A strange thing happened to me this morning. I was slowly waking up, browsing Instagram absent-mindedly… when I saw this video from nicolestorydent.
It’s pretty quick, so see if you can spot it. I almost missed it, the first time it flashed by. And then I watched it again, in disbelief.
The gameplay is a bit mesmerizing, and I find a kind of hypnotic appeal to the constant building and re-building of structures and roads, clearing out trees and setting up trade routes. Is it weird to say that it feels somewhat calming?
I want to argue that Cog (which came out in 2003) was one of the first “viral” Rube Goldberg machines to make the rounds on the Internet. Which was no small feat back then, since it would be another 3 years until YouTube came to be.
I’m a big, big fan of Sean Dunne, and am really taken by how he looks at the world. At people, in particular.
There’s actually two banks of elevators, but the vestibule area was cordoned off for some reason. The elevators were still working, but you could only enter them from the outside.
Peering into the vestibule area, every elevator door was criss-crossed with caution tape. It made taking the elevators feel really, really dicey.
One of my gifts was a new board game: Mandala. I came across this review of the game by Quinns, on Shut Up and Sit Down.
A photo of Kiss, with Gray’s Anatomy and the Illustrated Family Bible in the background.
Took a brief walk today, with Anne, Jackson, and Sandy. Along the way, we passed by a statue of Chief Wabaningo, a local historical figure – covered for winter.
The fascinating thing for me is how many different languages are at play, in any given episode. There’s a mixture of English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Japanese – and some characters have difficulty understanding others.
In a lot of mystery/thriller movies, you oftentimes get visual cues that help develop the story. I feel like language is being used in this series in a similar way – you have to almost watch and listen with a lot of attention, to pick up on some very subtle things at play.
Today, I watched Quintin Smith provide an overview of the sport of Blaseball… and it looks incredibly ridiculous and incredibly fun. I’ve signed up, and with great delight, feel like I have no idea what I’ve signed up for.
I was standing in the living room, when Liz whispered Window! to me, and pointed outside. I was able to grab my camera in time to catch a solitary deer, slowly walking by the house.
At times, there was nothing at all. And other times, we were nearly blinded with snowfall. This alternated back and forth for the last half of the trip. At one point, I remember most of the cars on the highway going down to around 30 mph.
Realized I never ended up posting my talk from the last 20×2 Chicago, back in June. It’s the first live event I’ve attended since the pandemic, and the first time I got back on stage in… well, in a while.
We had a blast, watching kids step up and try to “win” their candy. I think the most memorable moments for us were when the kids tried to unsuccessfully play the game (we had several kids just throw the pucks at the board, head-on).
The whole thing was held together with alligator clips, and wires plugged in directly into the breadboard. It ain’t pretty, but… we got it to work.