Things that Impress or Please you, or make you Happy...

No no; table top, like D&D and Paranoia, where the characters are written up on a sheet, dice are rolled, and role-playing happens. Sometimes there are maps where we move characters hither and thither. They're not exactly board games though there are similarities.

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I destroyed the dastardly dairy dame! I made mad milk maid mulch!

I hate insomnia. Oh yeah. Last year I had four cases of it, and each time it lasted three months.

Sure, I hear ya. Not a big D&D guy, but I am an avid board gamer and I do still play some video games when I get the chance, just not as much these days. Lately been playing Dune: Imperium Uprising, which is an excellent board game that combines Worker Placement/Resource gathering with deckbuilding.



I also really like the game Root a lot, but it's pretty mean spirited (while also being excessively adorable with its artwork, which makes it somehow even more meaner) and can end up making your friends consider pushing you down flights of stairs and the like. Fantastic game, super strategic, and draws you in with its deceptively cute demeanor before kicking you while you are down.

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Those sound fun too. I do enjoy board games as well. I just prefer the table top games.

Root sounds pretty interesting. It reminds me a bit of Paranoia in that, while the Troubleshooters, as the players are called, work together, they also have secret missions and are encouraged to deceive and betray their fellow players. Online it doesn't work as well, we play via Discord voice chat, but otherwise we have the full-on flavor of the game.

Do you have people who play them with you consistently, or at least who are usually game for a game? I find the hardest part of multiplayer games is finding a time for everyone to sit down and play. Thankfully for the two games I'm playing right now we have a consistent time every week (although sometimes life happens and we shift things).

I do have a steady play group, although we are still reeling from one of our dear friends and regular players passing away suddenly in November, and the sessions haven't been the same since. We are still getting together, but it hasn't been the same since.

That said, the game must go on, or something like that.

Yikes. Sucks he died. Yeah I'm in a consistent D&D group put together by the local library, which I thought was cool they do that. I think there are three game D&D groups that meet every week. I decided to stick with one.

Paranoia I'm trying to keep consistent, and after my horrible health interruption last weekend, I decided I should've played anyway and will be ready for it this upcoming Saturday. It's an awesome game, although not many people know about it. The goal is for me to keep a group going on Saturdays, at least until the campaign ends.

Another thing that makes me happy is making short films. Right now I'm working on a short where a character manipulates the real world with pictures. It's a sequel to one I did last year. So far it's coming together well, although I've only had one day of shooting. Hopefully tonight I can do more.

I thought I'd mention that the kiddos and I dabble in the board game scene every so often as well. It came to mind because we just finished playing a round of Sorry at the youngster's bequest. It was fun and there wasn't too much negativity. The two kiddos didn't like their pieces being bumped. I kept the rules fair and we played well together. It was fun. The youngster prefer board games to video games so we get one out now and then. He also likes to build with Legos which I helped him do.

We like to play games with our daughter that are cooperative vs the game instead of head to head etc., She is a Harry Potter fan, so we often play Hogwart's Battle with her, which is a game in which the players cooperate to build decks of spells and actions while battling a stack of villains from the films. It's a fun game, while maybe a little RNG dependent. It's got a rich theme and she really has a lot of fun playing it.

You may not be a fan of that IP, but there are plenty of Co-op games out there that are fun to play with kids.

That sounds fun. I like the Harry Potter books. I just don't like the movies. Yeah co-op games are fun. The kiddo and I play co-op video games pretty frequently too.

I finished Hammer's Slammers the other day and needed a book to read vis I had appointments yesterday except we hadn't made it to the library so my mom suggested Harry Potter. I am now reading Prisoner of Azkaban. It's not cheating; I read Philosopher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets a couple of years ago in their original British before reading Lord of the Rings, so I'm resuming the series where I left off.

I've been gaming most of today. I'll find time for the book in due course. I do enjoy Harry Potter as a book series. I just dislike the movies. I apologize I was not clear. That is my mistake. The books are awesome. I try not to compare them to other fantasy series, including Lord of the Rings. I think that's disingenuous because it's its own thing.

One thing that makes me happy is when my kiddos are happy. Of course I get extreme anxiety when people are angry which plays into it some. I have the clinical version of anxiety so there's that. I do what I can to make them feel positive.

Omeprazole is great, but be careful it can cause diarrhea over time. I had to quit using it. Now I am on Tums.

Tums are okay. They can be really chalky and some taste horrible.

I rediscovered that reading Harry Potter makes me happy. I'm re-reading Harry Potter in the original British, and am picking up where I left off; Prisoner of Azkaban. Setting aside some time to read it is fairly easy and I've been enjoying the book at my typically-slow pace. I usually read a chapter every night, at least I have done roughly four of the past five nights, so it should go fairly quickly. I may read more than that some times too. It's a minimum.

The youngster needed help with his toy building project, so we worked together on it. That was fun. He's good at stuff like that. He liked the end result and had to show it off (it was a little Kinect kart racer) (it's only like six inches long and three wide) (the thing is just to have fun building). The youngster was getting upset because he needed help and I was playing in the other room, so I gave him a deal; I help him until either it's finished or we're frustrated with it, and then I can come back to my game. He was fine with that. I try my best to keep everyone calm. Maybe not "happy" because they're sometimes calm and unhappy but I try to keep them the level-headed.

The “original British”?

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

American and British English are different dialects so there are differences between the two regions and their usage of the language, so when Harry Potter came to the States, things were edited to accommodate the difference in syntax. It's mostly subtle things. Like in Prisoner of Azkaban it says "by torch light" instead of "with a flash light", stuff like that. Similar to how movies lose flavor when dubbed, a book loses flavor when adjusted for a region's different dialect, so it's fun reading Harry Potter the way it was originally written, vis Rowling is British.

Let's see, today I ordered my tickets to Mickey 17, and tickets for a museum exhibit I want to check out next week. And tomorrow tickets go on sale for the local minor league baseball club, which signals the end of this winter chill and the beginning of getting outside and enjoying the spring weather.

And all of that makes me very happy.

After my shower tonight I got under the blankets and I could feel my feet let go and just relax. That felt so good. That made me happy. Indoor waterfalls wash away the worries of a world-weary Whicker to the point of being close to sleep. Say sayonara to Sunday as the superb soda slides through the speaking center of the skull to the staunch stomach where sustenance sails to serenity.