shannon_a | Entries tagged with endgame

Last night was my final night of gaming at Secret.

That's been the Wednesday-night Endgame replacement, since Endgame closed last holiday season, brought to us courtesy of Joss. Secret is a weird little Victorian house, whose downstairs is split between a shop on the right and a venue with a stage on the left, and with lots of people living in it, with a loft bed at the back of the venue (where we also game) and presumably more tight accommodations upstairs.

It's part of the more rebellious artsy part of Oakland that I've never been part of. Kind of counter-culturey. Joss, our host, is good folk, and all the other residents I've met there are very nice, happily greeting us, and even cooking us food(!). I'd say it's not exactly my scene, and it's not, but I was entirely comfortable there.

I mean, I missed the lofty soaring mezzanines at Endgame, where Secret felt claustrophobic in comparison. I missed the regular tables and chairs, where in comparison we were always setting up ad hoc tables at Secret, with a huge menagerie of seating.

But of course it was always the people that kept me coming back to Endgame, and later Secret. There were many people who never made the transition, but our remaining group was strong, with a few additions starting to dribble in because Joss was clearly doing some advertising and finding like-minded souls.

So last night I played Res Arcana with Eric V., Hey, and Mack, then after Hey left I played Wingspan with the remaining two. (Mack won both games; I love playing games with strong players!) And then I said goodbye to them and Joss and Belle (but not Sam, who I'll see again for some PACG games) and exchanged lots of hugs and lingered for a bit, then finally escaped into the cool Oakland night, hiking out to BART, who'd apparently just taken a train leading to Richmond out of service, leaving me in for a 20-minute wait. (Good 'ole BART. I remember when they mostly worked, 30 years ago.)

And it was the end of an era, just like the shipping of our furniture the morning before.

There are going to be lots of those in the weeks ahead.

Last night I had a dream about fighting off alien invaders with some newfound friends while a teenager at summer camp.

I don't remember many of the details, other than capturing the queen bee alien (who was bee-sized and shaped) and keeping her in a Plano box. We thought we'd cut her off from all communication with her drones, but then we came in and found a bee flying under the box in perfect synchronization with the queen bee flying inside the box, like they were connected by magnetic forces. DUM DUM DUM!

And then it was later and my friends and I were meeting up on a hillside road, saying goodbye. And it was clearly a big turning point in our lives, and as we hugged and cried, the subtext was that we'd never see each other again, because our lives were about to more forward at supersonic speed.

And I woke up thinking, "I was never that teary about leaving my high-school friends behind".

And then I realized that I was dreaming about Stranger Things and imagining Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, Six and the rest saying goodbye after their lives inevitably moved on. That Stephen King theme of never having such good friends as those you had while growing up always touches me. I mean, it's totally bunk, because those friends I had for five or six years in Jr. High and High School are never going to match my twenty-year relationship with my wife or the gaming friends I've known at Endgame for more than fifteen years or my Cal gaming group who I've known for thirty. But there's some truth there too because of the immersiveness of play when we're young, the novelty of every experience, and our ability to give ourselves freely without boundaries before life closes in on us.

And I smiled.

And then I realized that I was dreaming about leaving my gaming friends from Secret and Endgame.

And I smiled a bit less.

But the end of an era also means the beginning of a new one.

And so begins what should be our final year in the Bay Area.

We are diving straight in, doing our best to spend the whole year getting ready for our move to Hawaii. We're going to do our best to make sure we get something major done every month (this month: get our gardener and handyman who'll help prepare our house for sale going, which we still need to do) and we're going to do our best to empty the house of stuff that we don't need over the course of the year (this month: we've started with some games and clothes and oddments stuck in various drawers).

Good News: We were happy to lead the year off with some good news: the latest attempt by the insurance companies and/or hospitals to screw us out of money got dealt with when HealthNet agreed to pay for K's anesthesiologist from her surgery last year. I really don't exaggerate when I say that over the last two decades we've gotten tens of thousands of dollars of bills that the insurance company was supposed to pay and we had to fight about.

Secret Gaming: Gaming has begun at Secret, the Wednesday-night Endgame replacement. It's very close to Endgame, but about half-a-mile toward Jack London Square. The neighborhoods start to get a little seedier as you move further away from the Oakland Convention Center, and this place is almost directly under the Nimitz Freeway (which is LOUD), but it turns out to be a very nice venue. Just a quiet room in a converted Victorian that reminds me of a fraternal hall or something. It's got a stage for small shows and three tables across the other wall for our gaming. We had 10 people or so and two tables the first Wednesday, then 13 people or so and three tables this last Wednesday. It's been a good group of the nicer and/or more serious gamers from Endgame, and after the uptrend of people in the second week, I've got my fingers crossed that it'll manage to stick around.

Sunday Gaming: I got lots of games for Christmas, including Charterstone, a Legacy resource-management and village-building game. I'd been super-intrigued by it because of the idea of building up a village over 12 games, but all my local gaming friends had expressed a lack of interest, in part because of its relatively simple mechanics. Well, Kimberly to the rescue. She agreed to try it out with me, and we've now managed two games of the twelve (though they really have the second game set up as a continuation of the first, so the first, learning game was slow and the second was fast). I do agree the mechanics are simple, but I'm enjoying it, and am particularly intrigued by how our village will develop over the course of the next ten games, as we unlock new things and build them. As I was writing for this, I got lost for a moment in what I'd like to do next game ("get my gold up to four; unlock the constructed tile I held onto; and see what it allows me to build") and that's an example of why Legacy games work.

Bad Shoes: My biggest problem of the year so far: shoes. Yeah. For my great hiking shoes from two Christmases ago, I wore through the inside of the back of the heel, exposing the plastic stiffener there. Or as I call it: the plastic pain device, because it cut up my heel last time I tried to hike. But, because I largely used them for hiking on dirt paths, the soles were still good. So I took them to a shoe repair store and they said they could fix it by covering over the inside back with leather. Great, I thought: half the price of new shoes and more ecologically sound. Do it, I said. I got shoes back with an entirely stiff collar and when I took them out for a walk of less than a mile, they literally wore holes in my ankles. MUCH worse than they were before. So I took them back, and they've theoretically softened the collar, but I couldn't really measure if they wore right now because I still have painful holes in my ankles. Maybe in a few days. Meanwhile, I discovered that I'd worn most of the soles of my normal walking shoes smooth. They're just from September or so, but they were apparently a bad purchase without solid enough soles. They're probably still OK for a month or two, but not in the rain or in the hills. And it's been raining. So last week I was feeling like I had no good shoes to wear out of the house. Well, hopefully the hiking shoe problem is solved (if not, it's back to the shoe repair one more time for more softening), and today I made it out to Target and got some new walking shoes that will hopefully fix the other problem.

