Cool Links

It's a rainy Sunday here, so I'm just surfing the web and getting a bit of work done. I decided to skip Church today to offer milady a ride to one of her meetings; figured it was the more Christian thing to do. Quick aside- if you're into 40k, check out Defending Humanity if you haven't already. I have a poll up deciding which units I should use in my next couple of battles and a few battle reports.

Yesterday was fairly lopsided. In the beginning of the day I had work as always. The kids have discovered that they can come into my lab starting at 10, and so they do. Therefore I had a lot of wrangling in addition to my price quoting binge, which was ok. Then my student was late as usual and we only got halfway through the lesson. Need to really work on that...

In the evening we had Russell, Aaron and Kristin over and we played an exceedingly cutthroat game of Monopoly and some Boggle. Apparently Caroline has always played with the rule that if you land on somebody's space they have until the next person rolls to ask for rent. This led to a lot of rent not being paid, mostly due to the huge amount of negotiation that was going on. Deals were being bandied back and forth all game, with subtle threats and occasional blatant favoritism ruling the day. Huge sums of money were exchanged for monopolies which quickly grew to game dominating size, but were then sold off to avoid losing. It actually made Monopoly fun and fast paced- you needed to pay attention, there was plenty of backstabbing and dirty dealing... just like corporate America is supposed to be.

I lost first and got to painting more Warhammer models, and later got sucked into Boggle, which is a much tougher game than I first thought. It's surprising how incredibly simple and easy to spot words can be passed over completely simply based on where you are sitting/what letters you are paying attention to. The best strategy I have found is going for larger words, as fewer people find those and they are worth double points at least. That's how I won one round even though I found maybe half the words that everyone else found.

Anyway, I thought that I would share a couple of cool links that I have uncovered over the last couple of weeks. Pretty good timewasters, and occasionally even entertaining/enlightening, at least in my humble opinion.

First up is 365 Tomorrows, a collection of daily speculative short fiction on what the future might hold. Many very interesting looks at the land of tomorrow, especially those that look at it from decidedly alien viewpoints. Never longer than a page and a half and you get a new one every day.

Next up: webcomic called Heroes Inc. Alternate present where superheroes have existed since WWII and how seriously changed the world has become because of it. Interesting beginnings of a story, and pretty cool backstory as it looks at the proliferation of superpowers from a realistic point of view.

The rules for every single card game in existence can be found here. Found a lot of interesting variants on Euchre, as well as a plethora of two and three player games for those times that you just can't round up four people.

Until next time...

"The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust out doors I would drown him."
- quoted in My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens