After Lausanne in Part 1, we arrived in Sion late in the afternoon of Thursday − late enough that we only had time to unwind a bit before we went for dinner. We decided to go for crêpes, as the offer in Zürich ist sub-par, especially when it comes to galettes, and we ended in Régal’ette in the city center, which was a very good crêperie − we got what we were hoping for (and they also have an excellent cider.)
After dinner, since we had apparently not walked uphill enough in Lausanne, we strolled to the heights of the city. The sun had just set and the light was very nice. The highlight of the evening, though, was to see a fox, which was definitely not afraid of humans − I don’t think I ever saw a fox from closer! I consequently have a bunch of blurry fox pictures.
After this we went back to the hotel to sleep – tomorrow, we visit the Grande Dixence dam!
My hope was to be able to avoid cars altogether during this trip, but convenience won when it came to reaching the Grande Dixence dam. Yes, there are four buses in each direction during the day, but the hours don’t align very well with the visits, and we also valued a bit of freedom to explore a bit around without risking missing the last bus down. So we rented a carsharing Mobility car (conveniently in the parking of the hotel, but we only realized that when we came back) and drove to the dam for the 11:30 visit.
The weather was, euphemistically, not optimal. We were in the clouds for most of our visit, and it rained for a non-trivial part of it too. Still: the visit was very cool; we got to walk inside the numerous galleries of the dam, and while it wasn’t visually super impressive, the experience was well worth it. From the outside, the dam is gigantic; the lake above is probably a very nice place to hike around when there’s any visibility, but as it was, we walked on the dam top and that was pretty much it. Pierre still ran from the top of the dam back to the parking lot − since I’m far more reasonable, I took the cable car back 😛
On the way down, we made a stop at the Pyramides d’Euseigne, a super weird rock structure that I still can’t wrap my head around. And that is on the Grand Tour, so here, I have a new picture for my collection (it’s a very smol collection so far.)
Finally, before we went back to the hotel, we made a final stop at the Mont d’Orge lac, where we had a ~1km stroll around the lake and saw a bunch of water lilies.
For dinner, we went to Pinte Contheysanne, a Swiss restaurant where we had great dried meat and awesome cheese croûtes. After that meal we needed a bit of a walk, though, so we made a detour to see the Rhône river, which had a nice pedestrian bridge and a cool view over the castle and basilica at the top of the city.
Overall, I liked Sion very much; the city center is car-free and lively-in-a-good-way, and while it’s also not quite flat, it’s definitely more me-compatible than Lausanne 😉
The next morning, Pierre went for a run around the top of the city, and we took the train to our next destination, Zermatt.
This summer, we decided to go on an 8-night train trip around Switzerland, to visit places that we had wanted to go to for a while and never did anything about.
This is my traveling log − mostly something for me to remember, but I like reading other people’s traveling blogs/threads, so maybe someone will enjoy these as well! It’s organized in 4 parts, where each part corresponds to”where we dropped our suitcases” (we stayed in 4 hotels, 2 nights in each). After some hesitation, we decided to travel in style and to not worry about transportation tickets – we each got a month-long General Abonnement (in first class because see previous point about “in style”), which covers the very, very vast majority of the transportation in Switzerland. Probably somewhat more expensive than unit tickets, and probably slightly more expensive than planning things correctly and taking individual day cards with a discount, but peace of mind also has a huge amount in value in my book.
We first travelled to Lausanne, which we have passed many times over the years, but where we had never stopped. We left home around noon, got lunch at the Zürich Hauptbahnhof, and took a direct train to Lausanne. First train control, and our tickets do seem to be valid – yay, I didn’t mess up the dates! 😛
The arrival in Lausanne and the following small walk to the hotel gives as a very first impression of the city: it’s Not Flat. By then, it was roughly 15:00; we decided to go for a small walk around the Lavaux vineyards. These are the one place that will inevitably make me go “wooooooow” when traveling past them on a train, and walking around them definitely confirmed the wow factor.
We walked from Grandvaux to Cully, and again: Not Flat. Going down that hill was already challenging enough; I would not have liked climbing uphill, I think! (For sure my shitty right knee would have looked at me with disapproval. As it is…) After this walk, where we also saw a shitton of lizards and somehow resisted the temptation of stealing some grapes from the vine (they looked ripe!), we went back to the hotel and arrived there around 18:00.
