• whether I’ll have access to the appropriate mixers
• whether I should be pre-determining components rather than full drinks, to better suggest a pairing for the individual
• what sort of drinkers will be at the party (I’m best at hard liquor mixing, pretty bad at recommending beers and wines)

My general philosophy with mixing drinks for friends is to ask simple questions that help determine taste. For example, do you like drinks on the fruitier side? Or more “fresh”/”clean” tasting (like a martini)? Using a series of these questions (usually no more than three), I can find a tasty drink for the person. Doing pairings will be trickier, since I want to recommend a good drink to go with the dish but I don’t want to be giving tequila-based stuff to a rum drinker. Haven’t quite cracked that chestnut yet.

One thing I know for sure – after about two drinks, everyone’s going to love the third, so that takes the pressure off. Also, I’ll probably be taste-testing my creations, so I’m sure I’ll de-stress pretty quickly too!

There is a hidden cost to uncertainty, though, and that’s insecurity. When you are certain you are doing the right thing, or when you are certain in some aspect of your own future, you are confident and untroubled. Even new information fits into the framework of your certainty, and your faith can remain unshaken. When you are uncertain about your choices and your future, you doubt yourself and wonder how many things lie outside your control or ability to influence. Every new piece of information can trigger a staggering amount of reevaluation and that’s no recipe for confidence.

Is there a middle ground? I wonder about people who “want to believe” – is the desire to have certainty enough to inspire confidence? I feel this way about free will – as many folk I have talked to say, you either have faith in it, or you must live your life like you do, in a “fake it ’til you make it” kind of way. How dishonest is it to fool yourself into certainty? Even if it’s effective, is it worth the cost to open-mindedness?

I also find that it reminds me of the joy of mini-meta-games – that is, using goals outside the primary goal of a game to enhance one’s own enjoyment, like a sidequest or a personal mission. When I am playing a game that is old hat to me (like Magic) and/or I get bored with the primary goal of the game (like in Risk: Legacy), I look for other things to do that fill my attention. The aforementioned games have a plethora of sub-goals to focus on (like synergistic combos, “one big turn,” opening new packets of stickers, etc.) This is one reason I don’t like playing Poker, because once I check out of the main game, the only apparent sub-goals of interest are money-related (blech) and Jedi-mind-trick-related (double blech).

I didn’t realize until recently that I really do need a host of potential mini-meta-games to stay with a game for an extended period of time.

As I was thinking about his system, I got to thinking about the reasons I enjoy roleplaying games, and specifically running campaigns:

• I really enjoy imagining about 80% of a scenario and then telling my friends and seeing how they fill in the rest. This is basically exactly the blueprint of an RPG adventure. (Percentages may vary.)
• I love exploring fantasy worlds – the structure of them, the tone and the characterization of their inhabitants, the crazy epic things that can happen in them so different than our world.
• I like surprising my friends.
• …and finally, I enjoy the process of creating (or helping to create) a team and the shared sense of accomplishment, even if it is for an imaginative adventure.

It’s been a while since I have participated in any playing or running of an RPG, but I hope that running my short Mistborn campaign will rekindle my interest. (As an aside, I have been playing the first “boardgame campaign” I’ve ever encountered – Risk: Legacy – and OH MAN is it awesome. I’ll be posting about that in some shape or form soon.)

• Renew registration (expired December, and they start coming after you in early January!)
• Transfer direct deposit to BECU (screw you, Bank of America! at least, once I stop procrastinating…)
• Create a January-February-March rough schedule for my work projects
• Schedule a karaoke get-together at my house this month (or February)
  • Schedule some dinner parties at my house! Geez! I totally forgot about trying to get these going again!
• Nail down plan for college friends visiting in about three weeks
• Examine my expenses and find places to cut expenditures (kind of a goal for 2012)
• Come up with a new drink when I’m out (nobody seems to have ginger beer, because Dark and Stormy was my first choice) (switching away from Black Russian) (suggestions welcome!)
• Design lots of Magic cards!

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s off the top of my head.