Writing: I have been lagging in my writing since the new year, alas. I've just been feeling lazy/needing more downtime. But maybe I finally turned it around last week by starting in on some Mechanics & Meeples articles. I first-drafted the first, and I'm now working on a second and have notes for a third, which all told will take me to the end of February. And then I'd really like to get back to Designers & Dragons so I at least have the majority of the new books in a very raw form by the time we move.

Working: And of course it's been back to work for two weeks now. It's been the usual work I've had for the last several years, which is trying to balance way too many priorities, but I'm acutely aware this should be the last year that's the case because I'll be cutting down on my work and simplifying after we've (hopefully) sold the house next year.

The Last Days: Generally, I'm aware that these are my last days in California. We could move as early as January 1st next year. That's when our house should be available, and it's entirely possible that it'll be a day when we can get cheap tickets. (Though there are two parts to our move date: when tickets are cheap after the holidays, and when the Kauai Humane Society is willing to meet us at the airport to inspect our cats' paperwork.) But if not January 1, then surely within the week thereafter. So this day next year, we should be living in an empty-ish house in Kauai, waiting for our books and games and extra clothes and looking to fill it with new furniture. So I now know that I've been to Secret two times, and there now only 50 more this year, and that's likely it for me. And that I won't be seeing the first two weeks of winter in California again, and that when I'm annoyed by the students returning from winter break in a week or so, it'll be the last time. Because it's the beginning of our California end.

I first journeyed to Endgame on October 13, 2004. I'd given up in disgust on Games of Berkeley a few days earlier, after waiting five minutes for someone to come to the register to ring my purchase. At the time I said of my new store, "I like their store which is clean, quiet, and friendly. I also liked the people who came to play, who were generally adult and mature, not a bunch of kids. I also find the idea of trying out games I don't actually own and getting to play games I want to without having to worry about other folks or doing reviews all exciting, so I expect I'll return."

Funny story: Kimberly walked downtown with me that October evening. She headed back home, and I hopped on BART. Arriving in Oakland, and warily making my way into the store, I soon found myself invited to a game of Alhambra. I sat down and began to play, but about two-thirds of the way in, one of the staff came upstairs to ask if there was a "Shannon" there. I identified myself, and they handed me the store phone. Kimberly was on the other side of the line. She'd left her keys in the house when she went out with me, and was now locked out. She was calling from one of our neighbor's houses. So I finished out my game of Alhambra and then around 8pm was right back on BART to go home and rescue her. I picked her up from the Border's store, and we went home.

But I did return to Endgame, in fact continued to return for 14 years. And that was one of the last times that Kimberly locked herself out of the house.

(One of the things I love about that story is how much it dates itself, with the call to the Endgame landline, from a neighbor's landline, and the wait in a Borders.)

Last night, December 26, 2018 — or 14 years, 2 months, and 13 days later — was my last gaming night at Endgame, and quite possibly my last visit there. The store has descended through generations of owners since that 2004 evening. Though it's had problems with overcrowding in recent years, in large part due to a conflation of board game and D&D nights, the board gaming has been as great as ever. I've gotten to play hundreds of games I don't actually own with lots of great and smart and strategic players; I didn't know how I was going to replace any of that in Hawaii, but now it's gone a year early.

But one could also see the creaky edges of the store. They went all in on a cafe about five years ago, to give themselves a new challenge, and that crashed and burned. More recently, they just haven't had the expertise to order the great strategy games that they used to. Though I bought fewer games in recent years due to my apostasy from the Cult of the New, it's also been that the type of strategy games that I love most has been a lot less available from Endgame. (I've had to special order the last several Aleas, for example.)

Despite that, I'm going to miss it fiercely. I can now feel what Kimberly has said, that all of the things we love most are disappearing from the Bay Area in advance of our departure for Hawaii. It's going to make cutting those last cords that much easier.

And Endgame, it will live on, in a way. J. is making the Secret space available for Wednesday night gaming. It's just several blocks on from Endgame. WIth that and the maintenance of the same game night, we hope that we'll attract the best of the same crowd.

I will do my best to support the new space in its early days, to help it achieve critical mass, but I'm also talking with Eric L. and Sam (and Mike B.) about doing a final Pathfinder ACG adventure before we leave, the first half of the "Wrath of the Righteous" path that we didn't previously run. So, I might be varying my ex-Endgame gaming up a bit.

RPGnet. I hate doing big upgrades on RPGnet. I'm currently working on what I think is the third, after vB2->3, vB3->4, and now vB4->XF2. The problem is that the forum is huge, so when any changes are made to the table of posts (which was somewhere north of 10M posts last time I converted and is now closer to 20M), it takes a long time. The last conversion I did was awful because there was at least one "ALTER TABLE" which took 12 or 14 hours to do all on its own, with no milestones or save points along the way. Ayyyy.

This time around I testbedded our conversion and it ran 32-33 hours on that test machine. It was also a much better conversion, constantly saving its state. So, you could see it crawl along, but you knew if it halted at any point (and it did here and there), it could just restart.

But now that we're onto the REAL conversion, which I started Saturday night, things are going slower, likely because of the difference in the machine setups between my testbed and my real setup. We're almost 40 hours in, and the post table is likely to be about 64% when we hit that milestone. It could easily run into Tuesday night, which is much longer than planned.

I mean, there's nothing I can do about it, and this far in, it's best to let it finish, but I hate sitting here, knowing our very popular forums are down, and not being able to do anything about it. At least it's still the (long) Veteran's Day holiday.

Oh, and that's not even speaking of how I woke up at 2.30 last night certain that something was wrong. I stumbled into my office, logged into my computer ... and found the upgrade process had died! (Is it really paranoia when they are out to get you?) For some mysterious reason, it had created a duplicate post and gotten stuck. I fumbled with it for several minutes and managed to get it going again, but the rest of the night I slept somewhat fitfully. Now I just hope that nothing is corrupted. I just need to test that the forwards from the old forums line up correctly when we're (finally) done. (Boy, that would suck if after all of this, the conversion didn't work right.)