Time to find a restaurant, to go there, to have an absolutely excellent meal sitting at a delightful terrace (Jacques Restaurant, highly recommended). The food was amazing (especially anything around fish); the only annoying thing was that our neighbors were smokers, which got on my nerves a few times (but then I also didn’t ask them to move downwind for their cigarette, soooo.)
On the way back, we took the metro to go see the lake. Lausanne is the only city with a metro, and that metro is also Not Flat − there’s a sticker in the train warning that one of the stops’ platforms is at a 12% slope. It’s kind of weird to feel the metro brake much harder than it actually does due to the acceleration added by gravity!
The lake was quiet; we walked to the end of the jetty and went back home. The last adventure for the day was that our bus broke down: it was a trolley, and it needed to get its perches down to handle a section with road works… and one of the perches stayed up. We walked the remaining 3 stops (… uphill), and didn’t get passed by another bus. Hopefully they resolved it swiftly, still.
On the next day, Pierre went for a run in the city, and then we took the train to go to Bex, where we had tickets to visit the salt mine! We took the train to Bex, the bus to the salt mine, and started the visit at noon.
For the visit, we take the small mine train, go visit some tunnels with some explanations, come back to the main site with the train, and have a bit of food – chips salted with some salt from the mine, sausage that is actually dried in the mine too (fun gimmick tbh). The whole visit was pretty cool, but we both felt it was lacking a bit on the technical aspects of it. In particular, we did spend roughly 30 minutes on the train, and we got 0 mention of it during the visit − at the very least, I would have liked to know when it was built, see a map of the tracks (there was definitely some intersection going on)… and discuss the building of the rolling material itself, which is quite custom!
We still had some energy after the visit, so we decided for an impromptu visit to the Château de Chillon, which was on our way back to Lausanne. We decided against the audioguide – while I love a good guided visit, audioguides tend to get my attention drifting quite swiftly. So we visited the castle with the paper guide given at the entrance and following a number of information panels.
The path through the castle is very well made and well indicated; the castle itself has some very cool rooms and some neat furniture. There’s an overall feeling of “… yeaaaaah that’s how they restaured this at the beginning of the 20th century and the historical accuracy may not have been the priority” which was also interesting. Overall, I liked the visit − and the building itself is an impressive sight for sure.
We hurried a bit for the end of the visit, because we were pretty close to the timing of the boat that was going from the castle back to Lausanne, and that sounded like a great idea (especially since our month-long transport ticket also covers boats!) And it was indeed a very pleasant trip along the lake, looking at the Lavaux vineyards from below, having the train and the boat exchanging honks, and getting some apéro on the deck.
We went back to the hotel to drop stuff, and went for dinner to Les Trois Rois, a very nice brasserie-style restaurant next to the train station − good food, pleasant service, this was nice! And we went back to the hotel around 21:30, where I’m writing this post as we’re planning for tomorrow.
On the next day, we checked out from the hotel and dropped our luggage in a locker at the train station in Lausanne, so that we could have some freedom to walk a bit in the city. We visited the cathedral, which has an impressive organ (quite modern, it seems) and stained glass windows from the 1930s that I found myself spending more time than I usually do on stained glass. We also walked in the city, visited a board game shop (because that’s what we do), and decided on a whim to visit the Élysée photographic museum.
Said museum had three exhibitions, dedicated to Alfredo Jaar, Hannah Darabi and Ella Maillart. The first one hit me the hardest: 20 photojournalists had been asked for their most joyful and saddest pictures, and both of them were projected on the walls in large format. The exhibition “mood” changed every 20 minutes to go from one side (“paradiso”) to the other (“inferno”), and both “sides” of the exhibition moved me tremendously, in very different ways (I was in tears when I exited the “inferno” part). The other exhibitions were also interesting, but didn’t move me nearly as much.
After the museum, we got our luggage back from the lockers and, after a short train ride, arrived in Montreux where we left them in the local lockers 🙂
As a life-long Queen fan, I almost cannot believe that it took me 18 years living in Switzerland before I went to Montreux − where a number of albums were recorded, and where there’s a very cool Freddie Mercury statue next to the lake.
The casino in Montreux is also home to the studio where Queen recorded there (they did buy said studio, actually), and there’s a small Queen museum on the first floor of the casino. There’s a lot of items; I particularly liked seeing a lot of song lyrics/drafts. There’s also a room where you can see some recording equipment and play with a few sliders to mix various song parts of a song. It was all quite neat; and it made me happy to see a bunch of fans around (the statue has a lot of people taking pictures with various extra items, and the museum has a full corridor plastered with pieces of paper with fan messages. That felt quite wholesome.
