13 Years of I-Love-Yous

 I thought I had already written this blog post but a quick check in the archives and even on my personal blog revealed zero posts precisely about this topic.

Tobie and I say "I love you" to one another a lot. Like a lot, a LOT. It's one of the first things we say upon waking and one of the last things we say before bed. It's practically a punctuation mark for non-existent sentences. Either of us can randomly call the other's attention just to say "I love you" and then we go back to work or whatever. We say it at the end of any phone call even if it was just to confirm a grocery item really quickly or before we part ways.

I'm the sort of person who doesn't see the point of celebrating monthsaries after your first few years together but I will never tire of telling Tobie "I love you" just about any chance I get. There are fractions of a moment that I worry that we say it too much and it might start to lose meaning. But then I just look over at Tobie and find that not saying "I love you" would be impossible. It's just something that we have to do.

Welcome to the 13th year of our different baduy moments like this. Every day includes some other reminder of why we're meant to be together and why this relationship is still one of the best things to happen to either of us. We've had our fair share of ups and downs and now we can also say that we helped each other survive a global pandemic. 

We're happily getting older together and yet unabashedly will also be the sort of couple who never stops saying I love you at random moments. And I have no intentions of stopping.

I love you, Tobie. Now and always.

Vlog Ep. 325: First Contact

Today's episode of #BaduyPride was all about our personal first contact stories with travel! It has certainly been a while since most of us have gone on longer trips and it's pretty fun to look back at our different firsts whether it's a trip with family or our first time to venture out of the country on our own.

I really feel that technology has made such a big difference to the way we travel and I can't quite imagine traveling without things like Google Maps, Google Translate, or even just organized public transportation systems. There are still a lot of adventures for all of us to experience and hopefully, this pandemic will inspire more of us to try to make first contact once we feel it's safe enough to do so. 

While we chose today's topic, we're always open to suggestions! If you have ideas for future video discussions, feel free to fill out this Google Form and your idea may be featured as the focus for an episode!

Vlog Ep. 324: The Star Trek Deck Building Game

After a short break, #BaduyPride was back with a new tabletop game episode. In honor of First Contact Day, we decided to talk about one of the Star Trek-related games in our collection - this being the Star Trek Deck Building Game. We only have the Original Series edition of the game thus far and maybe we'll get lucky and find the Next Generation episode eventually. This is one of those out-of-print franchise curiosities that we're lucky that Tobie was able to find for us.

While not the most polished deck building game around, it still has a charm of its own. It uses different production stills as card art and managed to capture pretty much every single TOS story to some degree. The weird conceits of the game where everyone is in charge of a starship and recruiting very diverse crews from the Starbase isn't the greatest, but it works well enough to keep things going. And still play the game from time to time regardless.

While we chose today's topic, we're always open to suggestions! If you have ideas for future video discussions, feel free to fill out this Google Form and your idea may be featured as the focus for an episode!

Vlog Ep. 323: Talking Schitt's Creek

Today's episode of #BaduyPride is all about the surprisingly popular and award-winning Canadian sitcom, Schitt's Creek. We had a hard getting into this show, but we had heard a lot of good things about it and that helped us to get through the first few (rougher) seasons. But it did have quite the poignant ending with a lot of work put into giving all the main characters pretty solid arcs.

So in this episode, we talk about out Schitt's creek journey, many similar shows that weren't easy to get into but paid off in the end, and of course the different character arcs that ultimately defined the show. And that's where the show really shined - by figuring out how to get the Rose's to evolve from being selfish and out of touch with the world to people finally open to becoming better and making a difference. 

This was a community-contributed topic originally shared by Andrei! If you have ideas for future video discussions, feel free to fill out this Google Form and your idea may be featured in a future video.

Vlog Ep. 322: Reflecting on Canvas

Today's episode of #BaduyPride was all about the beautiful and creative card game that is Canvas. This 1-5 player game was designed by Jeff Chin and Andrew Nerger and published by Road to Infamy Games. The base game first went to Kickstarter and was released in 2021 and the expansion, Canvas: Reflections officially came out this year.

The core mechanics of this game are pretty simple to learn (and equally simple to teach). The individual aspects of the game also seem familiar as we've seen a lot of these ideas in different games. But how everything comes together to create a brilliant game experience is the true genius of the game. Just because it's family-friendly doesn't mean you shouldn't underestimate the game's potential for strategic play or at least very interesting game runs. 

While we chose today's topic, we're always open to suggestions! If you have ideas for future video discussions, feel free to fill out this Google Form and your idea may be featured as the focus for an episode!