended through the end of summer) the city had closed a nearby street to vehicle traffic and created an extended pedestrian mall space. We walked down there, but discovered it seemed to mostly be bars. Wandering around some more we eventually ended up at an Italian restaurant, Pacifico pizzeria & ristorante. It was pretty good. I don’t recall why I’m making the face that I am in the picture. The girls had cookies from the restaurant for dessert. Jess and I got a slice of red-velvet cake and an eclair from a bakery across the street from the hotel. The hotel key cards were wood, which was a fun extravagance.