Dark Skies. We continue to have crap out in the air for the fourth day running. Yeah, things are clearly worse north of here, where the worst fire in recorded Californian history continues to burn, but I'm going stir crazy. I feel stuck in the house, and even here I'm aware that we're breathing crap because about half of our windows are old and don't seal as well as modern windows. Today the AQI is still 175, which is square middle of the "unhealthy" range.

Endgame. And it's now been three days since I learned about Endgame closing. I wrote about it in Mechanics & Meeples today, but it's wasn't particularly cathartic, as I'd hoped it would be. Really, I think, I need to talk with friends there and see if there are any alternatives to see folks from that community and to get in my day of most freeform board gaming, where I'm most likely to play new and interesting and strategic stuff. But I can't do that until Wednesday, so for that moment it looms.

Really, this should all be looking better by the end of the week, and none of it's horrible for me, but you put it all together and it's a dark cloud looming over the new week.

Endgame announced today that they were closing. We've just got seven Wednesdays of board gaming left.

I looked through my blogs and discovered that I started gaming at Endgame toward the end of 2004. That means that I've been there almost every Wednesday night for 14 years, or through about 30% of my life. I estimate that I've played somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 games there. I met great people, some of whom I still game with and many more of whom have moved on. I've got to play hundreds of games from other peoples' collections there. I've enjoyed parties and tried to avoid buying things at auctions. I've run entire roleplaying campaigns there.

I made the contacts that resulted in the second, much more successful publication of Designers & Dragons.

I know my story is far from the only one like that.

Obviously, my severance from Endgame was inevitable, since Kimberly and I are leaving the Bay Area. But I've lost out on my last 50 or so games there, with the friends I've made over the last decade and a half, and I've lost my gaming home base when I come back to visit (and everyone staying in the Bay Area has lost much more).

The election was on Tuesday, and it was somewhat disappointing. But that was primarily due to the southeast where Democrats really underperformed. They'll still pickup about 35 House seats and lose 2 or 3 Senate seats, which is just slightly low of the median of reliable analytic sites like 538.

But, we were hoping for more. We were hoping that the polls were oversampling conservatives after the embarrassment of 2016. We were hoping the blue wave, which did crest over Washing D.C. really would be a blue tsunami.

And that disappointment has given the idiots in the media the ability to roll out the newest nefarious instance of bothsidism: the Democrats won the House but the Republicans retained the Senate. I mean, it's a particularly shitty frame, because even in the Senate the Democrats won far more seats than the Republicans did (more than 2x as much, it seems likely), they just had more to defend.

But that shitty frame has corrupted the coverage and given Trump and his sociopaths the cover they need to keep doing horrible things while claiming the people are with them. (They're not.)

There's going to be another reckoning in 2020. (Unless Pence and his cohorts 25th Trump as soon as he's more than halfway through his term. That's what I'd do if I was a soulless manipulator intent on climbing the ladder of political power.)

And I am sick of constantly smelling smoke. I feel filthy.

It's another fire up north, and a particular horrible one from the reports. Huge damage to structures, some people dead, lots displaced. But the Bay Area is impacted too. The air was crap yesterday and today the sun went orange again. It's just like last October, when we had the horrible Napa fires.

It does seem like these constant huge fires are another result of the climate change that Trump and his pet GOP continue to deny. And that's another reason I'm happy to move to Hawaii (though it's looking like hurricanes are becoming more common there; we're just f***ed all over this world).

On Monday, my friends at Endgame announced that they're closing the Endgame Café on Sunday, so today at my weekly boardgame night at Endgame, I followed their instructions: I visited the café one last time and I tipped like mad. Oh, and I got one last Tilden sandwich. That wasn't in their instructions, but it should have been.

Personally, I go to Endgame for the games. I supported the café because it was important to the Endgame staff: a challenge that would keep them going through the next five years. Not because I particularly cared about the café on my own. But I do have to say, they made great quality sandwiches. Great bread, great turkey, great avocado. And I never got around to their breakfast sandwiches which looked terrific too.

Shockingly, le café was almost empty tonight. I usually find it somewhat crowded, with people at several of the tables. I expected this week it would be even more jammed than usual, as people made their last visits. But tonight there was Eric V., Eric L., Jefferson, Amy, and me, and that was pretty much it. Easy to see how that didn't work out when they had two staff working.

(But the café as a whole had various problems, including a very long rollout that I suspect ate up the capitalization that would have been necessary to loss-lead things like evening hours, until they developed a clientele. And the interaction between the game store and the café never worked out like it could have. But, that's pretty much all water under the bridge at this point.)

I suspect there are some hearts breaking at Endgame this week. Hard choices. My condolences to my friends there.

And hopefully the game store will go on.

(If you're in the Bay Area, you've got through Sunday to say farewell to the café. Go visit one last, tip like mad, and eat a Tilden.)

To The Refuge. I had a marathon bike ride on Saturday. I rode up to Hilltop Mall for lunch (which has become a bit of a habit due to chicken cheesestakes and chocolate brownies) and from there went through Pinole and Hercules. I saw some nice parts of those towns that I hadn't seen previously, plus rode along my favorite creek trail in Pinole, but my ultimate goal was the Refugio Valley Park in Hercules, which according to Google maps was a lake at the head of a bike trail going south.

The Park was very pleasant, reminding me a bit of Lake Merritt, with its lake fountains, its stone overlooks of the lake, and its numerous geese. The trail leading south from the lake was less impressive. The first mile or so was nice, and I got a nice serenade of The Star-Spangled Banner from some sporting event at the Hercules Middle/High School. But then the "path" became little more than a narrow sidewalk that ducked down away from the road between the intersections. Well, I'm usually happy to try out each bike trail once.

There was a lot of open, brown land near the school and the community college, but then subdivisions began to appear to one side, and the road eventually came to an end. I was quite puzzled, as my (incorrect) Google maps said it continued on. I eventually sussed out that it was EBMud Watershed ahead. Eventually I opted to head in. (I now have an EBMUD Trail Permit for the next 5 years, so I'll to take advantage of it.)

