2007.06.25
Posted in Food at 9:43 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I know a number of people who seem to view food as being little more than fuel; it is something to be endured, a necessity of survival, but it certainly is not something that can possibly be enjoyed. I suspect you know some of them too:
- The shoveler, who finishes each meal in 3 minutes flat and rushes off
- The ketchuper, who slathers so much ketchup on everything as to drown out all other flavours
- The hot-saucer, who cannot even tolerate the taste of ketchup, and thus uses copious amounts hot sauce so as to eradicate flavour altogether
- The take-outer, who never cooks anything if it can be avoided
There also seem to be an ever-increasing number of people who eat while sitting in front of the television. While I admit to being guilty of eating lunch in front of my computer from time to time, every day I try to eat at least one meal (usually supper) in my dining room or at least at the breakfast bar. This is my time to slow down, relax, and enjoy the food I’m eating. Yes, enjoy.
Perhaps it helps that I also enjoy cooking, and take the time to cook something for supper most days. I live alone, so there are almost always leftovers for those days when I don’t have a lot of time to cook.
What surprises me most about this wholesale devaluation of food in North American society is how widespread it seems to be. As a whole, people just don’t take time for food any more, and many people seem to not enjoy food at all.
Perhaps not by coincidence, anglo-saxon North American culture is lacking in a customary phrase spoken before a meal.
The French say, “bon appétit.” The Germans, “guten appetit.” The Italians, “buon appetito.” It’s not just a Western thing either; in Japanese, it is customary to say, “いただきます (itadakimasu)” before eating. In English, we sometimes say “enjoy your meal”, but it carries no real cutlural weight compared to the equivalent phrases in other languages.
From a historical perspective, the saying of grace before a meal would have taken the place of such a phrase, but there are now many English-speaking North Americans who do not practice Christianity in any of its forms, and so grace is not said. We have nothing to take its place.
You might be wondering why the lack of such a phrase in English is a problem. There are two reasons:
- Speaking such a phrase before the meal becomes a ritual of a sort. It forces us to slow down for a moment, and consciously acknowledge the meal we are about to eat. And acknowledging the meal automatically gives it some value.
- The words have more meaning when others are present. Part of the purpose of saying the words is to wish others a good meal. Eating with others makes it a lot more likely that the meal will be eaten slowly and enjoyed, not just gobbled down.
The more I ponder this, the more I think I should start using one of the phrases before meals. It is high time that food returned to its former status as more than mere sustenance.
Permalink
2007.06.20
Posted in Board Games, Friends at 12:49 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Maharaja, one of several board games designed by the well-known Kramer / Kiesling duo, is a game I had only ever tried with two players until very recently. I’m very glad I did, because as a two-player game, it’s just not very good.
With only two players, it feels a little too much like a race game with very few options that matter. It’s also a little boring since there’s not a lot of incentive to head to cities that are far away – if a given city is currently inaccessible, it’s very likely that neither player will bother with it.
With four players, however, it’s a totally different game. The board is much more open, there are many more choices that can lead to victory, and the mechanics of turn order and city scoring order become much more relevant.
Jason, Chris, Dave, and I all pursued different strategies, and the game wound up being quite close. I was surprised at how many times Dave generated a substantial amount of income when other people traveled through villages he controlled. It was a lot more money than I would have expected.
My strategy was a little more focused on manipulation of the city order, but I just didn’t generate enough income quite quickly enough to keep up with Chris and his infernal “oh, it only costs 9 for me to build a palace” ways.
I would definitely play it with 4 or 5 players, but I don’t think it would work as well with three, and with only two players, there are so many other games I would rather play that I don’t think this would have much of a chance of hitting the table. According to what I’ve read on the geek, the sweet spot seems to be 4-5 people, and I would tend to agree.
Permalink
2007.06.11
Posted in Board Games, Friends at 7:31 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Jason and I tried Dungeon Twister for the first time last night. The rules are well laid out, if a bit lengthy, but we still got started reasonably quickly. Since neither of us had played before, we did the game setup completely randomly, just picking characters for our starting line at random and distributing the other tokens randomly into the rooms.
As we figured out the game a bit more, I started to enjoy it a bit more. Jason took an early lead, getting his wizard safely out of the dungeon, and I started to figure out my initial priorities. I had the Thief and the Goblin together on my starting line, and there was a rope in the first room, so I used the thief to run and grab the rope then gave it to the goblin so he could progress on his own without the thief helping him over pits.
Things slowly started to click for me as I shifted a couple of rooms around and made some more progress into the middle of the board with my thief and goblin. I had my goblin make a run for it and get the hell out of the dungeon as fast as he could, earning me 2 points and bringing the game to 3-1 since I had slipped another character out a few turns earlier. My Thief stuck around to support my other characters, notably my Mechanork. Jason uncovered some treasure and grabbed it, starting a run for my end of the board with it. He also started advancing his goblin up the board towards my end. I managed to give his cleric a good thumping in the mean time, earning a fourth point, and then had my troll smash his goblin right before the finish line to end the game.
Even though it was our first time and I had very little grasp on the strategy of the game, I still enjoyed it a lot and want to play again. A couple of things stuck me as being very interesting features of the game:
1. The ability to rotate rooms, even (in some cases) rooms that you do not currently have any characters in. This proved key to my success as I managed to trap a couple of Jason’s characters in such a way that it would have taken him ages to rotate them out.
2. The way that you place your opponents pieces when rooms are revealed. This is very key, as it’s also how I managed to trap some of Jason’s characters – I simply started them out in a bad position.
3. The need for judicious combat. My Cleric was surrounded by a number of Jason’s characters, yet he didn’t attack my Cleric. In my mind, he should have – it would have been an easy point. I wouldn’t have even tried to put up a fight, so hopeless was the situation.
Jason also made the observation that the game feels a little like RoboRally. The games do have similarities in that you have to pay attention to the board and the way your characters can maneuver around it, although for me at least the games feel different. When I play RoboRally I spend a lot of time focusing on small details of the board layout, since they make a huge difference. In Dungeon Twister, the board is somewhat more benign (though there’s still lots going on), and I’m able to look a little further ahead than the current turn. For a two-player game, I would prefer Dungeon Twister to RoboRally, although I have trouble imagining how chaotic a 3 or 4-player game of Dungeon Twister would be. RoboRally works well with 4 people, with an appropriate amount of chaos.
I’ll have to play Dungeon Twister at least a couple of more times to get a better feel for the game, but so far I like it.
Permalink
2007.06.10
Posted in House and Home at 11:27 am by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I have a work deadline to meet at the end of June, so I decided to work from home for the month. While the short-term goal is to ensure I meet the deadline, this is also a trial period of sorts where I figure out if I want to work from home on a more permanent basis or not. As the plan stands, I will return to working from the office as of the beginning of July.
So, a week ago, I hauled home my gear from work, and got right down to it. I was quickly surprised at how much more productive I am at home, but that’s not the point of this post. Rather, I want to discuss my other observations so far.
I have several friends and also coworkers that I’ve chatted to over the years about teleworking, and it seems as though experiences vary widely. The most interesting thing I’ve noticed as that teleworking seems to be a very individual thing, and it won’t work for everyone. Further, exactly how well it works depends on how well you can build it into a routine that works for you. Here’s what I do, and it seems to work for me.
1. I work the same hours I would in the office: 8:00 – 5:00.
This is actually sort of a requirement imposed on me by my employer, but it works well for me in the end, and I think the biggest reason it works for me is that the rigid structure allows me to get a routine going that is very easy to automatically fall into.
2. When I wake up in the morning, I wake up at the usual time and still shower and dress as though I’m going into the office.
My office has a very casual dress code, and so it’s easy to dress as though I’m going to work. I also get ready for the day in the exact same way that I would as if I was going to the office. About the only difference is that I don’t have the commute, so I can eat breakfast in a more leisurely fashion. This morning routine helps me get into “work mode” mentally.
3. I work in a room that I don’t use for much else.
My computers are set up in the den, which is a room I don’t often use for anything else besides work and using my home computer. As such, when I’m in the den, my brain knows that I’m “at work”, and I don’t feel the temptation to do housework or other non-work things as strongly. It also means that when I walk out of the den at 5:00, that’s the magical moment when my brain says “I’m home!” and I’m no longer at work. It’s a separate enough place that it’s “the office” to my brain.
4. I try to get outside for a walk at lunch
Because I now spend so much time in my condo, getting outdoors for a break is almost essential. Plus, the weather’s nice this time of year and there’s lots of people around on 17th Ave.
5. At 5:00, I turn off my work computer and walk away. No ifs, ands, or buts
My work computer is a completely different machine from my home computer and so I can turn off the work computer at 5:00 and not look back. This is how I avoid the overtime trap that some teleworkers complain about. If possible, I actually physically leave the condo at 5:00 to go to the gym, run errands, or even just take a short (15 minute) walk.
Overall I find that this approach and routine works well for me. If the rest of the month continues this well I’ll likely want to make it a more permanent part of my routine when I’m able.
Permalink
2007.06.03
Posted in Board Games at 8:35 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Last night I played both Power Grid and Caylus. I’ve played power grid several times before, but this was my first full game of Caylus. All in all, I enjoyed both games even though I didn’t win either of them.
As a consolation prize, I did win at Martian Coasters, which we played as a warm-up game. Of course, I can’t take much credit since Martian Coasters has a strong luck element to it.
I was doing reasonably well at Power Grid for the first half of the game, or so I thought. In retrospect I probably should have expanded my network of cities more in line with my power plants capacity, instead of racing ahead to get cheap connections. My first inkling of trouble came when I noticed that Jason H. was always powering more cities than I was, even though he sometimes had fewer cities in his network; the second inkling came when I realized that Jason was comfortably sitting on about 150 electro when I was nearly broke.
Still, I fought to position myself for the endgame as best I could, hoping to force Jason H. to run out of money before he could hit 17 cities. Had I been successful, the extra turn might have given me enough momentum to surge ahead. Unfortunately, he managed to get his 17th city (only just, though), and I was left with 16 cities in second place. He could power all 17 of them, so the game was his.
It was a pretty tight race all the way through – towards the end some of the auctions got a little intense. Power Plant 50 ended up selling for over 60 electro, and Power Plant 46 also went for upwards of 60.
After Power Grid, we got Caylus out, wound our way through the rules for Jason H. (who had never played before), and then we got down to the game. I was in the lead for a while, but somewhere in the mid-game I started to lose ground to Jason B. I had fallen quite a ways behind when I decided to switch tracks. I build the architect and started stockpiling gold so I could build a prestige building. Just in time, too. The turn I intended to build the prestige building, Jason plopped his first worker down on the castle. Uh oh. He was a bit shy of resources, but I didn’t see a way to prevent him from getting what he needed to complete the rest of the castle and thus ending the game, so I focused on my prestige building and hoped for the best.
In the end, I made an impressive surge, but came up about 4 points short.
Now that I’ve played a full game of Caylus, I really enjoy the game. There are a larger number of choices in the game than in many Eurogames, but that’s nice for a change. Also, I really don’t get all the grumbling about the game taking too long – even with one new player, we finished a 3-player game in about 90 minutes. It moved at a nice pace, with little downtime.
That was enough gaming for this weekend. Now it’s back to working on the short story.
Permalink
Subscriptions