My So Called Life

The Resistance

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I mentioned playing a game called The Resistance. You can buy The Resistance, but there’s really no point; it’s kind of like buying Uno when you can just as easily play Crazy 8s with a deck of cards. This is a great game; tons of fun and easy to play. The only downside is that you need at least 5 people to play.

So without further ado, here are the rules (slightly adapted from wikipedia).

Setup

Split a regular deck of playing cards into red and black cards.

Shuffle an appropriate number of black (Resistance) and red (Spy) cards as per the table below and deal them out at random.

Number of Spies & Resistance Members

Number of players:

5

6

7

8

9

10

Resistance

3

4

4

5

6

6

Imperial Spy

2

2

3

3

3

4

After each player looks at his card to know his role, discard the cards.

The first mission leader instructs the group to close their eyes, for the spies to open their eyes and see each other, for the spies to close their eyes again, and then for everyone to open their eyes and begin the game (with long pauses at each stage).

Missions

During each round of the game, the player to the left of the previous Leader becomes the new Leader. The Leader selects a certain number of players to send out on a mission (the Leader may choose to go out on the mission themselves), starting with Mission 1. The table below shows the required number of players to go out on each mission. All of the players then discuss the Leader’s choice and, simultaneous and in public, vote on whether to accept the team make-up or not. If a majority of players vote no to the proposal, leadership passes on to the next player to the left, who proposes his own mission. (I take this to mean that ties mean the mission continues.) This continues until a majority of players agree with the current Leader’s mission assignment. After five rejected mission proposals in a row, the Imperial Spies automatically win the game, therefore it is a common house rule to not vote on the fifth mission proposal and simply send whatever the Leader proposes.

Number of players required be sent on each mission

Number of players:

5

6

7

8

9

10

Mission 1

2

2

2

3

3

3

Mission 2

3

3

3

4

4

4

Mission 3

2

4

3

4

4

4

Mission 4

3

3

4*

5*

5*

5*

Mission 5

3

4

4

5

5

5

(*) Two Mission Fail cards are required for the mission to fail

Once a mission team is agreed on, the players then “go” on the mission. To “go” on a mission, each selected player is given a black (Success) card and a red (Failure) card. Players will turn in either their black card or their red card. Resistance members MUST turn in, face down, a Mission Success card, while the Imperial Spies may either secretly turn in a Mission Success or Mission Fail card. The cards are shuffled and then revealed. If all cards show Success, the Resistance earns one point. If even one card shows Fail, the Spy team has sabotaged the mission and earns one point (except for the above-noted exceptions on Mission 4, where it may be necessary for 2 Fail cards to be played in order for the mission to fail).

The game continues until one team accumulates 3 points.

That’s the boring details, but not the fun part of the game. The game is not really about the cards that are played, the game is about trying to guess who the spies are (or, conversely, trying to throw suspicion away from yourself and onto other people). It’s about bluffing, and reading body language, and misunderstandings.

It is so frustrating when you are accused of being a spy, when you are clearly not. I have never been the spy, not a single time, but there’s obviously something very suspicious about me, because nobody ever believes me. I am never the spy! Spoiler alert, Sara is ALWAYS the spy. I think the universe is trying to tell her something.

I also always make the first mission leader specify what exactly we are resisting against, and each individual mission leader specify what exactly the mission is. I think this adds a lot of fun to the game, and gives you something to talk about if you’re not chosen to go on the mission. I just like to imagine what kind of secret missions my friends and family are going on in order to disrupt the Evil School Administrator Overlords, or the 4 Year Olds in Strollers status quo.

Anyway, enjoy. Let me know in the comments if you give it a try.

Is “Gravity” Science Fiction?

/ Shane / 10 Comments

Recently, Sara and I saw the movie Gravity. It was a fantastic movie, and I definitely recommend it (and I think this post is spoiler free, so feel free to read if you haven’t seen it yet). I was saying to my co-worker that I always get excited when she wants to see a science fiction movie. “But Gravity is not science fiction,” he protested.

