27November
2010
maura @ 2:10 pm
OMG my mom made me watch a Tmobile ad the other day with someone singing “The Passenger” and now I am going absolutely nutty wanting to hear it. The Siouxsie & the Banshees version, specifically. I don’t have it on my phone and pandora isn’t cooperating and aiieee!!!
(Okay, found it on youtube, much better now, phew! Also, ripping all of my Siouxsie discs at home, wondering why I hadn’t done so before.)
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Over the past couple of days we’ve been playing long distance games of Carcassonne w/my brother. The basic game mechanic is that players draw tiles to create a landscape that includes cities, roads, cloisters, and open spaces (which can be farmed). Each player has 7 little dudes (“meeples,” their real name, is just too twee even for me) to use throughout the game to claim the aforementioned locales as their own and earn points. Some points aren’t earned until the game is over, when all tiles are placed.
It’s been interesting to compare gameplay between the iphone and real life. In the real life version of the game it’s easy to see the entire board and ponder your tile placement options. It’s also a bit more random — while in theory it’s possible to know how many of each type of tile is left in the (facedown) draw pile, in practice you would never take the time to count the tiles and look in the rules to determine the likelihood of drawing that perfect tile.
The phone version has the same rules + mechanics, but there are distinct differences to playing on a 2×4.5 inch screen connected to the internets. When you’re all zoomed in on your tile (which you kind of need to be in order to decide where to put your meeple), it’s impossible to see the whole board once the game’s more than a few turns old. I’ve gotten myself into the habit of zooming way out to see everything, but I still wonder whether the closeup view encourages weirdly spaced-out tile placements. It seems like each of us tends to hone in on a couple of areas and ignore the rest, which I don’t remember doing in the real world version.
Also in the phone version it’s possible to pull up a list of remaining available tiles at any point in the game. This strikes me as sidling up to cheating, though I definitely indulge, especially when it’s close to the end of the game. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this feature has proved extremely helpful to my endgame strategy.
It’s been pretty fun, definitely one of those situations in which you realize the magic of the internets. There’s a great built in chat function, so we can even trash talk when someone draws too many cloisters.
26November
2010
maura @ 8:17 pm
A few weeks ago I promised to tell you more about the new art near work. On Wednesday I finally had a chance to take some pictures. Here’s an art tour just for you!
This is the first piece of sculpture I encounter on my walk through the plaza on the way to work. According to the sign, this is a collage of objects that represent the top results of a Google search for the word sculpture. Funky!
I don’t know what the story is with these. They’re inflatable, and I could swear that one of the middle platforms had a cow on it a few weeks ago. Maybe it popped.
This is very cool: a photo of rushing water on a board strapped to most of the trees (the same photo on every tree). I should go back and get a closeup. It’s a neat effect.
These are the Louise Bourgeois-esque cubes — there are actually 3, but only 2 would fit in the photo. During the day you can’t tell that there’s anything in them because they are slightly reflective, as you can see.
Bat chair!
Here’s what one of the cubes looks like at night — internal lights illuminate everything within, which includes shoes, plants, bottles of cold medicine, and liquor. Good times in a box!
Yay for art! If I remember correctly these pieces will all be up through the spring, so come on out to Downtown Brooklyn if you’d like to take a peek.
25November
2010
maura @ 10:32 pm
Jonathan and I are playing Carcassonne on our phones. O, this modern world!
Happy Thanksgiving, dudes.
24November
2010
maura @ 10:25 pm
…but I am still tired. And I need to get a good night’s sleep so I can eat lots tomorrow. So in lieu of a real post, here’s a phone photo for you.
This is from our first trip to Governor’s Island, when Gus and I went with friends 2 summers ago. The Brooklyn ferries hadn’t started running yet so we had to leave from Manhattan, and there was that crazy David Byrne play the piano and play the building exhibit next door to the ferry building. I thought Gus would love it, but instead he was kind of cranky and bratty. But it was cool anyway.
The building housing the exhibit had lots of neat spaces, including this one. I’ve always liked this photo — it’s been on my phone still for all this time. I could easily see it worked into some kind of narrative or videogame. And the colors are nifty.
23November
2010
maura @ 8:32 pm
Well hello internets! Yes, I crapped out on 2 days of blagging. Once you fall off that wagon, it’s so easy to do it again. I meant to blag, really I did, but we’ve been busy and also spent the past 2 nights watching Shutter Island. Which was decent, but not amazing. And really *really* long. Boy howdy, whose idea was it to make a 2.5 hr long movie? So not necessary. I don’t know, Leonardo DiCaprio kind of bugs me lately. Though I did love Inception. On the other hand, Michelle Williams was awesome. So crazy!
Boy, I gots nothing tonight, either. Still haven’t taken any photos of the new art near work. Maybe I will do that tomorrow. The bathroom renovation is completely finished and the associated mess cleaned up. I continue to be stressed out by Xmas music/decorations before it’s even Thanksgiving. Thanks to the giving it’s a meeting-light week at work so I’ve been possessed by the completely unrealistic notion that tomorrow I will finish a whole slew of tasks that have been hanging out on my to do list for way too long. Maybe I’ll even bring the rest of my stuff over from the old cubicle to the new office. Big Wednesday plans, indeed.
