Plan 8: BANG XX "Get Lucky"

The Game is a puzzle hunt kind of thing.  People often describe it as a scavenger hunt, but we don't try and collect anything, we just try to find puzzles and solve them.  And that's just what we did for BANG XX, a "short game" -- just 4-5 hours.  XX-Rated (a team of wicked smart women from Stanford) threw the game; I played both of their other games: BANG 6 (a Valentine's Day themed short game with lots of chocolate-based clues) and Paparazzi (a 2-day game).

Planning the Plan

I signed up for the game well in advance, knowing that I'd have no trouble getting a team together in the last couple weeks before the game.  But due to my poor calendar maintenance (the game was the week before I thought it was), I ended up with 6 days to form a team!  Yipe!  I had pinged Alan and Arshad when I first signed up: Arshad could make it, but Alan couldn't.  When I reconfirmed, Arshad couldn't make it, but Alan could, and he brought his girlfriend Angela and another friend... well... it turned out that his other friend wasn't able to make it at the last moment... so we were a team of three.  But still, a good time was had by all.  Good puzzles, good company, and no rain!

Plan 7: Glass Blowing demo

My friend ErikO has been blowing glass for a year or so, and invited me to come up to Public Glass in SF for Hot Glass/Cold Beer, an event where your donation gets you a hand blown glass that they'll repeatedly fill with beer or wine and they have a glass blowing demo.  The artist in the photo is Paul DeSomma; he created an amazing female nude form in about an hour -- it was amazing to watch him poke and prod and cut and pull at this molten glob of glass until it finally began to take shape.

Glass blowing is full of double entendre terms: the glowing red kiln opening in the photo into which the artist inserts his piece periodically to keep it molten is called the glory hole.  When you sign up for some studio time, you're getting a blow slot.  Sometimes you'll have a friend be your pipe blower, to breathe some air through a tube to make a glass or other hollow object.  Actually, those terms are so ribald that you might even call them single entendre :-)

In another studio, they had a warm glass demo.  Warm glass is where smaller pieces are done, about the size of marbles.  The process involves a blowtorch instead of a glory hole.

Public Glass offers a one-day course where they'll run you through making three pieces of art.  They do a bunch of the work for/with you in order to accomplish it all in one day.  If this seems like your bag, they have several longer courses for various experience levels.  I'm interested in taking the one-day course and will spread the word and gather anyone who's interested in coming along with me.

Planning the Plan

I've had trouble keeping up with planning.  Not for lack of interest, though; rather that I'm spending more time hanging out with other people and their plans.  Not a bad thing, but I need to try extra hard to keep my plan alive!  I decided on Friday that I wanted to go to this glass demo on Saturday night, and I sent out an email that afternoon.  I got a few replies from people who said they were really interested but already had plans.  See?  With just a little more advance notice, it could have been a small group instead of just me and Erik.  Lesson: planning is different from planning in advance.