In Montreux, apart from that, we mostly strolled along the lake − there’s a very nice promenade; but we didn’t stay much longer before taking the train to Sion, our next destination.
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was Abstract, and I really liked the texture of this rock, found during a walk along the beach front. Not much to say here – this is basically reframing and moving a few cursors in Google Photos of a picture I took with my phone, but there wasn’t much thought around it (I like the colors, though!).
As you may have noticed, I already broke my previous streak − I did take some pictures for the Negative Space theme, but I forgot to post one in time. Still, get a negative space, as a treat:
Another “let’s get back into 52Frames and into the habit of blogging a bit more” shot for this week’s 52Frames with the theme Distortion. My initial goal was to get the crystal ball out and to get a few shots with it, but that didn’t happen 😛 Instead, we were in Graubünden this week-end, and I saw that traffic mirror – I like traffic mirrors 😉 This one isn’t particularly spectacular, but it does have the nice feature of showing the incoming menacing sky against the blue one!
Of note, there was another mirror visible from the first one, but the resulting shot was meh-er.
It’s been a while since I’ve submitted anything to 52Frames, and it’s been a while since I’ve picked up a camera with the objective of “photography” rather than just “remembering something” or “showing something”, and I also want to have more posts on this blog, and and and – anyway, here’s a non-optimal 52Frames shot, for the theme “In The Center“.
The wasp is kind of accidental – I was aiming for a flower picture – but now I do have a wasp in the center of the picture and I thunk that’s actually nice. The picture itself is not great – it’s a phone picture, taken with my hands up while coming back from the gym, it’s not super sharp and I’m not super happy with it. But, it’s a picture, it’s an attempt at getting back into something, and it exists.
I want to pick up photography again − I haven’t touched my camera in a while for Reasons (I’ve done other things! It’s fine!) and it’s at a point where I miss it. I have no idea if it’s going to stick − right now, I had a call with a bunch of photographers last night and I’m super motivated, we’ll see how that goes in the next few weeks 🙂 In the meantime, have some flowers (which are, apparently, trumpet vines). And a wasp. (Fuck wasps, but they are pretty.)
I’ve been using Obsidian as a note-taking app and platform for various personal stuff for almost three years, and that’s probably the longest I’ve stayed with any kind of systems of that type, so it’s a good subject for a post 🙂 I want to give an overview of my current usage, partly as “here’s how I use this tool, maybe it can be useful to you too” and partly as “it’s possible I will have forgotten everything about this in 6 months, so let’s write a few notes to be able to dive back into it if I want to.”
It has become a tradition: in October, we go to Essen in Germany for SPIEL. We have our habits, we know how things work, and we have a grand, if exhausting time. And it’s a great way to test a lot of things and to make opinions and quick reviews! And to come back with, well, a bunch of loot to enjoy between two editions of SPIEL 😉
The loot doesn’t reflect everything we played (and there’s a few things in there that are not a direct consequence of what we played in this edition), so here’s everything we saw!
Azul is a classic, declined in many versions, and this version goes back to the idea of the first game, but in a 2-player version. The original Azul already plays pretty well with two players, but I still appreciated the adjustments to the rules that make it more tactical – a bit more choices that depend on the exact timing (and not only on the opportunity to deny something to your opponent), and I liked the idea of building your grid as you go. We’re not really on the market for 2-player games these days, but if we had been, it would have been under consideration for a buy (especially since we don’t own the original version).
A cooperative game where players try to solve constraints of a round clock with the cards that they are given – but they can only discuss strategy before looking at said cards. Pretty neat, probably has the potential to get very difficult challenges – but it felt like, for us, it would fit the same niche as The Crew (which we both preferred). Very pretty, though, and probably shorter games than The Crew too.
Locus has a very clear (and acknowledged) inspiration from Ganz Schön Clever, except that instead of dice, you get cards with polyominoes – players take turn choosing one and crossing the corresponding patterns in the different grids, with a significant chance to have combos that yield more crossings on the sheet (and hence more points). I liked it well enough, I think it’s also less fiddly than Ganz Schön Clever, which has a few iffy corner cases that require going back to the rules a bit too often, but it wasn’t enough of a wow factor to get a copy.
