Yesterday was the Women's session of the LDS General Conference, and my wife Heather got to sing in it! She's in Women's Chorus this year at BYU and so they, as well as some other female choir BYU groups, got the change to be the Conference singers for that session. Here's some pictures Heather took (before and after the conference, I'd imagine, not during):
So cool, right? My mom got a screenshot of her, but I can't seem to be able to put it on here for some reason...
While she was out I cleaned the apartment, vacuumed, put clothes away, finished washing and putting away all the dishes and silverware in the sink, etc. I played with Henry and read him some stories and watched youtube videos with him (he loves "Try Everything," "Let it Go," "Get Back Up Again" from Trolls, and the "Waka Waka" song by Shikeria, although we don't let him watch that music video. So if you ever visit and he comes up to you and asks for Waka waka (It's Time for Africa) or Et it Oo (Let it Go) or Oh oh oh oh ohh (Try Everything) you'll know what he's talking about.
I had some spare time to play Somerset by myself, and so I played a 5-player game by myself acting as all 5 players, a 4-player game by myself acting as all 4 players, and a 3-player game by myself acting as all 3 players. I was expecting a 5 player game to be way shorter just because one of the end game conditions is running out of country tiles and with 5 players I thought that'd go a lot faster, but it took eight rounds, which is the average number of rounds it takes the game with any number of players. I try to play as many games as possible just to get a feel for it and see if I couldn't work out any bugs. And I did find some bugs which I need to work out. I'm drastically changing some of the cards and making minor tweaks on others, and slightly changing around the prices of a few country tiles. If you currently have a copy of Somerset, I'll let you know the exact changes later.
I heard the new live action Beauty and the Beast was really good. That was a weird target; it just came into my head.
Okay, I was going to add a whole ton of pictures of Henry right here, but for some reason it won't let me. Hold on, let me exit out and come back.
Okay, got it!
These next three pictures are Henry putting some train underwear on mommy.
Worked out well, didn't it?
His St. Patrick's Day clothes
Henry just ate a sugar cookie.
Henry loves trying on socks; it's one of his favorite things to do now.
Okay, so Somerset is pretty darn fun. I've played a lot of games this last week because I've played with a student after school for a couple days and during my break period I played a couple 3-player games. Tweaking the rules here and there, trying to make it balanced and even and tomorrow I'm going to be e-mailing Alan Bahr about meeting up with him to pitch him the idea. Below are the instruction videos I made about the game (although a few minor things have changed since then):
Video 1:
Video 2:
Video 3:
Explanations of the symbols: (although I changed the Roadbuilder's Store to also give you a coin when you land on it, and in Merlin's track the last two tiers are: +3 crystals or +1 crystal and cast two spells, and then +4 crystals or +2 crystals and cast two spells. Lancelot's last one has you looking at 4 instead of 3 cards now.
Time Travel. Okay, so it's been proven that if faster than light travel is possible than one can travel backwards in time (due to the geometry of causality, blah blah blah link to a video). And Brandon Sanderson has said that in the Cosmere faster than light travel is possible and will be done in the third Mistborn trilogy. When asked about if backwards time is possible, he said: Sanderson's answer. And I'm like, well you know faster than light travel travel is possible so of course backwards time travel must be possible in the Cosmere.
Now, we don't live in the Cosmere. We live in, what do we even call this thing? "The Universe"? What an unoriginal title. Okay, so the Universe. (Speaking of unoriginal titles, guess what the scientific name for the moon is? Yeah, that's right, Moon.) So in the Universe faster than light travel seems to be impossible. But faster than light communication? Based off of quantum mechanics, two particles that have become entangled can "communicate" with each other over super long distances, because they have to have opposite spins. If I change the spin on particle A, then the spin on B will immediately change to the opposite, even if it is on the other side of the galaxy. At least that's the theory.
(The best part about all this stuff is everyone in my family already knows all this.)
So if I could communicate faster than light, isn't that just me talking backwards in time? Short answer: yes. Okay, so what about cause and effect?
Okay, so the trip up with backwards time travel has always been that pesky little thing known as cause and effect. If I do A I cause B, which causes C, which causes D. But what if D killed your dad, so you went back in time (I'll call this event E because event D caused it) and stopped event A from happening? Well, A was the cause of event E, but if event A no longer happened, than neither did event E. Ah, you see the problem here, because event E was THE CAUSE of event A never happening (which I'll call event F for frustrating). So event F (also known as event A never happening) means that B didn't happen, or C, or D, or E. But we just said that E was the cause of F, so where does that leave us? In a paradox.
Okay, so how do we overcome time travel paradoxes? Depends on the book or movie (and I say book or movie because all instances of this have been fiction: there hasn't been (as far as I know) a single real event that has caused time travel paradoxes.