Alida and Paul (Levy) introduced me to a new way of resolving for the new year – naming your year with a specific ongoing goal in mind.  You say “this is the year of {blankety blank}” and then that becomes the rallying cry for you in things you do that year.  I am making mine the Year of No Excuses.  It’s something that immediately makes me nervous in how sweeping it seems in its applicability, but the first and foremost way I’m interpreting it is I’ll always be up front about the real reason I opt not to do something.  If I can’t come up with a real reason (only excuses), I’m going to do that thing anyway, over my own protestations.  Additionally, for some of my long-term goals, like figuring out if I want to go back to school, no more procrastinating with a million excuses – time to get it done!  I think it’ll be really great!  Thanks so much to Paul and Alida for the idea.

No theme for this month; just getting back into writing and jotting down thoughts.  I’ll definitely get back on themes for February forward, though!

Q: Have you seen the GeekChic tables?  They are cool / incorporate a lot of interesting ideas.
A: Yes, I have seen them.  Or rather, I knew of them and I had browsed their website once upon a time.  I don’t think I will be getting one of theirs, because two of the reasons I find this project compelling is the chance to build something myself and to have it be my design.  I do think I will review them, though, and possibly go check one out (at PAAAX?), to get ideas.

Q: How many people would you like to seat?
A: Ideally, a complement of 7 (6 + me) because I find that to be the maximum size of gaming group I am comfortable with.  I think it should have reasonably optimzed seating for 4 and 6 as well.

Q: When you say “cubbyholes” do you mean places below the tabletop surface, like indented or would you like to be able to place sheet holders in certain places that rotate/slide up and down?
A: I guess I mean places below the tabletop surface, indented.  Ideally, I would like some amount of display potential so that a player could raise up an illustration or visual aid in their space and others could see it, but most of the time (maybe all of the time) I would want that space below the table.

Q: LCD mounted flat facing up? or movable so it rotates around?
A: My initial thoughts were mounted flat facing up.  I want it to be a map on which miniatures can be placed, or a digital game board for board games, as needed.

Q: Drink holders that slide out of the bottom so spills are contained or hit the floor instead of the table?
A: Yes, that sounds like a great idea!  But in practice, I expect players will just place their drinks at table level, so I may also try to investigate solutions that involve having them spills-contained on that surface.

Q: How many in-progress games do you want to store?
A: Good question – probably no more than three?  Two is more likely, with a third on the actual table surface.

Q: Before you get too ambitious, exactly how much experience with furniture building do you have? And are your power tools up to speed?
A: Too late for that, heh!  But no, I have no experience with furniture building at all!  I am, however, naive, intelligent and somewhat patient.  I expect to be able to learn, and will budget time and resources to trial and error as well.  I don’t have any power tools other than a drill, so obviously that would be part of the project and would need to be carefully considered.

S: Tim has been dreaming about an LCD tabletop that can plug into an iPad for the DM and connect to each player via iPhones.
R: Tim is a genius!  I’ll have to consider this, and possibly *ahem* reacquire certain Apple technologies for the purposes of testing. >_>

Special thanks to Alan, Monty, Dylan, Sean and Molly for the feedback and questions!

Next up – some basic project outline stuff, so that I get it from head to (digital) paper.

• “Character Sheet Cubbyholes” – plus a larger one with a built-in divider/screen for a GM seat
• Removeable tops for storing in-progress board games
• An LCD integrated with the top-below-the-removeable-top that has a display-in port for hooking up a laptop to project a map
• Built-in drink holders (with some sort of anti-spill screen?)

I intend to make this my project this year, once I am settled into my new place fully… so probably design thoughts in late April, begin in late May?

On the Magic Cruise, that’s where.

I have been developing a local-area-network version of Facebook (*much* reduced in capability) for use on this cruise a bunch of nerd-friends of mine are taking next week.  I call it Faceboat.  Faceboat will do a few things for us that may or may not be useful:

• We can check-in from various parts of the boat, in case anyone was wondering where to find us
• We can set up rendezvous plans without needing to be in exactly the same place at the time of the plan
• We can put our room # up, available to friends, for reference

I’ll be honest – it was fun to release the creative desires that led to the imagined reality of Faceboat, but we may find it is completely unnecessary once we embark on the cruise.  Still, totally fun to do!

Tried a variant on regular Rum and Coke.  Turns out darker rum does not sit as well as I was hoping; the lighter rum gives a less overpowering rummy flavor.  It’s also possible I didn’t mix enough – darker rums are heavier.  The Grenadine is a classic “cherry coke” method and it worked well here.  Overall, slightly disappointing and a waste of the good rum, honestly.

Grade: B-