So Stick and I went looking for a good Christmas game for our first-grade niece (since she wasn’t going to get her dreidel), a good Useless Present that we could play with her on Christmas, and Ron from the Game Connection recommended Labrynth.

Labyrinth is marked as ages 8 and up, but because Isabelle is so smart, we thought we’d give it a try. It’s very hard to put an age designation on the difficulty; there’s no reading involved, but players need a good sense of  spacial relationships, and they must able to plan ahead and anticipate future moves. This fits Isabelle — she’s a lethal Connect Four player when she remembers to plan her moves ahead.

The object of the game is to move your token through a constantly-shifting maze, collecting treasure and  hoping that the other players don’t ruin your planned path (either accidentally or on purpose!).  Izzy’s Nana joined us to make up four players, and, even if it’s a bit strange to me to be one of the adults playing, it’s still exciting to get a full boardgame going on Christmas.

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Labyrinth (Muppets and David Bowie Not Included)

And re-enrolling was the right choice, too, because going back to school introduced me to more  books that I hadn’t read yet, and one day in a Roman history class, I met a boy called Stick — maybe I’ve mentioned him? — who’d left an underwhelming job at the phone company to come back to college. And that was good.

I started working at a local restaurant a few weeks ago.  (And Stick returned to the phone company a few months ago, but this is my blog.) This is slightly different from my mid-college diner job, although it still offers all the intellectual stimulation of carrying items from kitchen to table and back again, it’s really pretty nice. It’s a Middle Eastern restaurant, which means a kitchen full of cardamon and coriander, and the owners are very relaxed about letting me experiment (for me, I mean, not to serve to the customers), and I really can’t complain about all the mango lassis. The dining room is pretty, with exotic decorations, and the customers are not inhaling meals on the rigid work breaks like my diner patrons, and the hours work around my classes at Chinese school. As long as I don’t think too much about how going back to college was supposed to prevent exactly this situation from happening, the job’s good.

The Urdu-speaking chef likes to call me senorita, much to the amusement of the Spanish-speaking kitchen staff who respond with the throat-clearing noise that means miss in Urdu. After my stress and success differentiating the four and a half Mandarin tones, and forcing my mouth to make sounds that aren’t in our alphabet, I probably shouldn’t be surprised that there are sounds in other foreign languages that don’t sound like words. And even so, hearing Urdu is just as shocking as hearing full speed Yantai-hua again. That was a sentence? How can anyone possibly pick words out of that? I’ve already ranted here about my massive struggles to learn Mandarin, and overall, I’m quite proud of myself. Still, I look back on it, and keep thinking that if I’d just done a little bit more, and tried a little bit harder…  everything would have fallen into place. (Just another way Mandarin resembles my ex-boyfriend). I’ve been missing the daily challenge of speaking a second language. And Spanish is wonderful, with that nice alphabet for easy transition between reading and speaking, and nice Latin roots for guessing.

Even my mistakes in Spanish are wonderful. When I screw up un poco and pequeno, for example, I can be told that un poco is more like a little and pequeno is more like small, instead of that zhāng is a measure word used for flat objects, except not for paper and not for things that come in a pair or come in a bunch, and actually my tone was wrong anyway and I really said monkey balls. (I’m looking at you, Chinese.)

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Waiting

Our first-grader niece Isabelle asked Santa for a Snuggie (without irony) and a dreidel. We’d already gotten her a gift, but I’m hoping to spread the traditional Christmas latkes to the Malavette clan, so Stick went out searching for a dreidel.

He tried a few places before looking at the local K-Mart. Because, what could be more Jewish than a North Carolina K-Mart? Somehow I don’t expect this shopping trip to work out well for Stick. “Do you carry dreidels?” he asked an employee, after searching for a while.

“A what?”

“A four-sided top with Hebrew writing on it. Usually comes with gold-foil chocolate coins.”

“Dray-dell. I don’t think so.” she said, then called over to her co-worker. “Hey! We got dreidel?”

“Dreidel? She ain’t working today,” was the definitive reply.