I had to walk my bike, which was just as well, because there were some very large rises and steep drops on the Bay Ridge Trail that I was walking, and they wouldn't have been bikeable anyway. There were also lots of cows. Tons of them. And most of them have calves. Ever read that calves bound? They do, they really do. There were calves bounding all over, like they had springs in their legs. It was totally darling. The adult cows were less so; they were a little agro, but as I got close eventually backed away so I could pass.

The hike inside the EBMud lands was exhausting. It would have been hard without hauling a bike around, and with ... whew. A mile and a half (and probably close to an hour later) I made it out to a slightly hilly road and eventually followed that up to San Pablo Dam Road, which I took to Orinda. All in all I made a huge loop that was 35 or so miles total, plus a BART ride from Orinda to Rockridge.

Whew! Exhausting day, but there was cheesesteak to be eaten and new places to see and hills to climb and cows to avoid.

Endgame. Sadly, I missed out on Endgame's 13th anniversary party, which was also Saturday. I didn't see an announcement about it until Tuesday night, and by then I felt like I'd already promised out all my emotional energy for the week. If I'd known that people I would have liked to see were going to be there, I would probably have went, and I probably should have asked, but ultimately I decided that rather than expending emotional energy at a gathering, I'd build up emotional energy on a long solo outing.

And so it goes.

Television. Kimberly and I decided to fire Once Upon a Time tonight. The show has teetered on the edge for us for its entire existence, because it's never been a very well-written show. (To be precise, it's cliched and obvious and soapy.) However at the start of the show, there were interesting mysteries and long-term stories and consequences. (Though the producers seemed at least as bad about figuring out what their long-term plans meant as when they were working on Lost, particularly with the two saboteurs who came into town late in season two and seemed to totally change their motivation just before they were abruptly written out at the start of season three.)

But now the show has become some sort of saccharine family drama and rather than long term plots Once Upon a Time instead tells 11-episode arcs which are forgotten almost as soon as they're done. Their first one, on Peter Pan, was quite good, but I think that's because the show abandoned most of its less successful characters and its less successful setting (temporarily) to go to Neverland. Their second arc, on the Wicked Witch, was a total flop, and I say that loving Oz and Wicked. Their third one, on Frozen, is almost as dull.

I'd thought about waiting until the end of this Frozen arc to dump the show, but it just wasn't worth it.

Meanwhile, Gotham may be getting slightly better. It started with a horribly fractured premise (it is about a young Bruce Wayne? is it about Gotham Central? is it about the appearance of Batman's villains?) and I knew it was going to take a while to find its center, but Jim, The Penguin, and (much to my surprise) the young Bruce are all become increasingly strong centers of the show. I also like the two mobsters (Falcone and Marcone) who have become increasingly important in recent episodes. Hopefully that show is finding itself (because Once Upon a Time never did).

Gaming Anniversary. Last Saturday was Endgame's Anniversary party. I stopped by, though only for a couple of hours, as my free time continues to be very short. I got to see some friends and play a couple of games, so it was all good. Endgame, meanwhile announced that they're opening a little cafe immediately adjacent to the store. It's cool to hear that they're doing well enough to be considering expansion.

After my couple of hours at the party, I headed up to Lake Temescal to do some writing. I was delighted to discover that it was an extremely nice day. I'm officially calling it the last day of Summer, and I'd previously thought they were all gone. Anywho, I did the writing I had planned, and it was glorious outside, and I came home for dinner. A pretty typical Saturday of late.

Sick. Sadly, I also picked up my first cold of the year at the party, at lunch, at the lake, or somewhere in that vicinity, because I was coughing by Monday night. I think Tuesday was the worst of it: I couldn't put in a full day of work. I'm still sniffly now, but not as bad. And my energy is better. I'm hoping to be well enough on Saturday not to get tuckered out, as Kimberly and I have plans in San Francisco.

(For the moment though, it kept me from gaming the rest of this week; good thing I had that bonus Saturday gaming to carry me over.)

Halloween. And today is Halloween. Kimberly and I had planned to go get pie or something somewhere, to celebrate the season appropriately, but she unfortunately ended up with her stomach too upset to eat anything. So I went out and got some deserts at Berkeley Bowl, and I ate mine tonight (Double Fudge Cake), and she'll probably have hers tomorrow (Tangy Lemon Bar).

I was quite surprised when I rode to Berkeley Bowl to find the streets between here and there just jammed with trick or treaters. There were also several houses totally done out in Halloween regalia. I usually think of Berkeley as being pretty Halloween free. We gave up getting treats a couple of years ago because we tended to get 0-2 trick-or-treating groups and they were all mobs of overprivileged and overaged kids. The folks trick-or-treating south of us were more clearly parents out with their kids. It was very cool. As were some of the houses, particularly one that had smoke coming off its roof, and a light to make it look green! Someone else had a big open fire in front of their house.

So, that was Halloween. I also read the first 100 pages or so of Grendel Omnibus I. I figured it'd be appropriate for the holiday too, with its dark, noir feel -- but it's now being put away lest I overdose on stories of Hunter Rose.

AUCTION. Today was the annual Board Game auction at EndGame. I *always* use it as an excuse to get unused games out of my house, but this year I found myself a bit challenged, as my percentage of great games that I want to keep has crept up year-by-year, thanks to the annual Endgame filter. So, I set myself a target of getting 20 games out of the house this year, and made that. I'll pick up a little bit of cash for selling those off the next time I make it to Endgame.

But today I went to see if I wanted to *buy* any games. I've been doing this for the last 4 years or so, and I've generally stayed for a couple of hours, and bought somewhere between 0-2 games. Which was what I did today. I picked up Fast Flowing Forest Fellers by Friedemann Friese (which I gave an 8/10 on BGG when I played it three and a half years ago) and Rune Age (which will give me something to write about for both deckbuilding and cooperative design stuff that I'm working on).

I was quite pleased, because those were both "A" list games for me -- not just stuff that I bought because it was cheap. (Though definitely cheap: $13 for the still shrink wrapped FFFF and $11 for the Rune Age; yes, you should go to the board game auction at Endgame if you're in the Bay Area.) I left around 12.30. While there (mostly before the auction) I also got to spend some enjoyable time talking to Aaron, Andrew, Bob, Eric, and other Endgame folks -- which is the other joy of the auction.

