We recently went on a trip to a neat little nature spot in the west Chicago suburbs called Red Oak Nature Center. Easy to miss, but well worth checking out. Anyhow, I thought I’d share some pictures from that excursion; I can only presume it’s even prettier in the summer and autumn!
I managed to photograph several geese, but not the hawk we saw while walking one of the trails. I did get pictures of the small cave near the riverbank, though! It’s called Devil’s Cave (or Cave of the Spirit), and there’s a really neat legend behind that. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to photograph the placard. Oh well. You’ll just have to check it out yourselves!
As a bonus, the nature center itself had some absolutely stunning flowers in a pot near the doors!
No, I’m not talking about Jenga. Tower of Hell is a Roblox game where you’re trying to reach the top of the tower before the timer runs out and the tower resets. The catch? It’s a randomly generated layout each time… and there are no checkpoints.
Tower of Hell is an obby — in other words, an obstacle course. Each section of the tower sports its own challenges, from gaps you have to jump, to sliding zones (think moving sidewalks, but more likely to vroom you off the edge and halfway back down the map), to glowing areas that will kill you if you touch them. Dying respawns you at the very bottom, whereas falling off of something provides the opportunity to catch yourself on a lower level on your way down.
The progress map on the right shows where everyone is in relation to the sections, as well as the highest spot you’ve reached so far– the higher on the map it is, the more coins you get. Once someone reaches the top and steps into the victors’ archway, the timer speeds up, doubling its pace for each player who’s finished.
Usually, the clock is set for six minutes. I say usually because one of the things you can buy with coins are mutations, which affect the map for the rest of the current round — one of those is to add two minutes to the timer, and another, also pictured above, takes away the lethality of the glowing parts, so it’s just falling you need to worry about. Where mutations affect everyone, gears affect only yourself; both, however, disappear at the end of the round. In fact, the only in-game purchase of permanence are effects, which come in “boxes” that provide a random trail, gear skin (ex: Pastel Gravity Coil), or constant effect, like “Steaming,” which my avatar is sporting in the second screenshot.
As a final note, the (often witty) name of each section is displayed at their starting platform, which is the flat safe space that all sections have in common. I mention this specifically to point out that they are not the title in the lower right corner of the screen; that’s the name of whatever instrumental track is currently playing in the background.
This week’s post is just me celebrating that the snow has melted and, hey, look, daffodils! I didn’t realize until I saw them, but apparently I’ve really missed daffodils, so… pictures! (Credit goes to Mom for taking the photos; I didn’t have my camera on hand.)
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.
