Cute Casual Game in “BBQ Roast”

BBQ Roast is a cute browser game with a tasty food theme and a BBQ twist on the usual match-3 gameplay.  The graphics in BBQ Roast are cute and fun, reminding me of a Cooking Mama challenge (and I still love Cooking Mama).

In BBQ Roast, players have 6 skewers of barbeque ingredients, starting with fish cakes. The goal is to combine 3 of the same ingredient on the same skewer, to make the next level of barbecue cooking, becoming veggies, salmon and so forth. Every few moves, new ingredients come down from the top, either adding to the tasty trios on the sticks, or ruining the player’s strategy.

A good casual game is easy to pick up and play, with a mechanic player can understand in just a few moves. There are 6 levels in the game, with more challenging drops and more possible ingredients. The first couple were easy and casual for me, but as the number of possible ingredients grew, it required more planning, a bit like in the number puzzle games 2048.

And — call me old-fashioned — a good casual game shouldn’t have loads of pop-up ads for HomeScapes, either, or harass you to spend money on virtual currency because that’s the only way to progress.  BBQ Roast meets all these requirements, there are no pop-ups and no pay-to-play at all.

BBQ Roast is a cute and casual little browser game, with an easy-to-learn casual mechanic and attractive food art. Casual games are appealing for many reasons, but their accessibility and ease is key. With short play times and clear, simple mechanics, casual games like are easy to pick up and play immediately. That works well for a browser game, since many players are looking for a few minutes of a cute, fun puzzle, often while waiting for something else.

For other browser games, I’ve really enjoyed Doublespeak Games’ A Dark Room, a strange little adventure with no graphics at all, and Grey by Kevin Does Art, an indie platformer with a story twist.

What about you? Are you playing any good browser games?

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Escape Room: Adult Ed

Escape Room Concept: The players work at an adult-ed program and need to print something in 1 hour before students arrive, but the toner, paper, and printer access code are stored in different locked-away, hidden cupboards, so teachers aren’t wasting supplies.

The keys/keycodes to those cupboards are held by various part-time staffers (to save on benefits) who aren’t in today.  Puzzles include a deduction puzzle about which colored but unlabeled key matches which lock, codebreaking puzzles, and a physical search for keys and a password book. As the players search the room for the key to the locked drawer full of unlabeled keys, where the keys to the other locked supply closet are kept, large piles of foreign cash, gems, and gold bars keep falling out on the players, because the one-day-a-week staffer who does the international deposits hasn’t been in yet.

The game’s final reveal is the player team entering SchoolName101 into the printer at the last possible second.

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Gaslamps Gas Giant in “The Mimicking of Known Successes”

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older, was the kind of book where I wanted to read faster to discover the mystery (and Pleiti and Mossa’s relationship mystery), but I also wanted to read more slowly to stay longer on future Jupiter.

When a man disappears off a remote train platform, Investigator Mossa is assigned to see whether he fell or was pushed into the swirling gases below. It’s a mysterious, not-gory death (my favorite kind!) because we never see any guts, the characters all know that a human body couldn’t possibly survive the atmosphere and storms of Jupiter. Trains are the only method of transit between platforms, and platforms are the only places that can support life on Jupiter, so he couldn’t have wandered off.

I liked this from the start — a dramatic, not-gristly hook, and an intriguing character investigating that hook. We rarely get to see women being single-minded, dedicated geniuses in their work, and a bit socially awkward outside. There are 10,000 Sherlock Holmes reinventions where a man gets to be the antisocial genius, but I rarely read about a woman single-mindedly solving a mystery.

The story is told by Pleiti, Mossa’s ex-girlfriend, and her story begins when Mossa shows up asking for help in the investigation. Pleiti is definitely the Watson in this mystery, but she’s a pretty solid character and researcher herself. Pleiti is another familiar archetype, but again one I don’t see enough in a woman, and definitely not a woman in space! Pleiti is a scholar at Valdegeld, Jupiter’s university, studying Classics, which (sadly for me) doesn’t mean Romans, but old Earth ecosystems, from back before climate collapse. She reads ancient literature, like Watership Down, and tries to cross-reference the animals mentioned to understand how Earth’s ecosystem’s worked, back when there were ecosystems on the planet. Eventually, hopefully, someday, maybe, she’ll be part of rebuilding the planet enough to allow humans to return there.

