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The RyanariumLists, photos, and musings from the mind of Ryan Hackel June 25 I live here now In the last three months, my life has changed significantly. I bought a house! One week after posting the game bag update at The Ryanarium, my wife and I went trawling for a new house, a search that had already consumed a frustrating three years of our lives. We visited an open house near our apartment, and immediately felt it was perfect for us. Finally, a house that we did not have to compromise anything about! Great size, great condition, great neighborhood, and within our budget. This was what we'd been waiting for! (Bonus: the house belonged to a submarine captain!) We first saw the house on a Saturday. We bid for it on Sunday. Our bid was accepted on Tuesday. It was fast, thrilling, a dread hope. We moved in at the beginning of May, and were immediately confronted with a Herculean list of repairs and tasks. We replaced all the two-prong electrical outlets with three-prong, and replaced the metal cover plates of each. We replaced the sink drainpipes in the half-bath by the kitchen. We replaced a leaking hose bib (with a frost-free). We replaced the leaking main water valve. We installed pet-proof screen on the attic louvers. We replaced the attic ventilation fan. We pulled the weeds out from between the patio bricks. We mowed the neglected lawn, which had been growing unchecked all spring. We bought Ikea dressers and a loveseat, and assembled them. We put protective felt feet on the coffee table. We scrubbed every surface we could find to scrub. We hung portraits and put up drapes. During all this, I've been without a stable internet connection. As much as I'm tempted to, I will not grouse about it here; those in my corporeal life have had to put up with that enough already. Let's just say it's been a long six weeks, and it's still not resolved. I've also been busy Having A Life. My father visited to help us move in. My in-laws were here the following week. I was a groomsman for my brother's wedding. My wife and I satisfied our long-held cravings for roller coasters with a day at Cedar Point, where I was able to ride some of my favorite coasters (The Corkscrew, the Iron Dragon, and the Gemini) and discovered two new favorites (The Mine Ride and the WildCat). We visited Fort Necessity, a young George Washington's introductory course in colonial combat. I have learned to play and to love a co-op boardgame called Pandemic. My mother came to visit, and we showed her The Pope-Leighey House and Woodrow Wilson's house. Nifty Wikipedia Thing: Erdos-Bacon numbers I fondly remember Tako the Octopus, who will be cooking your dinner. Movies I've Seen:
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March 09 A guided tour of my game bag This is my Wednesday Night Game Bag. Dutifully carried to The Compleat Strategist on almost every Wednesday since 2004, it's got everything I need for tabletop gaming on the go. Altogether, it weighs 10 pounds, and holds twenty games plus six Icehouse stashes plus all the supporting generic accessories I can think of needing. The bag itself was meant for fishing tackle. I've never used it for outdoorsmanship, but it carried my towel during my days of competitive swimming back in the mid-Nineties. 
The main compartment is where all the games live, with minimal wasted space. It's taken me five years of Tetris-like precision packing, but I doubt I could accommodate even one more box. In fact, I'm in trouble if one of these games gets reprinted in a different size box! 
Back row... Bang (with all expansions) and En Garde share a plastic clamshell. So do Guillotine and Naval Battles. I carry two picks from the B-Movie card games, out of the six sets I own, and I swap these out as I see fit. Give Me the Brain, Chez Goth, Fluxx (in the Pink Treehouse box), and Management Material are lined up back to back. Behind this row lie Martian Coasters and Proton, two slim and sturdy flat games that fit nicely in a space where nothing else could belong. Front row... Battle for Hill 218, Aquarius, Igor, Chrononauts, Early American Chrononauts, and Burn Rate. I don't need to carry both Chrono sets, but I always will anyway. I'm a sucker for time travel. Then on top, I've carefully arranged five tubes of Icehouse pyramids. Each tube holds six nests, for a total of six stashes, sufficient for pickup games of Volcano, Martian Coasters, Zendo, or Zarcana. There's my Zarcana deck, too, wrapped up in the incredibly nifty Chessboard bandana. My deluxe copy of Wanderlust lives in its own box. Ferrball's Mansion has its own tuckbox, but the rulesheet won't fit. There's still room for three copies of Wanderlust to hand away, but I'm all out at the moment. I think I've sent out 25 copies already. The front pocket holds the rulesheets for many games. The rulebook for Naval Battles wouldn't fit without folding, so I made my own one-page summary sheet. There are a handful of ICE-7 packets to hand out to potential pyramaniacs. Two Altoids tins hold dice, one of d6s and the other of polyhedra. A mangled Magic: Ice Age box holds my promo cards. My deck of playing cards of choice is the 2003 California Recall deck, inspired by the Iraqi 52. The side pockets hold tins of things, and other extras. These mesh pockets aren't as protective as the main compartment, so boxes and cards don't go here. There's two tins of chips for tokens, a tin of Go stones for Othello or Zendo, a pouch of my best d6s, a d30 and d24 just in case, and two Altoids tins full of... Altoids. Go figure. 