Back to the Future: You change the future sure, but you slowly fade out of existence, giving you time to try to fix things. So at least a part of event A is there, coexisting for a short time with event F until one of them wins out in the end.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: If you change the past the future changes too, but when you return to it you only have your memories from your previous timeline, not this new one. You have changed time, but I guess in this new timeline you don't even need an event E, you don't even need to go back and change stuff because someone from another timeline parallel to yours did it for you.
Ah yes, parallel universes. Where if I change something that could be the event E, but instead of saying that events A and F happen on the same tie stream just split them up into two different time streams, two different universes.
Don't even get me started on the butterfly effect.
Lost/Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban/Interstellar: Everything that has happened has already happened and cannot be changed. You going into the past means that you already were there. You can't do anything about it. This gets rid of all paradoxes at the cost of something far greater: free will. How can free will exist inside a universe like this? If I choose to go back, it isn't because I chose to, it's because I HAD to because it's already literally happened. I don't think anyone who chooses this version of time travel actually addresses the question of free will. They should.
This kind of brings me to the title of my blog post today, which is the book (trilogy actually) which I really want to read some day. The author spent literally hundreds if not thousands of hours researching the information needed. The book, of course, is Things That Don't Even Come Back Around (TTDECBA for short).
Now, part of this book involves changing history; changing myths and fairy tales and what not; changing time. And how that works is that when it happens it's as if the world has always been like that. Except for the memory of the person that changed it, I guess? Or else hey we could be living in that type of world right now but never know it because once we change it our memories will be wiped and replaced with the memories we would have had if the world would have always been like that.
Plus, there's this whole going back in time thing involving a mole and I can't really remember the details but the question the author (Eric) brought up was on the idea of free will and time travel.
So how do we have free will and backward time travel? How can you change the past without creating a paradox?
My opinion is that the universe would try to right itself as much as humanly (universely?) possible, taking out all butterfly effects from that person somehow, like the universe affecting air currents and what not so that the butterfly effects from eh time travel never happen. My idea breaks down on a large scale level though: what if he kills somebody important? Would the universe just grab somebody else, person B, to replace their position in the future? But who would take person B's spot? (Ideas of this kind discussed in this video here.)
Okay, so you could go all multiverse style and say that the instant you appear in the past you have literally just split the universe into two parallel universes, and that every time time travel occurs it splits its time stream into two. Gets rid of paradoxes, because even if you killed your grandfather in this world who cares? You didn't even come from this world, you came from one that you could. . . never. . . get. . . back to? Could you? Or are you forever stuck in this time stream? And in the previous time stream once you go back in time you are never ever coming back--you just disappear? Or could you jump back into universe A from universe B, but only after you jumped back in time? So they see you disappear, and then a little bit later they see you reappear from universe B, if you wanted to return? Has anyone asked those questions yet? Besides Eric, I mean, who probably has.
So how does time travel work in TTDECBA? Does free will exist? Did it ever exist in Interstellar or Lost or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? (Tangent: they totally messed with time travel with Cursed Child, so I don't know which category the Harry Potter universe falls in any more. Heck, I bet you J. K. Rowling doesn't even know any more.)
It has been hypothesized that you cannot travel back in time further than when time travel was first invented. I like this idea. Get a wormhole, keep one end and have the other end sit near a black hole. 100 years later and you got yourself a time machine. But you can only go back 100 years, no further. And even if you did go back 100 years, which category of time travel would that put you in?
Anyway, I have a ton of other thoughts about time travel but I've gone on long enough. What's your opinion on time travel? Is it possible to create a loop like in this video? Leave a comment in the--what am I doing? This isn't some youtube video. I don't care if you like or subscribe. Man, I've been watching way too much Super Carlin Brothers recently. . .
Anyway, Things That Don't Even Come Back Around. It's going to be good. Maybe I'll even get a copy from the future. Yeah! And then I'll give it to Eric so that he actually won't have to write it, and then in the future he'll just take a copy of that and give it back to me in the past. . . so where did it come from in the first place? Is it then just self existing? How does entropy affect it? Will that compass from Lost ever be free?
Yesterday Jacob held a Perazzo family family game night. He was the first one to notice that all five families were represented: Becky Jamison was there representing the Jamison family, Amanda was there representing the Loveland family, I was there representing the Glen Perazzo family, Megan was there representing the Alan Perazzo family, and Brandon and Jacob (the only family with more than one representative) were there representing the David Perazzo family. Everyone married had their spouse and kids along with them.
From left to right: Amanda, Juliet, Todd, Andrew, Jacob, Susan, Heather, Henry, Megan, Brandon, Becky, and Calista.
Aren't all these kids just so cute?
Playing Camel Up with all the expansion modules ('cause that's what we do)
Henry and Juliet
When I got there Jacob was playing a game of 7 Wonders Duel with Brandon, and Calista and Susan were playing a Ravensburger game. Heather, Becky, Tessa, and I played a game of Hey! That's My Fish! and Heather won.
