:TESTO: :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:In case anyone actually wants to print the silly game-adaptation from the previous post, a fashionable and somewhat opaque card-back pattern may be desired.

If any of you have commentary/critique on the design, topology, room/weapon names, or even gameplay, I'd love to hear it. I haven't had a chance* to play the game myself.

*(Nat and Liz and Jo and Nathan, I'm passively talking directly to you!) :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've taken Kill Doctor Lucky, Everybody's Favorite Pre-Clue Mystery Board Game, and made a new house map and set of murder implements appropriate to Mad Science's favorite spokesviking. The game's balance (topologically and card-potently), should be fairly close, but not identical. The number of connections between rooms, the distribution of room-weapon points, all fair matches to the original. I look forward to playtest.

So the next time you need a board game for a stormy night... give Kill Doctor Hrothgar (PDF) a go. You'll probably want cardstock or such for the cards at least, as they'll be flimsy and somewhat transparent otherwise.

While I've included a synopsis of the rules on the game-board, it may be useful to refer to the original rules. I had hoped they were freely available on the Internet, it appears they're not. I may scan and post them later, if I decide that Cheapass Games wouldn't mind.

Enjoy! :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Mead Made Complicated is a good site for me, and probably for those of the mead-curious inclined toward numbers and science. Although I tend to be fast and loose in my actual mead-making (beer is brewed, mead is made*), I find it very useful to have a bio-chemical appreciation/intuition for that which happens in the shadow of my kitchen, and to have a numerical baseline from which to deviate wildly.

The site's mascot is also a totally sweet** rendition of the Mad Viking Scientist, of whom our own good Doctor Hrothgar is but one facet.

The results of today's idle mead-research (which took me to the above-linked site):

I may want to try other yeast-strains, or even another species. I've been using Champagne yeast, which is highly alcohol-tolerant and produces very dry drinks. I think I might like something that stops fermenting (by its own choice) a bit sooner, allowing products that are not quite so high-test, and perhaps slightly sweet.

I've been using tea recently (and blackberries and cherry juice, in the instance of Bee Seasoning) to add tannin, at the stage of heating the honey and steeping spices. I think I might try aging some future mead in oak chips or acorns instead. I quite like the notion of a mead with an oaky twist.

Aging: I want more carboys. As it is, I've got three, each fermenting happily. It's about time to rack one of them, perhaps two (to remove the mead and its yeast from the hulls of the departed fungi), and I don't want to bottle them until fermentation has completely stopped. So I'll siphon it into the 7.5-gallon stock pot, wash the carboy, and siphon it back in, but I still can't begin a new batch until I've bottled one of them. I've got signs with Ents on them reminding me to be patient, but it's so much more fun to be actively creating.

I also want more wine bottles. While I have about a dozen liter and half-liter bottles with lovely reusable gasket-caps, I foresee that they won't quite contain the 13 gallons I've got on deck. So if you happen to be one of the fortunate few of my friends to dwell near me, and you drink wine from pleasantly shaped bottles, save them for me, and a month from now I'll give one back to you, with value added.

It's been ten months since I bottled my first batch (Mad Doctor Hrothgar's Midnight Mead), and almost exactly a year since the wort was brewed. I've got one bottle left of that batch, having been saved for "a special occasion". If nobody shows up to share that special bottle with me before my birthday (one year to the date of bottling), I shall drink it then -- six months is often quoted as the low end of quality aging.

Ideally, I'll find myself in a new and fantastic relationship with someone who would appreciate finely-aged mead. But then, that won't happen on its own. Perhaps this deadline will encourage me to be more sociable - I did have a blast at the roller-rink (!) for my housemate's own 25th birthday party, with her peer-aged friends, but not so much at the bar after - smoky and crowded. I must actively select for higher-valued contexts.

...in the past seven days, I've spent about 2.8 days' worth at school, including 3 hours on Saturday. Slide a day forward (President's day), and I'll have spent just 1.8 days of the week in the classroom. The break has done me worlds of good, sleepwise and mindwise. Hence such bigger-than-the-workday thoughts as those of the last paragraph, which I really haven't taken the time for in the past month. I need to spend more time doing interesting things away from work, both alone and in good company.

