Lots of the things

So yeah, a lot of good stuff happening in August.  Big news on the Mars rover landing - that was some wild engineering there and I am so proud to be species related to the humans that did that.  It was especially interesting that it occurred while the Olympics was on because it was so much in the spirit of the Olympics - oh wait it wasn't at all nationalistic commercial or vain.  It was inclusive and uplifting and an amazing human achievement.  Well it was in the spirit of the spirit of the Olympics then.  The thing they say is represents but really it totally doesn't - like Christmas.
Lots of good science is already trickling back from Mars then and it should be an interesting couple years hearing about it.  There's a great little blog called Mars Weather that reports the daily conditions from the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) on Curiosity.  There is always the NASA site and the Planetary Society site and oh so many places to get more in depth info than the crappy sound bites that you get in the mainstream news.

Other things that are pretty nice are the various Kickstarter things I kicked in for, including the Dungeon World kickstart, the Flaming Carrot kickstart.  I'm considering kicking in for the Planetary Annihilation kickstarter because I loved TA and Supreme Commander (not so much SC2 however.)  I picked up a set of GameScience Zocchi dice from Awesome Dice and they arrived quickly even shipped to Canada, so I am ready and eager to paint them up and play some Dungeon Crawl Classics when I'm not running this fall's Beacon campaign.  I'm also getting ready to fire up my mystery SciFi game (I better do a special post on that bit of business).

And I've been playing a bit of Organ Trail on my Android phone.  It's a remux of the Oregon Trail PC game from waaaaay back and has you driving your station wagon across the USA after the zombie apocalypse, taking odd jobs and trading for food and ammo and gas.  It's a pretty fun diversion that makes no attempt to play fair so there will be some satisfaction when I make it to the west coast.

Also here's the Game of Thrones theme sung by a cat: