GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Month: September 2012

  • Experiment Week One Results

    I’m posting this for Sunday but its Thursday as I write. So its been 5 days since I started the experiment and I have 7 posts. I’ve fallen back on some tropes that I often talk about inconjunction to architecture and I suspect I’ll revisit them soon enough. One positive side effect I can see already is that I’m actually reading some of the freebie magazines around the house. These past couple years I’ve gotten on the mailing lists of a few homebuilding/multifamily housing magazines but the dead trees have just been stacking up. Now that I’m looking for ideas, I gotta start reading more!

    I suspect if I keep doing small short posts (almost-tweets) I can keep this up or the next three months, the length of the experiment. But I wouldn’t be horribly shocked if I run out of steam also (see all my old hobbies except for boardgaming).

    And here’s a shout out to Seth Godin since its his blog that is the model for what I’m playing with.

  • On a lighter note….

    Badger got sick this past week, turns out it was a urinary tract infection. But he’s off of pellets for a bit, which means lots and lots of veggies. But since his appetite is down, guess who got to eat most of the veggies!

    Which brings me to one of the major conundrums in Peppercorn’s world. She LOVES food but HATES cooking. As such the kitchen has always been a conflicted space for her. And generally she just avoids it. In our previous apartment, it had a tile floor so the material change maybe discouraged her from visiting the kitchen. But now its all tile, but she still avoided the kitchen.

    Till this morning. Now that she realized what’s going on, she came flying into the kitchen hoping to get an advance copy of the bok choy.

  • Barbarians at the gates

    It is an awkwardly personal experience to work on a remodel.  I’m not often tasked to work with the clients, so I don’t get to know my patrons personally.  But I’ve measured my share of homes.  This is an utterly invasive exercise. We go through their entire house, every room, every closet – there is nothing hidden by the time you leave.

    After taking in all this raw data, the draftsman then commences a silent struggle with the original designers and builders. As we draw up the building, the puzzle comes together, teasing out the logic of its forebears,  forcing them to give up their details and secrets. This exercise is an intimate chat with history, made with silent arguments.  By the time we’re done, an understanding has been made with the past and a vision of the present condition has been agreed upon.

    Unfortunately, the actual design of the remodel is often the least personal aspect of the project. This remodel will most likely be the most expensive modification of the largest purchase of the client’s life.  So the design is often focused on what the homeowners can recoup when they sell the house. Not very personal. Awkward.  But that’s the cost of living in a market driven world.

  • A kit of parts

    I remember my sophomore studio’s final project involved a kit of parts. It was a seemingly pointless exercise. And in many ways it was. The kit of parts was merely structural pieces, nothing of any complexity. However, when working with these non-cutting edge buildings (and I suspect even when you do) it definitely becomes an exercise in arranging a kit of parts.

    For example the kitchen has counter space, appliances, cooking zone, connections to the breakfast nook, dining room, etc., etc. Especially, when you’re working in an existing building, its a matter of massaging this kit of parts to fit and to work together. Coming up with a great solution, especially in a remodel job is not easy. But it is a lot of fun.

    The hardest part of the task is not settling for merely a “good enough” design but coming up with something that is “truly good”.

  • We’re all experts!

    Certainly at the way we live our lives, heck most of us are experts at how others should live!

    But that doesn’t translate into being experts at arranging the spaces that surround our lives. There’s a lot of architects who aren’t good at that either.

  • Paperwork!

    As I do more and more construction administration, its kind of scary how this last part of the process is really a LOT of paperwork. After taking a week and a half off in Vegas, I came back to a pile of 200 or so emails. That doesn’t sound so bad, but still, given our paperwork tracking software and the contractor’s paperwork tracking software, it took me a day and a half to go through all the emails and just put them in the right place. Literally, just moving these individual emails into the correct filing boxes. Ugh.

    And I have it easy. The typical construction administration process stipulates that all correspondance with the consultants (MEP engineer, structural engineer, etc.) goes through the architect. With the way my two projects are set up, at least the contractor is able to email the consultants directly — otherwise I’d be a bottleneck and I’d be forced to do this sort of mailbox cleaning every day just to make sure the project is being digested properly.

    I’m not sure if there is a better way to do things, but the amount of filing I’ve been doing makes me think there has to be a better way!

  • Remodeling yesterday’s home for tomorrow

    One of the most interesting things about remodeling a house is seeing how it was built before you got your grubby hands on it. Having worked on some older houses, I’ve gotten to see servant quarters, back staircases, old sunrooms turned into now-old bathrooms, etc, etc.