So I will. Do your part, come visit me -- or let me know if you want company (or an adventure), you just might get it.***


*wine isn't wound, or even wrought, but it would be, were I the wine-wright.

**it could also be dry, depending on the yeast used and the initial specific gravity of the must.

(!) I hadn't skated in a dozen years, nor had I skated much even then. I was quite pleased to discover the technique, through observation and experiment. Skating is a vitalizing challenge for both the body and the wit!

***Spring Break is the second week of April, a fine time for this pedagogue to be itinerant.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:The wonderful thing about pigeons
Is pigeons are wonderful things
Their tops are covered with feathers
Their sides can fold out like wings

They're happy, happy
flappy, flappy
fun fun fun fun fun!

AND the most wonderful
thing about pigeons
is that I just ate one!
O yes, I just ate one!

...

Pigeons are sources of protein
They'll put color back in your cheek
There's lots of good meat on the drumsticks
The crunchy part is the beak


They're munchy, crunchy
crunchy, munchy
yum yum yum yum yum!

AND the most wonderful
thing about pigeons
Is that I just ate one!
O YES, I just ate one!

...

The above came to me sometime Tuesday night. Although I don't really eat pigeons, I do like the way it progresses.

I was surpised to discover that today is another un-school day, due (I suppose) to a combination of sidewalk ice (partially remelted once-crunchy sleet, refrozen slick) and wind chill near zero degrees Farenheit. There may also be nasty ice remaining on roads in the less money/people-dense parts of the city.

If there's school tomorrow (and I imagine there will be), it'll be a hard-to-manage day, a Friday wedged between 2.3 snow days and a 3 day weekend. If I've got halfway decent attendance, I'll work the poor dears to death, though. I find that on the days that others throw away, the students are starving for something active to do. Other teachers will toss a DVD into their high-tech "Teaching" Station on such a day, or something equally low-energy. More for me, once I get over the initial resistance to pattern disruption.


I'm bothered that the Water From India hasn't started bubbling in earnest yet. I'm using a new brand of yeast, and if it stays unfermenting for more than today, I'll pitch in some of the old brand (or even an innoculation from a currently fermenting batch) and let them compete, and so put my college Honors Project to good use. Pity I can't observe the syntax trees for the yeast-cultures. I wonder how complex their genome is, anyway?

Edit: Saccharomyces' genome has 16 chromosomes. They've got a website.

Baking soda is a much more constant companion. Time for pancakes. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I brewed a new batch of mead last night, a straightforward 5-gallon affair with clover honey, about two cups sliced ginger, and 4 bags of black tea. I record here for the sake of my ailing memory that the specific gravity of this mix was just shy of 1100 grams per liter, giving us a potential alcohol content of 13 or 14 percent, by volume.

The airlock is a clever sideways S-curve thing, which traps the gas in the first up-curve until the pressure overcomes the water at the bottom U, pushing out the CO2 without letting in nasty oxygen, to keep the aerobic organisms at bay and the sugar-eating yeasts the dominant culture. I didn't have a third stopper-with-a-hole-in-it for the plastic water jug I've pitched this brew in, so I poked a hole in a conveniently sized juice lid and sealed it with candlewax. Just like MacGyver would, if he didn't chew gum.

The batch's name came to me in a vision-flash, of the Maryland Renaissance Festival's sword swallower Johnny Fox (also founder of the Freakatorium, and a likely contender in a Bruce Campbell lookalike contest), who performs a running gag of pouring water from a vessel which apparently fully empties itself on each pouring, yet more is poured from it a dozen times throughout the act. He calls it "Water From India", and claims it as his protection and the source of his sword-swallowing abilities.

So Water From India it is, an apt name for a tea and ginger brew. The likely label appears below.

---

In other news, today was a snow-day, ice outside and a lovely gas fire within. I cooked and cleaned and read and sketched and doodled and poked about in C++, a finely productive day.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Firefly be damned, and Farscape can take a back seat. Put Star Trek on the shelf in the closet. None of them are on the air, in any case. Doctor Who is back, and it's a delicious reincarnation.

I just finished chewing through the 2005 season of BBC's new series, 13 episodes in just over a week. I  ate too quickly, but each bite was uniquely delectable. Episodic science-fiction with sufficient variety in place and theme, nonetheless woven together nicely with a thread of continuity, development and purpose.