Bohemians is a deck building game where the currency that you have to get new cards depends on the half-symbols that you manage to combine into full symbols when you get your cards, with additional actions on the better cards (and bad things happening to you if you forget to work to support your artist ways). Cool mechanics (I had previously enjoyed the symbol combination mechanic in After Us), pretty theme, and made by Portal Games, for which I have a personal fondness – we got a box. And with the box I also got the third book of Ignacy Trzewiczek “Boardgames that tell stories” (I had enjoyed the first two) and got it signed since he was around when I got it 🙂
I liked the theme of Postcards – traveling through France and sending postcards – that sounded nice; and the first random postcard that I started the game with depicted Carbonnade Flamande (a personal favorite); but the mechanics of the game (filling in a few tasks, getting the opportunistic bonus and some set collection) fell a bit flat for us.
A Carnivore Dit It! is a cooperative deduction game where you try to solve series of puzzles where you get cards with animals, some statements where you know that a number of them are true (and the rest are false) and try to deduct as a group who’s the culprit. Fun times, a lot of scenarios to go through, and my love of logical puzzles made me grab a copy.
I enjoyed Railroad Ink (a series of roll&writes where you make a rail and road network), so I was very curious about the tile version of it. Players get a set of tiles to add to their network. During the game, they also get to add trains, cars and commuters to their network and score points accordingly; a few bonus tiles and the largest rectangular area of the board round up the final score. This sort of things tickles my brain exactly right, so we got a copy, even if Pierre was less convinced than I was (but then: it has a solo mode!)
Sanibel is a set collection game with a placement on a board and a seashell theme. I liked the theme and the different shapes of the tiles (diamonds and hexagons made of three diamonds), but again not enthusiastically so. And the table was a bit too small, which led to an incident of board flipping that was not very pleasant 😛 (Not the fault of the game, though 🙂 )
Wispwood is a tile laying game where, at each turn, players choose a colored tile from a common reserve and one of the polyominoes next to it to build an increasingly large grid that eventually gets scored along multiple axes. We didn’t get to play it, only got the explanation, but I’m curious about the feel of the game and we’ll try to find an open table in the next few days.
EDIT and we did find a table, and it was indeed delightful, and we bought a box.
In the 7 Wonders Extended Universe, we know have: the dice game! This is a roll and write – at every round, a set of dice is rolled, of which each player chooses one (at the same time) and adds it to their player board for various effects. We could only play for a few numbers of rounds since it was the very end of the day, but again the overall feeling wasn’t enthusiastic.
The Hanging Gardens is a tile laying game where you try to make gardens irrigated in the same way as your objective card while adding animals, plants, humans, and try to optimize the associated points. Pretty neat, but lacked a bit of a “wow” factor.
Castle Combo is a tableau-building game where players build a 3×3 grid of characters that interact in various ways to yield points. It was released last year, but there was an extension this year, which gave us the opportunity to play it; the publisher wasn’t selling the base box today, but it’s going to get on my next shopping list because I really enjoyed it – it’s fast, every decision matters, and it’s tight and well made.
City Tour may well have been designed as “what if Tsuro, but cooperative” – all the players are driving the same bus by adding tiles at the end of its path, gathering passengers and dropping them at various points. Cute, and the box seems to have more options than the basic version we played, but not much more than that for us.
Ladybugs was the unexpected territory control game of the day – you play as a colony of ladybugs that try to control fields of daisies. When putting a ladybug on the field, you get to place it at a distance equal to the numbers of dots on one of the previous ladybugs you have placed, orthogonally; this yields a nice puzzle to be able to place your bugs while planning your next moves. Pretty cool, not a buy.
Restart was the most puzzling game we played on Friday. It presents itself as a riff between Rummikub and Uno; players place numbered tiles in increasing rows, with a few special tiles allowing them to manipulate the board a bit. Whether it was because we were only two players or because we weren’t playing aggressively enough, neither of us got the point of the game (which doesn’t happen often!)
In INK, players try to get rid of their ink bottles by placing them on a tiled board that they build during the game – when an area is large enough, you get to place ink bottles on the few places in that area that welcome them. Larger areas yield bonuses that can create small combos. It was a very pleasant game and the ink bottles were adorable and I’m looking forward to playing it again with the box we bought.
