Month: October 2017

Ecosia

This is another topic that isn’t entirely geeky, it’s just super cool! In my speech class, we were supposed to choose an informational topic that would be used for our first and third speeches. I chose the search engine Ecosia!

Since I wrote a whole speech on Ecosia, I could certainly just write that here, but that would be sad and lazy of me, so I won’t. About a year prior, I found an ad for Ecosia on Facebook. Had I been entirely alert at the moment, I would probably have just ignored the ad. As it so happened, however, I was tired and bored, so I clicked on it.

I immediately became intrigued by the general basis of their site. As I said earlier, Ecosia is a search engine. Like all search engines, they make money off of ads when people search. What makes them unique, however, is what they do with that money: they use their profits to help plant trees in other countries!

I was so interested in how this worked that I went ahead and clicked through their extra info. I spent probably a good half an hour sifting through personal info, financial reports and other fun facts! I was so impressed with the work they were doing that I made it my default search engine.

Recently, they have rocketed forward in progress. They’ve planted 10 million of their 15 million total trees in this last year, as well as doubled the amount of countries they help in!

This past summer, I got to meet with their UX Designer Ina over a video chat. Since their headquarters is in Berlin, the time difference was significant, but despite having already spent about nine weeks chatting with users already, and being near the end of her work day, she seemed very excited to meet me and didn’t mind at all!

I don’t know about you, but I think that what these guys are doing here is really cool. You can follow their blog, their YouTube channel, or just use their site to help contribute! (Link to main site above) Whichever you choose, I hope you at least check Ecosia out and give it a shot!

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Time to go to the Robot Lab!

This week I’d like to introduce a Kickstarter game called Robot Lab. I’ll give you one guess on what it’s about: yup, it’s about robots!

In Robot Lab, you each choose a color for the body of your robot. As you draw cards throughout the game, you have two goals: get a head, two arms and two legs of your robot’s color attached to your robot, and stop your opponent from reaching that goal.Robot Lab

You can do this by using your “attach” turn to attach a piece you don’t want onto their robot. For instance, if they’re building an orange robot, and you’re building blue, and they had no head, you could use your turn to attach a red head from your hand onto their robot.

This game could theoretically be adapted to be cooperative or single-player, but I think that would take a lot of the fun out of it. One of the best parts is that it takes the Munchkin aspect of stabbing your friend in the back to simplest form. No fancy, triple-card moves, just a wrong colored arm and a turn to spare.

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Thou shalt not leave… before a game of Munchkin Shakespeare!

And, yet another Munchkin game has come out! Munchkin Shakespeare has, like all Munchkin games, its own twists and horrible puns.Munchkin Shakespeare

As I said, they all come with their own twists. Munchkin Shakespeare has Dungeons, each with its own special rules. My personal favorite is “The Dungeon O’ Bad Scottish Accents”, where ye have ta say everythin’ in a bad accent, though’ it dun’t ha’ ta be Scottish.

Anyway, enough with my bad attempt at writing an accent, and onto the monsters! Possibly the most dangerous monster is the Level 20 Lady Macbeth, but one of my personal favorites is the Level 1 Spamlet.

Finally, there are the items. My starting hand included my favorite weapon, the Dialog, a 2-handed log with a plus 4 bonus. I also had the Toga, which was a plus 1 armor unless being back-stabbed, in which case it wasn’t worth anything (only for that instance). I don’t actually know the reference for this, but I assume it has something to do with Julius Caesar’s assassination.

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Blue Box Cafe

For all the Whovians out there, I have something for you! In Elgin, there’s a small sandwich shop called the Blue Box Café. At the Blue Box Café, you can get coffee and sandwiches, purchase Doctor Who themed souvenirs, and watch Doctor Who.Blue Box Cafe

The merchandise was cool. I appreciated that it didn’t sprawl everywhere, but I do wish there was a little more of it. There were a lot of Blue Box Café shirts and stuff, as well as Dalek mugs and Cybermen action figures.

When we were there, they were playing the Peter Capaldi episode Dark Water and it’s sequel, Death in Heaven. They had the subtitles on, and no volume, which made sense, given the din of the Café.

Alright, I know, I know. It’s a café, and I have to mention the food. I was disappointed. There wasn’t an option for fish fingers and custard. In all honesty though, the food they had was great. I had the turkey ranch sandwich, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I also had a caramel apple cider, which was delicious.

 

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Fermilab

Last Saturday, Fermilab had an open house, so naturally I went. I got a ton of free science stuff, including 2 Gyro wheels.Fermilab exhibit

Directly past the security checkpoint, they handed us each a bag with a brochure, a pencil, and a VR box (only 1 per family). The VR is really cool, you put your phone in it and then use their program.

We wanted to see the Mr. Freeze liquid nitrogen show, but they were out of tickets, so we just walked through a couple Neutrino exhibits instead.

Then we went to the STEM fair, where I got about a thousand brochures. I also got to pet a raccoon fur. The picture above is one of the signs near the STEM Fair, showing some of the cool stuff in that building, most of which had tours and shows going on in them.

Finally, we went to see their buffalo. They were so cute! There are 2 bulls, 15 cows and about 11 calves.

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