- A chair/tank/robot.
- Sometimes being driven by a 12-year-old hacker savant, sometimes by that 3D printer guy, and once or twice, by me.
- A lab-coat that turned its wearer into a walking, glowing breathalizer. (Granted, I knew that would be there. I helped make that one.)
- Open-source martinis.
- OK, really, most martinis are open source. It was still cool.
- Lasers. Because everything is better with lasers.
- A lesson in how to make "Molten Chocolate Cake".
- A general surfeit of awesome nerds.
More parties should be like that.
They had one plan to send a 8 million ton ship to Jupiter. That's the size of a modest city, or 40 Sears Towers put together. Interestingly, running the numbers on what it would cost to do, it was ~16 trillion dollars; approximately the entire economic output of the modern US in a year. Actually, about 4 years worth of US economic output, taking inflation into account.
So, yeah, we could send a pre-fab city to one of the moons of Jupiter with 1960's technology, if we were willing to pay for it.
Science!! 2012 has concluded. This is what we have learned:
Guinness and Murphy's stouts both make a good Irish Carbomb.
Average rating for Guinness: 7.28
Average rating for Murphy's: 7.17
That difference is within the margin of error. They're both equally good, so far as we can tell.
If you don't know what I'm talking about...
Having concluded our service to Science!! for the time, I'm back to a healthy diet: One pint of Ben & Jerry's for breakfast every morning.
What? Dairy's good for you.
- Where'd the shampoo go? Ok, I'll get another bottle. Hm. Two choices. This one is green and has a leaf on it. This one is clear and has a turnip on it. Obviously, I HAVE to try the turnip shampoo. My Poland experience can't be complete without trying the turnip shampoo.
- I found a board game store! In Warsaw! In... the main train station? I asked the proprietor to recommend some uniquely Polish games so that I could have proper geek souveniers to bring home. I am now the proud owner of:
Mali Powstańcy (Little Insurgents)
The players are child scouts delivering messages to the resistance fighters in Warsaw during the uprising! Every turn you will get new orders to deliver. If you can't sneak past the Nazi Stormtroopers in five turns, it's too late and the brave fighters at the front die because you failed them. The game ends when the Nazi's crush the resistance, burn the city to the ground, and kill everyone the players held dear. A children's game, ages 8 and up.
Kolejka (Queue)
The game of waiting in line! You are a grandmother in Warsaw, 1980. You have a shopping list. Maybe something on your list will actually be in a store today. Probably not. But you're going to gossip until you find out where it might be and then get in line and you're going to wait for it like a motherfucker.
- Early snows caught the trees in Warsaw by surprise, coating many of them while their leaves were still in flaming autumn shades. I had the University Botanical Gardens to myself, no footprints in the snow except for where I'd come from.. That's a memory to tuck away and keep.
- My flight back to the US has been cancelled. Lufthansa doesn't want to fly into Hurricane Sandy as she lands on New York, it seems. Pansies.
- I just realized that Lufthansa's name is probably a reference back to the Hansa Teutonica, the old trade syndicate that made the northern coast of Europe its bitch for a couple centuries.
It's pleasant to have these quiet hours to myself during days packed into a hostel, 8 to a room.
Kraków is lovely, as always.
Today I meet one of the artists for my game face-to-face for the first time. I'll be catching brunch with Tomasz. Then Sunday I meet Marek at a tattoo convention in Warsaw.
I've ordered the new laptop to replace the vanished one. I went and splurged on the new one. It's a dream machine for photography, with all flash drive space and an extra helping of RAM. Pretty nice for general use, too.
I found the coffeehouse I'd live at if I were spending more time here, last night. Good rooibosh teas, veggie friendly menu, and the baristas come with a serving of adorable. Cafe Mana Mana by the University. What university? I have no idea. But from the crowd in there, it was in collegetown. Some things are the same anywhere you go.
If you are what you eat, I need to escape Poland before I become a pile of pierogi ruskie.
The table behind me is laughing, swapping jokes while skipping fluidly from Polish to French to English. I can only catch the odd reference to Steven Fry, Inspector Clouseau, or Monty Python's Grail.
That's who I want to be when I grow up.
Flight: Delayed, until my transfer would be missed.
Rescheduled.
Rescheduled flight delayed.
Screaming children on the flight over the Atlantic.
After being in airports, train stations and anywhere other than a bed for 24 hours, walked off a train, leaving my satchel on it. That's the one that held my computer. The one I hadn't been able to back up for a while now, because the last back-up drive died and the replacement was defective.
The lost satchel also had the tickets to the trade show I came here for inside.
I've had better travel days.
The flight was delayed. They rerouted me direct to Frankfurt, from there to Berlin. Now I'm listening to final boarding calls: Osaka. Narita. Places I like not so much as Berlin, and yet, as I hear those flights I'm not boarding, I long to be aboard. To hop those planes instead of my own, and visit places I haven't been in so very long.
So much world to see, and so few days in a year.
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I finished the 3D printer. That was fun. I'd like to build another CNC machine soon. Maybe I'll find a good reason to build a lasersaur.
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Ooh, the PA system just came on in Japanese. I like remembering that language. It'll probably wreck my German for the rest of the day, though. Ateh once told me that once a perosn becomes fluently trilingual, their mind splits out all the languages, and switching from one to another no longer gets tangled up. I'm not there yet. My mind, for now, runs in English, or in one foreign language. If German butts in on Japanese in my thoughts, Japanese leaves in a huff and won't come back for the rest of the day.
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I've loaded up on (virtual) books for the trip. Long travel leads to reading. This trip, last year, I picked up Game of Thrones on the trip over, and was in the second tome for the trip back. That set me on a reading jag that's lasted most of the year since. Books for this trip:
...and one actual paperback, for when the batteries run low:
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Wish me well fun. I'm off to the biggest boardgame trade show of the year.