I played Splendor next with Jacob, Todd, and Amanda. It was the first time I'v ever played (even though during Christmas break I helped clarify some rules because I had read them a long time ago). It was super fun. It's quick, easy to learn, and fun. I ended up barely winning.
Pizza came and we ate that. Afterward, nearly everybody gathered around for a game of Camel Up. That game can support a lot of players. I was doing super well at the start of the first leg until another player threw a wrench in my plans, which ended up making me lose four coins the first round. I never caught back up. I really liked the new expansion modules. My favorite one would probably be where you can bet on 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place. The one where you add dice is cool, but that's the whole reason I lost that first leg so I'm bias against it now.
That was the last game we ended up playing. Because nearly everyone has kids now it's more difficult to have longer game nights. Although I brought Somerset and showed it to Jacob we never got a chance to play it.
Speaking of Somerset, last week I mailed off both copies, one to my family in Fallon and one to my family in Rexburg. I know Eric and Ryan got theirs, but I haven't heard from Alex yet if they got theirs. After I mailed it to them on Tuesday I went to Clubs Night and play tested it with the Quark club. We tried five players and after two hours it still wasn't done. I was pondering on what to do and talked to Heather about it. I explained that you play until someone builds 12 tiles and she suggested that that was too much and I needed to make it less. So I changed it to 8 tiles. I play tested it that way and it was alright, but then I realized that most of the tiles and such were designed for a longer game, and that by cutting out the last third of the rounds you never got to do the stuff you might have spent all game leading up to, like casting spells.
So I went back to the drawing board so to speak and I modified that game slightly. I changed the prices on about half the tiles, changed how much it cost to advance your workers, modified some of the government advancement tiles, change the crystal cost on some spells, and changed some of the starting tiles. Also you can now use other people's roads, but you pay them a coin every time you do so, so it incentives roadbuilding. I play tested that and it was a lot of fun. And it plays about 15 minutes per person. When I did a two player game it took about a half hour. When I did a three player game it took about 45 minutes, and when I did a four player game it took about an hour. Also, for a 4-5 player game I did away with the duplicate copies of each tile and just had one of each, which made the game simpler and kept the 4 player game's time under check. So, um, if I sent you a copy of the game already I'll be e-mailing you the exact changes I made on those rules so that you can update your copy. Sorry about that. But please play the current version you have now to see how that runs. Your version can only support up to 4 players due to my lack of meeples, but if you wanted to do 5 I'm sure you can find a substitute.
The Game Design games came in! They came in on Tuesday, and I spent a lot of Tuesday and Wednesday putting them together, and on Wednesday and Thursday the students picked them up. One thing: the boards for Outbreak are bigger than the boxes for Outbreak. Yep: The board size folded up into quads was still too big to fit into the box I got for the Outbreak game. I'd never gotten that size board before, so I didn't know. I had to literally cut the box, fold a side of it down, and do some fancy tape and cardboard work to it and the top to get the box to be just barely wide enough to fit its board.
Eric got himself a copy of Outbreak, which I will be sending him along with the copy of Somerset I spent a lot of Friday putting together. Friday was parent-teacher conferences instead of school, so when a parent wasn't talking with me and I was by myself in the classroom I starting putting together the Somerset games for Eric and Ryan and for Home. They should be in the mail Tuesday, if not Monday. Speaking of which, Eric and Ryan I need your address.
Normally the Outbreak game cost thirty-something dollars, but Eric's copy is free for him. Why? Because of the amazing artwork he did for my Plan of Salvation card game.
Here's the backs of the cards he did:
And the fronts:
And here are the rules I wrote up:
As many of you know, in a few weeks I'm going to pitch Somerset to a professional game designer in the hopes that it will be published (which is why I need you to play test it! to get out the flaws! I've already play tested it a ton and have gotten rid of many flaws, and am now in the nitty-gritty stage of things) so that's one game that will hopefully be published.
I recently e-mailed Phil, from Covenant Publishing, about this Plan of Salvation game, just like I did a year ago with my Golden Plates game. And, once again, he said yes and wants me to send in a prototype so that they can playtest it and hopefully even publish it. Yay!
So that's two games now that are in the process of getting published.
Okay, so my mom asked for pictures of Henry, and I didn't want to disappoint, so here's 14 of them:
Henry loves drawing! It's one of his favorite activities now.
He also likes to line up the magnet letters on the fridge, and can even recognize some of the letters!
Here's a baby bottom picture for one of his wedding slideshow photos:
Henry also likes getting into trouble eating what he's not supposed to, such as mommy's chocolates.
And making messes with his food. In this case, cheese! All over our living room.
Yay! Mommy taught him how to clean, and he had a blast cleaning the toilet and tub.
