Played with six dice and two or more players. You probably don’t want to go above six because people will get bored waiting for their turn. A cup to roll the dice in is also handy – we use those foam can holder things that some companies give away.

Go clockwise around the table. You can pick who goes first arbitrarily or by having everyone roll a die and whoever gets the highest number is first (repeat the process for any ties).Then give all the dice to the person whose turn it is.

Roll the dice. Keep any counters you want and re-roll the rest. Repeat until you roll no counters (ching) or wish to stop. If you get all six dice as counters, pick them up and keep rolling in the same fashion. Keep track of how many points you have! (It is frequently helpful to have *everyone* watch and count points, in case someone miscounts or forgets where they were.) On your first turn, you must make at least 1000 points to get ‘on the board’ and start being able to record your score. Up until 9000 points you can keep or throw away counters at your whim. After 9000 points you must keep all counters. The goal is to make exactly 10,000 points. The first person to get 10,000 gets one thistle (*). The second gets two, and so on until everyone has finished.

Scoring:

1 – 100 pts

5 – 50 pts

3 of a kind – number on the dice times 100 (with the exception of 1s – 3 1s = 1000)

4 of a kind – number on the dice times 200

5 of a kind – number on the dice times 400

6 of a kind – number on the dice times 800

Straight (numbers 1-6) – 1500

‘Of a kind’ must all be rolled at the same time – if you roll 2 1s, reroll the other 4 dice and get another one, it’s 300, not 1000.

Straights can be rolled all at once or if you have it minus one or two dice, you can roll just those two and see if you can make the straight. If you do, 1500 points and keep rolling. If you don’t but you get a 1 or a 5, keep the counters and keep rolling. If you don’t roll any counters, ching.

If on the first roll of your turn you get no counters (and no three of a kinds or more, which also function as counters), that’s a natural ching. (Marked on the score sheet as  N .) On any subsequent roll of the die you don’t want to keep you get no counters, that’s a ching (marked on the score sheet as a  ) and your turn is over. If towards the end of the game you get enough points that it would put you past 10,000, that’s a plus ching, marked on the sheet as a  | .

A score sheet looks something like this. (I stuck a break in the middle – the row of ………. – because I didn’t feel like typing it all out. You get the idea.)

A place of light and laughter, of lush green and never night. There were flowers in the tall grass. No weather, in the meadow, for it has never lived in a reality where that is a requirement. There wasn’t even a sky, really. A small world, but big enough for those it housed, who were few enough in number – only three. And they lived and laughed on velvet green.

In the centre of the meadow was a tree. And the tree was very tall, and very old. Its trunk was thicker than all three of them could circle touching hands, even if there were two of each. And its branches reached high. The tree was a world of itself in its size. It was a place of dappled sunlight and hidden nooks. A swing hung from one thick bough, for the laughing child to play on. And a soft nest was tucked inside a hollow in its trunk, for the frightened girl to hide in.

Just one other thing was in the meadow – the stone gazebo, near the edge. It was old, and full of shadows cast by the thick ivy that covered it. Stairs led down to a level below the ground. Only the dark maid knows what was below, for it was her home after she came from the grey.

Oh, have I not yet explained the grey? They grey surrounded the meadow, the top layer of what lay beneath. It started out pale, just marking the boundary where green ceased to be, but deep in the dark it turned to black and the Bad Man lurked. We will not dwell on him, or there.

The laughing child was beautiful and innocent. Very young – perhaps five years old – and the most precious thing the meadow held. She was bright and beautiful, and her name was Summer Dawn. She spent her days playing on her swing and making chains of flowers. She seemed as though she was made of light.

The frightened girl was not so innocent. She had seen much, and been much, and fallen through the dark. She was eighteen, usually, on the cusp of adulthood. Often she had to tend to things outside the meadow’s serene bounds, but whenever she could, she played with the child. She would push Summer’s swing, or perhaps they would roll down hills together or braid flowers into each other’s hair. Her name was Shiyiya, and it meant leaper. And she was afraid of the dark that surrounded.

The dark maid did not play. She largely kept to herself, in her place of shadows and stone. For she had been born in the dark, and the bright innocence of the meadow was not comfortable to her. She better understood cruelty. Her name was Srystyn for the cutting wind, and she was seventeen.

