Alright, so for context, Mom and I were talking about one of Zuko’s toys, a red plastic pepper. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” Mom said (don’t ask me for context, I don’t have it), to which I responded, “So if we pickled the plastic pepper, would Peter Piper pick it?” Except why would you pickle the pepper before picking it? And so the following was born:
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. But the peppers weren’t pickled when Peter Piper picked them. Unless Peter Piper pickled the peppers on the plant… In which case Peter Piper wasn’t a very practical pepper picker.
What’s this? It’s been over a month since I’ve posted cat photos? Well, I might as well post more then! You’ve already gotten “Apparently June is a pillow,” now get ready for “Zuko using everyone else as a pillow!”
And as a bonus, that second photo zoomed out to catch Arwen glaring at the camera.
We’ve all wanted to be members of a prehistoric tribe, hunting dinosaurs for dinner and competing to be the next tribal chief, right? Right. Well, now you can, because that’s the premise of the board game Ooga!
In Ooga!, the board is a randomized array of dino tiles, comprised of 5 different color-coded species on 3 different terrains, as well as the occasional coconut (for nutritional balance, of course). The Tribal Chief flips over a menu, which will be the goal until it’s completed — for instance, 1 red, 1 purple, 1 green and 2 blues. The aim is to collect all the dinosaurs on the menu, at which point you call out “Ooga!” discard those tiles, collect the menu, and become the next Tribal Chief. The game ends once all 12 menus have been completed, at which point whoever has the most of them wins.
The catch is that you can only pick up the dino tiles which not only match at least one color on the menu, but also a terrain from the current bones. Each hunt, the current Tribal Chief will toss the four bones, and whichever flip picture-side-up are available that round. One of these, rather than a terrain, marks Coconuts as fair game, which act as a wild card to replace any one dinosaur when completing a menu.
I should also probably mention that once the bones are thrown, you collect dinosaurs on a first-come, first-serve basis by stabbing them with a suction cup on a stick. (Sorry, I meant a “spear.”) The round ends as soon as all but one of the players has caught a tile, or, since we were playing two-player, once each has caught one. Mom refers to this as “the matchy and stabby game,” and honestly if that’s not incentive to try it I don’t know what is.
(Apparently I’ve already done a write-up for this game, but I forgot until after I had already written this one, so… if you didn’t try Ooga! the last time I posted about it, maybe you’ll try it now.)
For a school assignment a little while back, I did an emotional analysis on the origin of “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” later put to music as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This is one of those topics in American history I remember sort of hearing about, but up until I did this short essay, I didn’t have many of the details, and so since I presume that’s the standard experience, I thought it would be neat to share my analysis.
It’s unsurprising that Francis Scott Key had such a passionate emotional response to the sight of the American flag still flying after the Battle of Baltimore, for many reasons. First is the simple fact that Mr. Key was a patriot. He may have been opposed to the war, but more than that, he was outraged by the British’s actions, including the injustice that had brought him to Baltimore in the first place: the arrest of a physician, William Beanes, for having the courage to stand up to British soldiers who had been plundering his home. Mr. Key, a lawyer, was there to negotiate for Mr. Beanes’s release. By the time he had succeeded in his venture, however, he had learned of the imminent attack on Fort McHenry and was therefore withheld from returning to shore until after the battle’s conclusion. This means that not only was Key witness to the bombardment, he knew that it was coming and was helpless to stop it.
This helplessness would have been bad enough as it persisted through the daylight hours of the attack, Key watching from afar as “it seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone,” but even worse as the battle carried into the night, and he had only red in the sky and the sound of “bombs bursting in air” as evidence that the fighting carried on, with no way to see the damage or which side the tides of war were favoring. It seemed inevitable to him that given the scale of the attack, the British would overtake the fort, and yet Key had not even the comfort of knowing whether that was so. I can only imagine the overwhelming relief he must have felt when dawn broke, and rather than the British Union Jack that Key feared he would see, the American flag still flew over Fort McHenry. It was, in his words, “a most merciful deliverance,” and from that raw emotion of relief and pride, “The Defense of Fort McHenry” was written.
The nurse offered me a hand… but it wasn’t his, and it definitely wasn’t attached to anything.
