Duplo

Lauren's getting more and more personality, and in looking for toys that we can all enjoy, we ended up getting a bunch of Duplo pieces.  Back when I was a kid, Duplo block meant 'dull and boring' blocks.  However, these days, they are just oversize legos that are hard to swallow.   Not just the blocks themselves, but the price of Duplos and Legos are also hard to swallow.  After looking around a bit, I bought some Duplos off of craigslist, and also from sellers on the website Bricklink.com.  We ended up with a tractor, a backhoe, a barn on wheels, a ship, a castle.  A small mountain of high density plastic.  Probably the best feature of the castle is indoor plumbing, which is an unusual feature for plastic castles.  A close second would be the portcullis, however.

Books

I recently finished reading (last year) Wool by Hugh Howey.  An interesting read for sure.  A futuristic post-apocalyptic fiction where life exists in a siloed reality.  It was an exciting and good read.  I also read the next part of the saga, Shift.  The first book was like the original Matrix, and the second part was kindof like the Matrix 2... or perhaps even the Star Wars prequels.  Answering questions that fill out the universe, but don't really fit the paradigm that the original set.

I also read Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett.  Another fun read in the Discworld series.

I am currently working through The White and the Gold; the French regime in Canada, by Thomas Costain.  Costain has a technique in his writing that makes reading history more enjoyable.  Perhaps it is the drawing of character into the history that enables him to make often bland subjects sparkle.  It is about the French colonization of Canada.

Roguelikes

A rogue-like computer game:
Like Rogue and Nethack, Brogue is an single player dungeon crawler.  It uses a software library specifically made for the creation of Roguelike games.  If you are going to download it, and play it, I recommend using the edition with character fonts:  Brogue with Tiles by Oryx




Legend of Dungeon, another rogue-like but with 3D voxel based graphics.  Probably best with a gamepad.  This one is pretty simple, with only a few controls.  It also features an online scoreboard.