BIKING. It's really not going to surprise you that after Endgame (and lunch) I headed out and did some biking. I've long wanted to head up into the hills from downtown Oakland, since I've done the reverse a few times. Today I did. First I circled around Lake Merritt and it was *so* nice to see that you can now traverse the south side of the Lake without having to go out to the streets. I think that's been a mess for the 10 years or so I've been regularly visiting downtown Oakland. (Sadly, the paths down to the estuary aren't open yet, though they looked done; I'll have to visit that another time.) After that I took a road called Trestle Glen up into the hills.

I was pretty amazed that the second I hit Trestle Glen, the houses got really nice. (And the housing prices seem to reflect that.) Very nice houses, nice neighborhoods, lots of foliage. The entire street is a long incline too, though not too terribly steep. I was getting tired as I rode, but not horribly so. Then I entered Piedmont, and suddenly the road turned to very steep. I alternatively walked and rode various bits from there on up. (I've learned through my hill riding that walking stuff that feels overly tiring can keep me from exhausting myself.)

Exiting Piedmont, I entered what's apparently called the Oakmore area of Oakland, looming over the Dimond Canyon. My new road up there was Leimert (after crossing the historic Leimert Bridge). This was quite attractive too -- and I got to see some really nice views of the Bay, the further I got up. They were pretty neat views too, because they framed Oakland's downtown right in front of San Francisco's downtown, a juxtaposition that I don't usually see.

Eventually I made it toward the Montclair area and headed up to Shepherd Canyon. I didn't ride the whole trail, but I did ride far enough to find a bench, where I read and ate dark chocolate. It was nicely shaded and there were wonderful breezes. Very pleasant! I eventually finished Swamp Thing vol. 2 and that it was back home for R&R for the rest of the day.

WRITING. Well, mostly R&R, as I'm now back to work on _Designers & Dragons_ (and have a few more writing projects, besides). Back on Tuesday I started on the various administrative tasks I'd accrued for _Designers & Dragons_: getting illustrations (covers) in order, making some tweaks to articles based on recent events, etc. I'll continue with this for several more days, then next weekend or so get started on some real writing for volume 4.

Had a very busy weekend, which I knew would be the case.

Endgame Party. Saturday was Endgame's 11th anniversary party. I've been going to the parties since, I think the 8th. As with last year, this time I opted to stay the whole day, rather than rushing back off to my own RPGing, as I have in the past. So, I played lots of board games from about 10.30 in the morning until 7 in the evening. I got to play with some folks I don't game with much like Aaron (out from Boston) and Brad and Bob. I also gamed with my most regular opponent, Eric, a bit. The highlight of the day was a game of The Castles of Burgundy, which I don't play a lot because it runs in the 2+ hours category. It was a great game to play on a Saturday and a great game overall. I won with a crushing score of 260+. Very fun. (But it would have been even if I'd gotten skunked: terrific game.)

There was a bit of an afterparty after the party at a local Mexican restaurant. I was totally wiped out from 8(!) hours of gaming, but I revived after a bit of sangria, tamale, and nacho — all of which were very tasty. Some gaming started up, but I was definitely not recovered enough to game any more. So I listened to some conversation for a bit, burned off my one small cup of sangria, and when the buzz was gone, headed home.

Biking on a Saturday night through Oakland was a just a bit more harrowing than my usual Wednesday night or Saturday early-evening jaunts, because there were more people out and some of them looked skeezy. There was also one set of six or seven blocks of Telegraph that were particularly icky because the power was totally out!! Biking through Oakland on a Saturday night during a blackout turned out to me not my idea of fun at all. Still, not a big deal, and nothing that detracted from any of the partying. I made it home safe and sound, though I may consider BART in the future for a late Saturday night.

Family Visit. Since moving to Hawaii, my dad has been flying back to the mainland about once a year. He stays with my sister, then comes up to visit Kimberly and me, usually on a Sunday. Yesterday was that Sunday. We mostly chatted for the ~6 hours visit, though early on we also went out for lunch. That was at La Med on College, which Melody calls "fancy downtown". (I told her we also have "college downtown", which is Telegraph, and "real downtown", which is Shattuck. I guess I neglected "not quite as fancy downtown", which is Solano, and would have been hellacious yesterday due to the Overentitled Solano Stroll.)

As we got to La Med around 12.30 or 12.45, we discovered that they have brunch and breakfast menus! In all my years in Berkeley, I've never had either there. I ended up ordering a lox levant, and it was terrific! Mm-mm. One of the best things I've ever had at the restaurant and a nice change from a typical Med Plate

Generally, the visit was very nice, and it was good to see both dad and Melody (though sadly not fiancé Jared, who has been getting increasingly busy at school in the last year).

Construction. I haven't written hear about the construction in recent weeks. In one word: UGH!

Some time ago the nice old Asian woman who lived in the house behind us sold it (or maybe died, but in any case, the house at least passed on). It seems to have been bought by a couple who love screaming on their cell phones in the back yard. I'm hoping that won't be the case when they actually move into a furnished house. But the much more annoying part is that they've had construction going on on their house for like a whole frickin' month.

It started with the roof, and we figured: OK, we get woken up at 8am every morning by workers, but reroofing is pretty typical for a new house buy. But then the work just kept going on and on and on (and we keep getting woken up more mornings than not). Currently they're reshingling the whole house, and going slower than I thought human possible. It's like they shingle a couple of feet a day.

Last week (maybe the week before) was the worst, when we had two other construction projects start up. Across the street they started jackhammering up the sidewalk (a plumbing problem, I think) and across another street they started cutting down trees (a tree "problem", I think). There was a day where we had so much annoying white noise that I was ready to kill someone (everyone).

Thankfully those other two projects are done, but STILL the house work behind us continues. And here's the punch line: on Friday we started work of our own. Using the month's free rent we got during our refi and a surprise legal settlement from a class action lawsuit we're partially remodeling our downstairs bathroom with a new tub, new tub tiles, and new piping. That started on Friday when our fabulous contractor Ting had his guys rip out all evidence of our past bathtub area. There's just a bunch of wood there now. He quoted us 8 days total, which I think involves him working on another project simultaneously, as that seems to be how things are done when you're not working on a huge garage-rebuilding project.

7 days left.