Cosmolancer is the new edition of a 1994 game (something we learnt after playing it 🙂 ). Players take turns placing score tiles and scoring tokens on a board to maximize their own score and minimize their opponent’s. Good design, tight game, a couple of things that we didn’t necessarily fully understand/score correctly during our game. But also not something we’d expect to put on the table.
The accidental social game of the day. In Dying Message, one player plays the murder victim and the others the detectives. The murder victim has a set of abstract cards to communicate who killed them from beyond the grave, and the detectives must decide, given a list of suspects, who the victim may be talking about. I took the role of the murder victim, and all my detectives failed at understanding me 🙁 This might be fun with the right group, but we don’t think we’re necessarily part of that type of group 🙂
Trnd is a game where you try to collect the largest possible set of a certain type of chairs while discarding the rest. And you can only discard identical cards that have a common characteristic (color or shape) with the current discard. Intriguing, but not quite enough to make us get a box.
In Knitting Circle, players create clothes from squares of wool that their cats bring them. There’s two phases in each round: moving cats around a wheel to get wool pieces, and assembling said wool pieces to clothes, with various bonuses for specific colors, patterns or shape. Cute, and the switch between player-interaction phases to get materials and more solitaire puzzle during assembly is pleasant. Didn’t click quite enough to get a box though.
Scribble City is a game where you draft cards to add roads and polyomino buildings to a map. A few objectives and additional bonuses make it a bit more strategic, and overall this would have been a buy… if their shipment had arrived in time for Essen! As it is, I’ll probably try to get a copy at some point still.
Ravel is a solo (or “two people working the problem together”) game where you have a set of dice, constraints on how you can move/change them, and objective to fill. It’s a very nice puzzle, it has a few ways to adjust the difficulty (we were either very lucky or very good at it today), and it’s delightful. I got a box.
Hues and Cues is a party game where someone tries to give clues for the other players to guess a color. The closer people are from the color to be guessed, the more points the clue giver and the guessers get. We had a few laughs in the couple of rounds that we played – including with someone who was very colorblind but evidently surprisingly good at color games 😀 Fun to play, but not a fit for our usual games.
Just 3 Folds is an origami game. You get a picture and a piece of colored paper, and you have to re-create the picture by folding the piece of paper only three times. The additional twist is that you’re actually creating only a quarter of the image, and check your work by putting it against an angle mirror. Cute concept, and we got a copy – it may work for us under some circumstances.
We hadn’t played Flip 7 yet, which is now fixed! It’s a push your luck game, described as “a mix of black jack and Uno”. You can continue getting cards as long as you wish, but if you get two identical ones, you lose (and the winner is the one with the largest score). Pretty fun and the Deluxe edition (which we played) is gorgeous, but the game itself doesn’t necessarily warrant the price point of said deluxe edition. That said, might get a deck of the regular edition at some point – looks like an easy filler game.
In The Last Droids, you get cards that you can either buy for their effects or recycle to get resources to buy said cards. It’s a post-apocalyptic theme where you try to rebuild houses, and the cards are defunct robots (that you can either repair for actions or recycle). The originality comes from the four-player game, in which players team up in two teams, and draft cards, giving the other one, depending on the turn, to their adversary or to their partner. I really really enjoyed it and I got a box. I’m curious to see how it plays with other numbers of players too!
We only got a table explanation of this game and we have very little chance of getting a table, but it looks quite fascinating. It’s an open world exploration game where players are (in game) physically separated but can communicate to achieve a common mission; there’s a metric ton of cards and it’s NOT a campaign game, just a game with a lot of randomization of the starting conditions. I’m VERY curious and I’d love to give it a try (but it’s also sold out, so even the leap of faith is not an option).
Propolis is a game with bees (and you get a bunch of beeples) where you collect resources to build cards that give you discounts for future buys. It is very reminiscent of Splendor, with a few more strategic elements, and it’s really nice, but not distinct enough niche-wise from Splendor to my taste to warrant a buy.
Carnival of Sins looks pretty neat, concept-wise – each player has a hand of 7 cards that they will play entirely to get dice that are rolled at the beginning of the round, with various cards effects (get the highest die, get an odd and even die, that sort of things), with a few backstabby effects too. The cards are also very pretty. But we did run in at least 3 corner cases that were not mentioned in the rulebook during our game, which made it feel a bit incomplete, rule-wise.
Into the Machine is a very efficient combination of racing game (you want to move your markers as fast as possible to the end) and worker placement (by making actions on a board where space is limited). Very very enjoyable, good iconography – it was a prototype so no copies to buy but it may be in next year’s list.
