Weekend Update

Sometimes I miss the "safe space" that livejournal provided to create locked blog entries. On the other hand, being prohibited from creating "tell all" entries online due to a lack of a protected forum in which to do so means that I must share these details in person with friends I lean on, bringing us closer together in ways that chatting online never could. Also, I know on some level that the "safe space" that lj afforded was merely an illusion- as evidenced by the repeated times that trust was breached by readers.

So I will just vaguely express my feelings on the series of events I experienced last week in a simple summary- people can be pretty crummy and when you focus your life on what is right and good it turns your stomach just a bit when you have close encounters with others who don't share this focus. A mixture of revulsion toward what they are embracing and sympathy for the life in Christ they are forgoing. I also want to reiterate that being a grown up means you don't do necessarily what you *feel* like doing, but what, after careful evaluation, you deem to be the best and most practical course of action.

In other news,my cherished cell phone/pda (Sprint ppc 6601) that I've had since my Congressional employee days was stolen on Thursday evening. I had to get a replacement phone, and since it was on my own dime, a cheaper one of course. I picked up a cute Katana II and it's pink! Pink! Tres adorable.

J and I spent the weekend wrapping Christmas presents. We are almost finished with all of our shopping and are trying to turn the focus of our time and energies to remembering the reason for the season. Christ, of course.

Another fun activity I was pulled into this weekend was researching my ancestry. My father sent me several emails with pieces of our family tree from his mother's side of the family [The Laraques] so I started to put it all together and found a great free tool to do so from myheritage.com. It wasn't long into creating my tree that the software reported to me that 2 other people had trees overlapping mine. How exciting! I got in contact with both of them- distant cousins [we share grandparents 4 or 5 generations back!] -and we started some great conversations. In the process of my research I've been able to go all the way back to 1613 and found 2 important people in history among my grandmother's line so far. One was a man who is held up highly in Haitian history for his work in the Haitian independence movement. Another was also a well loved man (Sylla aka "Tom" Laraque) by the Haitian people- so much so that he ran for president of Haiti in the 50s and had a good shot to win but was basically forced into exile to Mexico by the U.S govt who did not appreciate the fact that a Marxist might become president. (That's right, I've got a bloody Marxist in my heritage). I'm excited to continue the trace backward as far as I can go with my paternal grandmother's family and then I will move onto my paternal grandfather, my mother's parents, and then Jonathan's family.

Board Game Review > Middara: Unintentional Malum Act 1

I don't keep my finger on the pulse of all the independent Kickstarter campaigns running at any given time. There's just too much unique content being produced month after month for me to sift through everything. I leave that to those who write previews and reviews for a living (I am an IT Consultant for a living; I write reviews as a hobby because I'm passionate about board gaming). The only way an independent Kickstarter campaign is going to be on my radar is if the designer/publisher reaches out to me to let me know the campaign is running or if it's created a bit of buzz already in the key circles that I frequent. I definitely wasn't closely monitoring Kickstarter campaigns four years ago when the original edition of Middara was initially funded. It was an adventurous dungeon crawl that promised to be so much more than an ordinary dungeon crawl. With options to run in campaign mode for an ongoing narrative or crawl mode for one off gameplay, it could work as a...

Board Game Review: Anno 1800

Whenever Martin Wallace designs a new game, I am all over it. This is because I absolutely love Brass Birmingham (another MW designed game); in fact Brass Birmingham is my #1 board game of all time. Over the years, his other games I've tried have been pretty good, but not necessarily amazing must-buys. Still, I keep trying each new release of his, searching for that next star performer. That's why I'm excited to report that Anno 1800 is, in fact, a star performer, and an amazing must-buy board game. Anno 1800 was adapted by the publisher (Kosmos) from a Ubisoft video game of the same name. In the board game, players take on the role of industrialists, charged with developing their island economies and exploring other islands. Each player begins the game with a personal industry board with trade & exploration ships, a shipyard, and industrial goods tiles printed on the board. A starting collection of workers (wooden cubes) of various types to produce the goods is a...

Board Game Review: Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated (spoiler free)

We’ve had our eye on Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated since its debut in 2019 from Renegade Game Studios. In our house, we love legacy games and we own most of the other Clank! editions, so it seemed like a good fit. Boy, was it ever! We finally got the game a couple of weeks ago, and immediately fell for it so hard during the first few minutes of the game that we played it nearly every day with our 11 year old twin sons, Max and Locke. In Clank! Legacy: AI , designed by Andy Clautice and Paul Dennen, players take on the role of employees at a small organization. At the beginning of the legacy campaign, the organization is in the process of applying to become a franchise of Acquisitions Incorporated, a megacorp famed for its for-profit adventuring services. We loved the narrative and appreciated the touches of authenticity, like the franchise charter agreement. We’ve played through other legacy campaign games over the past year where the narrative fell flat at tim...