3/4 cups butter from fridge
1/2 cup microwaved liquid butter
3 cups sugar
5 eggs
3 cups flour
juice and zest of one lime, topped off with milk to equal one cup (my lime was a bit bigger than a golf ball, if you’re using tiny key limes you might want to use two or three.)
splash vanilla extract, ~1 tsp-1 Tbsp
spalsh lemon extract (optional) ~1/4 tsp

Preheat oven to 300F

Dump butter and sugar into bowl, Beat until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating between additions. Add a cup of flour, half a cup of milk mixture, a cup of flour, rest of milk mixture, and then the rest of the flour, beating between additions. Mix in extracts.

Pour/scrape batter into two grased and floured loaf pans – they should be about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way full – and put in the oven. Bake at 300F for an hour and a half, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

People, I am SO FUCKING SICK of Rose and Martha being hated on for mooning over the Doctor. I am especially sick of it when it comes from people who squeal and fan over how cute Tennant is. Way to fucking double standard, guys! You’re allowed to obsess over him, but the companions who spend LARGE portions of their lives – I don’t think they say explicitly how long Rose spends but it certainly is implied that it’s YEARS – living with him being dragged around the universe in his reckless enthusiasm are supposed to be what, asexual? Ignore the fact that Ten is attractive and adorably enthusiastic?

Seriously, I am just getting more and more pissed off about this the more of it I see. On tumblr, telegantmess posted a picture of a caricatured Rose sobbing I THOUGHT I WAS SPECIAL!!! – what, she’s supposed to psychically know that the Doctor in all his incarnations had lots of companions before? It’s not like he talked about them, is it? And she adjusted pretty fucking well – and quickly – to Sarah Jane, laughing with her about the Doctor’s quirks. (“Does he still stroke bits of the TARDIS?” “Oh god yes it’s like, do you two want to be alone?” [paraphrase because cba rewatching to grab correct wording atm])

If you don’t like constant love stories? TRY HATING ON RTD THEN. He certainly has enough bullshit to hate, especially with the ALL HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS ARE DOOMED thing in Torchwood. And being the writer it is (well, was, since he isn’t head writer on Doctor Who anymore) his fault when crap things are done to awesome characters. Or get annoyed at Moffat for the weird constant extra-Companional self-contained love stories in seasons 1-4. (Madame de Pompador, River Song, whatsherface from The Family Of Blood, probably others I’ve forgotten. Really Moffat, what is with that?)

In conclusion: STOP BEING JUDGEY HYPOCRITES PLX.

(inb4 everyone hates me now.)

an even field of rare clean hue this
day is dotted with a pale soft array
of puffs of cotton so white so clean
and lambs arranged in rustic display

no smooth leaf to draw upon this day
mere rough spun cloth is spread o’er
thick uneven threads of warring hues
dance a mottled weave upon the vault

umbrage taints the air upon this day
the firmament is dark and foreboding
fraught with hard flickering slashes
of capricious brilliant deadly flame

push
past too much and
on into this will
hurt me tomorrow.

go
and keep on going
even when you are
too tired to die.

move
it’s good for you
yes you i mean it
even if it hurts.

lies
are what they say
to make us try to
be like they are.

other
what you know you
are in this world
not made for you.

them
all we are to the
privileged class,
the vague masses.

try
is all you can do
just try and cry,
and fall and die.

[Image description: A tiered box built of several kinds of wood, including eucalyptus, pine, and others I am unsure of. The lid is swirly light-coloured silk oak, with the letters GWL set into it in a dark wood.]

My dad built my grandfather’s box out of the woods granddad had been saving for something special for years or decades.

I suppose I should back up a little. My granddad died on February fifth, 2008 – Mardi Gras of that year – from cancer.

Back up again, further. 2006. Family reunion in Colorado. Afterwards, I went with my grandparents in their motorhome up to Washington. I don’t know how many doctors we stopped at on the way. I don’t remember where the biopsy that found cancer in the lump on his neck was.

Back up again. I’ve lived in the same house since I was four years old. My grandparents have – grandma has, granddad had – lived in the same house since before I was born. Half an hour’s drive away. I grew up seeing a lot of them, naturally. Holidays were always at 8620 – the house’s street address and what it tends to be referred to as. My aunt and uncle and cousin are only a couple hours south, so there was always lots of family there at Christmas and Easter and.

Back up farther, before I was born. Grandma and Granddad – Marian and George – met at university in Washington. She was studying, if I recall correctly, Early Education. He was studying Electrical Engineering.

