Okay, so we played Zombies!!! last night. It really is an awful game. I don’t know how I forgot that. The tiles are flimsy and hard to place without constantly Hanwooling (i.e. messing up the layout of the board) and the actual gameplay is slow and dull. I like the zombie-killing alright, but you’re only doing that for a few seconds of the three to four minute rounds. Anyway, we played long enough to reveal the helipad tile, then gave up and declared Heather the winner. Upon expressing my severe displeasure with the game, Logan offered to let me trade it in for a five-dollar discount on Elfenland (which looks wicked queer, but won the 1998 Spiel des Jahres so how bad can it be?).

After that, we played Streetcar, which is incredibly awesome even though we totally screwed up our game by beanplating my version’s poorly-written rules. (BTW, Logan, Jones, et al.: I found another set of rules and it turns out it’s way, way easier than we made it: First, you have to lay all the track from your hand before you can draw new tiles. Second, you can’t do tile exchanges that change existing track — that is, your new tile can add new paths but it must also include track from the old tile. So our whole “change someone’s inaugural route” business was actually verboten.)

Anyway, fantastic game. It’s vaguely like Carcassonne (with only road tiles) crossed with Ticket to Ride. Now that I know how to play correctly, I really want to try the three-stop routes.

In other news: No new Lost until April 24th?! I hate when shows go on hiatus.

Been playing the first-ever MeFiNo this week. If you like arguing about and drafting rules, Nomic’s the game for you.

So it looks like Logan, Jones, Heather, and Justin will all be participating in the IMBC! Pretty awesome. Sadly, Paige won’t be because she’s in Hawaii with her family (though she did submit a ton of great TotDs). BTW, if you registered for the IMBC but did not get a reply to your registration email, it means your registration wasn’t received. Apparently this has happened at least once. Please re-send your registration and cc my personal email address.

Progress on the house: Nothing new as of yesterday except they sprayed this green stuff everywhere to keep dust from blowing about.

Some new Flickr sets:

• Geology Field Trip
• STIKFAS figures
• Houses on Pioneer Hill

Random MetaFilter/MetaTalk hilarity:

Another day, another lame MeTa, another lame comment complaining, wash, rinse, repeat, HERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT CANADA

HEY DID YOU JUST MAKE A JOKE ABOOT CANADA WHY I OUGHTA PUNCH YOU RIGHT IN THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:32 PM on March 18

What was up with last week’s Frisky Dingo? They killed three main characters in one episode! That’s hardcore.

Um… what else? I’m back in the Tri-Cities. Definitely going to be here till at least Monday (major software updates). Hung out with Jones, Amanda, and Logan last night (Heather was ill) — we went to Outback and played Bang! (with all expansions) and Manhattan (best game ever! I won, of course). Tonight we’re playing Zombies!!! and some new board game (TBD). Because of an insurance-related bit of weirdness at Amanda’s second job she has the week off, so we’ve been able to game with her at times that she’d normally have to sleep or work. So that’s pretty cool.

Boxhead: The Zombie Wars is a pretty awesome little Flash game.

More blogging/yet-to-be uploaded pics later. I’ll try to be less lazy.

Ordered-list blog GO!

1. Registration for Iron Man Blogging Competition 2008 opens in a little more than two hours.
2. Stargate: The Ark of Truth is out! The copy I pre-ordered a million years ago arrived on Wednesday. Plan to watch it tomorrow.
3. I know my blog’s been pretty dead lately, but my Flickr stream has been seeing pretty regular additions. Some new sets:
   1. Nigiri Sushi I’ve Eaten
   2. Construction of House in West Pasco
   3. Coos Bay, Oregon
4. Progress on my house: The foundation is all in and the dirt around it has been backfilled. The electrical wiring is partially run and the sewer hookup’s been trenched in.
5. Watched season six of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Very funny, but made me dislike Larry David more than usual. (I can only dismiss his rudeness with “oh well, it’s okay–he just doesn’t get it” up to a point.)
6. I discovered Phun (a 2D physics sandbox) and made some neat stuff with it, like this scissor lift.
7. Lost continues to be awesome. This week was great: Korean stories, another Oceanic Six reveal, and the return of Michael.
8. Yak Shaving.
9. Top Chef season 4 premiered! Hate Andrew already, think it’s dumb that they let a couple on.

