Most cats love boxes… climbing in them, sleeping in them, squeezing into boxes that they shouldn’t be able to fit in…
But Jinx just likes to tear them apart:
Home Arcade
Setting up a home video arcade…
Spoiler (click to reveal)
My brother’s response when I sent him this recording was fun:
Is that YOUR LIVING ROOM??!!!
Followed soon after by:
Oh! Faker! I was still watching this when I sent the first message.
I thought you’d bought a full cabinet game!
Pretty cool though. Although ExciteBike would be even better
If you don’t know already, this is Retrocade, as seen with the Vision Pro. (It’s also available on iOS and iPadOS but then you don’t get a full size game cabinet in your living room!) The cabinets are really the best part – they’re so well crafted and detailed. Note the simulated reflections from both the game graphics and from the windows and lights in my house reflecting on the cabinets and the “glass” screens.
Ah, but they need to allow placing more than one cabinet at a time and they need to let you leave them in place in your house while you use other apps, like how the VisionOS spatial widgets work.
Meanwhile… what do you do if a portal opens up to Half Life’s City 17 in your house? 🤓
And There Was Much Gaming
Another year of board gaming topped off with a gathering for New Year’s Day:
This gallery is from February 2025 through New Year’s Day of 2026 and includes SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Gentes, On the Underground: London/Berlin, Age of Rail: South Africa, Cloud Age, Arcs, Hollywood: 1947, Galactic Cruise, Bomb Busters, Gutenberg, Nucleum, Green Team Wins, Shackleton Base, Rings & Things, Dead by Daylight, Thunder Road: Vendetta, Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Andromeda’s Edge, Polynesia, Steam Power, Revive, Ecos, Merchant of Venus, Endeavor: Deep Sea, Wildcatters, Photosynthesis, Smartphone, Inc., Cosmic Encounter, Clank! Catacombs, Artemis Odyssey, Panamax, Flip Toons, Hot Streak, 1930 – The Golden Age of Airlines, Dead Reckoning, First Flight, Skate Summer, Rocketmen, The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, Speakeasy, Slide 5, FaeKin, Magical Athlete, Cosmic Encounter, Deck Chairs on the Titanic, Pandemic: Iberia
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The Sphere in Las Vegas
Darlene and I just made a short trip to Las Vegas midweek to see The Wizard of Oz @ The Sphere. They chopped the heck out of the original movie to make this production (and scale down the runtime) but the whole immersive experience is pretty wild and amazing – from tornado wind effects and flying debris to falling snow and apples. It’s definitely fun and worthwhile.
This video highlights some of what went into producing this experience and it was clearly quite the effort but I was also amused to see all the funny compromises needed to fill out the massive spherical display from the original 85-year old movie. In particular, you can see how they had to cut and paste various background characters to fill out the now expansive view – many are looking off in odd directions or stuck in little loops of motion or unnaturally still or even sized disproportionately. There are missing shadows and other compositing difficulties and all of the dialog echoes like sound in a stadium (because I guess that’s how big the space is) but it doesn’t matter – it’s still a fantastic spectacle! And yes, section 306 is the prime viewing area as others have reported – not too low, not too high and everything viewed straight on.
We stayed two nights at The Venetian to have a view of the outside of The Sphere. (We suspect now that the rooms at the Pallazzo have a more direct view than what we had in the North Tower but it was fine.) We spent the first half of the day at Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas installation (“Omega Mart”) – an interactive, immersive experience located in the Area 15 complex of attractions. It was fun and the amount of detail they put into everything is impressive – from the props to the backstory. You can engage with and digest the material to various degrees from just casually walking around to poring over the materials and interacting with the various terminals to solve the mystery or complete a sort of intensive scavenger hunt. We spent a middle ground of three hours just checking things out and completing the objectives associated with the optional employee “boop” card.
After lunch we spent a little time exploring some of the other attractions in Area 15 and then we headed back to our hotel ahead of the Wizard of Oz show by way of a free demo ride in a Zoox vehicle – a unique looking autonomous vehicle.
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Cats in the House Again
Yay! We have cats in the house again! We adopted Sabik and Jinx from the local animal shelter in late October. They’re brothers and they were eight months old and very skittish when we adopted them but they’ve quickly grown quite comfortable with us and their new home. They’re both very sweet and affectionate but still have some strong phobias about being picked up or held that we’re slowly working through.
Jinx is the tabby and the rambunctious one, tearing around the house and making a ruckus. Sabik is more calm but still very playful. They’re strongly bonded together and get along well, though Jinx tends to be overly aggressive in their play brawls. Sabik is learning to fight back though.
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More Wildlife in the Yard
An owl dive-bombs and kills a snake:
Turkey fight:
More bears in Tahoe:
And more deer, bobcats, coyotes, skunks and foxes in Santa Cruz:
Another Fine Halloween
Indiana Jones and the 101 Dalmations…
This year we got together on Halloween night with friends at Rachel’s and we hosted a gaming day at our place on Saturday.
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Mt. Rainier National Park
On our way home from Canada, we decided to swing over to Mt. Rainier National Park and squeeze in a couple of days exploring the south side of the park. We were arriving late so we found a wild campsite outside of the park boundary and then claimed an available campground site in the park the next day.
We got up to the trailhead at Paradise fairly early and hiked the full Skyline Trail loop. There happened to be a black bear and her two cubs near the lodge and we saw yet another black bear while on the trail as well as a mountain goat and a bunch of very tame marmots. We could also see Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens in the distance.
The following day I did an out-and-back hike alone to Comet Falls on the Van Trump Trail because Darlene wasn’t feeling up for more hiking. We also visited a bunch of roadside points like the Longmire Museum, Christine Falls, Narada Falls, Box Canyon and Silver Falls. We couldn’t easily check out the east or north side of the park due to road closures so after two days, we headed out and home south.
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