It never occurred to me that Gravity would not be considered science fiction. The entire movie takes place in outer space, which is traditionally a hallmark of science fiction. Many of the typical science fiction tropes and devices are in play. However, I subsequently had this argument with many other people, and everyone seems to agree that I’m wrong; this is not science fiction.

Now, as a writer of science fiction, I am probably a little more versed in the numerous sub-categories of science fiction than the average person. You’ve got “hard” science fiction, “soft” or “social” science fiction, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Space Opera, Space Western, and contemporary or “near future”, to name a few. My point is that I am accustomed to viewing the label of Science Fiction as a rather broad umbrella, perhaps broader than some might consider. In other words, I believe you can have science fiction without aliens and laser guns.

The debate seems to center on the word “future”. Everyone I’ve talked to about this stands firm on the idea that science fiction must depict the future. However, to my mind this presents two problems: 1) you have to ignore alternate history stories that actually occur in the past, such as Steampunk, and 2) how do you define “future”? How far out does it has to be?

For example, if I write a legal thriller that takes place in 2014, that’s clearly not science fiction, even though it takes place in the “future”. So to me, it’s more about the feel of the story, rather than a time frame. And Gravity feels to me like science fiction.

But we’re certainly not going to be able to agree on a definition that includes “how Shane feels about it”, so I tried turning to the Internet. It turns out, the Internet is just as confused as I am about all of this. There’s really no clear consensus about what makes something science fiction.

However, as a starting point, here are a couple of definitions provided by Asimov and Clarke, two experts in the field if there are any:

Isaac Asimov. 1990. “‘[H]ard science fiction’ [is] stories that feature authentic scientific knowledge and depend upon it for plot development and plot resolution.”

Isaac Asimov. 1975. “Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.”

Arthur C. Clarke. 2000. “Science fiction is something that could happen – but you usually wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen – though you often only wish that it could.” (emphasis original)

So based on those definitions, I would argue that “Gravity” fits the bill. On the other hand, one of my co-workers counter-argued that essentially all stories depend on technology for plot advancement. Receiving a phone call on a cell phone? Driving in a car? Using a computer? All dependent on technology. It doesn’t become science fiction until the technology depicted is technology of the future. At that point we’re back to arguing timeframe again.

Finally we settled on the idea that the timeframe can be anything, but the technology has to be something that “most people don’t have access to”. Under that definition, I think “Gravity” qualifies because most people don’t go into space, and it would stop being science fiction when space travel became mundane (the way cell phones and computers have).

However, when one is forced to argue with essentially everybody on a point, whether or not one convinces them, one must consider the fact that he is, in fact, flat out wrong. So we will settle this the way we settle all important arguments around here; with a web poll.

What say you, Internet?

At the end of the day, the label “science fiction” is a marketing term. It’s a way for bookstores and movie rental stores to classify stories. It’s essentially meaningless, other than to help people find stories they would be interested in seeing.

Under that notion, I’m confident in saying that someone who enjoys science fiction would also enjoy seeing “Gravity”.

Halloween, 2013

/ Shane / Leave a comment

pumpkins

 

Evie’s pumpkin’s teeth are very appropriate, given that gap in her bottom teeth.

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Here we have one very adorable little kitty cat…

2013_10_26_9999_9…and here we have one very pious angel

Those wings were no joke! All that tin foil was a lot harder to deal with than I thought it would be. Considering they had to make it through 2 Halloween parties, a day of school, and trick or treating, I’d say they held up pretty well (if I do say so myself!)

You know, costumes are so cheap these days, that it’s almost never cost effective to make your own (to say nothing of time-effective). It sure is hard to compete with a lot of the really amazing costumes you can buy online these days (waaay cooler than anything we had as a kid). But my heart is definitely going to break on the inevitable day when the kids beg me for a store-bought costume over the homemade one.