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A New One For The Baby Name Book

Cake Mania 3 is an adorable time-management game for the Nintendo DS. Jill, our heroine from Sandlot Games’ PC versions of the Cake Mania imprint, is cheerfully preparing for her wedding day when she accidentally breaks a time-bender (I suppose it was wedding decor), and sends herself and her loved ones off through space and time, only to be saved through extensive cake baking! Jill must rescue her displaced friends and family, repair the time-bender and make it back for her wedding – all by making and decorating cakes.

Once Jill lands in a new location and sets up her bakery (“Oh look,“ Jill notices, “My oven works in ancient China! That’s not weird at all!”), the top screen is used for progress stats, like time spent and money earned, and icons of waiting customers. The bottom screen is Jill’s bakery. Players send Jill rushing from oven to customer with a tap of the stylus. A checkmark appears over the future actions in Jill’s queue so you can easily keep track of what she’s doing. Tap the checkmark to remove a planned action from Jill’s to-do list.

Read the rest of my Cake Mania 3 review over on Casual Gamer Chick.

I didn’t mention how excited I was to receive this review copy, because professional reviewers do not share when they do the idiotic happy dance. Yeah. This is me, not sharing.

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Cake Mania 3

Jones Soda — yes, the people who came up with  turkey-flavored Thanksgiving soda — have just launched a new line of Dungeons and Dragons Jones Soda. I thought it was a joke at first, but Jones Soda’s Potion of Healing, Dwarven Draught, Sneak Attack, Eldritch Blast, and my personal favorite, Bixby’s Crushing Thirst Destroyer are all real flavors.

Which begs the question – what would a D&D soda taste like? I imagine a Sneak Attack would taste like a deceptively fruity and sweet girly drink, followed with a huge vodka kick when you try to stand up. And a Potion of Healing would taste like medicine –  I’m thinking  children’s Triaminic grape-flavored cough syrup.

I’m not really a soda drinker myself, preferring to take my sugar and caffeine through coffee, but I wonder if D&D soda will replace the official gaming soda, Mountain Dew, or if the limited-time sodas will be more like novelties, like the TruBlood bottles I saw at Hot Topic the other day.

And of course I have to wonder if they’ll be a second, third, third-and-a-half and forth edition of the sodas….

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Dungeons and Dragons Soda

I often feel like a fraud introducing myself as a writer. I first thought that once I wrote something for which I was paid real money, then I’d be a real writer, but I still felt like a fraud. Then I thought I’d feel like a legitimate writer when I first saw my byline on glossy paper, or when I had recurring gigs, or when I made a certain amount of money writing (that amorphous number is always just slightly above what I’m making). I feel like I need a footnote explaining that I also have another job.

Oh, but indie game developers understand small-time journalism. Maybe it’s because when I’m asked where they could have seen my work, I can tell them. WomanGamers. Indie Game Mag. I don’t have to try to explain that I’m not quite the featured article yet, and I haven’t been published in anything mainstream. Or maybe it’s that they’re also in a creative field, where a completed game, like a completed article, is the goal. Or maybe this is all me, and I just need to practice telling strangers that I’m a writer.

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Triangle IGDA

What I meant to say was, thanks for putting up with my moody high school crap, for letting me hang out in your classroom when I really should have been in gym doing… um… actually I’m not entirely sure what one does in gym since I never went, for pretending you had no idea who built a dummy DOS with a fake reformatting option and left it running on other peoples’ machines, thanks for turning me on to frustration and ecstasy of programming, I never did much with my Pascal skills but it was excellent practice for life in China.

Somehow what came out was a mutual rant about school politics, the joys of students who learn something in your class, and frustrations of precious-snowflake parents. This is because an announcement was made over the PA that there would soon be a fire drill, and that all students were expected to leave quickly and quietly, and wait at designated areas until they returned to class. There was to be no stopping at lockers to get coats, although it’s a planned drill, in November in New Jersey, and no leaving school property, even though students will be sent halfway to their cars. There would be undefined Dire Consequences for rule-breakers. And students must not dawdle on the way back to shortened pre-holiday classes since that would cut into their academic time.  Long winded announcements, it seems, must just be part of the learning process.  Seriously, how can you talk about life-altering influences that made me want to teach English when you have such school admin stupidity in front of you?

