Apparently it’s that time of year again, when the shrooms magically appear in your lawn overnight. Here are some of my favorites!
Mushrooms
Author: Cassandra
Hiatus Announcement + Cats
For personal reasons, I’ve decided to take a break from the longer written posts. Instead, my weekly updates are likely to consist of cute cats, pretty flowers, and whatever else I decide to photograph. Enjoy!
Cardiac Arrest: It’s The Best!
If that seems like a ludicrously terrible catchline, I’m doing something right! A couple months ago, I had a prompt to write an ad that deliberately employed at least 3 logical fallacies. I figured I might as well ride that train all the way to Station Absurdity, and this is the result:
Furthermore, we are proud to introduce the Cardiac Arrest deep-fried quadruple decker coconut butter burger, served completely encased in white chocolate! First of all, it's delicious! According to acclaimed astronaut Jessica Gonzalez, it's "the most incredibl[e] greasy thing [she's] ever consumed!" (The recommended maximum consumption is one serving per month; Greasivores Co. is not liable for any weight gain, heart conditions or death that may occur by disregarding this recommendation.) Cardiac Arrest: it's the best!
Tic Tac Chec
Tic Tac Toe meets chess in Tic Tac Chec, a short and simple strategy game that can be used to teach new players how chess pieces move, or to shake things up a bit for more seasoned players. I’ve been playing chess for years, but adjusting to new mechanics is always a bit of a learning curve, and our first round was actually kind of embarrassing – we were both so busy setting ourselves up in chess terms, we forgot the Tic Tac Toe part. But I’m getting ahead of myself… again.
Each player has four pieces: a pawn, a knight, a bishop, and a rook, all of which move the same as they do in chess, except the pawn switches directions when it reaches the end of the board. Tracking that is a little tricky, so I’d advise having the pawn on the side of its space closest to where it’s going next, instead of centered. We figured that one out the hard way, too.
The board is a 4×4 grid, and the goal is to align all four of your pieces vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The first step of this is having pieces on the board – on your turn, you may place any one of your pieces on any open space. Once you have three pieces on the board, you may begin to move and capture as you would in regular chess; captured pieces are returned to their players and “can immediately be played again on any open square.” It’s up for interpretation whether than means “they get to place it as soon as you hand it back to them” or just “there’s no cooldown before they can use a turn to put it back on the board,” so sort that out with your opponent before the game begins. It’s also up to you whether the “three pieces on the board before moving” rule applies to more than the beginning of the game. The rules on this one are pretty loosely defined, so there’s a lot of room to experiment and see which way is the most fun for you!
It’s A Wide And Wonderful Zooniverse!
Zooniverse is a volunteer-powered research platform, which I stumbled across by accident and have been obsessed with ever since. “What kind of research?” you might ask – a reasonable question, the answer to which is yes. They’ve got NASA projects, medical research, digitization of centuries-old handwritten documents… the list goes on and on. Another cool example is Saint George on a Bike, which is training an AI to caption European visual art from the 12th to 18th centuries, based off human input!
The great part about all this is that you don’t need to be an expert. Each project has a tutorial and a field guide, which will tell you everything you need to know to perform your classifications! Sometimes the images are a little unclear – they were taken at night, or in motion, or the handwriting is just awful – but because each piece of data goes through multiple people, everyone’s best guesses can still provide a useful approximation. (Ex: “We can’t agree what kind of wallaby that is, but it’s definitely not a dingo.”) Personally, I’m partial to trail cam research, where you’re identifying animals, so the classification pictured below is from the WildCam Gorongosa project based in Mozambique. They have some extra features in their system, so not only is there a field guide with information on each animal, you can filter by build, horns, pattern, etc. to narrow down your options.
Each project has its own homepage with a progress bar, which shows what percent of the data has been classified, the number of volunteers who’ve worked on it, and other relevant numbers. There’s an explanation of the project itself, and an About page in the toolbar with more detailed information. Also in the toolbar is a Classify link (there’s also one of these on the main page, and I appreciate that there’s multiple easy ways to get to the actual workflow), and a Talk section to ask questions, comment on specific subjects (that’s the image you’re classifying) and generally hang out. You don’t need an account to participate, but if you have one you can also mark favorites, make collections of related images, and revisit subjects you’ve recently classified in each project. Your profile page also has a pie chart of your classifications to date, and a shortcut to projects you’ve recently worked on, both of which I’ve found super helpful!
The other big feature I love about Zooniverse is that you can pop in and out whenever. If you want to show up and binge Galaxy Zoo for an hour, you can do that! If you only have time for two classifications before lunch, you can also do that! There’s no obligation, just the Zooniverse at your fingertips for when it suits your fancy. And when it’s fun, satisfying and convenient… what’s not to love?
Welcome to the Ice Age!
In past years, Brookfield Zoo has had either a Lego animal display or a dinosaur animatronics exhibit available all through summer. This year, they changed it up a bit and brought us Ice Age Giants instead! Also featuring life-size animatronics, this exhibit focuses on megafauna from the most recent Ice Age, from wooly mammoths to giant cheetahs to something called a “Josephoartigasia.” (Picture a capybara, except it’s 9-10 feet long!)
This post is absolutely, 100% an advertisement for this exhibit. It’s awesome, it’s informative, and it runs through October 30th (free with general admission!) so if you’re in Chicagoland you should definitely check it out!
