Faerie Solitaire Review

Posted on April 18, 2009 by Meg

I have a review of the new Faerie Solitaire up on ThumbGods.

I’m a bit late posting this because every time I went to get another screenshot or check a fact, I got sucked into playing a few hands of Faerie Solitaire.

Faerie Solitaire from SubSoap is a new casual game, mixing a cute fantasy story with basic solitaire. I’ve said before that the best games have simple rules, with many variations and strategies. In Faerie Solitaire, you are given a foundation card, and you can either play one card higher or one card lower than the foundation card. A played card becomes the new foundation card, and you do it again. You could easily teach a child to look for a number one higher or one lower than the selected card.

…

sometimes find it annoying when there’s a lot of game to be unlocked. In some cases, it seems like a tacit acknowledgement from the developers that some parts of the game are good and some parts are lame, and to make the game longer, you’ve got to grind through the lame to get to the good bits. When I reviewed GardenParty World, I talked about not enjoying games with the game mechanic of working at a dull minigame to earn spending points. GardenParty World is hardly the only offender here, I was also frustrated by unlocking the chance to play indentical levels in Fashion Solitaire. But Faerie Solitaire had a system of power-ups and unlockable features that kept me excited about the next add-on without leaving me feeling like the developers had greyed out most of the game.

Read the rest at Thumb Gods » Game Review: Faerie Solitaire

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Pokemon Detractors

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Meg

We gave our students a practice verbal SAT test in class this week.

“What does circumlocution mean?” asked one student, who wrote a hilarious career essay on becoming a successful Pokemon master.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said, “I won’t be next to you on the real test.”

“I could summon you from a Pokeball. Miss Meg, I choose you!”

“Then I would appear and tell you to break it down into smaller parts! Look for roots you know. What does circum mean? What other worlds have locu?”

“Circum is like circle and locution is like elocution. So… it means talking in circles?”

“I can’t tell you the answers, Ash Ketchum. The more word parts you know, the better you’ll be at this.”

“Gotta catch ’em all!”

Another student raises his hand. “Miss Meg, what’s detractor mean?”

“I can’t tell you kids the vocabulary words! Try to break it into smaller pieces.”

“Huh?”

“It starts with de. What does de usually mean? What other words have tract?”

“Oh! So it’s someone who takes apart a tractor! Thanks, Miss Meg!”

If only I could get back to privacy of my Pokeball to laugh.

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The TurboTax Turing Test

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Meg

Dear TurboTax,

Thank you for making my taxes kind of annoying instead of a total nightmare. Sure, it cost most of my tax return to pay for the TurboTax version for under-employed freelancers, but that’s fine. You made it easier to turn a stack of 1099s and scribbled receipts into the single-digit check I’ll be receiving from the state of North Carolina. This is the very first year I’ve filed on time, and it’s all thanks to you. (Well, thanks to you and a nagging worry that I might be paying this year instead of receiving, and I’ve heard the IRS is less forgiving about late filing when one is meant to be sending them money.)

But a Captcha at the end? Seriously? A check to see if I’m human after all that? Turbo, honey, if there were a program that could find my gross income from last year’s return, the employer numbers from a half dozen 1099s, my date of birth, my social security number, my special TurboTax pin, my routing number and bank account number, and then put all those numbers into the right little boxes on a hundred different pages… well, if there were a bot like that, I don’t think it would be thwarted by a Captcha image!

Meg

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No Surprises

Posted on April 11, 2009 by Meg

“Hey, Stick, do you know what the day after tomorrow is?!?”

“The day after Ea—The day Cadbury eggs go on sale.”

“Oh. Guess you already knew then.”

“Meg, we’ve been dating for five years.”

Related: Last year’s post on Cadbury Eggs.

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Disconnect

Posted on April 10, 2009 by Meg

We found mangosteens in the supermarket today! I recognized them from the Yihai market, but I really didn’t expect to find them in such close proximity to drive-thru hush puppies.

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Dirty Kitchen

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Meg

one of the cleaner combinations, only funny to Chinese readersA few years ago, my mom got me a magnetic poetry set. It was the seasons and celebrations collection, with haiku words like magic, flower, spring and rain. For Christmas, Andrea and Ian got us a sci-fi/pulp set. This one has goblin, squirt, bite and thump. I’ve got both sets up on our fridge now… It’s an interesting look at my character, when you think about it.

The problem is that the combination of the nature words and the pulpy words leads to endless romance novel euphemisms. I’ve mixed up some of the more obscene pairings, but my fridge still reads like the steamy parts of a potboiler.