20November
2010
maura @ 10:52 pm
Gus wanted to have movie night tonight, and really wanted to watch something sci-fi. Scrolling through Netflix watch instantly we came across Contact, and that’s what he chose. I think it’s PG? Maybe PG-13 — there’s a bit of language (“Mom, why did he say ‘son of a b…”), but nothing he doesn’t hear on the schoolbus every damn day, and a smidge of kissing (“Ewww!”), but otherwise it’s harmless.
Except that it’s kind of a grownup movie. We haven’t seen it in a while, and I’d forgotten about the religious discussions and the father dying and the bombing. And lots of talk talk talking. It’s kind of intense, and Gus was a bit confused sometimes.
But it’s also such a great movie and he really does seem to be into it. Who can resist Arecibo and the Very Large Array? And Jodie Foster is just so fabulous, always. The whole package makes me want to be an astronomer. Yay SETI!
19November
2010
maura @ 10:20 pm
Gus’s birthday is coming up, and this year he wants a bowling party. Absolutely! Good for everyone: we don’t have to clean the house, and Gus gets a party.
The bowling alley gave us invitations to send to his friends. Check out this blast from the past:
So awesome! We can’t figure out if they’re intentionally trying to attract the parents who love those fabulous ’70s fonts, or if these invitations have actually been around for that long.
18November
2010
maura @ 10:39 pm
I had thought we were finished with Pokemon, but one of Gus’s pals brought a game magazine on the bus the other day, and Gus read a review of the new Pokemon game Black and White (out now in Japan, not til the spring here in the US), and now he’s hooked again.
It’s not that I hate Pokemon. I do think there are lots of great things about the game, both the video and card versions. There’s memorization — the characters have endless stats and attributes — and organization — in this case, the Pokedex, which indexes all of the creatures you find. There’s math (especially in the card game) since the basic mechanic is 2 characters battling and the one with higher hit points (which can, of course, be added to with powerups and the like) is the winner. And there’s lots of reading, too.
But I do feel like the Pokemon universe is, well, thin. And based more on accumulating stuff in the physical world than many other games. He has a giant pile of cards that he never, ever uses anymore. Indeed, the card game is much more complicated than the videogame, and when he was young enough to want the cards he couldn’t really grok the gameplay. But of course he begged for them when he was into collecting them, endlessly poring over them and strategizing trades with pals.
The videogames, too, encourage real life consumption in a way I don’t like all that much. Often multiple versions of essentially the same game are released simultaneously, and sometimes they only differ in color (e.g. Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire) and a subset of creatures. So even though you’re collecting creatures virtually, your kid will still beg for more than one version of the game.
I guess we have time to deal with this, since the new game isn’t out for a while. But I’m sad that the newfound knowledge of this game has pushed him back into the Pokeverse. His birthday is coming up — maybe one of the new games he gets will drive all those Pokethoughts right out of his head.
17November
2010
maura @ 8:17 pm
Yes indeedy, I fell off that NaBloPoMo wagon. I really did *mean* to blog last night, but then I fell asleep right in the middle of reading my RSS feeds. And woke up at 5am again today, huzzah! Who needs sleep, anyway?
But I’m not TOTALLY giving up. Except for tonight, when I am, because I have a pile of student research paper drafts to grade and no helpful teaching assistants to helpfully assist me. And suddenly – bam! – I know what to ask for from Santa this year!
15November
2010
maura @ 11:01 pm
Today I took the day off so I could go on a field trip with Gus’s class. This is the field trip I’ve wanted to go on forever, the one where they get to celebrate building the wigwam in the park and do all kinds of cool ancient Native American things like try to make fire with a firebow.
I had completely forgotten that I suck at field trips. I haven’t had as much free time the past couple of years as I did when Gus was younger, so I don’t really know as many of the other parents + kids as I used to. Gus tends to be not on his best behavior when I’m around in a school-like setting, alternately clingy or not listening/paying attention. I never know quite what I’m supposed to be doing, and end up standing around feeling like an awkward extra appendage, not really talking much with the other parents.
There’s also the transport issue: often they get a bus to shuttle them to and from trips, but today they couldn’t so we took 29 fourth graders on three (3!) subways to go 2.8 miles. In rush hour! By the time we got there I was already exhausted. Luckily I had forgotten to bring hot chocolate (not entirely my fault! the pre-field trip directions were unclear!), so I had to walk a couple of blocks over to Dunkin Donuts and get 2 big boxes of it. Which was a great opportunity to purchase supplemental coffee (yay!).
I was also a little bit disappointed that I couldn’t get the kids to split up into groups nicely to do the skulls, skins and tracks matching activity. They were real skulls, so I got all zooarchaeological. Some kids were into it, and some were not. Gus was able to ID the skull, skin and tracks of the beaver (big front teeth!), so that’s something.
I shouldn’t complain: we were finished early enough that I had time to hightail it up to City College to finish the last of my 2 student interviews for my research project this semester. And Gus was happy to have me there. And no one barfed in the subway station.
(When Gus was in kindergarten I went with his class on a trip to the Whitney museum on the Upper East Side, 20 kindergarteners on 2 (maybe 3?) subways! It was intense, and there was no coffee when we got there. One of his classmates barfed as we were walking through the subway station to change trains and we just had to leave it there. I felt so bad, but what could we do? The group was moving forward, and we were far from a booth with a subway employee. A friend later told me that she knows a parent who brings a small plastic bag full of cat litter on every field trip for that very reason.)
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