Current mood:

good

March wrap-up
March, March, March.  Welcome, spring!  I didn't start this month with much scheduled, but a fair bit popped up.  I began the month by finishing the novelty mystery book Dracula's Heir, with its lovely inserts and letters and such.  I compared my solution with that of my father, and we managed to figure most of it out before reading the solution.

This month I watched Citizen Kane (four out of seven wands), Across the Universe (five stars), Sleepy Hollow (five swords) and Get Shorty (five swords), the latter two of which I'd seen before.

Work has been good, with volunteers of various sorts picking up the slack left by a departed coworker.  I was able to run my game Magnet Maze three more times, with very mixed results.  I'm picking up on what kinds of things are a good idea to include in a game for a large group of kids.

For Pi Day, a geek holiday celebrated on 3/14 in honor of the famous transcendental number, friends Matt and Kelly Strait announced that they were hosting a party.  It occurred to me that while I had never given a serious attempt to memorizing more than the first few digits of pi, nonetheless that's just the kind of thing I would do, and so I proceeded to memorize 300 digits.  I did it by associating each group of ten with a character from the casual Popcap game Peggle Nights, a contestant from the first season of Survivor, or a character I roleplay online.  If I were to continue memorizing pi, I would use contestants from the rest of the seasons of Survivor, thus making use of this nearly useless knowledge.  As for how each character matched up with ten digits, that's a matter of endless associations I have with numbers.  Each numeral has its own color in my mind (more or less), and I thought of the sequences in terms of evens, odds, squares, multiples of three, rising parts, falling parts, and symbolic groups like 26 as the number of instruction, 502 as the Egyptian number, 535 as the horn of the unicorn, and 73 as the number of Minneapolis fandom.

The party itself was pleasant enough, with many delightful pies (including a very nice homemade mixed berry pie from skylarker) and merry games.  I recited my list of digts dramatically to an appreciative audience, although I misplaced the page I'd brought for verification.

Speaking of Peggle Nights, I found myself a slave to that game, trying to beat the whole thing in Adventure Mode with no retries.  On the 19th I finally managed that feat, to my great jubilation and relief.  I've hardly played it since.

On the 21st the MN-Stf voting meeting was held at my house, though I had to work through the first part of it.  It was nice, giving me a chance to talk with a number of people I'd wanted to talk to, to win at Uptown, and to get thoroughly beat up at Search for the Emperor's Treasure.

The next day, I visited the Sheraton Bloomington to scout locations for this year's Minicon Medallion Hunt.  I'll be running it for the fourth time, which means hiding shiny marked pennies and coming up with clues for seekers.  This year I'll also be editing and printing the con newsletter, since my mother, who's been doing it the past few years, is running programming instead.  It's only going to be a relatively small portion of the bulletin for the medallion hunt, though.  I have most of the locations and clues decided at this point, but have yet to design the hardest ones.

On the 23rd, I finished the second draft of the epic interactive novel I've been working on since November.  What remains is a long list mostly consisting of cool things I want to work in, formatting issues, and consistency issues.  I plan to finish it this month.

I also read a couple of small interactive novels for kids from publishers I hadn't seen before.  These were Christmas gifts.  I found them both to be remarkably poorly structured, with numerous unnecessary bottlenecks and precipitous dead ends and mistakes (in one case an incorrect page number given in the winning line, making one book half-unwinnable) and basically all kinds of poor design decisions.  They gave me perspective and basically made me feel better about my own book by comparison.

On the 27th, I had the rare opportunity to meet a friend I'd hitherto only known on the internet, who'd come all the way from Mexico City to stay with our mutual friend Amanda.  The game party boasted a huge turnout and a great deal of fun, and our honored guest, while initially nervous, enjoyed himself quite a bit.  Seems he's one of those people who's quieter in real life than he is online, though that may have been due to the context.  While driving him back, he read me the words to a song I'd written for a MUCK we both played on a couple years back, so I could then sing it to the best of my memory, which was good for laughs.

Also during March, I discovered that you can make banana pudding in the same way as pumpkin pudding, using bananas instead of pumpkin.  Best, though, is if you use some of each.

I finished the month by filing my taxes, which was for various reasons messier than in past years, but it worked out all right.

And that's the end of the first quarter!