We talked for a while, catching up, until the alarm went off. I thought that the incessant clanging would be a good cue to go, so we said goodbye and I made my way through straggling students towards my car. I was feeling like a new stage of my life was opening, since I’d just talked to a former teacher as an equal. And he said I’d grown up!

On my way out, one of the school security guards tried to prevent me leaving school grounds, and I had to explain that I was actually an unauthorized trespasser, and not a wayward student. Perhaps I’m not as mature as I’d hoped.

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Standard Deviations

No Zombies Allowed, by Simpson’s Paradox

Undead parking is on the left.

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No Zombies Allowed

Um. Yes, I suppose that needs an explanation.

We stopped in to a wine tasting at a small shop, just another thing I like about Charlotte. By the chardonnay, we’d exchanged the Massachusetts liberal secret handshake with the group next to us.

One woman had been an English major, such a fan of Pride and Prejudice that she once convinced her husband to read it to her. Only once, though, because he skipped parts. Which was instantly obvious to anyone who really loves Jane Austen, of course, and I knew just how she felt, since I once read a copy of Pride and Prejudice with typos. Her husband and Stick immediately wandered off to talk about football, and possibly the horrors of living with a woman who tries to take an interest by cheering for the correct color.

The two women were lawyers and now professors of law at a local college. After a mutual rant on text message-speak slipping into students’ essays, they told me they’d recently been to an out-of-town conference in a city that was also home to a historical plantation house, surrounded by local legend.

“Amy and I had a whole day to relax before the conference,” she said,  ”and you know what she did? She dragged me to the Registry of Deeds.” (Please note: I had no idea there was a physical registry of deeds. I forget that sometimes you have to go to your information, instead of it coming to you.)

“Where we looked up the house.”

“And we found the deed.”

“Which was an irregular lawyer-babble lawyer-babble entailed on the heirs as a lawyer-babble!”

“And we did the happy dance.”

“The Registry of Deeds happy dance.”

Look, I’m still not entirely sure if the heirs owned the property and let the historical society use it, or if the heirs has defaulted and the society had picked up the slack, but I do know that I want the Registry of Deeds happy dance. I want to do something so interesting that I want to do it on my days off.

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The Registry of Deeds

Though no particular setting, theme, or plot is anathema to us, the following are likely hard sells:

* stories in which a milquetoast civilian government is depicted as the sole obstacle to either catching some depraved criminal or to an uncomplicated military victory
* stories in which the words “thou” or “thine” appear
* talking cats
* talking swords
* stories where the climax is dependent on the spilling of intestines
* stories where FTL travel is as easy as is it on television shows or movies
* time travel too
* stories that depend on some vestigial belief in Judeo-Christian mythology in order to be frightening (i.e., Cain and Abel are vampires, the End Times are a’ comin’, Communion wine turns to Christ’s literal blood and it’s HIV positive, Satan’s gonna getcha, etc.)
* stories about rapist-murderer-cannibals
* stories about young kids playing in some field and discovering ANYTHING. (a body, an alien craft, Excalibur, ANYTHING).
* stories about the stuff we all read in Scientific American three months ago
* stories where the Republicans, or Democrats, or Libertarians, or the Spartacist League, etc. take over the world and either save or ruin it
* your AD&D game
* “funny” stories that depend on, or even include, puns
* sexy vampires, wanton werewolves, or lusty pirates
* zombies or zombie-wannabes
* stories originally intended for someone’s upcoming theme anthology or issue
* stories where the protagonist is either widely despised or widely admired simply because he or she is just so smart and/or strange

I’d like to add sideplots that exist just to get all the characters naked (I’m looking at you, Piers Anthony), and XKCD’s made-up words rule.

Via Clarkesworld Magazine, and XKCD

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The Ancient Bracelet Of Detect Plot