    A building is an artifact of its time. Not just of the way people lived, but of the way people felt they should live – fashion and market pressures. I was just looking at a floor plan of a house that my coworker is remodeling. I found it quite interesting in that it looked like just an 80’s or tract home, so it wasn’t that old. But still with a separate den, dining, and living rooms it was definitely an artifact of a different time.

    I wonder what people will think of our gianormous shared spaces and our almost equally gianormous master bedroom suites when they remodel the houses of today in the future.

  • Allow me to reintroduce myself…a new experiment

    Just for fun, I thought I’d push this blog along in a slightly less eclectic/personal bent and push it in a more architectural bent. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I’m guessing I’ll find out soon enough, maybe after three months, mor maybe its will peter out long before then. In any case, I hope to have a more interesting run than my previous attempt at a weekly friday post. I will try to post on a semi-regular schedule, let’s say at least every other day though I’m thinking maybe even 5 days a week (!).

    Since everyone who reads this, mom, dad, sister and gradschool buddy knows who I am, there isn’t much to say in terms of introduction, but I’m gonna do it anyways. I’m a registered architect in Texas. I have a portfolio here that needs a little work. Currently I’m working for Ziegler Cooper Architects, in the multi-family studio. After producing a majority of the construction documents for an 8 story midrise apartment complex in Houston, I am now doing construction administration on that project as well as a similar project near by. My previous experience was in single family residential, additions and remodels, and yes I think I really do enjoy working on residential projects.

    As I’ve stated before, I like it when projects run into reality, so I am typically a fan of buildings that manipulates constraints to create something interesting and delightful. But then again I’m a modernist so I do love the occasional iconic building, though not nearly as much as many of my peers. I love my work and I love buildings, but what happens in them is where life happens.

  • Nefarious (2 player), Donald X. Vaccarino, 2011


    I purchased this game because it was accidentally shipped to me and Time Well Spent Games gave me a discount to purchase it outright instead of paying me to ship it back to them. It seemed like a nice light game that would fit in my sister’s wheelhouse and so it became an early Christmas gift when we had a mini-family reunion this past weekend. Since my girlfriend was a non-gaming mood, I ended up playing lots of boardgames with my sister. After about thirty 2P plays of this game, I think I am qualified to say something about Nefarious as a 2P game.

    Because my all the plays of this game were with my sister, so her preferences should be put up front. She and her husband (who did not come) are gamers, so she is perfectly capable at playing heavier games like Agricola, but she strongly prefers lighter games. Even a simple 2P abstract game like Let’s Catch the Lion was way too heavy for her tastes. She enjoyed Too Many Cooks (I think in part due to the art) but wasn’t totally enamored with it, nor with Indian Chief. Nor Parade, which can be a surprisingly thinky filler. I suspect No Thanks would have been played in regular rotation except we need a third player and my girlfriend was having none of that. The light Russian beating game Durak and Korean fishing game Go Stop both worked nicely as did Plato 3000 (which is a little too light for me).

    As for me, I typically prefer slightly meatier fare, but if I’m having fun why not? My 10’s are typically fillers because the great ones are reliably good in any situation where as medium / heavier games require the right crowd and mood. That said, my current hotness is Container, In the Year of the Dragon, Nefertiti, and Troyes.

    In Nefarious, each player is an evil genius trying to take over the world by creating new wicked inventions. Since this is a Eurogame, taking over the world means getting 20 VP’s before your opponents (of course!). Mechanically Nefarious is is a simultaneous action selection game where you collect money, draw invention cards into your hand, and gain VP’s by purchasing these cards in your hand and playing them to the table. You earn money by “Speculating” what actions your opponents will select (that is the only use of those minion meeples) as well as selecting either the “research “($2) or “work” ($4)actions. You gain cards into your hand by taking the “research” (one card) action. To play the invention cards to the table you “invent” them spending your money to get them into your tableau. Along with VP’s, most invention cards have instant effects on you and/or other players for good and/or bad

    This is a very nice clean design. Everything in this game has their place and there are almost no “exceptions”. Minions do ONLY one thing (earn you money through speculation). Inventions get played to the table ONLY via the “Invent” action. You gain VP’s ONLY through invention cards in your tableau. Effects from invention cards are ONLY instant and are not permanent. Effects from inventions affect you or ALL players (no selective attacks against other players). Money and cards in hand are more fluid, but of course these are the two resources you have to manage well to win the game

    The only thing that seems complicated is Invention Card effect resolution — but even then the rules are pretty clear. All players resolve invention effects simultaneously. Each player will resolve all personal effects (green arrow) first (from top to bottom). Then they will resolve effects from other players (red arrows) in player order relative to their own seat. It sounds complicated but it really isn’t. And of course in a 2P game this is completely not an issue.