There was one small issue for me, which is that so much of the book is worldbuilding, it was impossible to guess or predict the mystery for me. There was no way to guess ahead because I was discovering the rules of life on Giant. It was OK, because I loved discovering the Jupiter outpost, I just also wanted to understand the mystery earlier. Basically, Pleiti would notice Mossa’s reaction to something or someone, and I’d file that away, a-ha! a clue! There’s something important about that! but I couldn’t put it together because I was still working out how the world worked for most of the novel.

Without giving spoilers about the plot or the ending, there are heavy questions about what we owe to each other. What do we owe to other people, when we think they’re impossibly wrong?  How can humans coexist in shared spaces, whether that’s a society or a relationship? It works with the characters we’ve met, though, and adds additional depth, especially to the slightly-robotic Mossa. Some  heavy questions linger in this delightful scifi escapism.

I recently read The Siren, and blogged about how it had so many elements I knew I’d like. Some of that could be true for how I went into The Mimicking of Known Successes, too. I knew this book would be a not-gross murder mystery, set on Jupiter, with developed, complex women. All things I expected to like reading about! I just didn’t know that I’d like a gaslamp gas giant mystery, because I has no idea it existed. 

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My Double Life

“Oh, since you’re here,” my supervisor said, “Could I ask you something about your resume? Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you this since we first hired you.”

At this point, naturally, my head exploded. What could it be? Does one of my professional references secretly hate me? 

Oh no! She must have  figured out that  I put down one teaching job for “summer 2016” but I was really only teaching for 8 weeks, not from June 1 to August 31, so now I’ll have to explain the gaps on my resume. No! I also wrote that I kept state-compliant attendance records for my ESL classes, but really more than one supervisor has had to remind me to submit the attendance. I’m about to get fired. And what if I committed a crime and then forgot about it? Definitely fired.

“Yeah, I googled you before we hired you, I just never had time to ask about it. Did you really work on some Nancy Drew games?”

“Oh, yeah. That was me.”

“I loved those games!”

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I Remember Snow Crash

I don’t usually yearn for Books As Physical Objects. I don’t have great detail vision, so I usually like the large-print, high-contrast of an ebook for comfortable reading. I can read a typical paperback, but it’s enough effort that it sometimes keeps me from drifting off into the bookworld.

But this description of the 90s Snow Crash paperback in Jason Guriel’s essay I Remember the Bookstore just hit me in the feels. I read this copy too, a heavy, thick paperback with that plastic-coated cover. I almost felt it in my hands when I read this description. It was lent to me by a high-school friend, just like Guriel lends his in this article, though I promise I returned this in better condition. I carried Snow Crash in my bag to read on my train commute on my way to work as a quest designer at an MMO. The book and that time in my life are so deeply connected for me.

For instance, I remember standing in Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore—“long gone now,” to lift DeLillo’s line. It was around 1996, and I was considering a paperback copy of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The cover, you see, had cried out to my teenage self. A ninja type, sword raised, stands before an arch of ancient brickwork, bulging with duelling bulls in relief. But beyond the arch, across a plain of circuitry, a futuristic skyline awaits. Above the title, a header declares the book to be “THE #1 SCIENCE FICTION BESTSELLER,” the definite article doing some work. Below the title, a blurb from something called Los Angeles Reader (also “long gone now”) is blunt: “Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel.”

On the back cover, there’s a vote of confidence from William Gibson no less, maybe my favourite writer, plus other appealing endorsements. “A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” says one blurb. A “gigathriller” sporting a “cool, hip cybersensibility,” says the publisher’s copy. Hey, it was the 1990s.

Source: I Remember the Bookstore – Longreads

 

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And Here’s The Copier Code

In 2007, I was the newest staff member at LCC, and I shared a classroom with a teacher who let me know that she’d had the room’s supply closet organized this way since 1999 and she  had no intention of moving a single thing to make room for my supplies. Also, she knew exactly where everything was and that she’d know if my students ever touched her flashcards or books.

