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Week in review: Week to 14 March
Mar. 16th, 2025 09:47 pmThere was a state election. The overall result wasn't a surprise. The outcome in the electorate I live in is still in doubt, but it's looking like the candidate I was hoping for is going to win. (I should draw a distinction between the Labor candidate who I was hoping would win, and supported in the two-party-preferred contest, and the Greens candidate who I gave first preference to despite knowing he had no chance of winning in this electorate. He clearly knew it, too, because he didn't waste any resources on campaigning; during the entire election period I saw a single generic "Vote Greens" ad and nothing specific to this electorate or the candidate. I wouldn't even know his name if it hadn't been on the ballot form.)
When I first started playing Ingress, I got messaged out of the blue by a player on the opposing team to thank me for starting, because he'd been the only active player in the area for a while and it had been dull having no competition. Now he's left town, and I'm getting a taste of what that's like. On Sunday morning, there was a sudden burst of activity and I was briefly hopeful that there was a new player in town, until I checked the times and locations and realised it was somebody passing through on the transcontinental train and hitting up the tourist spots during the layover.
At the board game club, we played a new board game called Winter Rabbit. It's a collaborative game inspired by Cherokee mythology and culture, themed around building up a village so it has all the resources it needs to last through winter. We didn't quite make it, but we got a lot closer than we thought we were going to when we were halfway through.
Someone on Tumblr was asking people to nominate the five most important video games of their youth. I cheated a bit, since my five picks were two individual games, two series, and a genre - respectively: Nyet, a Tetris clone that was one of the first games my family had on our first home computer; Scorched Earth, a tank game we played incessantly on the rec room computer when I was at boarding school; the Commander Keen series of platformers; the series that was then called Star Control but is now, due to trademark shenanigans, called Free Stars; and the Concept of Interactive Fiction Games (I never quite had the patience to play any one interactive fiction game through to the end, but I was fascinated by their existence and the process of creating them).
One of my favourite youtubers, Tom Scott (who did Amazing Places and Things You Might Not Know, among others) is guest competitor on the current season of Jet Lag: The Game. The format of Jet Lag changes each season, but always revolves around the idea of using geographical areas as a huge game board; this season, the game board is the Schengen Area, the free-transit region that covers most of Europe, and the aim is to be the team that claims the most "spaces" on the "board" by travelling to the corresponding country. Being the first to set foot in a country is sufficient to claim it temporarily (for a metaphorical value of "set foot" that includes passing through on a train to somewhere else, a fact that has already resulted in some interesting tactical moves), but gaining permanent control of a country requires completing that country's themed challenge.
Dress rehearsals are going well.
I didn't get as much bike riding done this week as I would have liked, because of the weather, but on one of the bike rides I did do I saw kangaroos again.
When I first started playing Ingress, I got messaged out of the blue by a player on the opposing team to thank me for starting, because he'd been the only active player in the area for a while and it had been dull having no competition. Now he's left town, and I'm getting a taste of what that's like. On Sunday morning, there was a sudden burst of activity and I was briefly hopeful that there was a new player in town, until I checked the times and locations and realised it was somebody passing through on the transcontinental train and hitting up the tourist spots during the layover.
At the board game club, we played a new board game called Winter Rabbit. It's a collaborative game inspired by Cherokee mythology and culture, themed around building up a village so it has all the resources it needs to last through winter. We didn't quite make it, but we got a lot closer than we thought we were going to when we were halfway through.
Someone on Tumblr was asking people to nominate the five most important video games of their youth. I cheated a bit, since my five picks were two individual games, two series, and a genre - respectively: Nyet, a Tetris clone that was one of the first games my family had on our first home computer; Scorched Earth, a tank game we played incessantly on the rec room computer when I was at boarding school; the Commander Keen series of platformers; the series that was then called Star Control but is now, due to trademark shenanigans, called Free Stars; and the Concept of Interactive Fiction Games (I never quite had the patience to play any one interactive fiction game through to the end, but I was fascinated by their existence and the process of creating them).
One of my favourite youtubers, Tom Scott (who did Amazing Places and Things You Might Not Know, among others) is guest competitor on the current season of Jet Lag: The Game. The format of Jet Lag changes each season, but always revolves around the idea of using geographical areas as a huge game board; this season, the game board is the Schengen Area, the free-transit region that covers most of Europe, and the aim is to be the team that claims the most "spaces" on the "board" by travelling to the corresponding country. Being the first to set foot in a country is sufficient to claim it temporarily (for a metaphorical value of "set foot" that includes passing through on a train to somewhere else, a fact that has already resulted in some interesting tactical moves), but gaining permanent control of a country requires completing that country's themed challenge.
Dress rehearsals are going well.
I didn't get as much bike riding done this week as I would have liked, because of the weather, but on one of the bike rides I did do I saw kangaroos again.
