8r4d Our regular Thursday #running adventure was a bit of a mess and a slog after hills yesterday, but at least the weather is improving, huh?

8r4dsfeets First day of #spring our last day of #winter … you decide. Either way, the trails were a slip slop shop.

castironguy I had a couple spare hours this afternoon at work to re-focus our #coffee display to highlight some groovy #canadian roasts

8r4d The last few hours of #winter and we spent some of them #running up and down the local #hilltraining hill yet again. Six repeats makes brad a sore guy.

8r4d Morning #coffee and a #writing sesh making use of one of my #breakfast coupons at the local dub. A big luscious breakfast everyday would do me in but am occasional indulgence (particularly when i’ve neglected to bake bread this week) is great, right?

8r4d The #bridge was sporting a #green #irish glow for St. Patrick’s Day, huh?

8r4dsfeets Ready to try my new toy at #orchestra — i shouldn’t be this excited about a foot pedal.

8r4d Our new #orchestra rehearsal space is about to rock.

8r4d I finally broke down and bought a foot pedal for my iPad.

A couple years ago I switched to full digital for my #orchestra #sheetmusic which simply mean that rather than printing the multiple pages out and keeping them organized in a binder, I’ve been using forScore and PDFs on my iPad. This isn’t that unusual. About a third of the orchestra, including our conductor, are on tablets of some kind.

Turing the page has rarely been a bother tho. Tap the edge of the screen. But two things have changed this year: a) i’ve been sharing a lot more and b) our music is a bit odd this year in that some of our music has page turns mid-phrase or in confusing points. The solution is in a foot pedal. They are so integral that the box is actually cross branded with the sheet music app logo.

It does one thing. It turns the page with a foot tap… which is important when my hands are busy playing a violin.

8r4d The #winter temperatures were back for a reprise this week but it wasn’t cold enough to sway us from our determination to do 10k #running on a Sunday morning. The apricity of the sunny dawn helped a little, but we were still chilled to the bone.

8r4d #datenight out at the theatre

castironguy In this house we observe #piday

8r4d It was a five hills night out #running up and down and up and down in the sub-zero temps of “who thought hills in March was a good idea?” evening run.

pixelazy This old tree at the dance studio often catches my eye because I usually only see it lit by eerie lights at night when I’m driving taxi for the family dancers.

In case you haven’t already noticed I’ve been trying to post a photo of something here daily this month. This is what happens when I work all day and forget to post until late in the evening.

8r4d Or new rehearsal space for #orchestra is pretty slick , gotta say.

gamerdad My physical copy of Civilization VII showed up via a postman who made me sign for it and everything. Woah! Haven’t done that in a while. How apropos for a history game huh?

I did what I always do with new games. I have been avoiding too many spoilers or videos about “things you should know before you play” and just trying to sink into it as the devs intended. Raw and unfiltered.

If it seems as though I’m making too big of a deal, recall that I’ve played every edition of this series and another new one kinda is a big deal.

So there it is. Take seven? The game as I understand it so far has broken away from some of the expected conventions of the predecessors, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoyed six but there was a simultaneously a complexity in the game play and a lack of nuance in the world building that could be a little jarring at times. I found myself frequently customizing games to ignore certain mechanics or aspects. For example, the whole religions thing—which seems to be absent in seven from what I’ve played so far?—is something that I would ignore or turn off as a win condition in six. I just wasn’t jiving the whole religious imperialism thing.

One thing I really like so far in seven is the new city settlement aspect. It always struck me as kind of unrealistic that settlers would just go off and found a whole new city with loyalty to the whole central leader thing—and of course it could be easily gamed to spam the world with little colonies. In seven it seems like your settlers spin off more of a kind of satellite town that needs to reach a certain potential before it can self govern. So you build these little future-cities that need resources and protection from the actual cities and it makes it a little more strategic in the way that you do the expansion of empire thing.

Also, I should note, that I’ve so far only played the first age. The game is now parcelled out into Ages with different goals for each. Some folks have been complaining that this breaks the continuity of a spanning empire, but from what I’ve seen having merely but dipped my toe into the Exploration Age is that it is probably more nuanced than that. Hopefully in a good way.

All that said, I am open to a new experience. I know some folks like to grumble when a beloved franchise tries something new. But the reality is that I still have Civ VI installed on a couple devices if I really don’t like VII. Designing new games is about taking risks, after all, and when evolving a series like Civilization it seems like there is vast opportunity to try new ideas in this vast and complex simulator.

Plus, you can’t please everyone.

8r4d I’ve been experimenting with #popcorn making, trying to hit the sweet spot of ingredients to replicate that theatre taste. Getting darn close too!

8r4d A #homeowner afternoon as my sleuthing on our creeping decrease in water pressure over the last few months revealed that there was all sorts of plastic particulate in the aerators of our faucets… which quickly googled up as a hot water heater issue. So, I guess we’re due for a new hot water heater, huh?

8r4d The new #yeg #footbridge over whitemud is coming along nicely, maybe even in time for some new summer #running routes..???

8r4d Daylight savings time hits harder when it coincides with an early #running day. We clocked 8k in the cool damp of the icy streets.

8r4d I don’t think I’ve ever walked down this trail with the lights lit before.

They just finished building it in the fall and I can’t say that the dog and I ventured down this new trail as much in the winter as we did in the summer, and what with the coyotes roaming around this part of the world it’s not particularly safe after dark.

I spent the better part of the sunlit hours in front of a Zoom call doing the third day of my fourth class of my business certification work. A walk was in order, but you’d think I’d have a bunch of pent up energy to stroll forever. In reality, I was drained and we just strolled, lit by this nifty lamps which should make it safer—but then coyotes don’t care about a bit of light do they?

gamerdad I did the most gamer dad thing ever, emphasis on the dad. I ordered a copy of Civilization VII with my airline points.

And it’s not that I’d given up on Civilization VI, but if you notice the dates on my recent posting you will also notice that I haven’t been gaming much at all lately. In fact I’ve had my head down MAKING a game, writing code and making art and putting together bits of narrative dialogue—and not playing much of anything at all.

So, that I had not played Civ 6 in a few months was not surprising. Given that I have a shipping notice for the next edition of this classic series and it should be in my hands by mid-week, I figured I’d take one last stab at the one that is currently installed on my machine. Either this will be a comparative analysis in the making, or as the next edition rolls onto my console I won’t have much incentive to play the old one.

Reviews, I acknowledge, have been mixed about 7, but with these epic long-running series one needs to weigh the reviews against the reality that a lot of gamers like what they like and as much as they clamber for innovate things, what they really want is the same thing with shinier graphics. My understanding is that VII is not that. It leans into the innovative. Any my thoughts on that matter are simply that if I was averse to new things I wouldn’t be a 48 year old gamer dad, now would I?

If nothing else, playing through a couple hours of VI reminded me that I could use a fresh coat of paint on the gameplay and the soundtracks and the narration, because as much as I like Sean Bean hearing him read the same bit of quotation about archery for the eighty-seventh time is starting to wear.

adventuredog Just a wagging tail and a wagging tongue, too.

adventuredog #reflections of an evening #walk in the park