Table demo only for Skybridge, a game where players try to build a bridge in the sky with the hell of various characters and gods. It did look interesting, but not enough to try to fight for a table on our last, shorter day.
Weave
We played Weave at two players, and we suspect it’s best for two players – but it was very good at two players. You’re both playing on the same grid, trying to make alignments of gems on the correct color of tile with three actions: pick a gem, place a gem, flip a tile (to get another, known color). If you place a gem on a tile of the same color, you get an extra action depending on said color leading to fun combos. First player to three points (which happens when an action creates a line) wins the game. Very pleasant, and we got a copy (and I’ll update the BoardGameGeek link when it’s out of the processing queue 🙂 ).
In Five Families, players play mafia families trying to control boroughs of New York in the 1930s. They try to claim territory and, if they manage to transform their claim, control it, usually at the cost of people (canonically “injured”) and/or money. Areas are grouped into sets of threes on which majority of control is computed for extra points. I liked it a lot for the first half of the game, and then it felt like it was getting quite long. I suspect that we were not playing the game aggressively enough for it to quite work.
Kingdom Crossing was high on my list of games I wanted to look at this year, and it almost didn’t work out (but we found a table as the last thing we played this year!). There’s no way I’m going to resist “we took the 7 bridges of Königsberg and made a board game with that”. Add to that cute animals, a solid engine building mechanism and action selection, and you get a box I’m happy to have in my collection 🙂
I’ve been a very avid participant to the Photography Scavenger Hunt in the past, but I had let a few rounds go by recently for reasons that are not entirely clear to me either. For this round, I decided to get back on the horse and to submit pictures; we went to Iceland this summer, and I mostly submitted shots from that trip, including some “found shots” shoehorned into the theme after the fact! We did have to submit a grid of pictures as a bonus as well, though, so I reframed/cropped all the pictures so that they could fit on said grid.
In the order of the reveals, here are the pictures I submitted. The headings have links to the albums of my fellow Scavengers.
Asphalt was not a found shot, I knew the word was on the list, and I hunted it down specifically. When we were near a geothermal plant on the sixth day of our trip, this road going upwards seemingly alone in that terrain caught my eye, and I took multiple shots of it. I liked this one best, with the large white vehicle in the foreground – we’ve seen a lot of these during our trip.
Another one that was less “found shot” and more “I have bleak on my list, and this is actually pretty bleak.” That’s one of the recent lava fields near Grindavík, which we saw on the last day of our trip. Volcanoes are fascinating and terrifying, and Iceland is a constant reminder of that.
Well, that one is the only one that I did not shoot in Iceland; I came home, and I had nothing that I could make fit from that trip. So I got my tripod and light box out, a large water recipient, and some blue ink, and I made some ink patterns. It’s honestly quick and dirty for studio work, which makes it somewhat unsatisfying, but better a mid pic than no pic! 😀
I was probably thinking more of “bleak” than of “goth” when I took this picture on our day 10 on the black sand beach, but I think it worked well for Goth as well. I would like to point out that this picture is NOT processed as black and white and that it is indeed color photography!
This one was part found shot and part not. I didn’t have the word in my mind at all when I took the picture (I was more interested in the geyser!) but I knew exactly what to use when I saw the word again – small faraway people looking like ants! And a lot of them too. This was on the last day of our trip.
Mystery was absolutely a found shot. I had put that in “this is probably a Scavenger picture” when I sorted through my travel photos because the way the lava shows through the shadows makes it very difficult for me to see anything else than a fox with fiery eyes… but it’s “just” the way lava fell there. Also this was during the Lava show part of our visit on the 10th day.
Jet was pretty much a given: I’m travelling by plane, surely I’ll be able to snap a jet picture of some kind. Hence, I have a bit more plane picz than usual – and I really liked this one 🙂
Horses in Iceland are very photogenic, and I went through my horse pictures to find one for the theme. It was harder than I expected because the best horses didn’t necessarily work background-wise, but I eventually decided on this one.
Shadow was the hardest word of this Hunt for me, and I’m not very convinced with what I ended up submitting – this is the entrance of a small cave that we popped by almost by chance (tiny place, just a couple of interesting holes 🙂 ). But it definitely has a large shadow considering the lack of light!
