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Once again this year I have talked the talk and walked the walk: I got my annual flu shot.
I was hoping you’d see more of my asteroid tattoo in this picture, but what the heck. It gets the job done. As usual, the shot was painless, inexpensive, and should help my immune system do what it’s meant to do.
Flu shots are important. Everybody’s freaking out about Ebola right now, but every year the flu kills far more people! By getting my shot, I’m doing two things: teaching my immune system how to fight off the influenza virus likely to be common this season, and also keeping me from becoming an unwitting host to the virus, able to infect others.
That’s critical. For me personally, if I get the flu the odds are I’ll be miserable for a few days and more whiny than usual. But my wife is immunocompromised, and if she gets a full-blown infection, the complications could be very serious. That’s why we get our immunizations every year. It helps build herd immunity, and that protects people who cannot get the shot and could get critically ill from the flu.
Sure, Ebola is scary, but it’s made far scarier by the media in this country that have their priorities grossly out of whack. Given how communicable influenza is, and how dangerous it is, they’re spending way too much telling you about the wrong virus.
This video speaks to me on a spiritual level. It's pure luck that I haven't accidentally posted something with a string of cat-generated gibberish in the middle of it. Mostly, my cats like to run searches.
Whether it's mobile phones or electric cars, consumers tend to be put off by the long recharge times and limited battery life. Now, thanks a team of engineers at Nanyang Technology University, there's a lithium-ion battery on the horizon that dramatically improves both of these limitations.
Lexa One is a Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, Canada-based photographer that brings a unique and beautiful touch to cosplay photography. I know a few people who hired Lexa for private photo shoots and they were all highly enchanted by the experience, so if you are based in the province of Quebec and are looking for a highly professional photographer, Lexa is always available for hire!
Why, it’s me, who along with Naomi Novik, Kevin Avery, Sarah Maclean, Jeffrey Cranor and Kate Leth (who took the photo), wrote humorous erotic fan fiction of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen for the Shipwreck show that took place this evening in Brooklyn. And when the, uh, smoke cleared, my erotic fanfiction from the point of view of Dr. Malcolm Long was judged the best (or worst, depending) in show. I was naturally demure in victory, “demure” here being defined as “jumping up and down on the stage, hooting like a howler monkey.” Which is the usual definition of the term, yes?
I won, but I’m here to tell you it was a squeaker, since every single story was ridiculously funny and good, and the fact that each was performed by Cecil Baldwin of Welcome to Night Valejust made them all that much better. It was, seriously, fantastically fun.
And what does erotic fan fiction of Watchmen, written by John Scalzi, read like? Well, I’m not entirely ready to offer it up here yet, in part because I’m waiting to see if there will be audio/video from the event, and Baldwin’s delivery really makes the story. I will offer up three phrases from my piece, however, which should give you an idea: “quivering, manly love gate,” “deliciously fleshy proboscis,” and, of course, “moist, willing, tangy orifice.”
Oh, yeah. It’s one of those stories. Trust me, you’re sorry you weren’t there. Unless you were there, in which case you’re glad you were.
For the past several months, my producer Boyan, and I built a list of about 140 games that were potential candidates for Tabletop. We spent the last five weeks playing them to find our final list of games for season three of Tabletop.
It was a very fun process that was also very challenging and kind of exhausting. #GamerNerdProblems
Before I tell you what some of them are, I wanted to talk a bit about the selection process, because it comes up all the time.
I did a Not The Flog all about this, but the basic rules are:
I have to love the game.
It has to be in print.
It has to be teachable in roughly five minutes (there are some exceptions to this rule).
It must have a good ratio of luck to strategy.
It shouldn’t have player elimination.
It can not have simultaneous play.
It needs to have good production values.
It needs to play in under 90 minutes with four players.
I’m sure there are some others that I’m not thinking of at the moment, but those are the fundamentals.
We also put games into categories, like:
Worker Placement.
Area Control.
Bluffing.
Co-operative.
Co-operative with a defector.
Bidding.
Negotiating.
Storytelling.
And so on. If we end up with two or more games that we really like that fit into the same category, we pick the one that we think would look best on camera, or is in some way a better representation of the category for some reason.
There were games that I loved, like Daniel Solis’ Belle of the Ball, which just won’t work on our show (Belle joins Sentinels of the Multiverse, in that regard). There were games that were so infuriatingly awful, like [GAME THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED], they made me literally angry with rage. There were games, like Escape, that were supremely fun, but feature simultaneous play, so we can’t use them. There’s Rampage — which really needs to be played at human scale at conventions using cardboard buildings and plushie Meeples — that we can’t play because it’s impossible for us to shoot. There were games that seemed promising, but just fell apart at one point or another.
