Pandemic!

Sarah and I bought Pandemic at Barnes & Noble today and tried it out this evening. It was a really fun game and we really enjoyed the two games that we played. In short, Pandemic is a cooperative board game for two to four players.


In Pandemic, the players travel around the Risk-like board, treat infections and discover cures for diseases. The goal of the game (and its win condition) is to discover the cures for all the diseases. Every turn, the diseases build up on the cities where they are, and if the infection in the city becomes too large an outbreak occurs and it spreads to neighboring cities. The players have to move around the map and lower the infection levels while they try to discover the cures for the diseases.


Discovering a cure for a disease allows the player to more easily treat infections of that type. Diseases are cured by discarding 5 cards of that color while at a research stations (which are established throughout play). Each player gains two cards at the end of each turn. Each card has a color and a city. Cards allow the player to move to that city, establish a research station at that city, or can be discarded in groups of 5 to cure that disease.


Occasionally, a drawn card will be an Epidemic card, for which Sarah and I like to yell, "Crisis Alert!" (see video above). An Epidemic causes an immediate rise in infection and increases the rate at which the infection spreads.


There are 5 classes that the players can be, each with various abilities. The researcher only needs 4 cards to cure a disease, the medic treats diseases more easily, etc. 


It was an incredibly fun time. I highly recommend it.


Bonus Potpourri: REAMDE is consistently getting better. Sarah has finished the first Percy Jackson novel and really enjoyed it.

Work Frustration + 3 videos!

Calamity? Check.

Hilarious Dr. Who parodies on Community? Check

Pokemon fart jokes? Check.

Hilarious Tweets? You betcha.

Four things I didn't create? What is this? Tumblr? Let's get started.

I had one of those hard-on-the-brain kind of days at work today. All I needed to do was adapt some SQL code so that it would do something slightly different, right? Well, that would have been too easy. I started to read into the code before I tried to do it and it was the weirdest and seemingly dumbest thing ever.

(Don't worry, this doesn't get very technical.)

One of the most basic things you do with SQL is say, "I want to make a new table with the lines from this table, but only the ones that meet this certain criteria." After you do that, whenever you work with your new table, you don't have to re-specify those criteria. So why was this happening ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE IN THIS CODE.

There are very is ways to say, "I want all the lines that DON'T fall into these categories." So why did the person who wrote this do it in THE MOST CONFUSING WAY POSSIBLE. Allow me to explain. He made a table of all the thing that he doesn't want, left joined it with the original table under the criterion original.(unique identifier)=(stuff I don't want).(unique identifier) and then specified the criteria that he only wanted the lines where original.(unique identifier)!=(stuff I don't want).(unique identifier). I know most of you are confused by that and you think it's just because you don't know SQL. Well guess what, it's confusing to people who do know SQL also. It works, it's just bad.

And none of this is commented, none of it at all. To make sense of it, I had to PRINT IT OUT and WRITE ON IT WITH A PENCIL. I had to summarize sections of code so I knew what they meant. He created tables that he literally never used at all. They were just dropped at the end of the code. Which, by the way, isn't supposed to be done as

DROP TABLE1; DROP TABLE2; DROP TABLE3; ... 

It's supposed to be done as

 DROP TABLE1, TABLE2, TABLE3...;

Lastly, the names of the tables that were created were not helpful. Such tables were "BASE9", "BASE8", "BASE81", "BASE181", "BASE281",  and so on. Using the suffix 'BASE' is ok, but why not number them with 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. It would work tons better for me.

It wasn't very fun. And, of course, none of it was commented. I just don't get it. Tomorrow, I'm going to rewrite the shit out of that code.