The trip to japan was awesome. Photos here. Florence and I are still doing great. I’m sure Nate thinks I’ve abandoned him. I can’t even remember the last time I slept at the house. Last night Florence and I saw KR’s show in the fringe, and ran into Nate outside afterwards. It felt like the first time I’d seen him in weeks.
Last weekend Florence and I went down to visit her sister in Chicago. We went to Wizard’s World on Saturday, this giant comic convention, and it was pretty great. I’ve really been reading a lot of comics lately, Runaways and Young Avengers, and Futurama, and Girls… with some x-men thrown in there for good measure. It started with some graphic novels, V for Vendetta and The Watchmen. Florence’s sister Susie has tons of comics, and it was fun looking through her collection. (Mike also has a nice collection, and I haven’t taken nearly enough advantage of it — although I did borrow The Watchmen from him, and some of those x-men.)
On Sunday night, as we were driving back, we got off the freeway at the Wisconsin dells, and decided spontaneously to stay at Kalahari, this water park that I’d heard about because my brother John went there recently. Now I feel bad I didn’t go with him, because it was AWESOME. Florence and I had a really wonderful time going on all the rides together, and it really made the trip something memorable.
I’m reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s super good, chalk full of literary goodness. Also reading Game Plan, The Game Inventor’s Handbook, which is about what it sounds like, although it’s more about publishing games and getting them published than the actual act of inventing them. I’ve been playing a lot of games again, and have come up with this abstract strategy game that uses a bunch of dice in a non-random way. We’ve played it a few times, and it’s gotten some decent comments from everybody. I’ve decided I’m going to get a set of large (1″) dice to play with just for parties and stuff. Email me if you’re interested in the rules. As soon as I think of a decent name for it, I’ll probably post them to board game geek or something. I had this idea that I’d be coming up with new games to use the same dice, and selling a handbook full of them, and I still might do that, but I want to at least give one set of rules away. Plus, none of the other games are as far along in terms of rules and thinking them out as this one. There is one other one that I’d like to try out in the near future… I’ve just got to find time to do it.