Upon reflection, a dominant plot structure emerges (interloping aliens threaten the future/past/existence of Earth and/or humanity (usually on purpose, sometimes not), the Doctor arrives at a convenient time and must make a Moral Decision while saving the world and protecting his companion (who he continues to make googly eyes at, but little else in that regard). That repetition really didn't bother me, and I hardly noticed it in the thick of things. There's rich (somewhat essentialized, iconic) settings and slightly silly (but often impressive and quite varied) effects and creature makeup, a good blending of the show's retro roots with modern tastes and technology. It feels like Doctor Who should, albeit at a faster pace - I recall a certain lazy spacey-ness to the Tom Baker (4th Doctor, with the scarf) era, watching it late at night on PBS. This new Doctor (series and person) is witty and quick, action-packed with seat-of-the-pants nervous energy. He's expressive, fierce, conceited, and wears an old leather jacket, and is also goofy and endearing.

The show also makes you proud to be an Englishman (which is surprising, in my case) - loads of honorable moments for Brits, flags proudly waving, picturesque establishing shots of the London skyline. It would be sickening to see a show with the same sort of American flag-waving, but here it feels quite right.

But I gush - my review will not be satisfactory in this state (I've just been introduced to the new New Doctor, and emotions are running high), so I shall end it here.

Well worth your time, in any case, if you've got a police-box-shaped soft-spot in your heart, or even a vaguely sf bend to your knees. Go buy the DVDs, or grab a torrent or two (I'm seeding).

---

In other news, I taught pre-re-precalculus this morning, and it went rather well, I think. I didn't cover as much as I wanted to, which was not (as I feared) because I couldn't keep the pace moving and the students attentive, but because the frickin' fire alarm went off and wouldn't shut up for 30 minutes of my 180, and our Dear Assistant Principal spent more time with bureaucracy than I'd have cared for. I supplied a pleasant intuition for functions (via the Sneetch-Star-Machines of Sylvester McMonkey McBean, courtesy of (The) Doctor Seuss), basic rules for expression manipulation (especially exponential expressions - they had never got the idea of rational exponents in four years of high school math, and had barely touched upon negative ones). I feel like I'll be able to give them sufficient survey and understanding of the Things They Ought To Know such that when they come across them in college, they'll at least know what they are, and that there's something interesting they can do with/to/about them if they go look it up, or maybe they'll even recall it directly. Should they reach that point, I'm okay with approving their marginal passing of precalculus (each having failed it by 5 or 10 percent previously) -- I know I can't reteach the whole of the course in a way that satisfies me in six weeks, but I think I can make at least that much difference.

Ego boost for me, grade boost for them, and they get to graduate on stage. Everybody's a winner.
I also get to buy children's books in a tax-deductible manner.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've been increasingly dissatisfied with the instability of Firefox on my Mac. It just ate my post.

So I won't talk as much this time.

Boston Game Jam: Folks made "shift" themed games in 36 hours. A neat little sim toy posted thereat didn't work, the source didn't compile nicely for me, even in Windows. So I fixed it, with a hacksaw and GLUT. It works now. Source and (Mac OS X) executable here. I made little tinker-changes, to make the sim more self-sustaining. Recompilers should (I think) only need to change the #includes in "OpenGL.h" to suit the requirements of their own environment. Below is a screenshot of an intermediate stage of tinkering, wherein isolationist tendencies produced orbital death platforms instead of gentle slopes.



Super Bowl Ads:
Most of them are bad. I'm glad I don't work in an office, or drive a car. Fewer look-at-me-I'm-sexy ads, with the exception of GoDaddy. Robert Goulet makes a nice nut commercial - best of show, in my book (though there's still a whole inning to go, I think - the final round of commercials might beat it). The Coca-Cola GTA ad is interesting - does it provide a criticism of the game's wanton bad-making, or does its casual parody signal the Grand Theft Auto's entry into the accepted hallows of our culture?

Ultraman makes me smile.
Inconsistent Moon Gravity makes me frown.

I could have sworn the SalesGenie ad would twist wittily by the end. Woe to the world that it did not.

I wonder who's winning the Super Ball game? I suspect that many home-runs and three-point shots have occurred in the time between the new batches of commercials. And so on, with the non-sports humor.

Go Yeomen? :ENDTESTO: