Annapurna Interactive’s Donut County is, for my purposes, the best game made in 2018. It doesn’t take more than an afternoon to play. It has relaxing mechanics and simple controls that play well with my arthritis. And it’s got cute cel-shaded graphics and an adorable story about a raccoon learning to respect people of other species and a human girl learning to stand up for herself and her community against the rising tide of capitalism.
Story and puzzle spoilers below.
Monday, January 21, 2019
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
On the Needles 20: Make Nine 2019
There's a crafting challenge on Instagram called Make Nine, where people set goals of nine projects they want to complete in a year and post photos of their progress as they go. I don't use Instagram; I'm just learning about this from a podcast. But I think it's something I should do anyway.
I haven't been doing very much knitting in the first two weeks of January; the chilly, damp weather here in the Pacific Northwest is not good for my arthritis, and I think I gave myself a repetitive strain injury playing mobile games over New Year's. But once I can start knitting again, here's what I plan to do.
Things to Finish
1. The sweater with rainbow stripes. I'm almost done with the body; the next step is the sleeves.
2. I made a glove last month before my arthritis really started acting up. I will make the second glove.
3. I designed a shawl pattern last fall. I'll finish the shawl and revise the pattern, and maybe post it on Ravelry.
4. Over the summer, I started designing a pattern for pants with short-row butt shaping, and I started knitting a pair of shorts to test it out. I will either finish these or unravel them.
Things to Continue
5. I started making a blanket with little bits of sock weight yarn left over from other projects. I will work on that in between the other projects.
Things to Start
6. My favorite sweater doesn't have pockets. I will make patch pockets for it.
7. I now have the pattern for Celestarium, a circular shawl with a star map on it, and the first skein I need to make it. After I finish the first four projects on this list, I will buy beads and start knitting it.
8. I can't forget to make a Christmas present for the Geek's mother. Still have to figure out what that is, but it's going on the list so I don't forget.
9. A friend of mine sent me a big skein of laceweight yarn in an interesting green and blue gradient. I want to make a lacy crescent or half-circle shawl with it.
I probably won't get to all of these things. I think I'll have more energy for knitting once I'm done with my daily Pokemon sketch challenge (today was day 780 out of 809!), but this is mostly to make sure I don't start too many new things, and that I always have something to look forward to working on.
I haven't been doing very much knitting in the first two weeks of January; the chilly, damp weather here in the Pacific Northwest is not good for my arthritis, and I think I gave myself a repetitive strain injury playing mobile games over New Year's. But once I can start knitting again, here's what I plan to do.
Things to Finish
1. The sweater with rainbow stripes. I'm almost done with the body; the next step is the sleeves.
2. I made a glove last month before my arthritis really started acting up. I will make the second glove.
3. I designed a shawl pattern last fall. I'll finish the shawl and revise the pattern, and maybe post it on Ravelry.
4. Over the summer, I started designing a pattern for pants with short-row butt shaping, and I started knitting a pair of shorts to test it out. I will either finish these or unravel them.
Things to Continue
5. I started making a blanket with little bits of sock weight yarn left over from other projects. I will work on that in between the other projects.
Things to Start
6. My favorite sweater doesn't have pockets. I will make patch pockets for it.
7. I now have the pattern for Celestarium, a circular shawl with a star map on it, and the first skein I need to make it. After I finish the first four projects on this list, I will buy beads and start knitting it.
8. I can't forget to make a Christmas present for the Geek's mother. Still have to figure out what that is, but it's going on the list so I don't forget.
9. A friend of mine sent me a big skein of laceweight yarn in an interesting green and blue gradient. I want to make a lacy crescent or half-circle shawl with it.
I probably won't get to all of these things. I think I'll have more energy for knitting once I'm done with my daily Pokemon sketch challenge (today was day 780 out of 809!), but this is mostly to make sure I don't start too many new things, and that I always have something to look forward to working on.