Strange Sentences
I’ve already posted about Duolingo in comparison to Rosetta Stone, but I’ve recently realized that a not-insignificant number of my screenshots are of Duo… more specifically, of the strange and amusing sentences their lessons are known to have. There were several that almost made this post, including “The fly is important,” (why, we are not told) and “She is making a drink out of beans.” I’m hoping they mean coffee. In the end, though, these are the ones I chose:
There’s one more, which I picked less because it’s humorous, and more because it’s timely. I was pleasantly surprised to find it in my Hawaiian lessons!
Eldritch Pairs
Pairs is a press-your-luck game as simple as its name. The deck is triangular – there’s one 1, two 2’s, three 3’s, and so forth, all the way through ten. At the beginning of each round, every player is dealt a card face-up. Whoever has the lowest number goes first! (If there’s a tie, those players draw again, and so on until it’s resolved.)
On your turn, you may either hit or fold. When you hit, you’re drawing the top card of the deck and placing it face-up in front of you, alongside any other cards you’ve collected this round. The goal is to not get a matching pair. If you do, you take points equivalent to the number on the card (keep the card in front of you as a reminder) and all other cards in play are discarded. It’s time to start a new round. Folding also ends the round, but because you chose to stop, you score the lowest value card in play… even if it’s your opponent’s!
As you may have guessed, points are a bad thing. The first person to reach the target score – which is 60 divided by the number of players, plus 1 – loses. There are no winners in this game, just one loser, but I imagine you could play it elimination style if you have patient friends.
What we have (and what I linked to) is the Shallow Ones deck, illustrated by John Kovalic. As always with John’s work, the art is fantastic and frequently hilarious! It’s hard to see in the picture, because the card is upside down, but what Cthulhu and… I think that’s the Formless Spawn? From Cthulhu In The House? (…how have I not blogged that yet?)… regardless, what they’re watching in card #7 is, in fact, the contents of card #9. And card #10 is definitely the Shoggoth going to an optometrist. Poor optometrist.
Time For A Penguin Rescue!
To nobody’s surprise, the game Adventures of Riley: Penguin Rescue is about rescuing penguins. The characters are all part of the same rescue team, so it’s a very friendly competition… it’s just a matter of who can collect all 5 colors of penguins first!
The penguins’ colors match the colors on the dice, and the spaces on the board. Movement is simple – follow the arrows to the nearest of each color you rolled. You get to choose which order to resolve them in, though, so use that to your advantage! There’s a bit less choice involved when you roll two of the same color, but you do get to roll again once you’re done! Some spaces are slides, which you can use to skip sections or slide back to Start in the middle of the board. If there’s a stranded penguin on the slide, you can take it with you! There are also Rescue Zones, which let you collect any one of their remaining penguins when you land there. If you’re lucky, you might be able to hit it twice in one turn! Just remember, you can only have one of each color penguin, which are also differentiated by size and numbers, so it’s pretty easy to tell!
The sixth side of the die is the Wild side. If you roll this, or land on a Krill space on the board, you must immediately draw the Krill card and resolve its effects. Most commonly, these have you move forward or back a certain number of spaces, but they may also send you back to Start, end your movement for the turn, or have you un-rescue someone else’s penguin. (Unfortunate, but sometimes warmer ocean temperatures around the Antarctic Peninsula are endangering Uncle Max’s colony, and a penguin flees to safer ice. It’s for the best.) If you roll two Wild sides, though, you get to move anywhere on the board! Including a Rescue Zone, if you so desire.
Once you have all five of your penguins, you still have to make it back to Start. And honestly? We found this to be way harder than collecting all the birds. There were several rounds where both of us had achieved a full iceberg, but we kept passing over all the slides home. I suppose that’s when a double Wild would have been really useful, huh?
It’s a simple game, fun, and the cards are clearly aimed to be educational. The little penguin figures have also been kitten-approved as extremely entertaining! (No penguins or cats were harmed by this fascination, but she did bat them off the board several times. While sitting in the box. Because of course she did.)
Geez, those are some Loaded Questions!
The game Loaded Questions comes from the same creators as The Worst-Case Scenario Card Game, with a similar concept. When the question is posed, however, instead of everyone guessing how the active player will respond, everyone else responds and the active player has to guess which responses belong to whom!
It goes like this: each card has four categories. When you roll and move, the space you land on will determine which category you read off, unless you land on the wild space and get to choose your own. That question, whatever it is, is what your fellow players will be answering. For instance, in the photo below I picked the No-Brainers category, so the question posed was “What’s the best song you don’t currently have in your music collection?”
When everyone has written their answers, their sheets are handed to the previous roller, who shuffles them and reads them off. The current player will then decide who they think wrote each answer. For each correct match, they get to move forward an additional space! I especially like this game because it can be challenging even among close friends. In a lot of games like these, familiarity is an unmitigable advantage, but what I’ve found with Loaded Questions is like-mindedness just results in extremely similar answers, which makes them difficult to correctly attribute.
The objective is to reach the end of the board, and match at least three players’ answers correctly once you’re there. I’m not sure why that’s a fixed number, as it seems to me that it should vary depending on your number of players… but aside from that the mechanics are sound, the questions are fun, and we had a blast!