We have a new college intern at my school now, who’s teaching one conversation class per week. I really took a lot of joy in setting her up in my classroom, showing her where I keep my speaking games, crayons, bingo cards, books, my secret backup lesson for bad days, etc. Here’s how to use the projector and the copier. Please, come in, move the chairs around however you like, this is your room one afternoon a week.

There are a lot of things people told me would change when I got older. These are usually sad things, about losing interest in my hobbies or falling out of love with my husband or finding all young people annoying, and it’s been really nice to not get older that way.

 

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The Office: Somehow We Manage

Haven’t done a gaming post in ages, but I have to tell you about the idle game I’m playing on breaks these days.

The Office: Somehow We Manage is an iOs idle clicker about everyone’s favorite dysfunctional paper company. Send the employees to their desks, where they work hard until you automate them (this saves having to tap the stacks of cash that appear beside their desks every so often), spend the money starting more desks and upgrading and getting more money to spend on upgrades for more money to spend on… Ok, you get it, it’s another idle clicker, just set the show world.

The humor comes from little scenes from the show and little show references. In the beginning of the game, it’s fun to see how each actor was drawn for the game. Then each worker has personal items on their desks, and it’s fun to see the little references from the show.

Now, I should probably mention that this isn’t a particularly well-done game. First, The Office frequently resets chapters, and while it’s always annoying to replay a level after a technical glitch, it’s particularly annoying in an idle that’s literally all about time spent in game. And it’s constantly asking me to wait while it downloads the next chapter. I have no idea why it needs so many updates, because the app is a 2D cartoon picture of our favorite Scranton paper company, with the same working and automated animations for each character in each chapter.  Each chapter does have a couple screens of text bubbles from the TV show, but seriously, the frequency of downloading updates and how long it takes just does not seem in line with the game assets at all.

And this isn’t the only place where internal text is accidentally shared with players as flavortext, it’s just the one where I took a screenie.

Ok, so now that you all know this isn’t a terribly high-quality game, let’s talk about how freaking charming it is. Seeing the Dunder-Mifflin friends doing their repetitive work tasks makes a fun little break from my repetitive work tasks. And since it’s a pay-to-win style idle clicker, the huge stacks of cash become kinda meaningless and it’s the other, special currencies, like coffee, ShruteBucks and ScottCoins that are actually valuable. The cash quickly maxes out thousands or billions or actual numbers, and becomes aa, ab, ac, etc. There’s something ridiculous about the workers getting billions of billions of dollars but actually needing, say, 27 coffees to complete the next objective, and then after getting all the objectives, getting the 15 ScottCoins for completing the chapter. It makes a really delightful break when doing the kinda pointless and repetitive tasks that so many workplaces seem to require.

There are also special events, which are EXACTLY the same game, only at the end of the event, players instantly lose all money and other currencies, and get a very, very low-value tiered reward. This is hilarious because what’s more Dunder-Mufflin-y than the workers getting nothing? And also if you look at the ranking in the events, the top players are massive The Office fans so all their usernames are silly show references. There’s no chat, but I’m pretty sure they’re all trying to overlook the glitches for show jokes, too.

Anyway, this is objectively not a unique or innovative or high-quality game, there’s no character development or exciting mechanics, but if I’m in a meeting waiting for someone to figure out how to share their screen or unmute or whatever, I’m probably checking on my friends at mini Dunder-Mifflin.

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Just Thinking About How Fake and Stupid This Sounds:

At our Christmas party in 2019, my then-bosses gave Workbro and me a hard time about nothing. It made me feel really unappreciated at work, so I decided to start looking for a new job. So when I went back to school the first week of January 2020, I had a whole plan about changing jobs, and the first step was to digitize all the worksheets, class activities and lesson plans I’d made, and put them in my own Google Drive, so I could easily take them with me when I left. It took me about 2 months to scan and upload and organize everything I had in my class binders, so by the beginning of March 2020, I just happened to have put all my teaching resources saved and easily accessible online.

Just so I’d be prepared whenever I found a nice new job. Definitely not because I was about to spend the next 3 years of my life teaching online.

If I read that in a novel, I would roll my eyes so hard.

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Beijing Ghost

If You Could See The Sun, by Ann Liang, uses a supernatural invisibility power to tell a moving, realistic story about class, money, and adolescence in Beijing.

