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It is summer and the wildflowers in my front yard are off the hook!

I’m selling 2 Burning Man tickets (no car pass) at our cost, $870 each. Message me!

In our panic to get tickets, my wife and I both bought tickets to that thing in the desert. Please buy our extras. 2 tickets at the $750 level, selling for what we paid with all the fees, $870.48 each. No car pass, sorry.

Here’s my Tixel listing but don’t buy from those bastards! The listing shows how I listed at $895.68 (I aimed for us to split the Tixel $50 listing fee) but a few clicks later you’ll be paying $1084.81 for the ticket https://tixel.com/u/3693633. Screw those guys!

PM me. We can figure out how to trust one another on the phone to save $200 per ticket.

My GoConfirm code: L72T

GoConfirm is apparently a new way to verify a person’s identity. They are using it on the Burning Man Tickets and Vehicle Pass Exchange FB group.

Last night I played 7 Wonders at Monday night gaming.

It’s very complicated.

I suppose I mostly understood how to play by the end of the game but not really why. It’s 90% me vs. the cards I randomly get. And nothing seemed to “happen” during the game until we tallied the score at the very end.

Scoring is so complicated. I made most of my choices based on “ooh, that’s a pretty card, I’ll choose that one.” and I scored in the middle of the pack at the end of the game. So many of the “strategic” choices come down to whether luck will favor me getting the right cards. There are just so many ways to score victory points that it all evens out in the end.

I’ve also got to admit that I was distracted the entire evening due to some personal issues. So maybe the game is actually better than I experienced.

The night opened with a rousing game of Abducktion. I was too late to get in, but fun was had.

At the end of the night, we played a little round of Liars Dice. Such a simple game, but ultimately rather satisfying!

Last week at Community Games Night, I played Raiders of the North Sea again. Despite learning it just last month, I had mostly forgotten how to play. I ultimately played a bit better than the last time but quickly remembered that I would rather be playing directly with other players (either with or against); I’m playing mostly against my cards and the board. It was fine, the pictures are pretty.

Last night at Monday Night Gaming, I got to play Arcs: Conflict and Collapse in the Reach. It’s a complex, very nice game! By the end of 2 1/2 hours of gameplay, we were officially 3/5 of the way through a game and I was still figuring out rules, but it was fun! And a very good group to play with, teaming up with Kevin against Arthur will always be a thing. And Arthur will still always win ;-)

Kevin getting a shot of me getting shredded by my own attack on Arthur’s blue ships

There’s growing evidence that prenatal exposure to nitric oxide increases the incidence of autism in children, maybe 1.4 times. Nitric oxide is found in engine exhaust, natural gas stoves, tobacco smoke, and smog.

In April, RFK Jr. made it a top priority to identify the causes of autism. I wonder how the discussion will go: RFK Jr to Trump, “Fossil fuel exhaust causes autism! To make America Healthy Again, you should encourage renewable energy, electric cars, electric stoves, and discourage smoking!”
Trump, “Since taking office, I made executive orders doing exactly the opposite on each of those fronts.” (which is true) “So here’s what I’m going to do…”

Sources:

• Medscape Article
• Consensus.app review of research
• Info about nitric oxide

Is USDirectory.com legit? No. No it is not.

I first blogged about them 18 years ago. Wow, 18 years?! And just today I got another review reaffirming their scammy spamminess.

Stay away from USDirectory.com.

I got about 2/3 of the way through playing Small World world at Monday night gaming. I had to bail because Abigail said she missed me, so I rushed home. I think it takes a few playings to get the hang of all the characters and their powers. We all played quietly, focusing on the many many pieces on the board.

Pope Francis passed away 2 weeks ago. Would it be strange and deeply offensive if I put on a pope hat, robes, and a cross around my neck and posted a photo here? Well, that is what Donald Trump did. I am loathe to repost it but proof of this offense needed.

What if a week after the pope passed away, I said I thought I should be the next pope? Would that be strange and offensive? That’s what Donald Trump did.

It is disturbing in the extreme that anyone would seriously support such a notion. That is what the “Honorable” Republican senator from South Carolina did with his sycophantic remarks.

I tried Visible Wireless because they are an MNVO for Verizon and those towers have slightly better service at my daughter’s elementary school than the other networks.

But there is, apparently, congestion on their network most of the day in my area. With my phone sitting in front of me on my desk, calls often go straight to voicemail, with wifi calling on or off. Texts take 2-60 minutes to arrive. Their website is so terribly slow; logging in takes 13 seconds, every page load takes 3 seconds. Ugh.

I called support and they walked me through a 40 minute eSIM card reset that didn’t help. On the next call, they sent me a physical SIM card to try to fix the issue but it did not.

I upgraded to “Visible+” in the hopes that more money would magically fix the problem, but no.

After 2 months of trying, I’ve got to say goodbye to Visible Wireless.

This is a followup to my long running work on getting people to understand the proper medical symbol, the Rod of Asclepius. Read.

I finally reached someone at Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Dr. Alfredo Sansone, Executive Publisher at Elsevier and STM Journals.

Right now,  it appears that Dr. Sansone doesn’t appear interested in making sure good and correct articles are published and visible, but to… I don’t know! He responded to my first message having obviously not read it thoughtfully. For example, I made a summative statement and backed it up with a detailed reasoning along with several hundred citations (yes, several hundred). But his response was to attack the summative statement in a sideways manner, ignoring all the rest. His other disagreements with my thesis just don’t make sense. I followed up with a long clarifying letter, hoping to further progress but while he has definitely viewed it, and another message I sent, he hasn’t responded. I’m considering publishing our weird interaction and just giving up on this part of the project.

I had pursued this because when you google “medical symbol” an article on Dr. Sansone’s Mayo Clinic Proceedings (MCP) site came up first. Today I note that the MCP article doesn’t come up first any more! Google still gets the answer wrong in summary, but EVERY article it links to reports that the Rod of Asclepius is the more appropriate symbol.