Happy Fun TIme

[NOTE: It has been brought to my attention that there was something wrong with posting comments recently. I think the problem was somehow related to having an expired poll in the sidebar. Now that I have deleted it the problem seems to have gone away. So, if you had posted a comment over the past few days and you never saw it approved and put up, most likely it is because I never saw it. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

So, fine, I don't have a book to read. Big whoop. I've got other stuff to fill my meager free time when the boy is asleep and I am not.

For example:

Thanks to Rocksmith have been spending a lot of the past month holding a guitar. I have honest-to-God calluses on the fingertips of my left hand, and it feels weird to type. I am loving this game/tool. I will put up a progress post tomorrow, I hope.

On a quieter note, I finished Blueprint 3D. An unknown 2-D blueprint is exploded into 3-D space, the pieces are re-scaled, and then the whole thing is given a couple partial rotations. The goal is to rotate the mystery drawing around the three axes until the pieces line up and, from your point of view, become a line drawing of the Taj Majal or a Jeep or whatever. It is beautifully done and relaxing but not very challenging. There are too many pieces of text that immediately clue you in to two of the axes and you can usually nail the third in just a few seconds. I won't be buying any add-ons unless the text is removed.

Also “finished” W.E.L.D.E.R. It's a game that is a combination of Tetris and Scrabble, but without the time constraint of the former and without the full dictionary of the latter. Again, it's beautifully done but not very challenging. There are twelve levels but, while each one is a little harder than the last, it's far from impossible to come up with good-scoring words especially with unlimited time to do so. The types of tiles they throw at you (red hot ones you can't touch, broken ones that can't move) increase the difficulty quite a bit but that only makes the game feel like a chore you are chugging through. Meh.

I watched the last four minutes of the Bills-Jets game last Sunday. It is good to know that if Steve Johnson ever escapes his handlers and goes on a rampage through downtown Buffalo the best way to defeat him is to hit him in the damn hands with a football, cuz he is probably not gonna know what to do with the thing.

While getting stuff together to wash the wife's car this past weekend we discovered it was windy enough to fly a kite. So we did. [Editor's Note: As I re-read this prior to posting it occurs to me that I am implying that a) I wash my wife's car at night and/or b) enjoy flying kites at night with her while the boy is sleeping. Creeeeeepy. Neither of these things is true. We were all awake. It was daytime. I just felt like putting the kite stuff in this post.] For my sister-in-law's edification:

Happy kite: soaring, majestic, a joy for all to behold:

Sad kite: ripped, faded, alone:

The kite looks like it might break loose any minute now, though. It has been 263 days since my sister-in-law piloted it into the tree roughly twelve seconds after taking the controls. Will it be a cheap Christmas gift for someone or will it stick there for another seven months? Only time will tell.

Finally, the British government has put out a code breaking challenge as a recruitment tool for the Government Communications Headquarters (GHCQ). It looks fun so I will be spending some time at night working on this one. I hope it is not a purely computer-based cipher that only requires clock cycles or specialist knowledge to solve. I get the feeling it is more general and clever than that, though. I guess we will see since it is only going to be up for the next ten days. Good luck, all!