The final word was Grid, as a bonus to show all your pictures in a single one. I would have much preferred having all Iceland pictures, but Ink and Jet are a bit the odds one out (for Jet I probably had alternatives if it had been the only odd one out). I had laid out my grid before I did the processing of the other pictures, because it constrained the ratios of my crops; I considered going for all squares, but I felt like the longer format worked better.
And there, another round done! We’ll see how the next one goes 🙂
I’ve had the opportunity to take an 8-week sabbatical from work, and I took that opportunity this summer. Eight weeks feel both long and short – after a week, you’re more than 10% done! but then, you still have more than a month and a half off!
Overall, it was a great experience. It gave me time to travel to Pas-de-Calais in France, and to Iceland. Those two done, that was three weeks (both “already” and “only” 🙂 ).
A picture from the aforementioned Pas-de-Calais
And apart from that? Well, I enjoyed my free time. Processing the Iceland pictures did take a significant chunk of post-travel time, so there was that. I read a bit; I restarted reading The Expanse, I’m not done yet. I created an e-mail subscription to Serialit to read Notre Dame de Paris, and I’ve been reading that as well. I played videogames – including Expedition 33, which was also a large chunk of time.
I coded a bit – not that much – on some vague project that will potentially see the light of day maybe at some point – I currently envision it as a “to-be-read pile management clicker game”, but it has already changed shape two or three times since I started playing with the concept. It made me play with a bit of Typescript, some fancy CSS stuff, and handle a bunch of messy real-life data in the hope of being able to generate synthetic data (not with an LLM. Possibly somewhere in the realm of machine-learny-thing-stuff, but even that might be a stretch.)
I also spent some time preparing for Zug Day, to which we participated at the end of August – trying to get a maximum amount of points by going to various places in Switzerland, all by public transport. It was a lot of fun! (Also quite tiring 🙂 )
I handled a couple of chores, most notably filing the taxes – that was basically the first week (first year I’m doing that on my own in 15+ years – and the Swiss/Zürich tax form is no joke! And in German.)
I played some solo board games, an activity that I thoroughly enjoy but don’t necessary take the time to slow down for in my regular schedule. I still have a Welcome to the Moon campaign to continue, so that’s going to happen, and I’m grumpy at my Maglev Metro scores, so that will happen too, probably. The SPIEL fair in Essen is less than a month away; I might be on the lookout for stuff there too 😉
On the “gaming” side of things, I also made good progress with the amazing book that is The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, which is an utterly amazing puzzle book with a bunch of language puzzles. It’s a GREAT collection that tickles my brain in just the right way; I’ve finished a good 70% of it.
Being out of the usual schedule also gives an opportunity to evaluate, improve and fix one’s “systems” – I did manage to setup a todo-list system that actually seems to work (and that also apparently survived the “back to real-life schedule”) with Todoist, and I did some tweaking of my Obsidian setup – maybe I’ll talk a bit more about that at some point.
I wanted to work more on AlphabeticalZürich, and that kind of failed; part of that was traveling, part of that was “I fucked up my knee somehow and I’m currently supposed to be resting it”, which makes me a bit grumpy.
I have now been back at work for two weeks. The first week was a breeze, the second one hit me much harder. On the seventh week of my sabbatical, I was starting to look forward to being at work, although I was a bit anxious about catching up with two months of stuff happening. That, however, went surprisingly well – I’m still missing bits of context here and there, but overall it’s all good. But, I’ve long had issues with balancing the (objectively mistaken) impression that I’m not doing “enough” with long-term sustainability; I had made good progress in the past year, but I see old anxious patterns popping their head again as I’m back at work. Hopefully this will settle down as things go back to regular routine – and if not, well, I’ve done the work once, second time should be easier. I’m not too worried, and I’m still very happy to be back!
Overall, these 8 weeks were very (very) close to an unmitigated success: I’m happy I took that break, I’m now refreshed and happy that the break is over, and I think I learnt some sorely needed “taking-a-break-and-relaxing” skills 😉
Today, I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Before I give a link to the game website, I need to say that I’ve been advised to get into the game without knowing anything about it, and that it was good advice. That said, at the risk of spoilers: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
The game has been recommended to me by at least two people who do not know each other, with the same kind of recommendation: a/ it’s amazing you have to play it b/ don’t read anything about it before playing, just get in there and enjoy. I’ll try, in this post, to keep the potential spoilers to a bare minimum; that said, if you want the pristine experience, you may want to stop reading here, go play the game, and see where you go from there :p
