summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2012-03-17 11:48 pm
summercomfort) wrote2012-03-17 11:48 pm
Life is good
I have exciting things planned for the next few months that I can't wait to jump into. School-wise, I want to revamp some of my curriculum and develop a new course over the summer. Also, I might possibly be department chair next year? Jono is moving forward on his plans to change careers, which is heady and exciting. (I feel very lucky that I have a stable job that can support the both of us!) Outside of school, I have plans to move forward on getting my comics into a proper self-published form, and designing a website to host it. Peru is looking good -- the solid things of hotels and plane tickets are properly booked, so the rest can be a lot more flexible. There's some miscellaneous stuff I want to do for parents/Chinese School, but they all seem doable and focused.
I also just had a good day where we did Taiko, and then hung out withyeloson and played 3 new games:
- the Dungeons and Dragons board game (a solid "move and attack" game with minis with a nice monster/encounter engine)
- Cataan with the Cities and Knights expansion (I liked the increased interaction that kept the game lively and gave each turn more activities, but it dragged out the game, and made the robber 7-card rule really brutal. If I were to play it again, I'd like to experiment with (a) lowering the victory condition (maybe back to 11 points instead of 13), and (b) fiddling with hand size restrictions -- having the robber either half the hand size when you have more than 9 cards, or only trimming down to 6 cards)
- Chris ran an excellent impromptu super-light Burning Wheel Samurai game! I wanted to give my Games class co-teacher a taste of table-top board and role-playing games. Chris did this excellent quick setup where we were 3 generals vying for power after the assassination of our lord. There's an enemy at the gates and a young ward. There was intrigue, there was drama, an awesome fight scene, and really tense moments. I got to give dramatic battle speeches and die tragically. All within 1 hour! :D
There was also good eats in the form of Shooting Star and Afghani food.
And what's amazing is that this was a pretty typical Saturday -- taiko, good friends, good eats, good games. :DDD
I've had a pretty bad week last week -- there was a lot of stress from many meetings about school-wide iPad adoption, as well as stress from it being the week before grades and comments are due, so I was trying to get everything graded and organized, plus I was short on sleep and super-unproductive due to the Daylight Savings Time change. I felt underprepared in my classes. My next comic wasn't going anywhere. Our history department is in 4 different types of turmoil re: staffing, leadership, team planning, etc. I felt like I was juggling too much. But on Thursday when I was about to just give up on everything, our principal sent out an email pushing back the due date for the grades and comments, and also cutting the staff development day in half. WOW! That was AMAZING in relieving my school-related stress. I also sat down and sorted out all the things I wanted to do and made some decisions about what to shelf and what do work on. Then on Friday I went home early and took a long nap in the afternoon and felt REFRESHED for the first time all week.
So yeah, what started out as a bad week turned out all right. To quote MSPA: WHERE DOING IT MAN. WHERE MAKING IT HAPEN
I also just had a good day where we did Taiko, and then hung out with
yeloson and played 3 new games:- the Dungeons and Dragons board game (a solid "move and attack" game with minis with a nice monster/encounter engine)
- Cataan with the Cities and Knights expansion (I liked the increased interaction that kept the game lively and gave each turn more activities, but it dragged out the game, and made the robber 7-card rule really brutal. If I were to play it again, I'd like to experiment with (a) lowering the victory condition (maybe back to 11 points instead of 13), and (b) fiddling with hand size restrictions -- having the robber either half the hand size when you have more than 9 cards, or only trimming down to 6 cards)
- Chris ran an excellent impromptu super-light Burning Wheel Samurai game! I wanted to give my Games class co-teacher a taste of table-top board and role-playing games. Chris did this excellent quick setup where we were 3 generals vying for power after the assassination of our lord. There's an enemy at the gates and a young ward. There was intrigue, there was drama, an awesome fight scene, and really tense moments. I got to give dramatic battle speeches and die tragically. All within 1 hour! :D
There was also good eats in the form of Shooting Star and Afghani food.
And what's amazing is that this was a pretty typical Saturday -- taiko, good friends, good eats, good games. :DDD
I've had a pretty bad week last week -- there was a lot of stress from many meetings about school-wide iPad adoption, as well as stress from it being the week before grades and comments are due, so I was trying to get everything graded and organized, plus I was short on sleep and super-unproductive due to the Daylight Savings Time change. I felt underprepared in my classes. My next comic wasn't going anywhere. Our history department is in 4 different types of turmoil re: staffing, leadership, team planning, etc. I felt like I was juggling too much. But on Thursday when I was about to just give up on everything, our principal sent out an email pushing back the due date for the grades and comments, and also cutting the staff development day in half. WOW! That was AMAZING in relieving my school-related stress. I also sat down and sorted out all the things I wanted to do and made some decisions about what to shelf and what do work on. Then on Friday I went home early and took a long nap in the afternoon and felt REFRESHED for the first time all week.
So yeah, what started out as a bad week turned out all right. To quote MSPA: WHERE DOING IT MAN. WHERE MAKING IT HAPEN
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I was totally surprised that turned out as good as it did. I'm glad I finally got to run some light Burning Wheel!
And yes, food, games, geekery and good people FTW.
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a) Have you guys write down 5-10 skills
b) assign a set of ratings to them
c) Do the tracking for advancement FOR you so you wouldn't have to navigate it.
The one thing I think is cool the normal game does provide is the "FORK" dice where you use an extra skill to help the thing you're trying to do, which makes it worthwhile to have a small list of skills to do that with.