Great Apps for Kids

I’ve been meaning to recommend the catalog of charming, well designed and fun toddler apps from Toca Boca for some time since they are an invaluable resource for parents.

I’ve downloaded all of them and find each one delightful but am personally partial to Toca Tailor (where you makes clothes for quirky characters). Van’s interests rotate but he has always loved Robot Lab and playing Toca Kitchen Monsters with his dad.

Some games like Toca Doctor and Toca House have objectives, while others like Toca Salon are more open ended.

I never feel guilty about letting Van play with these games for a bit, in fact, I usually join in the fun. With so much junk targeted at kids it’s nice to find a company that seems to actually think of and enjoy children when designing for them.

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Posted on January 31, 2013

The Magical Quest Game

We used to be pretty avid D&D players but over the years, as adulthood has taken over, avid turned to occasional, which turned to rarely.

We were excited then, to find out about Talisman, a D&D like board game, recommend by a former gamer himself in a similar situation (thanks Chris!).

It’s perfect. In theory it can be played in one night/afternoon. (Though we’ve yet to finish a game in the three hours we’ve aloted for play.)

While there’s not the same customization and open endlessness of a real D&D game, (let’s face it there’s no substitute for a good D&D game) it is satisfying for that particular nerd itch and it’s even made gamers out of friends that use to refuse up and down that they’d ever get involved with such foolishness.

Plus it’s far more social that WoW (another abandoned but well loved past time of ours). We like to combine the evening with a special home cooked meal – like my recently recommended pork ssam for example.

Rumor has it that expansion packs are also pretty great but we’ve only tried the original.

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Posted on March 8, 2012

Iphone App

I’ve jumped on the Words with Friends bandwagon and it’s as addicting as I had expected (very). I seem to win about 50% of the time.

If you are my real life friend, my name is brixpicks – come find me.

If you’re not my real life friend, I’ll still play but won’t respond to messages, like “What’s your name cutie?” and “You keep blocking me!”

See more: Spend a Couple Minutes Apps Games

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Posted on June 7, 2011

What Will My Baby Look Like?

There’s little that could be less intriguing than a promise of seeing what your baby will look like when you’re over eight months pregnant. MorphThing is a free site that also lets you morph your face with any other (see Jim plus Brittany, aka Jimany below). According to my sister, the morphing of what your kid will look like in inaccurate (well, it would have been really shocking if it was spot on) but it sure is a fun way to spend a couple minutes and I think my fake, computer generated Van looks pretty cute. Bet he’s actually even cuter!

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Posted on September 26, 2010

This WOW stein will make you say wow! Hand crafted night elves, dwarves, mages, draenei, and gnomes! This was an excellent birthday gift to Jim from our friends who wanted to acknowledge his love for the game and for drinking beer from elaborate ceramic ware.

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Posted on September 14, 2009

Hey guys, we didn't get around to a day trip this weekend like I planned, so Jim submitted this brief Atlantic City overview.

Not too, too long ago, my former boss and I headed down to AC to scope out the annual Imprinted Sportswear Show. The conference was pretty off the hook, but my companion was antsy for some real entertainment, so not long after arriving at the Convention Center (located at One Miss America Way, by the way), we hit the Borgata.

In most of the anecdotes I've heard, AC's always been derided as a low-rent dump: one friend got bit by a spider in a moderately priced hotel; another (guilty of nothing more than wearing a backpack — which is only a crime on the subway), was invited by a scruffy looking dude to check out the local soup kitchens. My friend (and this happened years before the concept of 'hipster or hobo?' became mainstream), didn't initially comprehend that the scruffy looking dude was homeless and that he (the scruffy looking dude) thought my fairly scruffy looking friend was homeless as well.

But the Borgata was magical! And not sleazy at all; kind of like Mohegan Sun. We played roulette, my gracious employer purchasing all the chips, dined at a Wolfgang Puck-branded restaurant, and we're back home before 8:30. Despite the fact that many of the guests were dressed in shorts, t-shirts and sandals, the place still maintained an upscale and just-built vibe.

I actually returned to the Sportswear Show last year with a former coworker and, I've got to say, the experience just wasn't quite the same. We left a little bit late and hit some heavy southbound traffic, which would have been fine if the iPod we were listening to hadn't kept playing really explicit R. Kelly songs — not that there's anything wring with Sex in the Kitchen or Puttin' My T-Shirt on or Ignition or Bump 'N Grind, but we just felt like the randomizing software was somehow having a joke at our expense as it continued to generate R-rated audio content we were both too comfortable to skip while we idled in stopped traffic.

By the time we reached One Miss America Way, all the adjacent parking lots were full and we had to fan out a little to find a spot. As we drove away from the Convention Center, the seamier side of this fairly seamy city (seemingly unchanged from the days of the Dernsy/Nicholson masterpiece, King of Marvin Gardens) began to reveal itself. My advice is that if you're planning on visiting Atlantic City plan, just like you would in every other metropolitan area, to stick to the inskirts of town.

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Posted on May 4, 2009

The other day I just could not find the location of this specialized leather working trainer (Peter Galen,the dragonscale leather working trainer). I knew he was in Azshara, but I didn't have the time to fool around looking for this guy in some very dangerous territory. That's where Thottbot comes in. It's not cheating, it's more like a tool to help you maximize the amount of quality time you put into playing WOW.

www.thottbot.com

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Posted on December 5, 2005

Joe Don Baker (I don't know if you've ever seen “Mitchell”–if you haven't, rent the MST3K skewering right away) wants to close down a video arcade run by a guy who can't have sex or play video games because of what he saw reflected in the darkened screen of a broken Miss Pac console one terrible night. The theme song “Totally Awesome Video Games” brings a smile to my face every time I hear it, as does another awesome song from the soundtrack, “Vidiots”.

Characters called Dorfus and King Vidiot are involved in a video game contest with the future of the arcade on the line. There's a scene where a hot dog gets stuck between a girl's' tits and no one really does anything for like 2 minutes. “Joysticks” is a little hard to find, it will probably never make it to DVD, but we usually watch it at least once a year.

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Posted on December 5, 2005

Even funny for those that don't play the game. I did tests.

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Posted on November 14, 2005