Games July 2026

July 31, 2026 8:50 pm

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.

Books July 2026

July 30, 2026 8:42 pm

Accelerando by Charles Stross

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.

PNW Road Trip – Day 1

July 11, 2026 11:03 pm

I’ve been wanting to take a trip through the Pacific Northwest for years, but it just never worked out amongst various family functions and COVID. But, this year was the year. We drove up the coast and took a ferry into Canada and then came back down I-5.

(I’m back-dating these posts to the day of the events for convenience of using the blog as a journal.)

Day 1, July 11, was packing up the car with enough supplies to trek the Oregon Trail and getting to the northern coast of California which required more than 7 hours of driving with a stop for lunch at a Wendy’s. Our destination for the night was Motel Trees across the street from Trees of Mystery. We had tried to visit Trees of Mystery back in 2017, but their power was out from a storm and they were closed.

Jess took some pictures along the drive of views that she liked. We stopped to watch some elk. And once we finally arrived at the motel, and after dinner at the Blue Ox Cafe, we walked down to “Hidden Beach” with hot chocolate. I got some pictures I really like on the beach. There were a lot of pelicans flying along the shore.

My Circus Debut

July 10, 2026 10:25 pm

Venardos Circus came back to Livermore this year and we took in a show before leaving on our road trip. However, before the night was out, I found myself on stage performing with the show for about 10 minutes–with all instructions communicated to me through pantomime. I was a bit nervous, but it went well.

Thinking about it academically, using audience members for a such a long bit is a pretty big risk for the performer. He has to communicate his intentions to us while entertaining the audience, roll with whatever we happen to do, and trust in our willingness to play along. I’m really impressed with his ability to convey to us what he wanted in the way he did.

Anyway, he pulled me from my seat to make muscle poses juxtaposed with the brawnier guy he grabbed. Alright, skinny guy–brawny guy some silly poses and sound effects. That’s fine. But when I thought he was done with us he drags us onto the stage and has us engage in a pantomime pistol duel.

Jess started recording as I was getting dragged on stage after the muscle silliness. Her phone somehow choked towards the end and corrupted the video, but I was able to recover most of the performance.

Some pictures from the night with a couple stills grabbed from the video. And, after my participation, I had to get a group picture with the team.

Games June 2026

June 29, 2026 8:36 pm

My campaign group continued our Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall adventure with quests 21, 20, and 11. Victory on all three. Quests 21 and 20 were side jobs which earned us some money and weapons. 11 was a story-line quest. Our group has some good synergies set up and the battles were fun, but not trivial.

Played a game of Hardback with a friend. Close all the way and it came down the final hand of cards. I was leading and pushed my points over the end-of-game threshold giving my friend one last turn. He put together a great word and overtook my score by a few points.