As a writer, I’m comfortably familiar with spontaneous writing prompts, or, in other words, “this random (and often absurd) sentence just popped into my head.” For the most part, though, these are comedic dialogue snippets, intriguing first lines, philosophical speculations…. you get the idea. My point being that there are certain literary genres my prompts don’t usually include, like horror. I don’t standardly write horror. Nor do I standardly read horror. And yet, during the general mind-wanderings of lunch, I seem to have accidentally produced some.
(Yes, I realize I just did an entire post about one sentence of nano fiction. No, I’m not sorry. Enjoy! Or, uh, speculate?)
Alright, for context, we have a bird feeder in the backyard that gets plenty of visitors, from birds to squirrels to raccoons to the resident woodchuck. Up until recently, though, we hadn’t really had a visitor knock over the bird feeder, let alone multiple times. We were understandably curious as to which critter was responsible… until one night, I wandered up to the window, and spooked a couple of deer.
They came back later, so I got a couple of pictures (nighttime quality, but pictures nonetheless).
As a bonus, here’s a picture from when Mom spotted them a couple mornings later! (Better lighting, blurrier movement.)
Capricon has rolled around again, and as some of you may recall, last year I mentioned (here) that my cousin and her friends run a party called the Box Fort. Standardly, we’d arrange one of the party rooms at the con with pillars and arches and partial walls of boxes, complete with thematically appropriate cardboard cut-out decorations and markers so people could draw on the fort. This year, of course, Capricon had to go virtual, so the box forts are a DIY project. And in our house, where there are boxes, there are cats.
Unfortunately none of the real cats are in the next photo, but I wanted to share it anyways. Since most of the boxes were in the living room in the fort shown above, and Mom and I were attending the parties’ Zoom rooms separately… I made my fort out of plush instead.
Hey, would you look at that? It’s been over a year since I last wrote about a Fluxx variation (Jumanji Fluxx, December 2019). I guess we’re due for another one!
Our newest rediscovery in that vast, mythical land known as “the game closet” is Eco Fluxx. From Keepers like Birds and Flowers to Actions like Extinction and Pollution, this deck is, like the others, a fun and quirky reimagining of the original Fluxx concept. It’s more than re-themed cards, however, as like every version of Fluxx it has some unique mechanics of its own.
The first big difference is the Creepers. In any game of Fluxx, you can’t win if you have a Creeper in front of you (unless the current Goal says otherwise). In Eco Fluxx, though, there are 3 Creepers, and while they’re in play, nobody can win. Furthermore, 2 of them have a second, more active negative effect — Forest Fire will force you to discard one of your Keepers every turn you start with it in play, until you no longer have any (at which point the fire goes out and gets discarded). If you have Flood instead (or, ow, at the same time), then at the end of your turn you have to discard your hand and give Flood to the next player, until either someone intervenes (plays a card that allows you to discard a Creeper) or it’s gone through every player in the game.
The other feature that stands out as specific to Eco Fluxx is a particular subset of Goals that I’ve been referring to as the “[x] eats [y] Goals,” like “Snakes Eat Mice,” “Mice Eat Seeds,” and “Rabbits Eat Leaves.” The key difference here is that where most Goals say “if you have [x] and [y] in play, you win” and some Goals say “if you have [x] in play and nobody has [y], you win” (ex: the “Ferns” Goal requires Leaves and no Flowers), “[x] eats [y]” Goals say that you win if you have [x] in play and anybody has [y]. For instance, in the picture below, I won with the Goal “Bats Eat Insects” by having Bats in play, because even though I didn’t have Insects, Mom did.
Along with this new style of Goal are a couple ways to combat it — the first is Poison, a Keeper that protects your other Keepers from being eaten. The second is a New Rule called Camouflage — you can “hide” one of your Keepers by either playing it face down or flipping it over if it’s already on the table. You can only have one hidden at a time, but while it is, the card is treated as if it isn’t in play, meaning things like “[x] eats [y]” Goals, Forest Fire, and Keeper Limits don’t affect it. You can reveal your hidden cards at any time, but you can only hide them on your turn.
Unsurprisingly, I love this version of Fluxx at least as much as I love the others, and I hope you will too!
Exactly what it says on the tin. Time is meaningless and last weekend seems like both yesterday and a lifetime ago. So rather than scramble to draft something that surely deserves more time(?) and effort, I’m going to pull from the Great Archives of Cat Pictures for some convenient prepackaged, ready-to-go adorableness. Enjoy!
