Tag: Kyle

Games September 2025

September 30, 2025 10:58 pm

Started the month off with another adventure in Vantage. We completed our mission for a victory ending. Looking forward to playing again.

At the board-game meetup I played a couple rounds of Ruins. It’s a trick-taking game which usually isn’t my thing, but it has some interesting tweaks which I liked. It uses card sleeves and overlays so the cards get more powerful each round. I usually find trick-taking games to be repetitive and not interesting after a few rounds, but with this mechanic the game has a very different feel each time and we discovered very different strategies that could be used. The second game ended in a one-on-one tie-breaker round which I lost without even taking a turn when Robert made the ultimate play using every card in his hand on his first turn. It was brutal and epic. I also lost the first game too.

At the next meetup I played the classic Carcassonne for the first time. I can see how many games since have borrowed or built on the concepts introduced in Carcassonne. I lost.

After Carcassonne we played a couple rounds of a Hanabi. The cover art would have you believe this has something to do with fireworks. That’s a very loose theme–so loose I didn’t know that was the concept until looking up the image. It’s a card game where the only cards you can’t see are your own and you have to work together to play the correct cards in the correct order.

Like most games which do cooperation within restricted communications you end up with game-impacting issues. For example, if someone asks for clarification about a rule, just asking the question might give away a piece of knowledge that they’re not supposed to. Also, once a group has played a few times you end up with a significant amount of implied communication which maybe is intended in the design, but maybe not.

Rather than win/loss the goal is to get the most points. In our two games we ended up with 14 and then 20 out of 25 points.

During Jess’ birthday weekend we played Garden Variety which is another trick-taking game. It kind of highlights the things I don’t much like about many trick-taking games. In particular, many of your turns are spent just throwing away a card for no purpose because you have to play a card and your cards aren’t currently relevant which is both annoying and boring. I lost.

We also played several rounds of Cat Fluxx that weekend and in the following days. The base game, Fluxx, has dozens of themed variations and Cat Fluxx was just released in September. I thought Jess might enjoy the general concept themed around cats since the general concept has a lot of arbitrariness and is not to be taken seriously–like cats. I lost 3 and won 3.

Back to yet a third meetup for the month I got in a game of Heat. I still really enjoy playing. I was pushed to play much more aggressively than I usually play games and I just barely squeaked out a victory in what is probably the tightest and closest race I’ve played yet. It was lots of fun.

Books September 2025

September 28, 2025 10:50 pm

The Telescope in the Ice by Mark Bowen

After having been disappointed in the last few non-fiction books I read for being shallower than I was looking for, The Telescope in the Ice made up the difference.

A deep dive into the history of modern particle physics and what we now call the “standard model” with a focus on the neutrino. The book follows the global efforts to detect neutrino interactions culminating in the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole.

I found it really interesting. The author gives the history, science, and engineering of the topic with first-person accounts providing details along the way.

And that was the only book I got finished in September. It was lengthy and not exactly light reading. Then I started another massive sci-fi tome which took up the rest of the month. I’m almost done with it.

Cider Making

September 14, 2025 2:54 pm

I like apple cider, but it’s hard to find good (or even real) cider around here without driving way out to the orchards in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

So I bought a grinder and a press and built a cider station!

Building the bench took up a good chunk of Saturday–longer than I expected since it’s not exactly complicated, but I plugged along until it was done.

That made Sunday, Cider Sunday!

I bought 9.5 pounds of apples from Safeway: 50% Granny Smith, 25% Fuji, 25% Envy. I sliced them up, Corinne put them in the grinder, Heather ran the grinder. Then we loaded them into the press and out came beautiful, rich cider.

The 9.5 pounds of apples turned into 4.5 cups of cider. Less than I was expecting, but it tastes really good.

Also….not cost effective. I’ll have to pay attention to sale prices on apples. My delicious cider, ignoring equipment costs and labor, came at a cost of $6 a cup, yikes.

Games August 2025

August 31, 2025 11:36 am

I did not get much of any game playing done in August.

The family played Vantage, but didn’t ended it incomplete to get to bed.

Then Heather and I played Vantage with friends and after several deaths (and running out of time) decided to call it a defeat.

We’re still really enjoying the game though. So much to explore. It’s really about the journey–not the destination, so leaving a game incomplete doesn’t seem like a waste of time. And being defeated is okay since you got to learn more about the world.

Books August 2025

11:26 am

Did lots of reading but volumes two and three of the Baroque Cycle took a long time to get through.

The Confusion by Neal Stephenson

Volume two of the Baroque Cycle. The adventures continue around the world. Capers, betrayals, antics, and science.

The System of the World by Neal Stephenson

Volume three of the Baroque Cycle. We bring the 4300+ page story to a conclusion back in England. Isaac Newton’s mastery of the Mint is called in question after an epic heist. Our protagonist is imprisoned and led to the gallows. And alchemy brings someone back from the dead.

I enjoyed the series, but as I mentioned on volume one, I’m not sure how it would land for someone with no prior knowledge or interest in the early scientific revolution and its characters. Some knowledge of France and French helps too throughout.

An excerpt from The System of the World which I connected with from the end of Book 7 (Currency) – Chapter 8 (Westminster Palace):

Other men seemed to’ve been blessed with the ability to live in the moment, and to have experiences (Daniel imagined) in the raw vivid way that animals did. But not he. How would the ceremony, the pageantry of the Queen’s visit to Parliament look, to one who could see them thus? Colorful, magnificent, mesmerizing, Daniel supposed. He’d never know. Daniel could only see this as a sick old lady paying a call on a room full of anxious blokes who hadn’t bathed in a while.

I often feel like other people exist in a state of immersion that doesn’t exist for me. Seen most particularly in things like crowds. Many people seem to become one with a crowd (like at a sporting event) where the crowd becomes their own and whole self. Only as the crowd disperses do they regain their sense of self and individuality. I, rather, look around and wonder what’s happening to everyone and have the continual dialog running through my head wherein I see, process, and analyze the events around me but perhaps don’t experience them. At least, by outward appearances, I don’t seem to experience them in the same way as others anyway.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

And now, for something completely different. This is one of Jess’ favorite authors, so I thought I’d give it a try.

It’s written entirely in present tense which gives it a strange feeling–which goes well with the story which is about a strange circus.

There are competing magic systems at play, but unlike, say, Sanderson, we’re not giving some in-depth explanation of how they work. It’s left vague and dreamlike.

It was certainly different than anything I’ve read recently. I liked it alright.