Nifty Wikipedia Thing: Casanova's jailbreak Amusing Internet Video: When Engineers Own a Dog
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January 26 Robots, Time Machines, and Ayn Rand Here's a photo of my Wall-E mod of RoboRally. The movie and the boardgame were a perfect fit for each other, and I spent a weekend rebasing the figures and printing the player mats. UberKudos to Ian for locating the Wall-E figures, and BGG regular named Russell for making the player mats. The XIX Time Travel Movie Night was held on Dec. 31, 2008. 2009: Lost Memories is a Korean action film with a title that could not be more appropriate for the coming year. It takes place in an alternate history timeline, one in which the nation state of Korea (North or South) never existed, the entire Korean peninsula subjugated by Japan since 1910. The hero of the film joins up with some Korean nationalist guerrillas, and uses an ancient time portal to travel back a hundred years and create the timeline that you and I know as ours. This three-hour film is twice as long as it needs to be, with excessive amounts of character setup and backstory, along with unwarranted amounts of pathos for the hero and his comrades. The film pushed the boundaries of my cultural awareness of both Korea and Japan, and many of the film's subtler details were probably lost on me. Lastly, I'm not so sure it was a good idea to go back in time and *create* North Korea. My thesis remains that the Korean people may have fared better under Japanese dominance than to suffer the agony and dichotomy that has gripped half the peninsula since 1945. I'd give 2009: Lost Memories 3 stars out of five. Idaho Transfer is one of the older time travel films I've watched, and one of the more painful ones, too. It's an early 1970s dystopian vision of the future. Scientists researching matter teleportation stumble upon the secret to time travel, only to find that the future is an empty wasteland. Before government agents shut the program down, the project's leaders send a handful of the nation's smartest teenagers into the future with the mission of repopulating the earth. (Older people who attempt the 'transfer' suffer fatal kidney damage.) There are two plot twists near the end of the film that I won't give away here, but rest assured the film gets darker and moodier as it concludes. No animals were harmed in the making of this film, but a whole lot of weed was! Many of the characters spend a good deal of the time in a state of undress, part of the hippie culture's War on Pants (though in their defense, there is a good reason for this). The ambient electronic musical score is mostly in the style of Boards of Canada, assuming they had a blue period. But I still prickle at the way they decide to send academic prodigies into the future. Instead of botanists and geologists, the world of the future needed hunters, carpenters, and medics. Less eggheads, more Eagle Scouts! How are these kids supposed to survive alone without basic wilderness skills? The complete lack of common sense in the repopulation plan smacks of either total incompetence or total haste. This gets 2 stars out of five; I'll give it credit for trying to challenge me. (Oh, and did I mention that the only recognizable name in the whole mess is the director, Peter Fonda?) After ten months, I finally finished Atlas Shrugged, the heaviest, densest, most conservative and irascibly brilliant novel I've ever completed the chore of reading. I started it last March, and I couldn't have picked a more timely point in recent history to read this. As I write this, America and the world is mired in the fourteenth month of the harshest recession in seventy years. The events of the novel carried a eerie parallel to the daily news reports. As the fictional gears stopped turning, so did our own. As more than one economic pundit has pointed out, Atlas Shrugged is not just apropos for our time, we are currently living it. Rand's greatest fault as a novelist is that she's not very good at showing instead of telling. I do not mean that in the sense of scenery descriptions; Rand is the master of the simile and metaphor. However, she tends to describe things in a subjective rather than objective manner, painting the picture in such a way as barring all but one interpretation... hers. There's also a lot of expository filler, where Rand forgets she's writing a novel instead of a textbook. The perfect example is Part 3, Chapter 7 which is almost entirely a sole monologue. I think this novel would