Autumn is upon us so here's one final look at summer '25.


Friendsgiving was in August this year. It was in Las Vegas which isn't the best place to be in August. Luckily, Bret doesn't just have a stairway signed by Andre Agassi, he also has a pool and air conditioning. So we mostly stayed under water or indoors.

The sun and heat and pool time meant everyone was pretty exhausted by 9pm. The exhaustion meant that the boys conked on the sofa watching some mindnumbing social media stream (I think YouTube's TikTok knockoff?). The social media watching meant that the following morning we tried some dumb challenge where you fill your mouth with water and slap an opponent with a tortilla:


We did a fantasy draft, had carne asada for the FG meal, and let the kids run amok.

Jes, Dani, and I flew Alaska to avoid the unpleasant Las Vegas Southwest terminal. This worked better than intended - we were delayed a couple of hours due to a brief midday storm over the airport. On the other hand, we had a 45-minute wait to get a ramp after our arrival at SAN.


(Most of the above photos are Jes's.)


Last weekend was the airshow. I tried to do some 1/500 panned shots with VR/sport but:

1. From my vantage point, any perpendicular travel was far away.
2. There were no clouds so it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

Still neat to see and to shoot.



September featured plenty of pool time, a zoo trip, and Dani's first Padres game (with a 3-2-2 Tatis go-ahead grand slam).

With Chase temporarily out of commission, the boardgame crew is running an Elder Scrolls quest. It's a bit like Gloomhaven - particularly in terms of depth - but is very different in numerous important ways.


Each campaign consists of three 12-round chapters followed by a final confrontation. There are a variety (few? many?) of overarching campaigns as well as variable plotlines for each chapter. The campaign takes place in one or more of the familiar regions of Tamriel. So in comparison to Gloomhaven, TES:BotSE trades narrative length and depth for replayability.


The BotSE skill system is neat. You build your character around a combat role (fighter, ranger, mage, etc.) and gradually add skills (/skill dice) that let you do to things like do big attacks, heal allies, and inflict statuses. The action/cooldown system is elegant and tactical but not worth describing here.

Returning again to Gloomhaven, Elder Scrolls characters feel more customizable but don't have the huge variety of mechanics changes that come with each of Gloomhaven's playable characters.


The combat mechanics are fairly standard for an RPG with hexes. There's melee, ranged, status effects, shielding, and so forth. The difficulty seems to be on a knife's edge though. I was one-shotted in our second combat scenario but otherwise we've been pretty successful at avoiding attacks using positioning and skills. Rather than two sides wearing each other down, combat in BotSE is quick and dependent on having the right skill available to eliminate a powerful enemy or avoid getting wrecked. Enemy AI seems more exploitable in Elder Scrolls than it was in Gloomhaven - specifically the rules seem to dictate suboptimal actions for many situations.

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