An item from Toronto, by way of thelongshot :

New Board Game Café Welcomes You, But Not Your Laptop

Ben Castanie's new Koreatown café, at 600 Bloor Street West, just east of Palmerston Avenue, will emphatically not have free Wi-Fi. In fact, laptops and their attendant air of isolation are completely counter to what Castanie is trying to do. "I just don't want ( Read more... )

1. As I finish converting my contacts over to my new e-mail address, I got to the Recycle Bank customer credit site -- which lets you change everything in your profile *except* your contact e-mail. That, you have to do over the phone. Great way to introduce transcription errors. (I set my username to my new e-mail address and told the rep to copy- ( Read more... )

I picked up a copy of the game Pandemic and the On The Brink expansion, after finding it on sale and recalling it as interesting the one or two times I've tried it. As a bit of flavor, the expansion has a set of six "Petri Dishes" with "Infectious Substance" labels (presumably sufficiently different from real medical labels that anyone familiar ( Read more... )

Between a few of my games showing a bit of card wear, and the fact that we've been meeting Friday nights at Fuddruckers, I decided that it was probably a good idea to sleeve the cards in my various games as much as possible ( Read more... )

Capclave went rather well. I ended up doing more of my usual routine of settling into the con suite/game room and less panels than I'd originally intended, but I had a good time introducing a few people to Kingsburg (I ended up playing three games over the weekend, making it about the only game from the traveling collection that saw any real use, ( Read more... )

Work is going to be a bit busier than usual as the end-of-fiscal-year rush hits, but I was able to distract myself by getting ready for the next batch of conventions.

Usually, I spend most of Capclave in the gaming room, but the programming (especially some of the new-media stuff) looks more interesting this time (and I definitely want to catch the ( Read more... )

TCEP was fun; I got a chance at a few games the regular group ussually doesn't have time for (notably RoboRally) along with some favorites (Kingsburg went over particularly well ( Read more... )

First, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who gave me best wishes on my birthday Monday. I have some more reading and video watching (The Invention Of Air, which was one of the presents from  ( Read more... )

We arrived at starmalachite's parents' house late Wednesday night. I crashed pretty soon after we brought our overnight bags and electronics in from the car. The next day, we had a very nice Thanksgiving dinner (us, her parents, and her grandfather, who's doing very well for 90-something). I settled into a turkey-stuffed torpor for a while and settled in to ( Read more... )

Our Friday night gaming/dinner group at Potbelly's had just finished up one round of games and started another (the group at our table was breaking out our new copy of "The Good, The Bad, and The Munchkin". All of a sudden, the fire alarms went off. We grabbed everything off the table and headed out (there was no obvious immediate threat, and the ( Read more... )