    Of course, such a nice clean simple game can get pretty dull pretty fast. Even so, I think the first two or three plays with the base mechanics was still quite fun. But right as we began to tire of it, we opened up the pile of 36 “twist” cards that selectively modify the game slightly and every game should be played with two of these. Some of them are pretty simple, like giving you more money to start the game or increasing the victory VP requirement but some of them can make things pretty wild, like making the effects of your invention happen twice or letting you take two actions a turn. We played the twist deck once through and with two cards played per game there are definitely a lot potentially cool twist combos still out there (though of course there are also a few boring ones also).

    I’m by no means an expert Dominion player, but whenever I play with expert dominion players, they look at the table and they know what they want to do for the whole game, which thus essentially boils down to a shuffling exercise. There is a bit of that feeling in Nefarious once you get a little experience. At the start of the game you will you look at your hand, look at the twist cards, map out a strategy and execute. Ultimately, this is a race game to 20 points so messing around isn’t gonna get you anywhere but last place – and there isn’t that much game space to explore anyways. Maybe there is a bit more interaction with more players (I suspect the red arrow effects are a bit underpowered in a 2P game) but otherwise, it’s really is just a race to 20 points.

    As fitting a lighter game, there is a decent amount of luck of the draw which can doom you. But even then, it isn’t about getting the killer card XYZ, but a case of a series of bad draws that do not interact well with the initial strategy you chose to start the game. The deck is nicely balanced which gives you room to do some optimization and well as make make mistakes which will doom you. Then again being doomed isn’t that big of a deal, after a few plays, we were knocking out a game every 10 minutes.

    In short, Nefarious is a fun game and in the right crowd (such as say, hanging with your sister who doesn’t like heavy games).

    But do I love it? Not really. I don’t hate it, but I just don’t see much more there to explore, and I don’t usually find myself in a context needing a light multiplayer game. The multiplayer aspect sounds fun, but after a lackluster attempt at King of Tokyo, I’m not sure a lighter, silly, interactive game of this type is going to be normally a right fit for me. Currently I rate it a 6, however I suspect that it may slip down to a 4 as time slips by.

    That said, Donald X. has cemented himself as a top notch designer. His games don’t grab my attention, but he has two popular and critically acclaimed hits with Dominion and Kingdom Builder. For Nefarious he clearly wanted to design a lighter filler that was fun to play repeatedly. After thirty plays it’s hard to argue he did not succeed again, splendidly!

    One more note: I know it sounds like taking hatred of paper money to an absurd level, but this game is greatly improved if you replace the cardboard money tokens with full size poker chips. Once you get used to it, it’s easier to keep track of money with white=1, red=5, blue=10. During the game there will be a lot of single dollars coming into your system. In a 2P game you’ll be getting 2 or 4 bucks almost every round just due to speculation via your minions. Furthermore if you “research” or “work” you’ll get either 2 or 4 bucks. That’s a lot of singles, and it is a lot easier with poker chips to keep exchanging the big red and white chips instead of fiddling with the smaller cardboard money tokens.

    Originally posted on Boardgamegeek.com

  • An XY model of the gaming universe

    I am a huge fan of Mark Johnson’s podcast Boardgames to Go. He has one particularly epic episode on boardgames and themes. He just followed up with another episode where they “focus” on fantasy versus realistic themes. I use focus in quotes because it was a particularly disjointed episode, but if you are at all the type to listen to podcasts both are well worth your time.

    The first podcast discussion had a lot of discussion of theme as metaphor and narrative, with them being plotted on an XY axis. Feldmafx did a nice little diagram of that graph.

    From gallery of feldmafx

    While it feels like it makes sense, the graph doesn’t work once you try to locate games within the chart. Snoozefest proposed an alternate chart.

    From gallery of snoozefest

    I also jumped in with my own chart trying to grapple with individual games on a narrative/mechanism slice of the world

    From gallery of aaarg_ink

    In the end, no one ended up with an exciting model and the conversation just kind of died.

    But this latest podcast got me thinking. Maybe the problem is that the word “narrative” and “metaphor” are confusing. What if we went to more easily grasped ideas of “modeling” and “setting”. Using an XY graph you would have Modeling, Abstract to Specific, and Setting would be Fantastical-None-Historical. As I write this, I realize this doesn’t account for the story telling aspect of gameplay.

    Hmmm…back to the drawing board, but before I go here is a draft of what a chart might look like:

    From gallery of aaarg_ink

    Originally posted on Boardgamegeek.com