The Rest of the Weekend. Not much time for rest in the weekend, sadly! After dinner (somewhat restfully, on campus, with Top Dog and American Gods) I decided to go for a ride up the hill — as I'd been eating too richly and exercising too little all weekend. I was hoping to do it partly in sunlight but it was mostly dark by the time I hit Lake Temescal. I continued up to Shepherd Canyon for my ~13 mile ride there and back which I've been hitting in ~75 biking minutes.

For the first time that I did one of these nighttime rides it wasn't foggy at all (perhaps because of the earlier hour) so I enjoyed the stars a couple of times. Up on the Canyon Trail I saw either 3 or 4 deer — 3 going up and 1 going down. At least two of them were still babies with big floppy ears. Totally cool!

Afterward I did something rare, which is collapsed for the evening (or what was left of it) with no typing on my computer (no programming or writing I mean). Instead I just read for 2 or 2.5 hours. Very nice.

Back to projects tonight: a review to write, an AP to write, and my (completed, first draft) Gamescience article to proof.

Had a busy weekend, much of it spent in Oakland.

The Endgame RPG Flea Market. The weekend started with an RPG flea market at Endgame that I've been helping to advertise through RPGnet. My biggest challenge for me was actually getting the bins of books that I wanted to sell to Endgame. Fortunately, we've had a hand truck for a couple of years, so I just loaded them up at around 10am on Saturday and then started pushing my truck of games downtown to BART.

I've never used the elevators at BART, so that was the first part of the adventure. It turns out that they're set up purposefully inefficiently, for the most inconvenience to the disabled. You get on one elevator at the street and take that down to the "concourse" and then you walk a ways and take another elevator from the concourse down to the actual BART station. The idea is that you swipe your ticket in between the two elevators, and that split of the elevators might make sense if, say, one were in front of the BART gates and the other behind ... but instead they were just at random places in the station. And so my first experience with the BART elevators was lots of walking. I actually had to walk about 3 city blocks in Oakland to get from the bottom elevator to the top one, because one of their street elevators was out of order. And then I had to walk back those three blocks.

The other thing I learned: the elevator hallways and the elevators at BART smell of pee. Sometimes strongly.

And the third thing: it's easy to avoid paying for BART if you take the elevators. At least that's what the young lady who took the elevators with me at 12th Street and at Downtown Berkeley did.

The actual flea market was lightly attended, which was pretty much what we expected for a first event. We had four people selling things, and all told there was a pretty good amount of product. Buyers were supplemented by the Dresdacon III that was also running, so that was a plus. All told, I sold $75 worth of RPGs I didn't want, and immediately turned that around for a Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords book. Maybe I'll run that someday when Kingmaker is done (though next I'm thinking of something besides 3e/Pathfinder). Perhaps more notably I traded several things for a variety of indie RPGs, which I think will help in writing new Designers & Dragons articles. The whole thing was really an RPG Swap slash Flea Market, and the Swap was probably the best part of the thing for me.

Looking forward to it again next year!

The Mormon Temple. After I got home, around 3pm, I decided to go for a bike ride up the hill, as part of my regular hill-climbing and exercise this year. I went up to Lake Temescal and from there somewhat spontaneously decided to keep going to Montclair (mostly because I wasn't tired, despite the 2 mile drag of ~50# of RPG books earlier in the day). When I got to Montclair, I decided to see if I could ride out to the Mormon Temple, which I see so often when I'm in the lowlands or across the Bay.

It turned out that the Temple was only about 1.5 miles on, on a pretty straight shot, so I headed over there. What I didn't realize because I was looking at things on my iPhone — rather than Google's more detailed maps online — was that those 1.5 miles included a lot of up and down. I did the whole ride, but the uphill got a little tiring. At least twice I thought about going back and I definitely decided that I'd never be doing this ride again, and then I made the turn over Highway 13, toward the Bay, and suddenly my breath caught in my throat ...

The Temple was off to my left, but it was the view that I found so astounding. You just cross the freeway, going over a rise as you do, and suddenly Oakland and the whole Bay and everything beyond is all spread out from you in an enormous vista. Totally beautiful, and I think one of the best views of the Bay around. After that the Temple was almost an anticlimax. It's a neat building and the grounds are beautiful (not that I went on them), but it may be more notable when seen from afar. What did surprise me was how full of life and activity the grounds were. I also found it a real contrast to the evil that the Mormon organization was doing in our state four years ago, when they were actively advocating putting bigotry and hatred into our state constitution.

Anywho, after that I rode down many steep streets, finally leveled off at MacArthur, skirted the top of Lake Merritt, then headed home. Ironically I got to within several blocks of Endgame where I'd been earlier that day. Total ride was 16 miles. I was out from about 3.30-6.00, but that was with a stop by Trader Joe's for burritos, cookies, heirloom tomatoes and a candy bar.

The Bicycling Oakland History Tour. This morning, Kimberly I headed back to Oakland for a bicycling history tour of Oakland, which was sponsored by the Oakland Museum. We got there at 10am for the ride, which also included the docent and 7 other people (most arranged into couples I was amused to see).

It turns out that the museum has something like 8 different bicycle tours that they do, covering Brooklyn, Fruitvale, Alameda, historic downtown, and who knows what else. Today's tour was the Lake Merritt tour, which means that we basically did a big circle of the Lake.

We stopped at lots of interesting places.

One of the first particularly neat places we saw was the old masonic Scottish Rite Center, just past the southwest corner of the Lake. It's a slightly weird building with neat stained glass highlighting various religions that were welcomed by the center. So, one window had a Star of David, another a cross, and another a celtic cross. Kinda cool. But what astounded me was that the place is now a mosque. Our docent said they have blankets over those stained glass windows on the inside, but that they've (thus far) opted not to take them down.

(There's a newer Scottish Rite Center which is large and visible from the Lake.)

The next place that really caught my idea was the Whole Foods northwest of the Lake. Turns out that it used to be a power generation building for the trolleys that ran from Oakland to Berkeley. Amusingly, the excess heat was used to heat some public baths nearby. Apparently there are some pictures inside which I'll have to check out at some point. Our docent also explained that the trolleys were the reason that streets like Telegraph and Shattuck break the Berkeley-Oakland street grid. Telegraph branches off of Broadway at a 20-degree angle or so, then Shattuck branches off of Telegraph. It's all because the streetcars couldn't make sharp turns!

