Month: May 2024

Overly Sarcastic Productions (The Right Amount Of Sarcasm)

In my opinion, anyway. Overly Sarcastic Productions is an educational YouTube channel that covers topics like history, mythology, and tropes in entertainment, and they’re a great joy to watch. They offer the facts intermingled with often-snarky commentary (if you’ve analyzed history or writing, you know it’s well-deserved) and visual presentations you’ll want to stop and read. Sometimes for the info, and sometimes for the sass.

This is one of those discover-your-niche-for-yourself situations, but to start you off, may I suggest History-Makers: Iceland’s #1 Menace, Snorri Sturluson, Miscellaneous Myths: Pride Tales, and/or Trope Talk: Noodle Incidents? This Trope Talk delighted me especially by featuring Leverage as a primary example; identifying beloved stories in the explanation or the background clips is part of the fun! If you’re a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, you’ll find it works as an example for a truly shocking number of elements. The narrative kind, not bending. (And a good example, which not all of them are. Often the trope is as relevant for the ways it’s crashed and burned as the ways it’s been done well. And everything in between – the video on time travel is a good example of this.)

History and mythology, meanwhile, have a lot of “ugh, this guy again,” and “this guy” is frequently Murder. The narrators share our exasperation. And parts of those subjects that aren’t “ugh, murder”! As a treat. Honestly, I can’t believe I haven’t covered this channel yet – they’ve been a cornerstone of my edutainment for years.

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Cowabunga!

Cowabunga is a saying, yes, and also a cattle-themed surfing card game. The goal is simple – to wipe out the least!

The execution is more difficult, and requires a combination of luck, memory, and mental math. The whole game revolves, unsurprisingly, around a wave, the height of which is altered by player actions. Each turn, you’ll play a Wave Card, adding to the wave height when the wave is rising, and subtracting when it falls. But be careful! There are also Obstacle Cards, numbered ten through thirty, and if the sum (or difference) of your play equals an opponent’s Obstacle, you wipe out! You’re not out of a game, but you do have to take a Cow Pawn.

That said, you do have one advantage – you get to see the Obstacle Cards when your opponents first draw them. You then have to remember which numbers they are, and hope your Wave Cards grant you the option of avoiding them. This is further complicated as the game goes on, because whenever someone takes the wave to higher than thirty, or lower than ten, not only does the direction flip, but the player to their right draws another Obstacle. In other words, if you’re the one to cross that threshold, the surf just got more hazardous for you.

Especially in a two-player game, you can reach a truly impressive number of Obstacles to remember. I think I had to avoid twelve numbers, the last time we played. Regardless of the number of players, the game ends when someone reaches four Cow Pawns or the last Obstacle Card is drawn. And as I said earlier, the player who wiped out the least wins!

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Midwest Tulip Fest

When last I wrote about Kuipers Family Farm, I sung the praises of their apple picking and sunflower features, with a blurb about the pumpkin experience I’d never actually done. Well, I’ve still never been to their pumpkin picking, but they’ve now added a tulip festival!

In front of a building labeled "The Farmstand," a metal structure is completely surrounded by pink tulips, with a gradient from darker in the middle of the petals to lighter on the outside, and yellow at the very bottom. There are occasional white and yellow tulips interspersed.

Like the sunflowers, the tulips span seven acres, and you can pay extra to cut your own and bring them home. Or, if you have cats like ours who don’t understand “don’t chew that” (tulips are bad for them), you can just pay admission to wander and enjoy. It’s in the same area as the pumpkins with what I assume are year-round features (though again, never having been to the latter, I can only infer). These include a sort of jungle gym, games like tetherball, and a small zoo! There are also food vendors. All in all, it was a lot bigger than I expected, and of course the tulips were gorgeous! Their season is over now, but there’s always next year.

A swathe of deep purple tulips, almost black, on tall green stems. Seemingly much taller for the fact that they were photographed at their own height.
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Hearthstone Updates: The Good and the Bad

There have been some changes to Hearthstone since I last posted about it, bringing good news and bad news. The bad news: they’ve discontinued Duels, which I was rather fond of. The good news: they’ve added a Duos mode to Battlegrounds!

Instead of eight players fending for themselves, four sets of two share health stats with their partner, and so must coordinate their approach. This includes the ability to Pass cards to your teammate’s hand at the cost of Gold. To that end, you can flag certain cards or other options (i.e. Tavern Upgrade) to confer with your opponent! It’s a very simple system, just a checkmark, an x, a question mark, and a portal symbol. Part of the joy for me has been learning how to click with each new teammate, because we all use the same four-symbol shorthand a little differently!

For the combats themselves, you and your teammate take turns fighting first, facing off one-on-one with an opponent until one or both combatants lose all their minions. Their teammate(s) immediately tag in, the fighting continues, and whichever team still has minions in the end does damage! If one player defeated both their opponents, their teammate’s minions fill in the empty spaces in their board and contribute to the damage total.

(Additional note: the Anomalies update I mentioned in the previous Battlegrounds post was, I believe, Season-specific, and isn’t currently in effect. They shuffle cards and rules like that with the major updates, so there’s always something new to play with!)

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