Heaters and hiptops and little plastic pyramids

Friday was Games Club, as usual. I convinced some folks to try out Doug Orleans’s idea for a Carcassonne-like game played with Aquarius cards and Icehouse pieces. cthulhia introduced Chris and me to this last week, and I came up with some new ideas for it on the way back home. Tried ’em out in a four-player game, and the new poaching rules seemed to make for a good, vicious game. We also played with open goals, which made the Trade Goals and Shuffle Goals cards more useful, but Trade Hands is still a fairly useless card.

bigscary showed us his new toy — a T-Mobile Sidekick (aka Danger HipTop to those of us who follow the tech news or CJ Silverio’s web journal). When he started using it to do Google searches I made a comment about his having “the power of Google — in his pants!”, which lead to far too many impromptu verses of “He’s got the whole world in his pants”. (Besides, he actually wears it on his belt.)

Yesterday was CthulhuPunk at the abode of drcpunk and mnemex. We (or our characters) have the misfortune to need to get in touch with some beings on the planet Uranus. For a few minutes there we almost had a Beavis & Butthead episode going. (“I’ve never had contact with Uranus!”)

Afterwards Josh and I played a two-player game of the Carcassonne/Aquarius game, and learned that playing with two players needs more than six pieces each; we wound up having used up all our pieces with half the deck still to go, which did lead to an interesting situation where each of us was hoping to get Zapped, just to get a free piece to play. I think I’d recommend giving each player one more small and one more medium piece for a two-player game. Maybe two more smalls.

After that I took the whole gang over to Jersey City to see the new apartment. akawil’s furniture is there, so we’re starting to get a sense of how the place will look like occupied. I took measurements of my room, for planning purposes. I also realized that my room has no heater. The landlord promised to buy me a space heater, saying something about a new kind of oil-filled electrical heater that looks like a normal radiator — I think he means something like these. We’ve gotta pay for the electricity, but it shouldn’t be too bad, and it’ll be useful to be able to wheel the thing around instead of having it take up an arbitrary pre-chosen corner of my room.

All the rooms need more light, but that’s easily done. I’d also like to repaint the kitchen in a warm yellow, instead of the nasty greenish yellow we’ve got, but that probably won’t happen.

I’ve got that first box of comics pretty much filled. The second box will soak up the remainder of the pamhplets in the living room, and some of what’s stacked up in what Chris and I call the study, more honestly yclept the junk room.

Cool stuff

• Check out Kris Dresen’s journal. She’s got some gorgeous artwork in there. (Scroll down past the bit about how she lusts after Yanni’s violinist.) Also look at her website. (I’ve used the imperative, so now ya gotta.)
• This plan for a new Battlestar Gallactica miniseries actually sounds interesting. Might grab my eyeballs for at least an episode or two. (via BoingBoing)
• Ah, the units command. I love having a Unix command line on my Mac.
• Which reminds me of the cal command, which displays a one-month calendar. Get to a Unix prompt, type cal 12 2002 (or just 12 2002 into this online version) and you’ll get this:

     December 2002
   S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
   1  2  3  4  5  6  7
   8  9 10 11 12 13 14
  15 16 17 18 19 20 21
  22 23 24 25 26 27 28
  29 30 31
  

  Best part is, if you type cal 9 1752 you get this:

     September 1752
   S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
         1  2 14 15 16
  17 18 19 20 21 22 23
  24 25 26 27 28 29 30
  

  Gotta love that kind of attention to detail.