We spent quite a while in the Lakeside Park at the north end of Lake Merritt, where our docent took us through the gardens and showed us many neat features. The Dawn Redwoods were cool; they have leaves that look a lot like Redwoods, but they were thought extinct (and only existed in fossils) until they were rediscovered during World War II. The trunks are also very cool because they twist as they go up. All around neat. The rest of the gardens including a bonsai garden and a Japanese Tea Garden were all very attractive too. Now I know to go here if I opt to read at Lake Merritt rather than at the bird sanctuary (where I have read before).

We rode around the rest of the Lake pretty quickly. The Cleveland Cascade east of the Lake was particularly cool. It's a big set of stairways in the hillside that once upon a time had water running down the middle. Still stunning today. The coolest part of the story was that it was totally overgrown and lost in the '50s until rediscovered sometime afterward.

We saw the old Kaiser convention center on the south of Lake Merritt, which is a woefully ignored space, and then it was back to downtown proper (and once more within several blocks of Endgame). After the tour, Kimberly took us out to lunch at Spice Money, and then we biked home.

The tour was cool, the docent was great (very knowledgeable about a variety of topics), and we'll definitely be going back for some of those other tours in the future, if we can figure out which tours they're doing when.

I was planning to do some writing (Designers & Dragons) and programming (Armorica) this afternoon, but after a little bit of Designers research and a bit of recreational reading, I fell asleep. Well, I guess a nap was in order after two early mornings and two days of busy activity.

A slightly busy Saturday.

Today was the annual board game auction at Endgame, so I headed out there in the morning. As usual, Aaron L. was back to MC, so I got to chat with him for a bit (which is one of the reasons that I've been attending the auction in recent years).

Afterward, I sat with Eric V. and Jon S., kibitzed, and watched the first hour and a half or so of the auction. I bid on three or four things, but the only thing I was really enthusiastic about was Wolfgang Kramer's El Capitan. Sadly, I dropped out at $15 or so and it went for $17 or $18.

That was one of the higher-priced euros. Generally, the auction seemed to be a buyer's market today. I expect I'll have less credit than I have in other years, but since the primary goal was to clean as much as I could out of the house, it's all good. (That goal is also why I didn't bid very aggressively on the stuff I bid on.)

While at Endgame, I was happy to receive compliments on Designers & Dragons.

Aaron said he was impressed by the neutrality of the Wizard's Attic mini-history, as Wizard's Attic was a company run by my great friend Eric R. (now sadly gone across the sea). I told him that I'd really striven for it in the book, and that though some earlier drafts of articles like FGU and Palladium came out less than neutral, fans and employees helped me out with that as they read drafts. I've actually seen quite a few compliments about the book's neutrality.

Jon also offered kind words about the book, which he'd quite enjoyed, I believe for its nostalgic value.

I should note how nice the bike riding was today. Nicest day of the year, up in the high 70s or so. It actually would have been a little hot if not for the breezes I worked up by riding. But totally beautiful.

(Aaron said he'd brought the weather from Boston, which was hitting 90 degrees before he left. Ugh.)

I had lunch out, picked up some healthier cat food for the cats (since I hope we can feed them healthier now that super picky eater Cobweb is, alas, no longer with us) then enjoyed the rest of the evening at home.

This evening, we received delivery of a custom built paperback bookcase from Fernand P., a local craftsman who sells bookcases at the Ashby Flea Market. That got installed in the hallway upstairs (where I'd taken away a bookcase for the games closet when I rearranged it a few weeks ago). It seems to fit my paperbacks well and now holds May through Zelazny.

Bolting the bookcase to the wall got me into the home improvement mood, so I also took on a long-delayed task: putting in a second curtain rod for our bedroom. The first was a real pain in the butt, between setting six anchors, then screwing the six screws into those anchors. Finicky, careful work that also took a lot of elbow grease (as power tools weren't useful for most of it). The second was much the same, but an hour later I had new curtains up. Hopefully these will keep Lucy from playing with the blinds in the morning and waking us up (and protect the bedroom a bit more from light, especially as we head into summer).

Tomorrow, I mostly have R&R planned. I've got some tax refund money to spend, since it didn't go to the auction, so I'll be browsing for books, CDs, and comics that I've been wanting, but haven't gotten. Fun, fun.

Went out to Endgame this morning for my friend Eric's release party for his two games Cambria and Hibernia. There was tasty catering and fun games to play. I've played a lot of prototype games over the years, and I'm happy to say that many of the ones I've played at Endgame (Armorica, Cambria, Hibernia, Race to Adventure) have been top-rate, and the sort of things that I'd be interested in playing even if designed by people I didn't know. I did horrible in my one game of Cambria, but pretty much sharked both Hibernia games I played.

My Dad called in the late afternoon, which he often does on Sundays. We chatted for a good hour on this and that, which is always a pleasure.

I picked up the Ascension card game while at Endgame today and introduced it to Kimberly tonight. She's been a big fan of Dominion (having played the game more than I have, I'm positive, and I have almost 100 plays under my belt), so I've been wanting to introduce her to another of my favorite deckbuilding games--except I didn't own it until today. I'm very happy to say that the experiment was successful, as she liked it, even after I got out a rampaging horde of Mechana Constructs.

My Mom called in the evening, and we're going to go visit her for Christmas Dinner on Christmas day. We haven't done that in many, many years, but with a relaxing week afterward and plenty of notice on the plans, I was happy to say yes.

Whew! Which is why I say busy. I was going to do some more writing tonight (on the AP for my Pathfinder game, which is now done for the year) and some programming (on the iPhone version of the aforementioned Armorica game, which is nearing feature and UI completion, but still has no AI), but I got knocked off track when my dad called around 3.45, and it's now much, much too late. So instead, I'm going to relax, finish the volume of Scalped I've been reading (#7), and do some other assorted reading.

I cancelled my normal Kingmaker game today and instead went to Endgame's Xth anniversary party. I had a good time, playing several fun games with quite a few people that I don't get to game with enough (Aaron because he no longer lives in town, Bob, Brad, and Robert because our times don't tend to sync on Wednesdays). I think that in the future I'll go ahead and plan to attend these anniversary parties, even though they're not the big X (and not just for an hour or two before RPGing, like I did the last few years).