 

Sara puts another half marathon under her belt

/ Shane / 1 Comment

One of Sara’s college roommates had the brilliant idea of all meeting up again back at the old stomping grounds, and doing a race together. It was a lot of fun getting the four of them (and all the associated spouses and children) together for the first time in 10 years. Actually, come to think of it, Gregory was the only non-Purdue-ex-student among us (though I think he could be an honorary grad if Alexis would have just bought that “Purdue Boyfriend” shirt for him). We had quite a herd of children, and the lot of us together were more of a force of nature than a group of friends, but it was a lot of fun to cruise around and relive old times.

Only Sara, Phil, and Amy’s sister Mary opted for the half-marathon, though in Amy’s defense she is what can only be described as shockingly pregnant. This should not necessarily be considered a handicap though, since she and Alexis crossed the 5k finish line at the same time, but since her timing chip was pinned to her tummy, she ended up winning by a nose baby.

Sara usually runs in Chicago, which is the flattest of the flat, so she was a little nervous about running on all the hills. However, she was quite pleased with her time of 2:39:59, which was only 3 minutes longer than last time, even with the hills and the 5 extra minutes in the bathroom line (and that’s not even mentioning the freezing rain!)

Once again the kids and I tried to meet up with her as often as possible along the route. We did a pretty good job, but this was super-stressful, because it was very difficult to navigate through all the one ways, dead-ends, road closures, and tricky traffic situations along the route. We actually did a pretty good job of meeting up with her, but I was pretty tired at the end of it from getting both kids in and out of the car so many times, finding parking, and somehow dredging my brain for directions on streets I hadn’t used in 10 years.

The kids made signs to hold, and they both did a really good job. Sara came up with the idea of offering high fives to the racers and it was a HUGE hit.

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2013_10_19_9999_14

I don’t think any of us were prepared for the amount of high fives; it was somewhat staggering. It really did seem to give a little boost to the runners, and even when we didn’t get the signs out of the car people would say, “There’s the high five kids!” One lady even risked life and limb crossing traffic to give us an extra high five.

In fact, the kids made the cover of The Exponent, the school newspaper (more pictures available in their gallery here).

Photo via The Exponent

All in all, it was really a lot of fun being at Purdue. Mostly if we go back there we just go to campus, but this time we were all over town, which brought back a lot more memories (“Oh, remember when you lived here?” “Wait, I remember this place, so and so used to live here!” “Didn’t this used to be…” etc.)

In fact, I guess it really was a throwback because as soon as we got back Sunday night, I had a nightmare that I was late for a physics lecture in EE 129 and when I got there I found out they were having a test I hadn’t studied for. I asked the professor if I could retake it and he started quizzing me with questions about how to draw different molecules. “Oh no!” I thought, “I totally don’t remember this being in the lecture!”

Yes, I guess we’re never too old for the old “test I didn’t study for” nightmare.

Good times with good friends, and I was very proud of Sara. Overall, I give the weekend a high five.

Email from the past – A day in the life

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I was searching my work email and I came across the following email:

From: Halbach, Shane C.
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 1:46 PM
To: Sara
Subject: ooooooh Sara

Ooooh boy oh boy.

So we were playing hide and seek today. Oliver found a great hiding spot: balled up under the shelves behind the curtain in the bathroom. He was down there for a while, and when I found him and he came out, he was *covered*, head-to-toe, in crystallized cat urine. It was in his hair. It was in his eyelashes. His face and hands were sticky with it. His clothes looked white.

I put his clothes right in the laundry and put him in the shower. It was so gross. When I crawled in there to clean it out, it smelled so ungodly, I can’t imagine how he could have been laying in there (face down, mind you). It was putrid. Afterwards, I told him 3 or 4 times, “Buddy, if something smells that bad, don’t crawl into it, okay?”

As you can imagine, he was generally in good spirits throughout all of this.

And that’s the kind of emails you get at work when you’re a mom.

Long time readers will remember that we once had a problem with Nala using that part of the bathroom as a toilet. It turned out she was up to her old tricks again (but hasn’t been since then).

Even though this was back in March, I can remember it like it was yesterday. I can only assure you it was probably worse than it sounds.