Skip forward. Four kids. My aunt Mary – more frequently known as Polly as a child, because Marian was also Mari. My uncle Dave – he died in 2001, of Hep C and probably AIDS from a destructive drug habit developed after his son, Sean, died of an accidental overdose of methadone pills his friend gave him; Sean was sixteen when he died (I was five and don’t remember him at all, which makes me sad). My dad, Robert generally just called Bob. My uncle John.

Sorry, that was tangential.

Granddad was a rocket scientist. He worked for Raytheon during the Cold War. He designed what went into the tips of the Titan missiles. (I’ve been to the site where they keep one of the decommissioned Titan missiles for historic/educational purposes. They’re impressive.) He also, according to a friend of his from NASA who spoke at his memorial, figured out what went wrong with the Challenger.

Granddad was a genius. Good at absolutely everything he tried. Grandma got him to start doing flower shows with her – probably because they always needed more entries to fill them out – and he won virtually every show after that.

[Image description: An older man in large bifocal glasses with white hair wearing a yellow shirt and grey pants strands grinning in front of a flower arrangement and holding a large purple Best In Show ribbon up to his chest. The arrangement consists of a white hexagon standing on a white pillar. The center of the hexagon is cut out and contains a bubble-like glass vase with a purple iris suspended sideways in water in it. Little shelves wrap around either side of the vase horizontally, with unopened poppy buds extending up and down from tubes through the shelves on each side.]

Granddad always had a project going. He built an extension onto their house, which became the master bedroom and the entire old baster bedroom because closet space. (They did square dancing, my grandma has a LOT of clothes.) The new and improved master bathroom didn’t get finished before he died.

If granddad’s cancer had been caught in time… I’m not positive I remember right, but I’m pretty sure by the time they found it it was stage IV. Metastasized, everywhere. He had radiation treatments and made a joke out of the bright yellow shirt proclaiming him to be a biohazard.

He got so sick. It was terrifying. Granddad always seemed like he’d be immortal. He was nearly eighty and still going strong before he got cancer, as vigorous and active as a man half his age. He had more hair than his sons, until the chemo.

He was so sick. He could barely talk and he fell asleep at the table. I was terrified. I barely talked to him the last six months. I will always, always regret that.

The cancer filled up his lungs until he had nothing left to breathe with. He was in a coma in a timeshare in Scottsdale when he died. I was there, and my parents, and my grandma, and my aunt Mary. Uncle John and aunt Val and my cousin Elizabeth weren’t. Lizbet might still resent that she wasn’t there to say goodbye. I was too afraid to say goodbye. And then he died, and I was right there in the room, and I put the pulse thing on his finger to check, and there wasn’t any, and he was gone. It was five in the morning when he died. By the time a nurse got there to do the death certificate it was seven fifteen, which is what the death certificate says. And I was in the room when they put him on the gurney and rolled him out to the van to take him to the mortuary. My aunt Mary apologized later for letting me be there and said she should have made me go into another room.

And then he was at the funeral home and he didn’t look asleep he looked dead and everything smelled funny and then they cremated him. And his ashes went in the box my dad made. There was a memorial service here, and then a few months later we all went to Vashon (Washington) for the funeral. He was buried in the cemetery on Vashon island, where they had (have) a cabin, next to Sean and Uncle Dave. I sang For Good at his funeral.

It’s still hard to believe he’s gone. I want my granddad back.

~`~

That poor cat. Spoiled little girl, stop tormenting your cat.

I am torn between “I like that Tiana isn’t just PRIIIINCE I WILL DO ANYTHING” and “augh stereotype of girls hate slimy things!”.

Tiana is an adorable little girl. I really love her family. They are sweet. And her dad is awesome. And I like the nice community eating together scene. And I like the moral he tells her of “you can wish on a star but you have to help it along with some hard work of your own”. I find this to be a good lesson, generally.

Musics! I like the musics. The musics are pretty.

I am still pretty irritated about the Shadowman. By the end of the movie you can see that all his evil and his problems are because off his own bad choices – but that’s late in the film, and it might be too subtle for the target demographic to get. I am not pleased with “this religion is OTHER and thus evil”. That’s a bullshit thing to do, Disney.

Why does the prince have to be a useless asshole who is CHANGED? Why can’t he start out as a sympathetic character?

Lottie is irritating. Why does there have to be a stereotypical ditz? She’s well-meaning, but the stereotype is frustrating.

Oh dear, why does the place have to be a dump? Also, I did not catch her mom’s “I want some grandkids” line the first time. Grr. Nice art deco musical number, though.