have more widespread appeal, and have its message reach more people, if it were stripped down about 30%, focusing more letting the story tell its own lessons. Also, Rand is unabashed at foreshadowing, completely lacking subtlety. Chapters in advance, she makes big deals of things that ultimately pan out to be rather minor. Again, she's forcing you to interpret the story the only way she intended it to. I would have loathed to be on the debate team with Ayn Rand, as her aggressive style of persuasion reminds me of certain politicians, the ones who are always right not by reason but by denial of rebuttal. Amusing Internet Video: Look Around You (Iron)... part of a series. Nifty Wikipedia Thing: Life on Mars, the hard way Movies I've Seen:
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December 23 The Puzzle Challenge When I was a lad, my family had a Christmas tradition. We would give ourselves the collective gift of a large jigsaw puzzle, often one thousand pieces or more. If we completed it before New Year's Day, then the coming year would be a lucky one. Evelyn and I decided to dust off the tradition this season, choosing as our start date the shortest night of the year, incidentally the beginning of Chanukkah. She chose this year's puzzle... a scenic caricature of Washington DC. In the spirit of TGI Friday's, there's all kinds of crazy stuff hidden on it, inexplicable things that we've given silly nicknames to in our attempt to navigate the chaos of the scene: Dr. Dolittle, Go North Guy, Whigman, Car Parts Kung-Fu Guy, The Popcorn Smasher, The House Carriers, Easter Bunny, The Gingerbread Walkers. and my favorite, the guy holding up the protest sign that reads "Hooray For my Sign"! I want to do that at a protest rally someday. :) We have seven days left until our 1.1.09 deadline. Will we complete it in time? The race is on! Nifty Wikipedia Thing: The Great Daylight 1972 Fireball Movies I've Seen:
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December 07 16, 26, and 007 I went home to Indiana, where I met a mother, a father, a grandfather, a brother, two fiancees, an uncle, an aunt, a stepmom, a dozen cousins, two friends, six cats, two ferrets, and a brand new niece. I ate lots of delicious food. It feels like I spent the entire nine days constantly being fed. I visited Lincoln's birthplace near Hodgenville, Kentucky, pictured above. At the top of the steps is a Greek revival temple containing a 19th century log cabin very similar to the one Lincoln was born in. (People used to consider this The Cabin, but modern science has recently disproved the notion.) The Lincolns lived here for just a few years. Abe's father Thomas was challenged in court as to his ownership of the land. Thomas lost, and the family had to move ten miles northeast to Knob Hill. They stayed there for a few more years then moved across the Ohio river to Indiana, where Lincoln lived until beginning his law practice in Illinois. Evelyn thinks that his father's defeat in land claims court inspired young Abe to become a lawyer. I also visited former president Benjamin Harrison's house in Indianapolis, where he lived from 1854 until his death in 1901. It is well-preserved and contains many period items of furniture and decor from the Gilded Age, many of which belonged to the Harrisons. I viewed the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, and inevitably made comparisons between it and 2006's Casino Royale. QoS maintains the same level of debonair realism that CR had, but replaces the love story with a cavalcade of action. The movie starts with a vicious car chase and shootout on crowded Italian coastal roads. Then a brief scene of dialogue segues into a chase on foot leading to a gunfight. Clues are revealed, leading to more killing, a boat chase, and some explosions. In general, the film is really a series of actions sequences tightly strung together by brief but interesting dialogue, a far departure from CR's languid suspense. Gone are the casino games, the shaken martinis, the gadgets (aside from some lucid computer screens at MI6), and the girls with double entendre names. Casino Royale showed us that Craig exudes a brash and bold Connery, but QoS demonstrates his ability to portray a haunted angry Dalton. If you liked From Russia With Love and The Living Daylights, then you will like QoS. Nifty Internet Toy: The Common Census Project Another Nifty Internet Toy: All of Inflation's Little Parts Movies I've Seen:
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