When teenage “Study Machine” Alice Sun discovers her invisibility power, she immediately puts it to use to earn money to pay her exorbitant school fees.  She’ll do favors and perform secret tasks that only someone invisible could accomplish, anonymously, of course.  Once Alice started getting secrets and requests of secret favors, I thought this was going to turn Gossip Girl, but there’s a uniquely Beijing flavor. No mean girls or gossipy backstabbing here, as much as ambitious high-school students willing to do anything for success.

To get her invisible-favors side hustle going, Alice has to turn to her (handsome) academic rival, Henry Li. Henry agrees to build the app and split the profits, which starts out as BULLSHIT because ALICE is the one doing all the DANGEROUS work! Also Henry doesn’t even need the money! But as their app, Beijing Ghost, takes off, Henry somehow starts doing more decoy work to let Alice work her invisibility magic. Henry creates increasingly goofy and risky distractions as the story goes on, adding humor and also making it clear that he doesn’t think they’re rancorous enemies.  I thought the book’s title should have been Beijing Ghost. I mean, the story’s about the invisible parts of Beijing: the unofficial rules and class divisions and struggles, Alice’s own secrets and then her classmate’s secrets.  I also loved that her plan was an app — you can order anything from Taobao in Beijing, so why not a secret favors app? This is so Beijing and so now, and just a wonderful, obvious next step for Alice’s situation.

I taught in a Beijing high school, although it wasn’t nearly as high-class and prestigious as Alice’s school, so a lot of the school life felt familiar. The extreme exam pressure and the glorification of exhaustion made such a good background for the supernatural storyline, and Alice’s own story. I loved that this book talks about fuerdai students avoiding the gaokao in an IB school, without feeling the need to explain fuerdai or gaokao in detail. It made me feel like If You Could See The Sun was for me.

I want to highlight a scene that stuck with me: Without spoilers, there’s a recounting of a crime in the only Asian-owned business in a town, and the responding police officers say it’s probably not race-related, just random. And there’s no way to prove it was a hate crime.  I filled up with rage, like this was every guy who’d ever said, sure, that particular woman earns less than her coworker, but are you SURE it’s gender-related? I mean, did the boss specifically say he won’t pay women decent money? Can you prove it? Same thing here… a criminal targeted the Asian-owned store and harmed the owners, but did he specifically say he’s racist?  Ugh. This part is infuriating, but also highlights this whole invisible-rules theme in the book.

I’ve read other novels about ambitious social climbing, like Everybody RiseSnobs, or Social Creature, or just books about characters who aspire to more than they have. Alice is sort of in this mode, with her intense (but still likable) ambitions. The twist really is her invisibility powers — this isn’t a manners novel of a working-class girl carefully imitating the style, speech, and correct designer handbags of the upper classes. Instead, Alice’s superpower comes from being unseen and unnoticed.

Being the Beijing Ghost while getting top grades is exhausting, but Alice can’t give up either one.  Eventually, Alice has to decide how much she’s willing to do to stay in Airington High School and achieve her goals. This section was an absolute pageturner, because I wanted Alice to be able to stay in her school and follow her ambitious and I didn’t want her to do the increasingly sketchy (and increasingly well-paid) ghost missions at the same time. This question of what are you willing to do? where do you draw the line? who are you becoming is such a solid YA center, with a great character and so much Beijing style here.

Don’t let the generic cover fool you. This is not a generic YA.

(Crossposted to my book blog)

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Online Learning, Again

Dept of Ed: To improve online teaching quality, we’ve decided that teachers need more paperwork. There’s now a new form for lesson plans and you have to submit then in new places and there are new, required PD sessions where a boomer will tell you about Jamboard again and we have a new evaluation system for teachers on how well you’re incorporating technology and there are new benchmarks and paperwork for this and you’re supposed to evaluate your junior teachers on this and there’s another mandatory meeting about how to do that and of course you won’t be paid extra for any of this.

Me: I’m not doing any of that bullshit. Make me.

My student: Hi teacher, I’m doing class in my car parked outside Starbucks because the wifi’s out in my building, but don’t worry, I brought a pencil and my homework packet.

Me: Ok, yes, I’ll work very hard to make our online classes work for you guys.

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