Yeah so my old phone broke, and it wasn't my fault, the battery is faulty I think. Anyway, my mother-in-law got me a new phone. Here's a picture of it:
No, wait, sorry, my bad. Here's a picture of it:
Anyway, none of my contacts transfered over, so I'm back to square one on that.
I heard once that motivation was bunk. That a whole bunch of motivational speakers who talked about how to be motivated for something---that they were wrong, it just didn't work. Or if it did, it wasn't really that effective. The key to doing something, the speaker said, was
Election's coming up soon. Soon meaning 72 days. Less than two months. And I've heard people from both sides saying that if the other guy wins America will be plunging into chaos and our country will be destroyed and yadda yadda yadda. Or you could think like I do, and think that this is just going to be another election, and life will go on. Because the 2016 election was also supposed to be, like, the finalizing election to determine the future of the country. And do you know what happened? The nation kept right on moving. However, during this election I really hope that
So many game ideas. Working with A Thousand Faces again. Newlands. History of the Church the Game (a co-op game where you try to move Church headquarters all the way to Utah before too much bad stuff goes down). The Magnificent Machine. A new one that uses colored dice to buy new cards that can do awesome things including affecting future dice and so forth. But, like, I only have so much time. And there are so many ideas. And I have to do school stuff too, and games take up so much time, especially creating them, that I think I will have to
My mother-in-law's birthday was this past week. 61 years old. Older than my own mother. Which I guess makes sense because I'm the eldest child in my family and Heather is the second youngest. You know, I've thought about that. Like, what if the oldest kid in a family (we'll name him Mark) has a kid when he's like 20 or something (we'll name Mark's daughter Julie), and then someone else elsewhere is the youngest kid in their family (we'll name him Ralphie), born like 18 years after Mark was born. So Mark and Ralphie are in the same generation, right? Like, their parents could have gone to school together in the same grade and everything. But Julie and Ralphie meet at BYU or something and they fall in love and since there's only 2 or 3 years difference between their ages it's totally cool, even though one is in a completely different generation than the other! And suddenly the whole generation thing isn't a step by step ladder into the past, it's messy and full of
School is still all online. Our district decided to not meet back up in person yet. And I'm like, hallelujah! Because I like online teaching. You get a ton more time to prep and make cool videos like this one:
Which is part of our Beowulf unit we are doing right now. And the students can go on any time they want and watch, to help them with their homework or quizzes or their huge Beowulf project that involves
I've already mentioned before that I have these story ideas but can't seem to get the motivation to start writing them. I heard once that motivation is bunk, that it's a lot harder to do something you don't want to if you allow yourself to talk yourself out of it. The trick is to just jump in and do it as soon as you think about it. The speaker called it the 5-second rule, that you have 5 seconds after you have a thought to do something (clean the dishes, write a letter, do homework, etc.) before your brain says, nah, here's some excuses. But if you just jump in without thinking too much to think yourself out of it, you can get tons of stuff done, all without worrying about the whole "motivation" thing. I've tried it before and it does actually work.
Last election year, 2016, was kind of a lose-lose for me, because I didn't want Hillary or Donald to win. This year is kind of a won-win for me because even though I'm not going to vote for Trump, if he does win I'll be like, okay, good, we have a conservative in the White House who's pro-life and stuff. But if Biden wins at least we'll have a President who knows and acts on the fact that Climate Change is real and man-caused, and might actually do something to help save our planet rather than denying it like most conservatives do for some unknown reason. Plus other factors as well (one of the biggest being he's actually Presidential and won't be a complete embarrassment to our country).
I'm just going to have to set some time aside for making games, and maybe even work on just one at a time. Working on too many at the same time drains your resources (no pun intended) and energy and you aren't as effective at any one thing. That's the same reason why multi-tasking is ineffective.
Genealogy is cool because I can have a person that is seven generations back on one side of my family but only five or six on the other. This is where the term "once removed" comes from. For more cool facts, check out this generation chart found here: https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/cousin-chart/
My students' final Beowulf project comes in three parts, and each part has two assignments. However, they only have to do one assignment per part. So in all there are six assignments, but only have to do three. It gives them a bit of choice just in case one of the options sounds terrible to them. They have to 1: a) make a crossword puzzle, or b) make an album cover. 2: a) make a storyboard, or b) write their own song. 3: a) Choose already existing songs that match up with Beowulf and explain how, or b) write a character analysis on six different characters.
Right now Dominion is my favorite game.
7 Wonders is very very close to beating it out though.
7 Wonders is, like, the perfect game.
Simultaneous play so that there's no downtime.
Player interaction each turn without it being a fight. This is because you can buy your neighbor's resources to use. Plus, the purple cards give you points based on neighbors, and of course the red military. And some yellow cards too even! If I could make a simultaneous play game that had player interaction, I'd be in heaven.
Multiple paths to victory. Do you go green cards? Red? Blue? How many brown and grey cards do you get? How many yellow?
Engine building-ish. See above. Plus, the free construction chains.
Variable player powers-kind of. Each board is different, and each side is different. Each gives you a different starting resource and different stages you can build.
And the game is epic in scope. You start with nearly nothing and at the end you've built an entire grand civilization. To me, it's one of those vast epic sprawling civilization games, but can be played in under a half hour.
It scales well up to 7 players, 8 with the expansion.
The only flaw is it is terrible for 2 players. So much so that the brand new reprinting of the game is now labeled 3-7 players instead of 2-7. That and it might be a bit fiddly to set up and put away with the different cards depending on the number of players you're playing with.
Let's now talk about Go.
I've been playing Go with Ryan online. Just on a 9x9 board, not the full 19x19.
It's crazy that with such simply rules it can be so deep and have so much strategy to it. And every game somehow turns out completely different, even though the board itself is just a 9x9 grid and your pieces are all identical. Somehow your placements make every game have a unique feel all its own.
Ryan's still better than I am. But I'm getting better.
I often fins myself thinking, "okay, I'll do that, then he'll do that, then I'll do that, then he'll do that..." Which I can do a lot better at Go than I can in Chess.
But there are still surprises and your opponent can make a move that you did not see coming. If you've never played Go before and want a hint, here's mine: Get an area with 2 eyes and you'll be golden. At least, that's my basic strategy.
Don't tell Ryan.
Here's the joke that Heather thinks my dad would get a kick out of. I think he's heard it before.
"Hey guys, are you working hard, or hardly working?"
Third week of school coming up. I'm also going in to Apple to see if they can see what's wrong with my phone.
My family played another game of Newlands.
Angeles (red) won, but seeing how she added her three-sail mast before her two-sail mast accidently, I'm not sure how legitamite her victory was. That's a nice five-tile green island though.
Be on the lookout for a new Beowulf video on my YouTube channel soon.
And remember: I before E, except after C, or when your weird foreign neighbor Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.
