Bill Roper's Journal

One of the things that we've picked up this season is a new game show on Fox, "The Floor". It's an interesting concept.

The game starts with 81 players on the floor. Each player has an area of expertise. One player (who has never dueled before, but this will change eventually) is chosen by the Randomizer as the challenger who can then try to capture one of the squares bounding his in a duel against the player occupying it. (No diagonals.) Whoever wins the duel captures the opponent's section of the floor and then has a choice of whether to challenge one of the squares bounding their new, larger section of the floor or go back down and wait to be challenged by someone else.

The trick here is that the area of expertise that was just dueled in goes away and the survivor gets what remains. So if you challenge and win, you keep your area of expertise, but that's the only way you do.

There's also a $20000 bonus prize after each episode for the player holding the most territory. The grand prize for the final survivor is $250,000, which is a good amount of money.

And the strategy is fascinating. Since the Randomizer will (for now) only select players who haven't dueled before, if you win a match, you are safe unless someone else picks you.

After seven episodes, there are two whales on the board with vast tracts of land.

And there's this guy with two squares in the corner, surrounded by one of the whales. Unless that whale gets challenged and the winner of that duel decides to pick him, he may be there until nearly the end of the game. He won't get any bonus prizes, but he's likely to get to the final day of the competition.

And then he could win.

This morning, I woke up and said to Gretchen, "I think we misplaced a present for the kids."

The very first thing that I bought for this Christmas was a copy of the Catan game, which had been placed in a safe place and then forgotten and not wrapped. So, this afternoon, we presented them with the box. Due to a small miscalculation, Julie had headed off to the basement when the game began, so the first game was Gretchen, K, and me. K won, narrowly -- or maybe not so narrowly, it being hard to tell when it's your first time playing the game.

We'll try this again tomorrow, with all four of us, given a bit of luck. :)

I see that Niantic's Harry Potter game has released. I have managed to make level 3 without leaving my recliner chair...

It's not so much Minecraft that I hate.

I hate Minecraft mods. These are additional JARs that you can load into your Minecraft environment to add cool features and new things to play with. As a concept, this is a wonderful thing.

In practice, it is a steaming pile of poo.

The way Minecraft is structured, all of the mods need to be loaded into a single mods directory. But not all of the mods are available for all of the versions of Minecraft. Some of the mods will refuse to run if you don't fire up the correct version of Minecraft and will prevent Minecraft from loading at all. You can flip between versions of Minecraft that you intend to use, which is a wonderful, easy-to-use feature, but pick the wrong version and some mod will shut you down.

And did I mention that all of the mods seem to be hosted on websites that desperately attempt to download malware onto your computer? Or, as I encountered today, give you the "You need to call Microsoft!" screen with a bogus phone number for bogus tech support?

Of course, little girls love mods and beg me to download them. Three out of four times, the mod fails to work after I have run the gauntlet. And then is much sadness and "Can I have a different mod?"

I hate Minecraft for having a design this stupid. I just Googled and there are some marvelously complex ways to try to work around the problem.

But it all falls into the category of "What idiot designed this system?"

Katie and Julie are anxiously awaiting an opportunity to go out and play Pokemon Go with me. The problem is that I need to figure out enough about the game so that they don't get frustrated. This could be a challenge.

In a burst of Christmas spirit, I have broken down and purchased a second Minecraft account so that each of the girls can have one.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

In an effort to convince myself to do more walking, I picked up playing Ingress from tollers last Saturday. Since then, I've walked 10 kilometers, which is about 10 kilometers more than I would have done otherwise. :)

This afternoon, I went on a walk / bike ride with Julie (I walked, she rode) which took us over to the park where there are a number of portals near the playground. Much mayhem was committed by both of us...

The head cold is in full swing, with a low-grade fever and congestion. I'm treating it symptomatically so far with aspirin and pseudoephedrine while waiting to see what happens. *sigh*

I was sufficiently tired of being cooped up in the office that daisy_knotwise and I played three games of Ticket to Ride. We split the first two games. Then I had some of the most ridiculous drawing luck of my life and made fourteen destinations, finishing with a final score of 203. Gretchen was in the very respectable 150s, which will win most games where someone else is not drawing cards that say "City X" (which I go to) to "Atlanta" (which I also went to).

After playing "Ticket to Ride" at Inconjunction with daisy_knotwise and harperjen, we decided to buy a copy for home.

Now the problem is that you have to be able to read the destination cards in order to play the game, which makes playing with the girls a bit problematic. But the game arrived today and Katie and Julie wanted to play it, so we took a run at it, with me helping Katie and Gretchen helping Julie. And it mostly worked out.

Late in the game, Katie proceeded to draw some of the best destination cards imaginable. (Oh, look. Two cards with high point values, each of which connect to her existing network with a three-train gray -- use any set of three matching cards -- build. Whee!) In the final tallies, she picked up 91 destination points and beat my total with my four sad little destinations by some fifty points. Gretchen was slightly behind me with Julie trailing, although Gretchen did -- to her surprise! -- get the bonus for longest contiguous track, edging me out with her last build. Me? I owned four of the connections into Denver, as my initial destinations were L.A. to Chicago, L.A. to Helena, and L.A. to Seattle. L.A. was my friend and would have been an even better friend had I later drawn L.A. to N.Y. (which Katie got) instead of N.Y. to Dallas, which was darn near unreachable by that point. (I managed to get there though, which messed up Gretchen's attempt to get through Denver.)

Anyway, it's a fun little game and I'm sure we'll play it again.

This morning, daisy_knotwise put Katie on the toilet when she woke up. Nothing happened, so after a bit, Gretchen got her down and put her pull up on. About fifteen minutes later, Katie announced that she had peed a bit in her pull up, so Gretchen put her back on the toilet and we were rewarded with a bowel movement that actually hit water. :)

As a reward, Katie got the "Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom" Wii game that I'd bought several weeks ago for an occasion such as this. Unfortunately, it turns out that an hour of helping Katie play the game will make me motion sick.

*sigh*