Week 50 — Holiday's end | Daniel Nitsikopoulos

It was a quiet week this week :) I spent the first half of it cleaning out and re-painting my home office. The walls were an odd yellow colour — which no longer matched the colour of the rest of the house. Thankfully, the walls were in pretty good condition, and only needed a couple of small patches, and a quick sand / wipe down. Moving all the things out of the room was by far the hardest part. The painting itself only took 2, 2-hour sessions. I also removed and packed away the art that was on the back wall, then replaced it with a single floating shelf with some plants on. The plan is to get some art back on the wall, but I need to get some things framed, as the sun was doing a number of the bare paper, and the blue-tack that was affixing things to the wall.
I went to my first Magic: The Gathering pre-release event this weekend! The way the event goes is that you pay your $45 entry, and then each attendee gets 6 packs of 15 cards with which to make a deck of at least 40 cards. You're then matched up against another attendee and see how well your deck plays in a best of 3 match. This then continues for another 2 games with 2 new opponents. I knew none of this going in, so it was kinda fun to just wing it and see how my deck-building skills fared. Turns out, not well! I lost all 3 of my games, even though my deck put out some decent threat, all my opponents had answers and their own big pieces to respond with. It was a ball though. These kind of events aren't usually my thing, but it was great to just hang out with some folks, talk about Magic and see some really sweet decks come together from a mishmash of cards. One thing that stood out, was the pace at which people were able to play at. When Abby and I play at home, a turn can take between ~10 - 90s, compared to some turns taking sub-2s at this event. I guess most people that go would know all of the cards inside out and don't need to read them each time, but it makes for a very intense play experience!
This week is a wrap on my time off before going back to work too. It was a fantastic and productive break. I got almost everything I wanted to get done, done. With the last thing being to launch PatternMate on the App Store. I put through the first sacrificial submission to App Review, and got some good feedback on things that I had missed, so I will get to those at some point and re-send the app to be submitted!

Week 50 — Holiday's end

This week, years ago