So we took over 100 games that we thought looked promising, and eliminated the ones that broke one or more of those rules. I’d say that left us with about 45 games in all those categories, which we played many times. I guess we’ll call those games the finalists, because I can call them whatever I want, since this is my show. In fact, we’re going to call them Batman.
So we took the Batman games and played them intensely over a span of about five weeks, ending up with 23 games to be played in 20 episodes. They’re all really great games in their various categories, and I’m super excited to see how they play out when we film the show.
I thought it would be cool to share some of the games we’re playing before we get into production, instead of making everyone wait until the episode comes out, so anyone who is interested in them can pick up a copy before the Tabletop effect hits, and also because I like the freedom to be open like this that comes with our crowd-funded season.
So, here are a few of the games we’ll be playing this season:
This is a gorgeous, perfectly balanced game, where players take a journey from Kyoto to Edo, along the East Sea Road. It’s from the same designer as Takenoko and Rampage.
In Libertalia, we’re all pirates trying to outwit each other and bluff our way to the best treasure. It’s super fast to learn and play, has massive replay value, and allows us to talk like pirates. Yar.
We describe this as “7 wonders express”. We’re all trying to have the best meal in a sushi bar, passing cards around the table and trying to keep what will help us, while we try to mess up what everyone else is trying to get. I just love this game, and it’s one of many that are simply outstanding offerings from Gamewright, a publisher that is increasingly becoming one of my favorites.
This is one of the few “gamer” games we’re going to play this season. It’s published by Days of Wonder, a company that usually publishes “lighter” games (like Ticket to Ride and Pirate’s Cove). I’m most worried about how we’re going to make this game work, because it has a ton of meeples and the art on the game, while beautiful, may feel cluttered on camera. I love it so much, though, I am determined to make it work. I even had my editor come over yesterday to play it, so he could give us ideas on how we can best film it. Not that it matters, but this was my favorite game at GenCon this year, and is so far my favorite of 2014.
Oh, I guess I should tell you a little bit about it, right? All these different colored meeples are on the board, and we pick them up and drop them off like in Mancala, as we use them to claim spaces, score points, and collect resources. It’s a little complex to learn (just because there’s a lot of information to digest), but once you climb the steep learning curve, the gameplay is very intuitive and easy to understand. Because it’s set in ancient Persia, there are Djinn that can help players, and it’s heavily thematic.
Also, while we were playing it yesterday, I got up from my crummy card table (I’m waiting for my Geek Chic table to arrive), bumped the table leg with foot (well, maybe I kicked it really hard because DEX is my dump stat), and not only did I knock all the meeples off their tiles, I spilled my iced coffee over all the djinn cards, and knocked a bowl of almonds to the floor.
Click to embiggen and get the full horror of my Anne Wheatoning.
It was the most epic and total destruction of a game I have ever witnessed, and I’ve been to France.
Not that it matters, but I ended up winning the game after we restarted with an entirely new setup. I’m really good at this game, so when I lose on the show like I always do, it’s going to be rough.
So there you have a few of the games we’re playing this season on Tabletop. Over the next few days or whatever, I’ll post some more of them. We go into production on Thursday the 8th, and we shoot until the 20th.
OH! And there will probably be a MAJOR AWESOME ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT SEASON THREE in the next few days. I hope you’ll join me in getting excited about it.
Autism is a poorly-understood neurological disorder that can impair an individual’s ability to engage in various social interactions. But little 5-year-old Iris Grace in the UK is an excellent example of the unexpected gifts that autism can also grant – her exceptional focus and attention to detail have helped her create incredibly beautiful paintings that many of her fans (and buyers) have likened to Monet’s works.
Little Iris is slowly learning to speak, whereas most children have already begun to speak at least a few words by age 2. Along with speech therapy, her parents gradually introduced her to painting, which is when they discovered her amazing talent.
“We have been encouraging Iris to paint to help with speech therapy, joint attention and turn taking,” her mother, Arabella Carter-Johnson, explains on her website. “Then we realised that she is actually really talented and has an incredible concentration span of around 2 hours each time she paints. Her autism has created a style of painting which I have never seen in a child of her age, she has an understanding of colours and how they interact with each other.”
