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PAX and Other Paragraphs
Apr. 4th, 2026 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
l33tminionHaven't written for a while, so writing about a variety of things this time:
Last weekend, I went back to PAX East for the first time in a long time. I stopped going some years ago when tickets started selling out almost immediately. That seems to no longer be the case, though the event was still pretty busy day-of. It was fun, but I didn't enjoy it as much as some times in the past. I have little tolerance for standing in line for things. At the Magic booth I played an apples-to-apples-style game with packs of Strixhaven, promotion for the upcoming set returning to that setting. I didn't find a lot of indie video games that really jumped to the top of my play-next list. The demo that I found most striking was for Of the Devil a Phoenix Wright type game of high stakes legal defense with a cyberpunk dystopia setting, Persona-esque aesthetics, and heavy leaning on card games and gambling as inspiration for its mechanics and metaphors. I played a demo (and wound up getting a copy) of Duat, which was a beautiful and interesting little board game. It's one of those games that gets surprising complexity from simple rules, it's quick and pretty fun. The openings are quite constrained, so I wonder if it will continue to hold interest as I play it more, but it definitely seems pretty neat. The craziest tech demo was for immersive-scent peripheral OVR. (Credit for trying, and it works well enough. Who knows, maybe in the future this will be an obvious key component of interactive experiences that produce heretofore unseen depths of emotional resonance and immersion.) Erica played a game of Lanternlight, a simplified tabletop roleplaying system designed to be easy for kids to learn and play, designed by game designer Andrew Harris in collaboration with his daughter, Anika.
I had to take Erica to the doctor for a blood draw this week, and boy oh boy was the pre-suffering much worse than the actual getting the thing done. Proud of her for being able to master herself eventually. The ancestral lizard brain has a long history of keeping humans safe, but it has a real lack of chill and a poor understanding of modern medicine.
We went to my Aunt Milly's house for the first Passover Seder this year. Always nice to see my Boston extended family.
We saw the The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this weekend. Most of the criticism of it that's going around is objectively correct, it's not that connected to the Mario Galaxy games specifically, and it's real simple, thrown-together, and shallow. It kind of feels more like a theme-park-ride than a movie, but I found it fun.
Japan trip is rapidly approaching, and the pre-trip logistics are done but my travel stress is high.
A favorite link from this week: My journey to the microwave alternate timeline - An essay centering on the book Microwave Cooking for One, a bit of history-of-technology, history-of-cooking, culinary-alternate-futurism that makes me (a bit) want to get a Corningwear Pyroceram microwave browning dish.
Last weekend, I went back to PAX East for the first time in a long time. I stopped going some years ago when tickets started selling out almost immediately. That seems to no longer be the case, though the event was still pretty busy day-of. It was fun, but I didn't enjoy it as much as some times in the past. I have little tolerance for standing in line for things. At the Magic booth I played an apples-to-apples-style game with packs of Strixhaven, promotion for the upcoming set returning to that setting. I didn't find a lot of indie video games that really jumped to the top of my play-next list. The demo that I found most striking was for Of the Devil a Phoenix Wright type game of high stakes legal defense with a cyberpunk dystopia setting, Persona-esque aesthetics, and heavy leaning on card games and gambling as inspiration for its mechanics and metaphors. I played a demo (and wound up getting a copy) of Duat, which was a beautiful and interesting little board game. It's one of those games that gets surprising complexity from simple rules, it's quick and pretty fun. The openings are quite constrained, so I wonder if it will continue to hold interest as I play it more, but it definitely seems pretty neat. The craziest tech demo was for immersive-scent peripheral OVR. (Credit for trying, and it works well enough. Who knows, maybe in the future this will be an obvious key component of interactive experiences that produce heretofore unseen depths of emotional resonance and immersion.) Erica played a game of Lanternlight, a simplified tabletop roleplaying system designed to be easy for kids to learn and play, designed by game designer Andrew Harris in collaboration with his daughter, Anika.
I had to take Erica to the doctor for a blood draw this week, and boy oh boy was the pre-suffering much worse than the actual getting the thing done. Proud of her for being able to master herself eventually. The ancestral lizard brain has a long history of keeping humans safe, but it has a real lack of chill and a poor understanding of modern medicine.
We went to my Aunt Milly's house for the first Passover Seder this year. Always nice to see my Boston extended family.
We saw the The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this weekend. Most of the criticism of it that's going around is objectively correct, it's not that connected to the Mario Galaxy games specifically, and it's real simple, thrown-together, and shallow. It kind of feels more like a theme-park-ride than a movie, but I found it fun.
Japan trip is rapidly approaching, and the pre-trip logistics are done but my travel stress is high.
A favorite link from this week: My journey to the microwave alternate timeline - An essay centering on the book Microwave Cooking for One, a bit of history-of-technology, history-of-cooking, culinary-alternate-futurism that makes me (a bit) want to get a Corningwear Pyroceram microwave browning dish.
