Belarus makes the best potato 🥔 chips, fact.

Yum 😋

Discovered Sauternes wine 🍷 last weekend at a tasting. Super sweet but not as ridiculous as ice wine. My new favorite sweet wine.


https://winefolly.com/deep-dive/sauternes-wine-guide/

#wine

Hardspace Shipbreaker, a junkyard work sim in space. I find it very cathartic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardspace:_Shipbreaker

#videogame

Cafe board game review:

The second game we tested at Spielweisen.

As you can see by her website, https://mariashears.com/coffee/, my wife is extremely deep into coffee. Naturally we picked out this game to try because of the attractive theme. Opening it up and getting started we saw it not just a coat of paint.

Game mechanics reflect coffee production. You start by growing beans, then drying them, roasting them, and ending by shipping to a warehouse or cafe. This is accomplished by stacking cards, partially covering other cards. Building out a production chain / card stack which grants you a number of actions. Moving the small wooden cubes between roasty and cafe for example. All this seem great on paper. As did the helper women at the convention who helped explain the rules. The trouble comes with scoring.

Besides some simple victory points for getting the requested bean combinations to cafes you score beans in the warehouse. Something along the lines of, you score for beans in the two colors of which you control the least, 🤷‍♂️. We didn't find it very intuitive.


Despite the great theme ☕️ this one didn't make our Wishlist ❌.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284936/cafe

#boardgame
#boardgame_review

Сейчас я пишу прописью.

Concordia Boardgame Review:
After being on my list for a while I finally got the chance to try it at Spielweisen.

Filling out a big map of Europe: building houses in cities, collecting resources, and taking over providences is a common element in complicated German strategy games. Concordia takes this concept and adds a deck building aspect that makes it both more simple and completing. A great game with many things to like.

For me playing on a map of Europe has appeal all its own. Our table got a lot of looks from passerbys. Another draw is the diplomacy card that lets you copy your opponent’s last played card. This keeps things from feeling unfair if they have a good card or took one from the store you wanted to buy. Games not perfect though.

The intermediate scoring was confusing. Rather than wait to the end of the game the rules recommend beginners calculating it several times during play, after tribute cards are played. The first step in the calculation was to sell all resources back to bank??? No thanks. Maybe we got this wrong so we just left scoring to the end. Our next playthrough will be fine since we now understand victory points. Here is to hoping there will be a next time.


Concordia has been added to my wishlist ✅.


https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124361/concordia

#boardgame
#boardgame_review

All the games!
https://spielwiesn.de

#boardgame

Made mussels last night. Been using the same drunken mussels recipe for years now. Thinking of posting in my new recipe section of my personal site. It’s nice to collect the recipes somewhere because other sites go down / drop content. My wife and I lost a delicious Swiss chocolate cake recipe this way.

#cooking

Played Magic the Gathering today with Masha. First time since I lived in the US ~five years ago. Still an exciting game after all this time!

#mtg

Back from vacation in Mallorca and Madrid. Preparing dive logs and a blog post.

This is screenshot of editing the first dive recording. Log post live at: https://travisshears.com/diving/dive-log/silleta-south/

#video_editing

First attempt at making cheese crackers.

#cooking

https://climbinggrades.xyz/ lives again! Revived this little web app written in elm.

repo: https://git.sr.ht/~travisshears/climbing-grades

#tech
#elm

Lot of cool "Modern Unix" cli tools, mostly written in Rust, listed here: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix

#tech

Tracking events set to their backend servers and can't add my own autocompletion.. No go. Had to uninstall.

#tech

Love jq but found combining it with less for quickly exploring JSON clumsy. jless to the rescue!

https://jless.io/

#tech
#json

Been trying my hand at PCB etching with mixed success. Looking forward to sharing a working prototype on a diy PCB.

#electronics

Trying out a new terminal, Warp.

https://www.warp.dev/

#tech

Verdaccio looks interesting. Looking for a reason why I need to run my own NPM repo so I can try it.

https://verdaccio.org/

#tech
#javascript

The architecture school I went to does an award every few years. One where the winner comes and gives a seminar. This years pick looks interesting.
Ensamble Studio
https://www.yellowtrace.com.au/ensamble-studio-ca-n-terra-house-menorca-underground-architecture/

Trying out new note taking app on my phone. Beta app is pretty polished. So far enjoying it.

https://www.andnotes.app