Monday, January 14, 2019
On the Stack 13: Playing Magic by Post
A while back, I was interviewed for a Kotaku article about small Mastodon instances. Neither I nor the friend with whom I run wubrg.social actually had any quotes get into the article, but the author expressed some interest in talking to us at some point about our instance, and specifically the practice we’ve set up of playing Magic by post in the local timeline. So I’m going to assemble my thoughts about it here in case that actually happens.
The idea of Magic by post probably came from this LoadingReadyRun video in which the characters play Magic like correspondence chess, sending their plays back and forth by snail mail. I was reminded of it on Twitter by someone who was trying to revive an obscure Magic format called Tiny Leaders, and borrowed the idea for wubrg.social, which my friend and I created with play-by-post in mind.
The basic idea of play-by-post is that each player has their own paper deck and posts declarations of their actions to a shared thread, along with photos of their board state and shared information like their life total and the number of cards in their hand. Posts are hidden under content warnings to prevent clutter in the timelines of people who aren’t part of the game. The amount of information in each post varies based on both what the poster is doing and whether their opponent can respond; for example, if your opponent has no land untapped, it’s usually safe to post a whole main phase because there’s very little they can do in response to each spell you cast. Most of the time, the etiquette has settled into one post for the beginning of a turn up through declaring attackers, a pause for the opponent to block, and another post for damage and the rest of the turn.
Games are usually slower than face-to-face games, since play is asynchronous, and especially slow when players are in different time zones or when more than one player has to respond to each action. The most complicated game we’ve played so far was a four-player Commander game with one player on a different continent from the others. The game could only progress while everyone was awake, so it took about three days, and we ended up using a Google Sheet my co-admin has developed to record the big complicated board states and link to descriptions of the cards involved. The game was won by a mono-black sacrifice-based deck, which profited from a board wipe played by the Artifacts deck.
Play by post is a lot of fun, even when it gets that complicated. It gives me more opportunities to play Magic with the people I want to play with, and the slow pace of the games means I don’t have to focus on it as intensely as a face-to-face game, and can take a turn or two at a time on a break from work.
If this sounds like something you'd enjoy doing, leave a comment and I can get you an invitation to wubrg.social.
The idea of Magic by post probably came from this LoadingReadyRun video in which the characters play Magic like correspondence chess, sending their plays back and forth by snail mail. I was reminded of it on Twitter by someone who was trying to revive an obscure Magic format called Tiny Leaders, and borrowed the idea for wubrg.social, which my friend and I created with play-by-post in mind.
The basic idea of play-by-post is that each player has their own paper deck and posts declarations of their actions to a shared thread, along with photos of their board state and shared information like their life total and the number of cards in their hand. Posts are hidden under content warnings to prevent clutter in the timelines of people who aren’t part of the game. The amount of information in each post varies based on both what the poster is doing and whether their opponent can respond; for example, if your opponent has no land untapped, it’s usually safe to post a whole main phase because there’s very little they can do in response to each spell you cast. Most of the time, the etiquette has settled into one post for the beginning of a turn up through declaring attackers, a pause for the opponent to block, and another post for damage and the rest of the turn.
Games are usually slower than face-to-face games, since play is asynchronous, and especially slow when players are in different time zones or when more than one player has to respond to each action. The most complicated game we’ve played so far was a four-player Commander game with one player on a different continent from the others. The game could only progress while everyone was awake, so it took about three days, and we ended up using a Google Sheet my co-admin has developed to record the big complicated board states and link to descriptions of the cards involved. The game was won by a mono-black sacrifice-based deck, which profited from a board wipe played by the Artifacts deck.
Play by post is a lot of fun, even when it gets that complicated. It gives me more opportunities to play Magic with the people I want to play with, and the slow pace of the games means I don’t have to focus on it as intensely as a face-to-face game, and can take a turn or two at a time on a break from work.
If this sounds like something you'd enjoy doing, leave a comment and I can get you an invitation to wubrg.social.
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