Still displeased with the Shadowman thing. And the servant dude.

Disney seems to like putting its non-white princesses in turquoise, don’t they? (I mean, it’s gorgeous on her, but it’s interesting that Jasmine’s outfit is the same colour and Pocahontas also has a turquoise dress.)

I want to HIT the prince. He is SUCH a jerk. And the LIAR trying to bribe her with money he doesn’t have. *grumblegrumble*

Why does she have to be a ridiculously skinny an unrealistic looking frog?

I hate the prince’s guts and I am SO mad that she falls for him. And that he makes her “lighten up”. WOMEN DON’T NEED A MAN TO BE HAPPY. *grumble grumble* Also irritating that it’s the prince’s lazy git-ness that saves them from Louis.

That poor turtle. And I really really hate how this movie seems to enjoy making Tiana look foolish. I love her work ethic and drive and… BUT THOSE ARE BAD THINGS, IN DISNEYLAND! Harumph.

Grrrrrr for the accidental kiss thing.

Also GRAH for the toothless Cajun stereotype. I am unable to not like the going down the bayou song, because I am a sucker for music/musicals, BUT I AM PISSED AT THE RACISM/CLASSISM.

Creepy hunter-seeker shadows.

And now HUMAN Cajun stereotypes, which are EVEN WORSE than the fireflies.

“You’re a no-account philandering LAZY bump on a log.” Yes. Fuck yeah for you, Tiana. Pity Disney went and made you have to get rescued by him two minutes later. Douchefaces.

“Oh look the st*pid cajun firefly doesn’t realize that that’s a star and not a firefly lol”. Fuck you, disney. Also, STOP MAKING AWESOME TIANA FALL FOR THAT JACKASS.

Wait, she’s blind, so why are you POINTING instead of telling her?

FUCK YOU, Disney. Not everyone NEEEEEEEDS to have love, you jackasses. (Whee, erasure of asexual people!) Tiana’s work ethic is admirable. And why does Mama Odie tell Naveen what he NEEEDS straight out, but makes Tiana guess? And then humiliate her? Of course. Men get everything handed to them on a platter. WOMEN don’t deserve it. Fuck you some more, Disney.

They’ve known each other for what, six hours? Ten? Why the fuck are they in love? DISNEY, YOU ARE MORE RIDICULOUS THAN ROMEO AND JULIET IN TERMS OF ROMANCE AND THAT IS SAYING SOMETHING.

So he’s a jackass misogynist philanderer creep. WHY DO YOU MAKE HER FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM DISNEY. WHY.

Also, I think it is a PERFECTLY AWESOME THING for her to work to fulfill her and her Daddy’s dream. There’s time for dancing later.

NO. STOP BEING IN LOVE WITH HIM. THERE IS NO REASON FOR YOU TO BE IN LOVE WITH HIM. STOP IT DISNEY. YOU DOUCHCANOES. >:(

No. Bad Disney. Stop making her strengths into weaknesses. Jerkfaces.

And now the Shadowman has paid for his debts and yes you can tell it was his bad choices that made him evil, and not voodoo inherently. But I’m not terribly sure the target demographic can tell that. And demonizing of other religions, as previously stated, is Not On.

NO THERE IS NO REASON FOR THEM TO BE IN LOVE STOP IT. At least Lottie stops being selfish there. But DISNEY WON’T LET IT BE THAT EASY.

Okay, I do at least kind of like the ending you gave Ray, making him right about being with Evangeline. Besides how wtf since when is starlight that bright?

I hate the ending. I hate what Disney does to Tiana. And hey, that’s the transformation sequence from The Swan Princess! Frog-Naveen is also basically exactly Jean-Paul or whatever the hell the frog’s name is in The Swan Princess.

Yeah okay I like Louis intimidating Fenner & Fenner into selling her the building. And Louis playing jazz at Tiana’s Place. Lottie deciding to wait for the six and a half year old prince to grow up was good comedy but kind of unpleasant how desperate they made her. Also pissed that they made it NO HARD WORK FOR YOU JUST WISH WORK ETHICS ARE BAD. That is a WORTHLESS MORAL. HMPH.

~`~

THIS HAS BEEN LIVEBLOGGING OF THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG! I don’t blame you if you didn’t read it all, I am very ranty.

Hir name is Alex. (Link is to the deviantART page where you can click to see hir bigger.)