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Record-Breaking Uno

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Meg

Draw 4A few nights ago, we had our newish friends Monty and Lynn over to play Arkham Horror. Monty works with Stick, and I’ve hung out with his friend Lynn a few times outside of our D&D game. I guess they’re more acquaintances, but, hey, socializing with people in North Carolina, outside of Stick’s family!

Arkham Horror is a complicated boardgame based on HP Lovecraft stories, where players play against the game, not against each other. It’s got a good story and characters, with a strong random element, and a lot of resource management. It’s a bit like Betrayal At The House On The Hill, although not enough like it to make up for Betrayal House going out of print. We played over two evenings, and when we finished on the second night it wasn’t too late.

“What about a quick game of Axis and Allies?” Stick said. He has a special super-deluxe exclusive edition where you can manage everything, down to what color socks your troops are wearing.  He loves this game, I think he’d sleep with it under his pillow, but it’s the opposite of quick.

Although Stick has a lot of games, we decided on a quick round of Uno, out of my ESL materials box, since it wouldn’t require any time to set up or explain the rules.

Our quick game turned into the longest Uno game in the history of the planet.

Somehow we all ended up with huge hands, while the pool of drawable cards dwindled. No one was going to be able to call Uno! But this was a group of players amused by statistical possibilities, so we tried to see if we’d break the game by playing only draw cards, creating a smaller and smaller pool of cards with a higher and higher proportion of draw cards. While shouting Trienta y nueve! or Veinticuatro! to break up the card-drawing monotony.

I think that means we’re friends now.

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Fashion Solitaire On The Shelf

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Meg

I was so excited to see this in Target the other day! I beta-tested Fashion Solitaire in February 2008, but I was in China when the game came out so I’d never seen a hard copy on a store shelf before.

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Podcasts

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Meg

I got into podcasts last year when I had the Beijing commute. I’d listen to Notes From Spain and ChinesePod.com, crammed with full bodycontact against other bus riders. Now I listen to them when I’m either at the gym or talking walks and telling myself that any minute now, I’m going to start running and really burning calories. Any minute now. Oh, look, I’m home again.

Right now, British History 101 is my favorite history podcast, mostly because Skaggs picks interesting topics that history books often gloss over, like exactly what one has to do to receive the order of the garter. The show has a great overall tone. There’s no condescension to listeners, but you don’t need to keep a massive calender of events in your head to follow it.

I also like TudorCast, Ancient and Midevil History and The Biography Show, for more non-pretentious, informative podcasts produced by independant history buffs. Both TudorCast and AMH are on extended hold right now,  but BH101 and The Biography Show are still producing new episodes. I think of myself as a classicist, but really I think I’m just interested in not-American history. Any recommendations for other history podcasts?

Podictionary, a vocab podcast, sounded good at first, but I only made it through a couple episodes before unsubscribing. Each interesting three-to-five minute word etymology comes with an abrasive advertising minute. It may sound odd to complain about ads in a podcast when I run ads on my site, and even British History 101 is ad-supported, but that means that once in a half-hour podcast, he mentions how great his podcast host is. Other podcasts also suggest buying paid subscriptions.  Maybe it’s just the grating announcer voice I don’t like.

I also follow a podcast review blog, Anne Is A Man!, which first made me think that some distant crossdresser had amazing podcast taste, but it turns out that Anne is a man’s name in the Netherlands. I imagine the blog title occuring around the 3,000th time he had to explain that.

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Eight

Posted on April 1, 2009 by Meg

When I started working on my happy post about all the new podcasts I love, I felt an elephant in the room.

Eight years ago, a guy I knew jumped off a bridge. I remember hearing about it and thinking it wasn’t true, it was someone’s April Fool’s joke in horribly bad taste. I also remember standing around at the wake with goth club friends, in our black, without our makeup.

I wasn’t particularly close to him. He was a friend of a friend, we knew each other peripherally from where the anime crowd and the goth crowd intersected. I have friends who were much more affected, then and now. I didn’t lose a friend, as much as I saw emotions kill someone.

No idea why this is on my mind this year, and it wasn’t so much on anniversaries that I’ve spent with that crowd of friends. I don’t know if I’m even thinking about Bill, more that I’m thinking that people look like they’re just fine when they’re really not.

I wasn’t going to mention it here, since I like my blog to be happy navel-gazing, not depressing, but I just felt that I was faking my cheery post while I was really preoccupied with other thoughts. Happy post to follow.

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