Games Played included: Ascension (with a win that proved I was able to take skills from the iOS game to the tabletop); Maharaja (also a win, but also a game that showed me Maharaja is usually too thinky for me); Sun, Sea & Sand (a game that I really enjoyed, especially thanks to the SimResort theming, which goes great with Oh Zoo Le Mio by the same author); team Innovation (which is the only way to play the game with 4); and Race for the Galaxy (my second play with the prestige rules, which sent one of the players right out to buy the expansion that includes them).

Between biking and about 6 hours of gaming and interacting, I'm pretty tired out, but will probably read for another hour or so before bed.

Oh, and congrats to Aaron, Chris, Chris, Anthony, Finn, and everyone else at Endgame for 10 years and for running one of the premier gamestores in the country for community and for fun.

Endgame has been impressively jammed each of these last Wednesdays. Both nights I looked up around 8pm to see almost every table filled. Today it was a step further, though. We finished up our first game of Eminent Domain (which seems like a winner at first cut, at least once we got the rules right) and had 6 people to arrange for our next games ... only to discover that there were only 4 or 5 available chairs in the whole mezzanine. Yowza!

(Three of us ended up going downstairs to sit in the lounge area with the postage stamp sized table. We were able to barely fit a second game of Eminent Domain into that space.)

A tiring weekend. Each of Saturday and Sunday night I opted to go to bed because I couldn't keep my eyes open to read, which is totally uncommon. (More usually, I go to bed because it's time and hope I'll be able to sleep.)

Prepping Friday. Busyness started off on Friday when I prepped for my Saturday Kingmaker game. Actually, I didn't spend too long on that. I've found it a bit freeing not actually knowing what the players are going to do due to the sandbox setup of Kingmaker. It means there's a limit to what I can prep and it's resulted in me being more casual about both the prep and the run.

Scanning Saturday. Saturday was the marathon. The fine folks at Endgame were kind enough to let me scan covers from their stock (which includes a good chunk of used material!) for my RPG history book. So I got in there at 10.15, scanned until 12.20. Then I went and gulped down lunch, getting back just in time to run my Pathfinder game. Dave P. had to leave early so we closed that down at 4.30, and then I went back and scanned until 6.45.

Total count was almost exactly 200 scans, of which I'll lose a few as I edit them due to bad scanning. (I'd edited about 80 as of last night.) There were a number of very specific books I was looking for, but I was also able to increase the breadth of notable companies that I didn't own many books of (e.g., White Wolf, R. Talsorian, Hero Games, Palladium, etc).

My biggest problem with the Endgame scanning is that Endgame is run like a professional business. They get rid of old stock that doesn't move. Thus, for example, I still have a big gap in my scanning for the Dungeon Crawl Classics from Goodman Games, which surely existing in abundant quantities at 9 out of 10 game stores, gathering dust because the retailers refuse to drop prices (or recycle the material). Troll Lord Games and Palladium give me similar problems, though I've got at least a decent smattering of Palladium and may be able to get some more.

When I got home, Kimberly and I got groceries. Then we ate and watched a Chuck, then we read the penultimate chapters of White Night aloud. By which time my brain was largely off.

Family Sunday. And finally, Sunday. The daytime was pretty mellow, though Kimberly and I did spend an hour reading aloud to finish off the 30+ page final chapter of White Night.

That evening at 6 we went up to Taste of Himalaya, a Himalayan Indian restaurant in north Berkeley. There we met my mom, Bob, Jason, Lisa, and Rob for dinner. It was Jason's birthday. (Well, actually, today is.) The food was good, the company was nice. I gave my mom some hints on how to play Reiner Knizia's Money better. I was pretty surprised to learn that it was almost 9 by the time we left.

Rainy Monday. Today it's been raining lightly most of the day. Which is nice, as we've had six weeks without rain, which is pretty unusual for winter here. And, I like the occasional rainy day.

A very busy Saturday.

Got up early (for a Saturday) and I was out of the house by 10am to go to EndGame. It was their 9th anniversary party, and these last couple of years (since I started biking again), I've made a point to head out there, even if I was gaming later in the day.

So I chatted with all the EndGame staff and got introduced to David S. over at Sandstorm. We chatted about RPGnet, Tinker Tailor, and some stuff I'm working on for the history book. Seemed like a very nice guy, and I'll have to follow up with him on some stuff. Aaron also made it out here for the party, so I got to chat with him for a while and later Eric V. and Bob who'd shown up.

I'd brought a few games but didn't get to play any; ironically I left one of my games there, as Eric !V. has really been hankering for Race for the Galaxy, which happened to be one of the two that I'd brought. (I just asked Evan to rescue it for me afterward.)

I was quite happy to get a chance to talk with people; it was well worth the ride down there and back.

Afterward was roleplaying which was the finale of the Savage Tide. It played out well and I think everyone enjoyed it. I think that's the longest campaign I've ever run myself. I can't entirely remember what I might have been running in high school days, but I haven't run anything longer up here. I think it's possible that our combined Vardian's Tomb + Dragon Rise campaign (which was group run) and Eric's various Erzo games are the only longer ones we've had.

Oh, it looks like Eric's MERP went 95 weeks, beating out Savage Tide too. It was easier to rack up the weeks when we played every single week, rain or shine, whereas the 64 Savage Tide sessions were spread out over 3 years and some spare change.

Following the finale, we chatted some about upcoming games, and it sounds like everyone might want to play Mary's Dresden, which if so would probably mean we're cutting down to roleplaying every other work, as most everyone is showing up biweekly now (with the exception of me, Mary, and Donald), and so we were only maintaining weekly play (theoretically) by alternating games.

We'll see how that goes. I won't even know what to do with myself if not running. I won't complain, as it's been a lot of energy. In any case, I have one more run for sure, which is next week, where I'll be offering the "season finale" of Traveller. (I don't know when I'm going to run it again but it's just the end of the current chapter, which should give everyone closure but still leave room for a continuation later ... and, I need to start outlining it soon.)

And after that K. and I got groceries. We'd decided to head out to Target again, which means we got super cheap stuff of pretty good quality (as opposed to Safeway, where we get somewhat cheap stuff of less quality on average). It was 9pm by the time we finally got home with groceries and dinner.

And now I'm about ready to collapse. My brain says that I should work on my rpg-history book article(s), but I may be done (for the night) ...