When you’re rich you can buy all kinds of weird shit.

Ugh.

Oh good it’s not just me.

This reminds me of the time my group played a kobold campaign. We found a halfling scout and dealt with him. Then we made an improvised catapult and launched his corpse into the middle of his camp. And then we snuck in and wiped the rest of the halfling party while they were trying to figure out what was happening.

One of the guys in our party put skills in cooking and rolled a nat 20 making halfling jerky. A few sessions later a wizard or whatever granted us a wish, and we wished for our supply of nat 20 halfling jerky to never run out.

So now we’re rolling around the countryside raising hell and handing out halfling jerky to everyone because it is now the most powerful diplomatic tool in our arsenal. We never told anyone what it was made out of and pretty much any NPC who didn’t want to kill us on sight got a piece.

I don’t remember what happened to the party. I think our GM gave up in disgust after a while. Good times.

“I’m a specialized clerk interested in mathematics” if you don’t wanna get burned.

Nah. I went to HS to get HS over with. I knew zero people. I doubt anyone even remembers me.

I have no idea what year it happened, but my parents and I were driving from church (evening service) to a restaurant and a dark shadow appeared on the moon. This would have been late 80s / early 90s in the mountain west, USA, around 8PM. It kind of looked like it was cracking apart at the bottom. It stayed that way for a few minutes, so theoretically longer than something like a branch hanging over the road. It didn’t move at all. It was just there suddenly. Everyone in the car saw it, and the people we met at the restaurant saw it too. I’ve never seen anything like it since.

I’m guessing something in space cast a shadow on it? This was before phone cameras so no evidence exists other than a weird memory.

I had kind of a similar experience a while ago. My parents moved a couple times after I went to college but kept a lot of the furniture between moves. I visited one xmas and slept in my childhood bed, next to my childhood dresser in a completely different house, on a completely different side of the country. A lot of the same chairs were there in the living room. For a variety of reasons I don’t tell my parents much about my private life. Most of the conversations picked up from around when I was a teenager.

It felt like everyone but me wanted me to feel like I was right back at home and nothing was different. We’d pressed rewind for more than a decade and should be able to pick up right where we left off. I wasn’t the weird, deeply depressed and anxious person I’d become; I was supposed to still be the awkward, slightly hopeful teenager. And I could not connect in any way. Being surrounded by just enough of the artifacts from my childhood only made it weirder. Things are better now for all of us, but I still have dreams about it. They’re not exactly nightmares, but I’m rarely happy when I wake up.

I actually went and talked to her before I started because I knew that was how it’d end up going.

The snowblower froze up (specifically the mechanism that turns the spout) so I had to drag it into the house to warm it up. The plug cap on my headbolt heater also froze solid. I couldn’t bring the car into the house to warm it up because, among other things, I already had the snowblower in there. I spent 20 minutes with a heat gun prying it off instead.

Aside from that it was a normal weekend.

It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”

So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.

The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.

Gross.

“I should make sure my software architecture mirrors our org’s communication structure.”

Conway’s law exists

“Holy shit I am already so good at this.”

My soon-to-be four year-old loves Sushi Go and we love playing it with her. She mostly just picks the cute cards and doesn’t win much, but games go fast and my wife and I have fun.

They should name him Steve. He looks like a Steve.

Chinatown - My friends tell me that this game transforms me into a different person. Not sure I would call it an euro game but I had to put it somewhere. This is a negotiating game, you’re going to spend the entire game trading locations with other people or selling them for money or both. Check this one out!

I’ve spent actual cash from my wallet trying to close a deal in Chinatown. It’s nuts.

Hmm, I’ll have to read up on it more.

I sort of fell off the boardgaming bandwagon, but I loved OG Brass. We had a dedicated crew that would play it at boardgame night back in the day. Definitely going to check Birmingham out.