Category: games

02/08/2006

Tax return computed. HDTV haughtily mocks and disdainfully laughs at tax return. Tax return hangs head in shame and pretends it wasn’t even looking at HDTV. I got to play with my grampa’s new HDTV the other night. It had a VGA and DVI input. I shoulda brought my computer to hook up to it. BF2 on a screen that large would probably make me sick though.

Gramma Peny, who’d been staying with us for a few months, has left to visit relatives in Kansas. It was nice to have her with us, and to have her as a Scrabble player. Unfortunately, she polished Vanessa into a razor-sharp and unbeatable player who usually wins. Is it time to escalate the Scrabble cold war to studying word lists? I hope not. Won’t someone please think of the children?

Well, congrats to Kelly and Bethany who have just had their second child. Kelly sent me a link to his photos of the baby. It was quite a contrast in the photo album…from a cat peacefully resting on a sunny windowsill to a pink, screaming, angry newborn.

Sean apparently finds Google video and flickr to be very interesting. I can show him a slideshow of basketball hoops (which he is strangely fascinated with) or a video of dogs playing with a basketball in a swimming pool at his whim. I downloaded this video to the Google player and now he can hit the spacebar to start it over and over and over…as long as I’m in a different room…because if I hear those dogs yapping in that video one more time, I’ll go mad! Mad, I tells ya!

People actually consume silver for medicinal purposes? Wowzers. Wonder if it works as well as mercury. Still can’t beat leeches.

12/22/2005

We had a round of Scrabble last night. Vanessa busteth us up. I had three zeroes…a personal record for me, I think. “zenon”? What was I thinking? Stupidly challenged “phi”. I think my brain was missing. At one point I misspelled “lewd” as “leud” but was lucky enough to make it through the challenge because a “leud” is a feudal vassal. Yeah, I meant to do that. Good words to learn include “qua” and “biz”. This is a good page to determine legal words. We leave the site open as we play for challenges.

11/28/2005

On Thanksgiving day, we went to my sister and brother-in-law’s. That evening, my brother and Kyle and I played Risk. We had planned to play a full game. However, it turned into a loooong 3-way stalemate. When one would get too powerful, the other two would attack him, keeping a balance. The dice battles…I don’t know how many times we cast dice. Finally, it came down to a delicate interplay of sleep and outside obligations involving work and guardianship. Ethan decided it was time and he thinned out his forces taking out Kyle. He brought him down to only 3 armies but couldn’t quite finish him off. It was around 2 AM at that point and what 3 cards does Kyle happen to have? Yes, of course, Australia goes from 3 armies to 88! He’s back. We just kinda gave up at that point and said I won since their forces were thinned out at that point…but who knows? Risk could theoretically go on forever! We’re not playing that again without computer dice rolling.

A friend of ours came and helped repair our doorbell. And the secret location of the hidden rebel transformer? On the attic light fixture above the garage.

11/22/2005

I came up with the idea of buying the Alhambra board game so we could play it on Thanksgiving but Vanessa couldn’t find it locally. We ended up ordering it from the internet but alas, it won’t be here in time.

Went to dentist for cleaning this morning. I asked the hygienist if she dreams about teeth at night after dealing with them all day. She said not after 30 years of doing the job. Hopefully this friendly banter will make her less prone to jabbing my gums with sharp implements next time, but I’m not optimistic.

10/24/2005

I saw in the Blue Room playlist, Dinosaur Jr. covering The Cure’s Just Like Heaven. Thought, “I’m going to hate this.” (I disliked Dinosaur Jr…too generic.) Strangely, it turned out to be amusing enough…especially the heavy metal screams.

There’s a homeless woman with a dog whom I usually see in a tiny grass area in the center of the PNM buildings. I’m not sure if she lives there or not. There are some benches there and she has several bags with her. If she does live there, I guess you could call her the resident of PNM.

Yesterday, we briefly went to a park to watch part of a rugby tournament. We had no idea what was going on. One odd thing was that when they toss the ball in from out of bounds, both teams each have two guys lift a guy up to catch it. Some players wear things that look like wrestling helmets.

08/05/2005

Last night, after getting the living room computer set up, I played an English Beat
video on the TV as Sean and I danced. Sean is quite the dancer. If he hears a good beat, he
starts doing a bouncy dance with his arms in the air and then tries to snap his fingers.
After that, I put a picture of his face on the TV, taking up the whole screen. I tried
to get him to point out his nose, ears, and owie (on his head), but he didn’t get it.
I’m hoping to get MAME set up with 4 joysticks on the TV for some X-Men and Ninja Turtle action.

03/25/2005

Here, have a sweet mp3. Ratatat – Seventeen Years

It’s the music video to The Bees – Chicken Payback in streaming Windows Media or Real Video. Best music video I’ve seen in a while.

So, on the Sony PSP couldn’t they have let you open a simple text file from the memory card? Is that too much to ask? Maybe Sony would let you do it if all you could put in the text file is “I love Sony”. I really hope someone eventually hacks the machine to run executables from the memory card. Of course, Sony would hate the idea. I love seeing proprietary stuff fixed to run the way the consumer wants it to.

Last night, it was round 3 in gramma Peny’s Scrabble Champeenship. Amazingly, I actually won. My first word was rigatoni which got rid of all my letters and gave me a 50 point bonus. Part of the game feels like luck, though. I mean, I sometimes wonder if expert players could still win if they were drawing all vowels like we were the other night. I just found a Scrabble page with a dictionary and even a cheat field to offer suggestions when you tell it what letters you have. This page has a text file of scrabble words that would probably serve as a dictionary. Good to put on a PDA.

03/24/2005

I got up early this morning to go get a Sony PSP. This confirms that I am in the 99th nerdity percentile for people my age. The only place there was any sort of big to-do about it was at Best Buy where I saw a line forming outside. For some reason, I didn’t drive up and tell them that Walmart and Target both had plenty of them without the silly bundles. Target was overstaffed in expectation of the big rush that didn’t seem to happen. Alas, none of the stores I tried had the game I was looking for. Must be a bit rare. Guess I’ll just have to stare at the videos that come with it.

Update: I went to something like 5 different stores at lunch before finding Untold Legends at Toys R Us. One thing I will miss about the GBA is the fast load times. This game loads as slow as a PS2 game.

We played team Scrabble again last night. Once again, Gramma Peny’s team thrashed us soundly. We were using a pitiful 1976 dictionary for reference on challenges. Vanessa and I got away with 2 “bluffs” that weren’t in the dictionary. “biz” and “yo”. Gramma won with “jo“, which we stupidly challenged. It means sweetheart.