The movie-spree I mentioned in my last post continued a bit. I went on to watch The Ten (funny, typically Stella-ish humor; loved the H. Jon Benjamin parts), Sweeney Todd (kind of boring/unpleasant; dull music), Death at a Funeral (okay), Juno (very good, even though the main character is rather contrived), Run, Fat Boy, Run (decent), and The Mist (better than I expected; reminded me of Half-Life).

Still reading Born to Kvetch. Been learning some really cool stuff about Yiddish that I’ll expound on later. Haven’t been keeping on with Wizard’s Bane though; the author stopped the narrative to tell this long, pointless side-story about two wizards adventuring on a mountain and it got a little intolerable. Started reading (well, skipping through) Mortgages for Dummies.

Worked out a couple times this month (stopped logging it in January, but I’ve been going occasionally). The gym is so crowded now that it’s not really pleasant for me anymore. A few times now I’ve driven down there, seen that most of the ellipticals were occupied and just turned around and come home. And this is at like 10, 11 PM, even midnight. The whole reason I paid for a membership there (instead of using WSU’s SRC) was so I could work out with few people around. If that meant going late at night, fine. But now that’s not even enough. I think I’ll cancel my membership (which I need to do before moving anyway) and start taking daily walks around Pioneer Hill or something.

Made some pretty killer roast beef sandwiches for lunch today.

I don’t know how it happened, but all my WordPress pages (e.g. Contact Info) became unpublished (returning 404s) at some point. Took me a while to figure out what had happened. At first, I thought my .htaccess had gotten messed up. Anyway, fixed it by opening each page in the WP editor and saving it. Good thing I don’t have a lot of pages…

I finished Vacuum Diagrams. It was a lot longer than I thought it’d be. And the last few stories just dragged along. Going from galactic wars and exotic aliens to teepee-dwelling primitives kinda killed my momentum with this book. The breadth of history covered was cool though; reminded me of Terraforming Earth that way (though it was only four million years in this case). After Vacuum Diagrams I read The Burglar in the Closet, another Lawrence Block book. Not as good as his hitman series, but it’s okay. It’s told from a first-person perspective and I kinda resented the times when the protagonist kept the audience in the dark about a crucial detail, like when he described “objets d’art” found in a suspect’s apartment as “two pieces of meticulously engraved copper plate … mounted on blocks of three-quarter inch pine” knowing full well at the time that they were printing plates for counterfeiting.

Now I’m reading Wizard’s Bane (cheesy, cliché-ridden fantasy, but kind of cool cuz it’s about a C programmer who learns to apply his coding know-how to magic in a new world) and Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods.

I’ve been on a sort of movie-watching jag lately. In the past five days I’ve seen Mallrats (so much worse than I remembered it being; awful acting), Enchanted (okay, had some good music), Dan in Real Life (awesome), Jersey Girl (decent), The Darjeeling Limited (gorgeous, but a little vacuous compared to previous Anderson films; I’d never realized how cool Adrien Brody is), Idiocracy (bitter/depressing), and I Could Never Be Your Woman (fantastically awesome; Paul Rudd at his funniest/most adorable, hilarious references to other Heckerling movies, amazing cast).

Got new tires last week (was getting the studded ones taken off anyway). Had the Les Schwab beef (steak) for dinner last night. It was pretty good; very tender. Also ate at the Moscow Bagel & Deli a couple more times. (Tip: Do not go there on a Saturday night — the nearby bars make the whole area too crowded. Damn Idahoans.) Anyway, got a better picture of the Sweet Midge:

I noticed that those poppy seeds leave a weirdly sweet taste in your mouth for hours after eating… Not unpleasant, just strange. And persistent.

Hey, didja see the new Venture Bros. season three characters spread over at Jackson Publick’s blog? Can’t wait for June.

Oh, and how gratifying was last week’s Lost episode? Time travel, yay!

IMBC 2008 starts in 28 days.

Edit: Gary Gygax RIP. Also, Kaleidosketch is fun.

Edit 2: No, wait, Myoats is better.