The Hottest Day
I like how the iPhone’s noise makes this photo look like a painting with no extra filters.
This weekend my family and I retreated to Ocean Shores, a sleepy little beach community that provided us with a hiding place from the hottest days of the year.
We planned this trip two weeks ago, before we found out that the weekend would be three straight days of record-breaking heat. Seattle’s high was 104 on Sunday, 108 on Monday, and we drove though heat up to 112 (according to the car) on our way home last night. Even near the ocean, temps were in the high 80s all night Sunday, with no breeze but plenty of bugs.
We don’t have AC in our house, but we have it in the car, so these turned out to be the perfect two days to escape Seattle. We took a nice, cool morning ferry to the Olympic Peninsula, spent Sunday afternoon shopping in Port Townsend, and drove through more hellish heat on our way down to the coast.
Monday morning at the beach, pictured above, was apocalyptic. It was still hot in the morning, but a cool breeze rolled in with a thick fog bank around noon. The shoreline was one Hans Zimmer short of a Blade Runner.
We had planned to go north along the coast on Monday, but it was still nearly 100 anywhere but Ocean Shores, so we ran out the clock in the beach town, shopping and touristing until about 5:00. Luckily, the car didn’t break, though the AC does leak profusely into a puddle in the front seat that we dubbed “passenger lake.”
We’ve all seen hotter, of course, but not in Seattle. This town isn’t ready for it. Nobody has air conditioning. The highways buckled. It’s 103 in Las Vegas right now, and they probably aren’t even noticing. But up here, it’s nasty.
Meanwhile, at Crab Fragment Labs
November Cons: Looks like I will be rejoining the convention scene in November, if Covid continues to remit. I’m looking at no fewer than four gaming cons, including GobbleCon in San Francisco. I’ll post more details on the home page as those plans come into focus.
Tresotti: Last week I uploaded the rules to Tresotti, a basic trump game with the Fairmarket Deck. Today I made a few clarifications in that rules doc, thanks to feedback on Twitter, so please check out version 1.1.
The Cottage War: My big project last week was writing the background for yet another “traditional” card deck, set in the Carrisor universe, and featuring a whole new cast of characters from 40 years prior to the current story line. If you want to read more about that game you’ll have to be patient, or you can get a sneak peek behind the scenes by becoming a subscriber on Patreon.
Agents of the Crown: I’ve struggled with this one for months. For now, I’ve decided that the best way to share this game is as a pure standard-deck game, which is how it was originally invented. So I will write up the rules and history of this game (the actual history!) sometime this week.
So Much More! Last week I met with Lone Shark Games, to help with their plans for a few new Lords of Vegas expansions. Mike reminded me that there is still a great word game sitting on my back burner, that just needs me to make a deck of letter cards, and hopefully I will find that time soon. And of course I can never sit still, so I’ll shortly be on the road again, driving a load of boxes to Las Vegas, where I hope nothing has melted since I saw it last.
And now, a slice of natural beauty from Ocean Shores:
A literal crab fragment, courtesy of the Pacific Ocean. “Never turn your back on the sea.”