Game Notion

ursulav made a teeny post featuring the painting title from a dream: "Two Ninjas Negotiating With An Earth Elemental To Buy Gravity." (never seen in the dream, sadly).

Now I want to do a magic system based on the premise of magic-users licensing from various elemental beings the right to use, abuse, and violate natural laws.

Technically, It's Still Spring

I've been on a cleaning binge this week. telnar came to visit last weekend, and we had a lot of fun. The hotel across the street from my house built an attached indoor waterpark. Telnar was staying at the hotel and we spent most of Saturday at the waterpark.

Because it's indoors, it's very small. It is, both despite and because of this, very nice. "Despite": there's not a lot of room for the big rides I'm used to in an amusement park. "Because": since it's small, there aren't the long walks between rides that I'm also used to.

The park has two long tube-slides and one long person-flume. These three are about equivalent to typical outdoor waterpark slides: they're four stories high and twisty. They also have a "river ride", where you hop in a tube and float in a long circle. One nice feature of the tube slides: they end in a pool that connects to the river ride, so you can either get out and do the slides again, or coast into the river and continue on its circuit.

There's also a section in the center, surrounded by the river ride, that's mostly for children, but has three more slides long enough to be fun for me. In the center section are several fixed-mount water guns that customers can use to shoot people lower down. Mostly the guns get targeted on people floating by on the river ride.

Lastly, they had a wading pool, a four-foot deep swimming pool, and a ginormous multi-section hot tub that was bisected by the outer wall, so that most of it was outside and part of it was inside. The outside hot tub was ringed by deck chairs, so you could lay out in the sun if you wanted.

The park had little in the way of concessions: one combined Pizza Hut/A&W shop, and a bar. The bar area had way more table space then they could possibly need, so far as I could tell. Officially, the waterpark rules prohibited bringing your own food or drink, but the attendant didn't say anything about the diet Coke I carried in.

Even on a Saturday, there weren't enough people to give the "overcrowded" feel I'm used to from amusement parks. There were plenty of people around, but not enough to form significant lines. Usually on the four-story slides, we had to wait for one pair ahead of us to go down and clear the pool. The longest waits were never more than a few minutes, and rides like the river had no wait at all: you just hopped into a tube and went 'round for as long as you liked. Since the rides were all so close together, there was little time spent walking from one to the next. So the ratio of time spent on the fun things vs time spent getting to the fun things was excellent. Overall, very happy with the place. I need to find out if they sell season passes. They make good neighbors, too: Lut was worried about noise or traffic from the park when we first found out it was going up, but as it turns out it hasn't been an issue. They're small and indoors and quiet from the outside.

The park wore me out, in fact -- probably all those trips up the four flights of stairs to the slides. We spent an hour or two lazing around in the hot tub.

We also took a break in the middle of the day to eat lunch and play a game of Titan. We played Titan again on Sunday, and also a game of RoboRally that Lut joined in on. Altogether a good weekend and rather a busy one.

Normal people clean before a guest arrives, so the house will look nice for company. I didn't clean for Telnar, who is notoriously oblivious to the cleanliness or lack thereof in a domicile. Not that he's a slob: he generally keeps his things organized. But he wouldn't really notice if I did or not.

But he did leave the toilet seat up, and every time he did I was forcibly reminded of just how disgusting the toilet was. I mean, I already knew that it was bad, but with the seat down it was partly disguised. With it up, the full grotesque glory of it jumped out at me.

This led directly to many of the purchases I made at Linens & Things on Sunday evening, and from thence to
( Too Much Cleaning )